Design and Graphic Design

Publications

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Description: A. W. N. Pugin: Master of Gothic Revival
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00252
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812–1852) was one of the most influential architects and designers of the nineteenth century, a man whose ideas and design principles were adopted and developed by followers as diverse as William Morris and Frank Lloyd Wright. As an architect, Pugin created cathedrals, churches, colleges, convents, and a wide range of domestic buildings whose form and structure changed the nature of architecture in his era. As a designer, he was responsible for the Gothic Revival, the most popular decorative form in Britain and around the world, and he was the creator of stunning furniture and woodwork; silver, metalwork, and jewelry; pottery and tiles; textiles and wallpapers; and books. This important book, written by eminent scholars, presents a comprehensive picture of Pugin, his achievements, and his times.

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Author
Print publication date January 1995 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300066562
EISBN 9780300260922
Illustrations 410
Print Status out of print
Description: Alvar Aalto: Architecture, Modernity, and Geopolitics
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00347
Perhaps no other great modern architect has been linked to a native country as closely as Alvar Aalto (1898–1976). Critics have argued that the essence of Finland flows, as if naturally, into his quasi-organic forms, ranging from such buildings as the Baker House in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to iconic 20th-century designs, including his Savoy vase and bent-plywood stacking stools.

What did Aalto himself say about the importance of nationalism and geography in his work and in architecture generally? With an unprecedented focus on the architect’s own writings, library, and critical reception, Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen proposes a dramatically different interpretation of Aalto’s oeuvre, revealing it as a deeply thoughtful response to his intellectual and cultural milieu—especially to Finland’s dynamic political circumstances following independence from Russia in 1917.

Pelkonen also considers the geographic and geopolitical narratives found in his writings. These include ideas about national style and national cultural revival, and about how architecture can foster cosmopolitanism, internationalism, and regionalism. Expanding the canonical reading of Aalto, this work promises to influence future inquiries on Aalto for generations to come.

"This novel interpretation sheds a clear light on Aalto's relationship with Finland's society and culture, not merely by better defining the architect's often overlooked 'context,' but by recreating the intellectual milieus in which he developed. Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen introduces a very fresh discussion of Aalto's writings and designs in the framework of Finland's modern history."—Jean-Louis Cohen, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

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Print publication date May 2009 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300114287
EISBN 9780300273953
Illustrations 124
Print Status in print
Description: An American Style: Global Sources for New York Textile and Fashion Design,...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00254
In 1915 the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) embarked upon a mission to energize the American textile industry.  Curators sought to innovate a distinctly “American” design idiom drawing on a more universal “primitive” language. Ethnographic objects were included in study rooms; designers gained access to storage rooms; and museum artifacts were loaned to design houses and department stores. In order to attract designers and reluctant manufacturers, who quickly responded, collections were supplemented with specimens including fur garments from Siberia, Persian costumes, and Javanese textiles. This book positions the project at the AMNH in the broader narrative of early 20th-century design education in New York, which includes the roles of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Newark Museum.
Print publication date October 2013 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300199437
EISBN 9780300264562
Illustrations 111
Print Status in print
Description: Art & Graphic Design: George Maciunas, Ed Ruscha, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00305
This fascinating study of the role that graphic design played in American art of the 1960s and 1970s focuses on the work of George Maciunas, Ed Ruscha, and Sheila Levrant de Bretteville. Examining how each of these artists utilized typography, materiality, and other graphic design aesthetics, Benoît Buquet reveals the importance of graphic design in creating a sense of coherence within the disparate international group of Fluxus artists, an elusiveness and resistance to categorization that defined much of Ruscha’s brand of Pop Art, and an open and participatory visual identity for a range of feminist art practices. Rigorous and compelling scholarship and a copious illustration program that presents insightful juxtapositions of objects—some of which have never been discussed before—combine to shed new light on a period of abundant creativity and cultural transition in American art and the intimate, though often overlooked, entwinement between art and graphic design.

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Print publication date November 2021 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300249859
EISBN 9780300269338
Illustrations 152
Print Status in print
Description: Back to the Drawing Board: Ed Ruscha, Art, and Design in the 1960s
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00335
Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) emerged onto the Los Angeles art scene with paintings that incorporated consumer products, such as Spam and Sun-Maid raisins. In this revelatory book, Jennifer Quick looks at and beyond the consumer imagery in Ruscha’s work, examining it through the tools, techniques, and habits of mind of commercial art and design. Quick shows how his training and early work as a commercial artist helped him become an incisive commentator on the presence and role of design in the modern world.

Back to the Drawing Board explores how Ruscha mobilized commercial design techniques of scale, paste-up layout, and perspective as he developed his singular artistic style. Beginning with his formative design education and focusing on the first decade of his career, Quick analyzes previously unseen works from the Ruscha archives alongside his celebrated paintings, prints, and books, demonstrating how Ruscha’s engagement with commercial art has been foundational to his practice. Through this insightful lens, Quick affirms Ruscha as a powerful and witty observer of the vast network of imagery that permeates visual culture and offers new perspectives on Pop and conceptual art.

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Print publication date May 2022 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300256925
EISBN 9780300272611
Illustrations 131
Print Status in print
Description: Design, Form, and Chaos
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00036
Paul Rand's stature as one of the world's leading graphic designers is incontestable. For half a century his pioneering work in the field of advertising design and typography has exerted a profound influence on the design profession; he almost single-handedly transformed "commercial art" from a practice that catered to the lowest common denominator of taste to one that could assert its place among the other fine arts. Among the numerous clients for whom he has been a consultant and/or designer are the American Broadcasting Company, IBM Corporation, and Westinghouse Electric Corporation.

In this instructive book, Rand speaks about the contemporary practice of graphic design, explaining the process and passion that foster good design and indicting fadism and trendiness. Illustrating his ideas with examples of his own graphic work as well as with the work of artists he admires, Rand discusses such topics as: the values on which aesthetic judgments are based; the part played by intuition in good design; the proper relationship between management and designers; the place of market research; how and when to use computers in the production of a design; choosing a typeface; principles of book design; and the thought processes that lead to a final design. The centerpiece of the book consists of seven design portfolios—with diagrams and ultimate choices—that Rand used to present his logos to clients such as NEXT, IDEO, and IBM.
Author
Print publication date March 1993 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300055535
EISBN 9780300230239
Illustrations 116
Print Status in print
Description: From Lascaux to Brooklyn
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00052
One of the world's leading graphic designers, Paul Rand has had a profound influence on the design profession: his pioneering work in the field of advertising design and typography has helped elevate "commercial art" to one of the fine arts. In this book, Rand awakens readers to the lessons of the cave paintings of Lascaux—that art is an intuitive, autonomous, and timeless activity—and he shows how this is conveyed in works of art from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to a painting by Cézanne, African sculpture, a Gorgan pitcher, and a park in Brooklyn, all of which are aesthetically pleasing no matter what their era, place, purpose, style, or genre. Rand defines aesthetics and the aesthetic experience, in particular as it affects the designer, and he helps members of his profession articulate and solve design problems by linking principles of aesthetics to the practice of design.

Illustrating his ideas with examples of his own graphic work, as well as an eclectic collection of masterpieces, Rand discusses such topics as: the relation between art and business; the presentation of design ideas and sketches to prospective clients; the debate over typographic style; and the aesthetics of combinatorial geometry as applied to the grid. His book will engage and enlighten anyone interested in the practice or theory of graphic design.
Author
Print publication date February 1996 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300066760
EISBN 9780300230222
Illustrations 96
Print Status in print
Description: Gego: Weaving the Space in Between
This important book is the first extended study of the life and work of German-born Venezuelan artist Gertrude Goldschmidt (1912–94), known as Gego. In locating the artist’s contribution to postwar art and her important place in the global conversations around modernity, Mónica Amor explores her intermedial practice as a model of cultural complexity at the “edge of modernity.” In situating Gego’s work alongside other local archives and against her European education and global reception, Amor offers a monographic model that complicates traditional approaches to history. She investigates the full range of Gego’s work, including her furniture workshop, her teaching at schools of architecture and design, her seminal reticuláreas, and her lesser-known prints. Through rigorous archival research, formal analysis, theoretical relevance, and deep exploration of historical context, this essential book unpacks Gego’s radical recasting of the modern sculptural project through her engagement with architecture, craft, and design pedagogy.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date April 2023 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300260687
EISBN 9780300278125
Illustrations 172
Print Status in print
Description: The Genius of Robert Adam: His Interiors
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00304
Robert Adam was one of the greatest British architects of the later eighteenth century. So widespread was his influence as a decorator and furniture designer that his name has become a household word. But it is the synthesis of architecture, planning, and decoration that stands at the heart of Adam’s achievement, as Eileen Harris shows in this enlightening book. She considers in detail the interaction of each of these elements in nineteen of Adam’s most accomplished interior projects, including some of the most famous British country houses and London town houses.

Most of Adam’s enormous body of work was in preexisting houses; the challenges of remodeling stimulated his inventive imagination, and he became a master at turning awkward situations to advantage. Harris has mined archival sources, including the large collection of drawings from the Adam office at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, and fully examined the houses themselves to discover exactly what Adam did in each project and why. In her detailed discussions of the planning, decoration, ceilings, carpets, chimney pieces, and furniture of such interiors as those at Kedleston, Syon House, Osterley Park, Newby Hall, Culzean Castle, and Home and Lansdowne Houses in London, Harris uncovers the full extent of Adam’s prodigious achievements.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date November 2001 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300081299
EISBN 9780300267518
Illustrations 506
Print Status out of print
Description: Henry van de Velde: Designing Modernism
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00063
The painter, designer, and architect Henry van de Velde (1863–1957) played a crucial role in expanding modernist aesthetics beyond Paris and beyond painting. Opposing growing nationalism around 1900, he sought to make painting the basis of an aesthetic that transcended boundaries between the arts and between nations through his work in Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Van de Velde’s designs for homes, museums, and theaters received international recognition. The artist, often associated with the Art Nouveau and Jugendstil, developed a style of abstraction that he taught in his School of Applied Arts in Weimar, the immediate precursor of and model for the Bauhaus. As a leading member of the German Werkbund, he helped shaped the fields of modern architecture and design. This long-awaited book, the first major work on van de Velde in English, firmly positions him as one of the twentieth century’s most influential artists and an essential voice within the modern movement.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date August 2019 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300226669
EISBN 9780300253351
Illustrations 141
Print Status in print
Description: History of Design: Decorative Arts and Material Culture 1400–2000
Pat Kirkham (Editor), Susan Weber (Editor)
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00219
Spanning six centuries of global design, this far-reaching survey is the first to offer an account of the vast history of decorative arts and design produced in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Indian subcontinent, and the Islamic world, from 1400 to the present. Meticulously documented and illustrated, the volume covers interiors, furniture, textiles and dress, glass, graphics, metalwork, ceramics, exhibitions, product design, landscape and garden design, and theater and film design. Divided into four chronological sections, each of which is subdivided geographically, the authors elucidate the evolution of style, form, materials, and techniques, and address vital issues such as gender, race, patronage, cultural appropriation, continuity versus innovation, and high versus low culture.

Leading authorities in design history and decorative arts studies present hundreds of objects in their contemporary contexts, demonstrating the overwhelming extent to which the applied arts have enriched customs, ceremony, and daily life worldwide over the past six hundred years. This ambitious, landmark publication is essential reading, contributing a definitive classic to the existing scholarship on design, decorative arts, and material culture, while also introducing these subjects to new readers in a comprehensive, erudite book with widespread appeal.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Author
Pat Kirkham (Editor), Susan Weber (Editor)
Print publication date December 2013 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300196146
EISBN 9780300255973
Illustrations 817
Print Status in print
Description: Interaction of Color: Fiftieth Anniversary Edition
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00210
“One of the most important books on color ever written.”—Michael Hession, Gizmodo

Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color is a masterwork in twentieth-century art education. Conceived as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students, this timeless book presents Albers’s unique ideas of color experimentation in a way that is valuable to specialists as well as to a larger audience.

Originally published by Yale University Press in 1963 as a limited silkscreen edition with 150 color plates, Interaction of Color first appeared in paperback in 1971, featuring ten representative color studies chosen by Albers. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the original publication of Interaction of Color, Yale University Press released a new paperback edition that presents a significantly expanded selection of more than thirty color studies alongside Albers’s original unabridged text, demonstrating such principles as color relativity, intensity, and temperature; vibrating and vanishing boundaries; and the illusions of transparency and reversed grounds.

The A&AePortal version of the Interaction of Color is based on the 2013 edition, and includes original video commentary by experts explaining Albers's principles in some of the color exercises featured in the book. The electronic version also combines the classic texts with the plates and commentary, chapter-by-chapter, providing a seamless reading experience.
Print publication date June 2013 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300179354
EISBN 9780300260830
Illustrations 62
Print Status in print
Description: Le Corbusier Before Le Corbusier: Applied Arts, Architecture, Painting, and...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00301
In his numerous writings, Le Corbusier remained uncharacteristically silent about his early career. This intriguing book examines his nascent years as a designer and architect, focusing on the period from 1907 to 1922—the year he changed his name from Charles Edouard Jeanneret and established his identity as Le Corbusier. The contributors to the book offer in unprecedented detail an account of Le Corbusier’s formative years and the cultural, intellectual, and artistic concerns that absorbed him as a young artist in Switzerland and Paris.

From 1907 to 1922 Jeanneret learned the art and craft of architecture and design, and defined his own image as an artist. The book discusses the cultural climate of his Swiss hometown, La Chaux-de-Fonds; his early mentors, friends, and clients; his educational pursuits, including his self-designed Grand Tour; and his first successes as an architect and designer. More than 350 illustrations—including architectural drawings and models, watercolors, sketches, photographs, and furniture—show the range of young Le Corbusier’s work and illuminate the principal themes and issues of his formative years.
Author
Print publication date August 2002 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300093575
EISBN 9780300266252
Illustrations 466
Print Status out of print
Description: Livable Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design during the Great Depression
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00076
During the years of the Great Depression in America, modernist designers developed products and lifestyle concepts intended for middle-class—not elite—consumers. In this remarkable book, Kristina Wilson coins the term “livable modernism” to describe this school of design.

Livable modernism combined International Style functional efficiency and sophistication with a respect for consumers’ desires for physical and psychological comfort. Wilson offers a new view of many popular designs for living rooms, dining rooms, and bedrooms of the 1930s and investigates the remarkable marketing savvy of the furniture and decorative arts companies of the day. As the first study of the advertising and retailing of modern design during the Depression years, Livable Modernism also features an extensive array of vintage advertisements from such popular magazines as House Beautiful and Ladies’ Home Journal.

Engagingly written, Livable Modernism is an essential book for anyone interested in modern furniture and decorative arts. The author demonstrates that the work of these designers—including Russel Wright, Donald Deskey, and Gilbert Rohde—paved the way for Charles and Ray Eames and other post-World War II designers, and that the importance of their philosophies, innovations, and influence has until now been underappreciated.
Print publication date September 2004 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300104752
EISBN 9780300232530
Illustrations 112 Illus.
Print Status in print
Description: A Modern World: American Design from the Yale University Art Gallery,...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00002
Americans living in the first decades of the twentieth century felt they inhabited a modern age. A spirit of excitement and experimentation transformed the world around them, in particular the consumer goods that filled their homes and offices. A Modern World draws upon the renowned collection of American decorative arts at the Yale University Art Gallery to explore the appearance and dissemination of modern design in the United States. This catalogue organizes roughly 300 examples of silver, glass, industrial design, furniture, medals, jewelry, and printed textiles into thematic groups that chart the aesthetic and social trends that defined American design from the Jazz Age to the Space Age. The authors consider modernism broadly—from handmade luxury goods to mass-produced housewares—establishing a context for the objects within larger international developments in architecture, avant-garde art, and scientific innovation. New research and compelling juxtapositions offer an expanded understanding of the era, and designer biographies and corporate chronologies help make this catalogue a valuable resource.
Print publication date December 2011 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300153019
EISBN 9780300232493
Illustrations 348 illus.
Print Status in print
Description: The Origins of Graphic Design in America, 1870–1920
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00152
By the time the phrase "graphic design" first appeared in print in 1922, design professionals in America had already created a discipline combining visual art with mass communication. In this book, Ellen Mazur Thomson examines for the first time the early development of the graphic design profession. It has been thought that graphic design emerged as a profession only when European modernism arrived in America in the 1930s, yet Thomson shows that the practice of graphic design began much earlier. Shortly after the Civil War, when the mechanization of printing and reproduction technology transformed mass communication, new design practices emerged. Thomson investigates the development of these practices from 1870 to 1920, a time when designers came to recognize common interests and create for themselves a professional identity.

What did the earliest designers do, and how did they learn to do it? What did they call themselves? How did they organize them-selves and their work? Drawing on an array of original period documents, the author explores design activities in the printing, type founding, advertising, and publishing industries, setting the early history of graphic design in the context of American social history.
Print publication date August 1997 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300068351
EISBN 9780300233995
Illustrations 51 illus.
Print Status in print
Description: Paul Rand: A Designer’s Art
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00092
Paul Rand was the most influential American graphic designer of the twentieth century, and Paul Rand: A Designer's Art is arguably the most important book on his work. It presents a comprehensive collection of Rand's most important and best-known designs, imparting unique insight into his design process and theory.
Author
Print publication date September 1985 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300034837
EISBN 9780300230246
Illustrations 213
Print Status out of print
Description: Poisoned Abstraction: Kurt Schwitters between Revolution and Exile
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00317
This fascinating book offers a definitive new assessment of the oeuvre of Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948), a central figure of the interwar European avant-garde. Active as an artist, designer, publisher, performer, critic, poet, and playwright, Schwitters is best known for intimately scaled, materially rich collages and assemblages made from found objects—often refuse—that the artist described as having lost all contact with their role and history in the world at large. But as Graham Bader explores, such simple separation of art from life is precisely what Schwitters's "poisoned abstraction" calls into question.

Considering works reaching from Schwitters’s earliest collage-based pieces of 1918–19, through his 1920s advertising designs, to his seminal environmental installation the Merzbau, Bader carefully unpacks the meaning behind such projects and sheds new light on the tumultuous historical conditions in which they were made. In the process, he reveals a new Schwitters—aesthetically committed and politically astute—for our time. This authoritative account reframes our understanding of Schwitters’s multifaceted artistic practice and explores the complex entwinement of art, politics, and history in the modern period.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date November 2021 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300257083
EISBN 9780300270600
Illustrations 130
Print Status in print
Description: Wearing Propaganda: Textiles on the Home Front in Japan, Britain, and the United...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00331
Protest fashion from the Vietnam War years is widely familiar, but today few are aware that dramatic fashion and textile designs served as patriotic propaganda for the Japanese, British, and Americans during the Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945). This fascinating book presents hundreds of examples of how fashion was employed by those on all sides of the conflict to boost morale and fan patriotism.

From a kimono lined with images of U.S. planes blowing up to a British scarf emblazoned with hopeful anti-rationing slogans, Wearing Propaganda documents the development of the role of fashion as propaganda first in Japan and soon thereafter in Britain and the United States. The book discusses traditional and contemporary Japanese styles and what they revealed about Japanese domestic attitudes to war, and it shows how these attitudes echoed or contrasted with British and American fashions that were virulently anti-Japanese in some instances, humorously upbeat about wartime deprivations in others. With insights into style and design, fashion history, material culture, and the social history of Japan, the United States, and Britain, this book offers unexpected riches for every reader.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Author
Print publication date December 2005 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300109252
EISBN 9780300272260
Illustrations 356
Print Status out of print
Description: Weaving Modernism: Postwar Tapestry Between Paris and New York
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00269
With a revelatory analysis of how the postwar French tapestry revival provided a medium for modern art and a model for its discourse and marketing on both sides of the Atlantic, Weaving Modernism presents a fascinating reexamination of modernism’s relationship to decoration, reproducibility, and politics. Tapestry offered artists a historically grounded medium for distributing and marketing their work, helped expand the visibility and significance of abstraction at midcentury, and facilitated modernism’s entry into the dominant paradigm of the postwar period. K. L. H. Wells situates tapestry as part of a broader “marketplace modernism” in which artists participated, conjuring a lived experience of visual culture in corporate lobbies, churches, and even airplanes, as well as in galleries and private homes. This extensively researched study features previously unpublished illustrations and little-known works by such major artists as Helen Frankenthaler, Henri Matisse, Robert Motherwell, Pablo Picasso, and Frank Stella.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date March 2019 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300232592
EISBN 9780300264289
Illustrations 105
Print Status in print
Description: Women Designers in the USA, 1900–2000: Diversity and Difference
Pat Kirkham (Editor)
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00208
This stunning book celebrates the many contributions women designers have made to American culture over the past century in such fields as textiles, ceramics, graphics, furniture, interiors, metalwork, fashion, and jewelry. It includes designers from the arts and crafts and modernist movements, Native American and African American cultures, the post-World War II era, craft and “ethnic” revivals in the 1970s and 1980s, and the world of today. Many famous designers are discussed, including Eva Zeisel, Maria Martinez, Ray Eames, Florence Knoll, Edith Head, Clare McCardell, Bonnie Cashin, Elsa Peretti, and April Greiman, as well as less well-known designers.

The book features seventeen essays by such eminent scholars as Valerie Steele, Ellen Lupton, Cheryl Buckley, and Edward S. Cooke, Jr. A timeline offers readers a broader context within which to understand the developments discussed in the text, as does Eileen Boris’s chapter “Women in the United States, 1900–2000: Social Change and Changing Experience.” In addition, an essay by Pat Kirkham and Lynne Walker explores such fascinating issues as the differing gendered nature of the various areas of design, training, and education, support networks, “race,” class, cultural traditions, and the diverse ways in which women came to be, practiced as, and experienced being designers.
Author
Pat Kirkham (Editor)
Print publication date January 2002 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300093314
EISBN 9780300255980
Illustrations 454
Print Status out of print