Events
Typography of the Avant-Garde
with Dr. Bettina Richter
The Curator at Museum für Gestaltung Zürich examines typography from their exhibit “Avant-Garde—Graphic Design on the Rise.”
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This salon places special emphasis on the development of typography into an independent medium of design. The visual poetry of around 1900, the image-text collages of the Cubists, and the linguistic and typographic experiments of the Dadaists and Futurists inspired typeface design after 1920. Conventions were joyfully and anarchically shattered, and new typefaces were designed that challenged the traditional foundries. Theoretical writings, however, initiated a return to order: in his 1925 manifesto, Jan Tschichold advocated above all for clear legibility.
It is part of the tragedy of the avant-garde that experimental design and the emancipatory potential of content became increasingly estranged. By the 1930s, some of its representatives became servants of power and even repression. New regimes appropriated avant-garde design innovations wherever they proved effective for mass propaganda. (In Italy, Futurism and Fascism always shared a common ideological foundation.) Some avant-garde artists fled into exile; others fell victim to totalitarian terror. In both its formal and thematic radicalism, graphic modernism temporarily became a thing of the past, but after World War II, it gained new currency.
This online lecture will be illustrated with selected examples, particularly from the poster collection of the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich.
Dr. Bettina Richter
Bettina Richter studied art history as well as German and Romance languages and literature in Heidelberg, Paris, and Zurich, graduating in 1996 with a dissertation on the anti-war graphics of Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen. From 1997 to 2006, she served as a research associate at the Poster Collection of the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich and was appointed its curator in 2006. In this capacity she has realized, among other exhibitions, Protest! (2018), Talking Bodies (2023), and Avantgarde (2026). From 2000 to 2005, she taught at the Zurich University of the Arts. She has published and lectured extensively on subjects related to the history of art and literature, as well as on posters. Since 2007 she has served as the editor of the Poster Collection series.
