Cooper Hewitt says...
Jan Tschichold was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1902. His father was a sign painter and lettering artist whose occupation exposed Tschichold early on to practical typology and typography. Between 1919 and 1921 Tschichold attended the Akademie für graphische Künste und Buchgewerbe (Academy for Graphic Arts and Book Production), where he studied calligraphy, wood engraving, etching, and bookbinding. He also studed type design under Heinrick Wienyck at the Kunstgewerbeschule (College for Applied Arts) in Dresden. Upon completing his education, he worked as a traditional calligrapher in the field of advertising, and also taught at the Leipzig Academy. One of the most formative events in Tschichold’s career was his visit to the Bauhaus Weimar exhibition in 1923. Impressed by the works he saw by Laszlo Maholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, and Kurt Schwitters, Tschichold began incorporating Bauhaus functionalism and Russian constructivism into his designs, influenced as well by theories of the Dutch De Stijl.
While Maholy-Nagy had been the first to coin the term Die Neue Typographie (The New Typography) in the 1923 Bauhaus catalog, Tschichold would become its most vocal proponent, publishing several seminal texts on the movement. The first of such was a Sonderheft, or special issue, of the printing trade journal Typographische Mitteilungen, which Tschichold—then just twenty-three—was invited to guest-edit in 1925. Originally intended as a Bauhaus special edition (the journal title set in lowercase for the occasion), the issue included a twenty-four-page insert designed by Tschichold and entitled elementare typographie, which was dedicated entirely to The New Typography. The special issue was printed in red and black and laid out the basic principles, ideologies, and applications of the movement, which advocated the use of sans-serif typefaces, asymmetrical layouts, geometric shapes and reliance on the grid. German typography had favored symmetrical layouts and the medieval typeface Textura. Tschichold’s manifesto introduced practical printers, typesetters and typographers to the new, modern school of typography. In 1928, Tschichold further refined these ideas in his first book, Die Neue Typographie, which today is recognized as an essential document of modernist design and an influence of a range of printed matter from brochures and business cards to magazines and advertising posters.
Politically, Tschichold had leftist sympathies, and briefly changed his name to Ivan in an optimistic response to the Russian Revolution. Convinced by his colleagues to drop the new moniker—he shortened his given name to Jan—he was nonetheless arrested shortly after the Nazis assumed power in 1933. Along with his wife, Tschichold was accused of “cultural bolshevism,” and after their release from so-called “protective custody” the couple fled to Basel with their son. Tschichold became a Swiss citizen, and save for a stint in London, lived the rest of his life in his adopted neutral land, producing graphic and identity designs. Between 1946 and 1949, Tschichold served as art director at Penguin Books, where he established important early precedents for corporate identity design. He died in Locarno in 1974.
As early as the 1930s, Tschichold’s stringent modernism became less rigid. In 1942 he renounced his 1929 Neue Typographie as too extreme, too authoritative, and modernism more generally as too fascistic; his work moved back toward classicism and incorporated roman typefaces. Nonetheless, Tschichold’s designs and publications firmly established The New Typography as the paradigm of typographic modernism and helped disseminate its aesthetics and ideologies throughout twentieth-century print culture.
