Postcubist Pictorial Modernism

Postcubist pictorial modernism developed during and in between the World Wars, specifically after World War I. Throughout this time, technology and machines was an unequaled and important part of the progress in history. This translated to the arts and design of the time. Industrial and mechanical forms became a vernacular design resource for a new type of visual language in pictorial images, taking inspiration from Leger's cubist ideas about spatial organization and synthetic images. Basically reducing communication into a simplified manner.

Edward McKnight Kauffer (1890 - 1954)

Edward McKnight Kauffer, born in Great Falls, Montana, an important American graphic artist to present cubism into his work, incorporating directly with his commercial art approach.

Kauffer's formal education was limited to eight years of grammar school, since his father abandoned his family at the age of three. He began to work several jobs to help his family at the age of 12. Kauffer traveled to San Francisco, being 16 working at a bookstore while taking night-school art classes and painting on weekends. Going to New York in late 1912, he stopped in Chicago to study at the Art Institute. During this time he was lucky to see the famous Armory Show, showcasing artists as Duchamp, Picasso, Kandinsky, Matisse and more. The important part been that he was introduced to cubist and futurists pieces that would ground Kauffer's style as an artist. 

Kauffer at 22 moved to Europe, finally deciding to stay in London in 1914 right when the war broke out. This is where he did most of his work as an advertising artist, showing how the formal idiom of cubism and futurism could make a strong communication in graphic design. Kauffer said that he prefers the more difficult task of advertising products in terms of forms that are symbolical only to those particular products ,expressing through simplification, distortion, and transposition, producing not a copy, but a simplified, formalized and more expressive symbol of the subject or product.

When World War II began, Kauffer moved back to America, where he worked until his death in 1954.

A.M. Cassandre (1901 - 1968)

Cassandre spent his childhood years living and roaming between Russia and France, before he finally moved to Paris with his parents in 1915. In 1918, he enrolled in the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts to begin his studies in the field of Arts. With so much passion, he also entered the independent studio of Lucien Simon then continued formal schooling in the Académie Julian. He worked toward different career paths such as being a graphic designer, poster artist, painter, and a stage designer.

A.M. Cassandre, in my opinion, embodied and played the important role as the artist that defined the new idiom and approach of Postcubist Pictorial Modernism. Incorporating elements of cubism and art deco. The term art deco was used to identify popular geometric works of the 20s and 30s , signifying and grounding the look of graphics, architecture, and product design. Cassandre's work was bold, simple, emphasizing the two-dimensional and used simplified planes of color. He reduced the information and details of the subjects to iconography symbols, becoming unironically more information as a visual communicator, coming as close as synthetic cubism.

Cassandre, as we see in his work, actually really loved typography, integrating the letters as shapes that belong within the composition and imagery. Combining type and geometric forms with iconographical imagery, he was able to create works that are unified. Only using capitals in his designs to be more legible and can be seen in large scales.

Austin Cooper (1890 - 1964)

Canadian-British illustrator and commercial artist. Austin Cooper made a direct application of cubism to graphic design in England. In his most famous work for the London Underground, he uses geometric shapes and colorful palette to represent glimpses of the landmarks, wanting to achieve a symbolic visual look of temperature change, instigating the reader to understand that it is much more comfortable below in the underground, inviting them to enjoy their travels.

Joseph Binder (1898 - 1972)

Another important designer is Josef Binder. He reduced the natural images to basic forms and shapes, translating the subject into cubes, spheres, and cones. Binder's work was flat but naturalistic in looks, creating shadows and light. He developed a highly refined and stylized naturalism in posters and billboards advertising throat lozenges, beer, travel, and public services. Pioneer of the two-dimensionality Vienna style.

Heinz Schulz-Neudamm (1899 - 1969)

Superb printing technology and rigorous art training institutes enabled German graphic designers to achieve a high level of excellence of work print. Heinz was a staff designer for motion picture publicity at Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft, he is prominent among the many German designers who created memorable graphics during this period. His most famous work been a Metropolis movie poster, colour lithograph.