Journal of Design History Vol. 18 No.

doi:10.1093/jdh/epi005

Graphic Change
Design Change: Magazines for the Domestic Interior, 18901930
Jeremy Aynsley

This article examines the character of magazine publishing for the design of the domestic interior between 1890 and 1930. Its primary focus is on German-language publications that appeared from specialist presses between the height of Jugendstil and early modernism. It suggests that Alexander Koch, the Darmstadt-based publisher, established a paradigm for how the new design could be interpreted for a contemporary readership. From examining the visual strategies employed by Koch and other contemporary magazine publishers, the article traces the signicant shift which occurred in the modernist magazine in the 1920s. The latter offered a resistance to the increasingly commodied representation of the interior in consumer interest magazines and attempted to present interiors through techniques that stressed information above advertising.
Keywords: Das InterieurDas Neue FrankfurtGermanygraphic designinterior designmodernism

Introduction
There are designers who make interiors not so that people can live well in them, but so that they look good in photographs. These are the so-called graphic interiors, whose mechanical assemblies of lines of shadows and light best suit another mechanical contrivance: the camera obscura. [A. L005]1

The turn of the twentieth century witnessed a rapid change and development in forms of design journalism. In part this was prompted by diversication and improvements in the techniques of graphic reproduction through which visual strategies for the interpretation of the domestic became multiple and complex. More signicantly, however, tremendous experiment in art and design throughout Europe, on the cusp of modernism, informed designers approaches to graphic and interior space; what the English modernist designer Paul Nash would later address as Room and Book.2 While design historians have tended to concentrate on either interior design or graphic design, the aim of this article is to bring together these two fields to examine the act of

representation of the interior. It will explore how periodical publications could both reect and help to actively construct attitudes towards the interior in early twentieth-century Europe.3 For the purposes of this article, I will concentrate on examples of design magazines drawn from two historical moments, 1902 and 1929. These years were extraordinarily rich in events in the realm of design. They are marked by a conuence of design ideas, made known through a variety of signicant exhibitions and publications, as well as the actual designs themselves. For in many respects, the years mark the watersheds, respectively, of, on the one hand, Art Nouveau or Jugendstil, and on the other, the new design, die neue Gestaltung and early modernism in particular in Central Europe. An indication of their scope is illustrated in an initial contrast between two periodical covers [1,2]. In 1900, on the title-page of the rst issue of Das Interieur, the Viennese journal devoted to interior design, a line-drawing by Marcel Kammerer depicted a woman in an aesthetic environment, her dress co-ordinated with the interior, with a strong emphasis on stylized 43

The Author [2005]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Design History Society. All rights reserved.

Jeremy Aynsley

Fig 2. Cover of the modernist magazine Das Neue Frankfurt, vol. 3, no. 2, February 1929, designed by Geschwister Leistikow

Fig 1. Title-page of the Viennese magazine Das Interieur, vol. 1 no. 1, 1900, by architect and interior designer Marcel Kammerer

oral decoration. Her pose, reminiscent of much symbolist portraiture of earlier years, was characteristically reective and introspective. The titling of the magazine was in an elegant script, typical of Secessionist lettering in its restrained decorativeness, and the entire design seemed informed by the belief in the aesthetic philosophy of the total work of artthe Gesamtkunstwerkheld by many such designers at the time. By 1929, the cover of the architecture and design journal Das Neue Frankfurt [The New Frankfurt] by Hans and Grete Leistikow portrayed ostensibly the same subject. Not dedicated solely to interior design, the magazine promoted all aspects of the new design as commissioned by this forward-looking socialist municipal authority. Here, the medium was montage, a technique associated with the radical wing of avantgarde artists and designers. A photograph of an equally fashionable woman was juxtaposed with an evocation 44

of the citydynamic lines lead to the words Italy, Russia and Franceall signalling an internationalism of outlook. The typeface, Paul Renners Futura, was machine-like in its precision and became an industry standard on a par with the English designer Eric Gills sans-serif of the same years.4 This particular issue of the magazine was devoted to the theme of the chair. It included a review of the important German Werkbund exhibition of the same name, held in Stuttgart in the previous year and in an abridged form at Frankfurts Arts and Crafts Museum in the city.5 The new woman, identied by her hairstyle, stockinged legs and shoes, turns towards the reader and engages directly with us. Pose and demeanour suggest a modern, liberated subject who is at home in the contemporary world, whether private or public, interior or exterior. What marks the difference between these two publishing moments could be explained as a changed artistic sensibility brought about by the First World War.6 Alternatively, it could be characterized as a shift from an individualistic to collectivist interpretation of the role of the designer. A further line to follow would be to see them as encapsulating real changes and progress in gender politics and specically womens suffrage achieved at the time.7 While

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acknowledging all the above as possible determinants of the changing appearance of magazines, in what follows, I am interested to trace the attitudes and ideas to what the published page itself could convey and will focus on issues of graphic representation.

Magazines of design
This is not the place to provide a detailed analysis of the emergence and denition of magazines of design in the last decade of the nineteenth century, although it is clear that considerable developments took place at that time.8 In the case of Britain, for example, The Studio was heralded as an important model for subsequent titles, at home and abroad.9 When it started publication in 1893, its innovation was to cover contemporary decorative as well as ne art, informed by the challenge to the conventional hierarchy brought about by Arts and Crafts thinking. Other European magazines which shared this moment of recognition for the decorative are Art et Dcoration, published in Paris from 1897, and Dekorative Kunst, Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration and Innendekoration in Germany.10 Although addressing furniture as one of the decorative arts, the original emphasis of such journals was on it as an extension of an art form. Consequently, articles on furniture joined decorative sculpture and paintings, along with textiles, metalwork, jewellery, glass and ceramics as a topic of interpretation. The ensemble of the interior was introduced to their pages largely in reection of the increasing number of installations in the specialist and international exhibitions. Prior to The Studio, design coverage in Britain had been the domain of specialist trade literature, in titles such as The Furniture Gazette and The Builder. These were intended foremost to guide representatives of the trades and professions, but also consumers, in practical and artistic matters.11 It is important to stress that such artistic magazines were concerned with the discussion of self-consciously designed interiors, rather than interiors of the everyday. Whether actually executed or remaining only projects, designs were presented as ideals. At one level, therefore, these published interiors occupy space in the stages of the professionalization and promotion of the interior decorator and designer, and the advertisements in the magazines announcing their services testify to this. It would seem reasonable to assume that such design magazines addressed other 45

designers and architects as their primary intended audience. However, research into the subscription of such magazines has shown how in fact readership of the design magazines came from a wide range of professional groups and institutions, as well as private, individual consumers.12 It was in the USA that a focus emerged on modern houses of signicance, those owned by prominent business, professional or cultural gures, setting in train a further genre of magazine, aimed more specically at the consumer. For example, House Beautiful, begun in Chicago in 1896, and the New York-based House and Garden, launched by magazine proprietor Cond Nast in 1901, each offered proles of celebrity homes and advice on decorating without the more overt design reform agenda of their European cousins.13 Recent literature on womens magazines helps to dene how these interior magazines may have been read and consumed in a period of immense growth in the publishing and advertising industries.14 The contents of many publications mixed the didactic with the entertaining, and the practical with the aspirational. In fact, although appearing to reconcile contested and even contradictory points of view, it has been argued that it was the very nature of magazines to be polyvalent and, through their composite nature, to accommodate simultaneously different readings. And such distractedness was essential to their modernity. What also emerges is that serial forms of publication had to full the paradoxical demands of appearing novel with each issue, while also maintaining an editorial consistency and identity through which readers could identify and remain loyal to individual titles. Interpretations of magazines have also stressed the heterogeneity of their content. For example, in the case of design magazines, a characteristic range could include an editorial, reviews, shorter notices, reports and more polemical essays. They depended on a variety of journalists and writers to move beyond a single authorial voice and to embrace mixed media and genres. In this sense, design magazines conformed to the usual expectations of the more popular monthly magazines. However, unlike products of the cheaper and more prolic presses, design magazines were intended to be kept or collected. Produced on high-quality paper, they were often distinguished by their striking visual appearance and in certain cases the cover was used to signal the individuality of an issue rather than the seriality of the title [3].

Jeremy Aynsley

Fig 3. The frontispiece of Das Interieur, Wiener Monatshefte fr angewandte Kunst, 1902 shows how its design could stress consistency across a serial publication

The genre established

The most obvious models for interior magazines were the art and architectural journals, which, as we have seen, had expanded in their coverage in the 1890s to include consideration of furniture and interior schemes. In terms of their design, these magazines were predominantly laid out in conventional book format, often with single- or double-column pages of printed text. In most cases, one level of imagery was integrated in the text, highlighting individual items under discussion. Often, additional illustrations appeared, either as full-pages within the magazine layout or as tipped-in sheets. Most frequently, independent specialist publishers were responsible for such specic art and design periodicals. Their pictorial reproductions were overseen by expert graphic and 46

photographic institutes, which were acknowledged in the signatures on the images immediately beneath the pictures frame, through which they established copyright, as well as alerted the reader to the artists and printers skills. The layout of an article in the architectural journal Moderne Bauformen on the American designer Will Bradley, better known as a typographer and poster artist, was indicative of this general approach and included a characteristic range of illustration types [4].15 Intense interest was shown in the various advances in reproductive printing, aimed at making available high-quality, chromolithographic art prints for collection and display in the home. It is probable, as the magazine monogram suggests, that it was the intention of publishers that such images, culled from magazines, also be collected and displayed, just as reproductions of paintings from more conventional ne art sources were. A magazine such as Art et Dcoration, for example, ran articles introducing its readers to the new science of colour and printing, explaining techniques of illustration and colour theory such as De LEmploi de la Couleur en Impression in 1902. This introduced a new level of self-consciousness about reproduction which was the more familiar territory of the specialist literature, and the same author, Verneuil, for example, was also featured in the leading British printing journal, the Penrose Annual.16 In Germany, a principal initiative in addressing interior design came from F. Bruckmann, who published Dekorative Kunst from Munich, a seedbed of design reform ideas, where it became the mouthpiece of the workshop movement, led by Richard Riemerschmid and the Vereinigte Deutsche Werksttten . It was Alexander Koch of Darmstadt, however, who was responsible for the countrys rst serial publications specically on interior design. Kochs Innendekoration started publication in January 1890, while his Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, which also focused primarily on interiors, began in October 1897. In many respects, the latter represented Kochs greatest undertaking and ran for thirty-ve years until 1932.17 As a young man, Koch had worked for the type foundry and printer Flinsch of Offenbach am Main. Kochs rst magazine was Tapeten-Zeitung [Wallpaper Magazine], which was initially a trade journal that moved during the late 1880s from addressing the concerns of the producer to those of the consumer, and from issues of manufacture and style to those of

Graphic Change

Fig 4. Layout of an article on the American designer Will Bradley, from Moderne Bauformen: Monatshefte fr Architektur und Raumkunst, Julius Hoffman, Stuttgart, 1906

retail and taste.18 Kochs own drawings skills and experience of typography and ornament meant that he took an active interest in the design of the journal and he subsequently commissioned many prominent designers of the Jugend generation for his later projects. Throughout his career he used books and periodicals as a source for thematic publications promoting ideas about interior design. An early work by Koch and Hermann Werle was Das Vornehme Deutsche Haus [The Rened German House] of 1896 [5,6].19 With its subtitle of Interiors, Furniture and Ornament [Innenrume, Mbel und Dekorationen] it consisted of a portfolio of drawings by the architect Werle, presenting the interior through expansive and interpretative illustrations. Aimed to inform on matters of taste, to instruct and inspire, in such a volume the only text was the captions, given in German, English, French and Spanish. After 1891, Kochs range grew to encompass prescriptive design magazines in line with other international design developments aimed towards the growing professions as well as consumers, homemakers and the patrons of architects, designers and artists. Kochs broader notoriety rose as he became the ofcial publisher of the design reform movement 47

in Darmstadt. The city, situated in the duchy of Hesse, was one of several places to develop an identity as an art city at the time. The beginnings of the Darmstadt Jugendstil are usually associated with the Grand Duke Ernst Ludwigs commission of Mackay Hugh Baillee-Scott in 1897 to equip two of the private rooms of the New Palace and his subsequent invitation to Joseph Maria Olbrich and a group of eventually twenty-three other artists, designers and architects to live and work on the site of the Mathildenhhe artists colony.20 Here the collection of houses, museum and other purpose-designed buildings was opened to the public during four exhibitions between 1901 and 1914, aimed to promote the new way of life to the public. Signicantly, in his commentaries Koch used the term Dokument in several ways. For instance, the 1901 inaugural Darmstadt exhibition was entitled Ein Dokument Deutscher Kunst.21 To promote the new design, Kochs formula was to publish large-scale professional visual records through which the reader could scrutinize documentary evidence, details of furniture, arrangements, surfaces and ttings. It was Kochs intention to dene through publication and exhibition a reform of living that went far beyond design.22

Jeremy Aynsley

Fig 6. Title page of Das Vornehme Deutsche Haus by Hermann Werle and Alexander Koch, 1896 Fig 5. Cover of Das Vornehme Deutsche Haus, a book of designs for houses by architect Hermann Werle and co-published with Alexander Koch, 1896

In his writings, Koch also drew analogies between the magazine and the shop window, and this came to fruition in one respect, in a special issue of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration in March 1903, which featured all the furniture available at the Wertheim department store in Berlin.23 This included designs by members of the Werkstatt movement, using serial batch production, as well as more exclusive ranges [7]. One editorial strategy Koch shared with The Studio and Art et Dcoration was to run competitions for amateurs and professionals in his magazines. No doubt such competitions were both to attract readers or subscribers and to generate editorial content, with female readers especially targeted. They began with a poster design competition for the journals and the competition How can our women undertake the decoration of our living rooms? [Wie knnen unsere Frauen zur Ausschmckung der Wohnrume beitragen?], which ran between 1891 and 1906 in Innendekoration.24 A second 48

competition held in 1896 and 1902 was for Simple and Cheap Dwellings (Einfache und Billige Wohnung), an area of design activity in which Germany was to gain prominence.25 The most prominent competition, however, was for Ideas for artistic and original designs for a House for an Art Lover, a competition that drew responses from a range of internationally based designers, announced in December 1900. The results were published in Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, as well as featured in the celebrated portfolios, die MappenwerkeHaus eines Kunstfreundes.26 The special issue of the magazine devoted to Haus Behrens, one of the villas designed for the artists colony in Darmstadt, shows the in-depth, monograph treatment of the full aspects of a house that could be given in the journal [8,9]. At the time, Koch and Peter Behrens were collaborating on the Turin International Exhibition in 1902, where the designer installed a version of Kochs editorial office as part of the German display. Koch invited the architect to design the entire issue of the journal. Behrens employed his own typeface and ornamental devices throughout the

Graphic Change

Fig 7. Cover of the special issue on the Berlin department store Wertheim, Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, March 1903

Fig 8. Cover of the special issue of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoaration on the architect and designer Peter Behrens, January 1902

design. The house was depicted photographically, as a drawing and in architectural plan and cross-section. Further details of room arrangements, the garden and even ttings such as door handles were given. The unity of female form, design and the interior was shown in the artistic photograph of Frau Behrens in one of the rooms, dressed in an example of a Reformkleid made to her husbands design. As an editor, Kochs most signicant achievement was to nd strategies to link the book, the exhibition and magazine. The rest of his professional life was dedicated to publishing with an emphasis on interior design.

The interior as sign

The Viennese journal Das Interieur interestingly took the French term for its title when it started publication in 1900.27 Editor Ludwig Abels represented interiors of a diverse kind: shops, ofces, cafs and restaurants, as well as the domestic. The magazine featured photographic proles of actual interiors and designs 49

by leading modern architects and designers, among them the Secessionists. Like many titles at the time, it was either available monthly, as a single issue, or could be acquired as an annual compilation. In such an anthology of Das Interieur, a set of drawings would be presented as an appendix, forming an impressive compendium of visual references. It was in this Viennese publication, more than any other, that striking parallels between design for the page and design for the room became apparent [10,11]. The magazine was lled with stylized natural motifs on the page, which are echoes of the surface pattern on walls, furniture, textiles and ceramics to be found in the actual interiors. This heightened awareness of the place of ornament ran throughout Viennese design at the time. It had also been studied by the Viennabased art historian Alois Riegl, at rst as Curator of Texiles at the Museum fr Angewandte Kunst and later at the University of Vienna: in Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament [Stilfragen, Grundlegung zur einer Geschichte der Ornamentik] of 1893.28

Jeremy Aynsley

Fig 9. Haus Behrens, showing the front elevation in a photograph and drawing, from Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, January 1902

Among characteristic graphic devices in Das Interieur was the inclusion of monograms, reproduced along with the designs, which took the form of a branding of design, elevating personal style to signifier. This identification of ornament became an important integral element of the overall presentation of the interior, acting like a hallmark. Indeed, it was Walter Benjamin, writing about a house by another Jugendstil designer and architect, Henri van de Velde, who commented, Ornament is to this house what the signature is to a painting.29 Many of the designs in Das Interieur were enclosed by square borders with softened corners. The titling of the drawings, in stylized capitals, was carried out in a specic style associated with the von Larisch school of lettering. A nal distinctive feature of these images was their point of view. Often the interior schemes were represented from above and from a diagonal axis, emphasizing the angularity of the composition with a rapidly receding vanishing point. On lea ng through such volumes, the reader would encounter a strong contrast between reproduced drawings with their imaginary colours and the factual record of the photograph in black and white [12]. It is tempting but would also be misleading to read back a lack of advancement or sophistication onto such black and white photogra50

phy. Quite how the contemporary viewer oscillated between the two forms of representation remains a fascinating question and one worth further exploration.

The rhetoric of photographic illustrations

Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent: the age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social value, which is the publicity of the private: the private is consumed as such, publicly. [R. Barthes]30

Roland Barthes idea that it is the ability of the photograph to bring the private into the public realm, and in so doing, render it a consumable experience, is central to the process of publishing interiors. For Barthes, the late nineteenth century, his age of Photography, began with the proliferation of reproducible images in such magazines as those under consideration. To this must be added that most of the interiors were knowingly prepared for public consumption, however, and therefore the private was carefully selected. In many respects, at an experiential level, to view photographic illustrations of interiors in magazines was anal-

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Fig 10. Drawings from the supplement of Das Interieur, 1902 dedicated to the designs of Max Benirschke, here, a corner of a reading room and seating by Albin Lang

ogous to witnessing room installations in the international expositions, or indeed, the department stores and more exclusive furniture showrooms and their sales catalogues. The mode of display for interiors was to look onto the real interior, positioning the onlooker beyond the imaginary fourth wall. Characteristically, most photographic scenes of interiors, like shop displays, were unpopulated. For the upper and middle classes of the early twentieth century, it is possible to suggest that the practice of viewing the interior offered a continuum between the magazine, the department store, the trade or retail catalogue and the exhibitions. To use a popular trope from more recent photographic history, these interiors appear to lay 51

bare the scene of the crime for the detection of their evidence. Jonathan Crary has suggested in Techniques of the Observer how by the mid-nineteenth century the dominant model of vision, based on the camera obscura, was being replaced by other, more complex ways of coding the visual, largely in response to modernity. Crary makes the convincing case that photography was a crucial component of a new cultural economy of value and exchange31 and he offers ways of thinking about magazines and images of the domestic circulating in an ever-increasing variety of contexts with a commercial purpose. It is also Crarys contention that; The collapse of the camera obscura as a model for the condition of an observer was part of a process of modernization. He continued, By the early 1800s the rigidity of the camera obscura, its linear optical system, its xed positions, its identication of perception and object, were all too inexible and immobile for a rapidly changing set of cultural and political requirements.32 Crary alerts us to the contradiction that while photographic images that conform to the conventions of the camera obscura proliferated, in the nineteenth century this visual mode was no longer the most modern. Nonetheless, it is clear that it was exactly the visual regime of the camera obscura that codied the interior on the pages of many magazines, straightforward photography without pictorialist intentions, which placed the interior, mis en scne, for the readers scrutiny. Novel ways to edit and manipulate the photograph were also evident in the magazines and increasingly so as we move into the new century. For the eye of the expert, or the reader interested in the minutiae of particular products or designs, alternative forms of representation were used to great effect in the journals, often isolating and abstracting objects. As such, they removed their subjects for analysis from their everyday contexts of display and use, paradoxically, then to be pored over by readers, once again often in a domestic setting. One of the interesting questions in the early stages of the development of design journalism is the extent of the overlaps and cross-overs in terms of personnel and content between the different genres of magazine publishing. How did the treatment of the domestic interior differ according to the contexts of its publication? And what sort of exchange was there, for example, between the apparently different forms

Jeremy Aynsley

Fig 11. Das Interieur, 1902 prize-winning design for a bathroom by Max Benirschke

of magazine as those devoted to womens interests and interior design? Jennifer Scanlon has shown in her book Inarticulate Longings how the American magazine Ladies Home Journal grew to become, by September 1889, the best-selling magazine of the nation. It was, she suggests, lled with articles and advertising produced by women who led lives distinctly unlike those they counselled readers to live.33 In the area of the domestic, what Scanlon has called the philosophy of simple living is signicant. She writes, by simple living Bok (Edward Bok the editor) meant an emphasis on buying simple fashions, furnishing and living in small homes, and maintaining uncomplicated relationships in the home and community.34 In 1901 the magazine introduced a series of one-page proles of houses, their gardens and interiors. The articles are instructive in what they tell about the editors expectations of their readers. February that year saw a design by Wright, 52

A Home in a Prairie Town, and July that year another of his designs, A Small House with Lots of Room In It [13]. Crucially, in this context, no concessions were made to change the established conventions of architectural representation. These included cross-sections, oor-plans, elevations and birds-eye views. The accompanying text echoed professional discourse and drew attention to the architects interpretation, emphasizing the arrangement of space, circulation and materials used, as well as estimating costs. Wright was still a junior architect at the time of the publication of these designs, not the famous name he would later become. No doubt, the signature of his style was a useful marketing strategy, as in small print at the foot of each article, the text ran: The architect is ready to accept the commission of preparing the working plans and sample costs were given. The assumption was that the professionally coded systems of representation of architects and designers would be

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Fig 12. Contrast between a graphic and photographic rendering of a suite of furniture, Das Interieur, 1902

understood by Americas middle-class women and shared with their husbands.

A Call to Order in design magazines

It is important to place the persuasive force of architectural modernism in a study of representations of the domestic interior of the early twentieth century. In many respects, avant-garde design movements of the 1920s developed an aesthetic of distinction and reaction to the mainstream that forms the basis of the concluding section of this article. The case of Le Corbusier is well charted. Of particular relevance is the study of Beatriz Colomina, whose Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media explored the contrasting publishing dimensions of the Swiss architect and the Viennese Adolf Loos.35 Unlike many of his contemporaries who were drawn to Dadaist cacophony or Constructivist dynamism on the page, Le Corbusier and his fellow 53

editor Amde Ozenfant developed an aesthetic of scientism in the early 1920s when they launched their journal, LEsprit Nouveau [14]. Historians have placed this tendency within a broader cultural return to order [rappel lordre], a term rst applied by the artist and poet Jean Cocteau in France following the First World War.36 LEsprit Nouveau ran from 1921 to 1925. Interestingly, Colomina writes,
Purist culture, by which I mean Le Corbusier and Ozenfants project of arriving at a theory of culture in an industrialized everyday life throughout the pages of LEsprit nouveau, can be read as a reection, in both the specular and intellectual sense of the word, on the culture of the new means of communication, the world of advertising and mass media.37

The journal aimed to review contemporary developments in painting, literature, music, architecture, scientic aesthetics, cinema and sport.38 The magazine hovered between a literary and scientic journal in its layout. Even articles on Le Corbusiers own

Jeremy Aynsley

Fig 13. A Home in a Prairie Town by Frank Lloyd Wright in the Ladies Home Journal, February 1901

architectural work remained restrained and understated in their graphic representation. Le Corbusiers distinctive use of stock photographs of industrial and engineered goods and fascination with a particular set of images such as the ocean liner or Innovation trunks should be seen in dialogue with the emphasis on visual 54

luxury of many other contemporary French publications. In particular, he was drawn to images gathered from industrial manufacturers brochures and department store or mail order catalogues. By taking such imagery from its conventional commercial sources and re-presenting it in a new context as a readymade,

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he drew attention to the particular visual qualities and rendered them strange. A similar interest in dening a distinctive visual language was evident in Das Neue Frankfurt, a journal that ran from 1926 to 1933 under the subtitle, a monthly publication for problems of modern design. It is a suitable publication to conclude with, as it marks a stage of an increasingly overt role for the graphic designer in interpreting a magazines subject.39 Between 1925 and 1933 the city authorities of Frankfurt am Main mounted a publicity campaign to promote a new style of living, known as die neue Wohnkultur. This was perceived as an attempt to introduce modern design to a broad public under the guise of a heroic form of social engineering. The most famous examples of design were the housing estates (Siedlungen) of Ernst May and associates, as well as the design of the Frankfurt kitchen by Margarete Schtte-Lihotzky, itself a response to Christine Fredericks ideas of the Taylorized home applied to homes for standardized living. As well as many articles on the citys own building projects and their ttings and furnishings, the magazine covered related themes. These included special issues on hygiene, schools, the city, cheap dwellings and the art school. It covered parallel building movements in other countries, notably the Soviet Union and Switzerland, as well as design themes and an occasional prole of individual designers, including Adolf Loos. These movements are by now well established in the commentaries on architecture and design. However, it is noticeable that within the literature, little has been specically developed on the periodicals appearance. The graphic, typographic and photographic strategies employed in the Frankfurt projects represented a consolidated campaign to apply modernist design principles to areas of publicity that advocated rational consumption in a form differentiated from conventional marketing strategies. First, there was the Frankfurt Register, a list of recommended goods intended to help equip new homes, and secondly Das Neue Frankfurt, the monthly magazine, which carried more discursive articles that developed themes of the neue Wohnkultur [15]. Designed initially by the brother and sister team Hans and Grete Leistikow, known professionally as Geschwister
Fig 14. Cover and the opening of an article of Le Corbusiers villas LEsprit Nouveau, 1, 1921

55

Jeremy Aynsley

Leistikow, and after 1930 by Willi Baumeister, it can be situated in the context of contemporary publicity and advertising strategies. While the covers of the magazine reected current ideas of innovative and arresting design solutions among them montage, abstraction and graphic symbolsthe interior pages were more measured. In design terms, the full page of Das Neue Frankfurt was used actively, organized according to the principles of the new typography. These included the constructive use of white space on the page, sans-serif typefaces, text interpreted as abstract blocks, and the use of directional arrows to lead the reader to the correct way of thinking. A more straightforward juxtaposition of contrasting photographs was also used, as for example, the traditional, comfortable, bourgeois luxury interior contrasted with the preferred, standardized, modernist interior designed by Ferdinand Kramer [16]. If such graphic strategies were more extreme than those used in more popularly oriented magazines, they served to distinguish Das Neue Frankfurt in sympathy with its message of functionalism. Within the pictorial language of the magazine there was a distinct reaction against the developing commodity culture of more characteristic contemporary magazines such as Ideal Home and House Beautiful,

which stressed personal fullment and psychological gain in their editorial and advertising content. Instead, objects and interiors presented in Das Neue Frankfurt were intended to be non-commodied, fullling needs rather than desires, and serving as equipment rather than lifestyle accoutrements. As architectural historians have stressed, many of the design principles of the Frankfurt project were informed by a political commitment to socialist planning, and the magazine was conceived as the equivalent of a socialist graphic design. However, an irony exists that the American efciency movement in part informed these graphic strategies, which applied diagrammatic layouts to illustrate time and motion studies. For instance, photographic documentation of the Siedlung movement in the magazine was accompanied by a combination of visual ideas; these included plans of estates and the layout of individual dwellings, as well as statistical tables and charts recording the provision of homes, room size or number of occupants. As the Das Neue Frankfurt cover design predicted, the various ways to represent the new home stressed their collective rather than individualized aspects in terms of interior design [2]. And the emphasis was classless rather than class specic. In many respects modernism presented a set of oppositions. As the mass media became more adept at providing images that captured the colour and texture of modern life, modernism could be said to have codied an aesthetic of resistance and critique. Such oppositions were formalized in matters of technique, design and editorial principles: black and white rather than colour, sachlich [new objectivity] rather than pictorial photography, and statistical rather than suggestive copy. In content, the opposition presented was in terms of returning the subject of interiors to a professional rather than a leisure or popular readership. In all this, Das Neue Frankfurt located itself directly in the debate between the collective and the individualized home.

Conclusion
By the late 1920s, the tradition of design publishing, associated with the 1890s and represented here by Alexander Koch, continued alongside more modern developments. While minor changes in paper, printing and layout design had occurred, the essential format, 56

Fig 15. Cover of Das Neue Frankfurt in January 1928. Directional arrows were used to construct a narrative about the inappropriateness of ornament

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Fig 16. A simple juxtaposition of photographs in Das Neue Frankfurt, 1928, was intended to stress the contrast between a traditional beautiful living room and a modern, functionalist work room

repeated over the years, remained unchanged. From having been associated with the new, the formula had lapsed into what might best be characterized as a form of conservative modernity.40 Symptomatically, when in 1929 Dekorative Kunst changed its title to Das Schne Heim [The Beautiful Home], a title it would retain until it ceased publication in 1942, the new name implied a re-orientation towards consumer ideals. In fact, however, the magazines preoccupation with a professional set of interests remained and its continuing focus on the villa as a housing type betrayed its Wilhelmine origins. With a subtitle, Haus, Wohnung, Garten, Kunsthandwerk [House, Apartment, Garden, Art Industry] the emphasis remained on embellishment for the home of good taste.41 The modernist magazines such as LEsprit Nouveau and Das Neue Frankfurt enter the history of design publishing as much for the signicance of their ideas and their visual attitudes as for their immediate impact through distribution and readership. They also formed a model for much design journalism in the midtwentieth centuryparticularly that associated with prescriptive views of good design, emanating from museums. For instance, in the early catalogues of the Museum of Modern Art New York, where a direct connection between designers from the Weimar period existed, a similar commitment to abstraction, 57

object photography and scientism of layout was manifested. This was the case for the catalogue Machine Art in 1934, for example, with its cover designed by Joseph Albers, by then of Black Mountain College.42 The visual rhetoric of modern magazine design also became the accepted form for the publications of the rst of group of design councils established in Europe in the early post-war years. Here again, a middle path was suggested through their concern to distance commentary from advertising and promotion in their texts and an experimental visual rhetoric was combined with factual object photography that avoided the allure of more overtly promotional images.43 On a broader front, in many respects it could be said that modernism pushed the magazine away from the culture of advertising, to dene its layout as a form of information design. A further stage in the history of design magazines would be a reconciliation of these two apparently oppositional tendencies in another kind of design journalism and in tune with what has been described as a softening of modernism, as in the Italian design journal Domus. But that is another story.
Jeremy Aynsley Royal College of Art

Jeremy Aynsley

Notes
1 A. Loos, Regarding economy, in Raumplan versus Plan Libre, quoted in B. Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, MIT Press, 1994, p. 64. 2 P. Nash, Room and Book, Soncino Press, 1932. 3 Beyond design history, studies of magazines can be subdivided into broad categories: there are those that have focused on the magazine as a specic form of literary genre; for example, C. L. White, Womens Magazines 16931968, Michael Joseph, 1970; R. Ballaster et al., Womens Worlds: Ideology, Femininity and the Womans Magazine, Macmillan, 1991; M. Beetham, A Magazine of her Own: Domesticity and Desire in the Womans Magazine 18001914, Routledge, 1996. Other interpretations stress magazines as a source of evidence for consumption practices, particularly those associated with the feminine, such as E. Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s, Oxford University Press, 1996; J. Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings: the Ladies Home Journal, Gender and the Promises of Consumer Culture, Routledge, 1995. A third broad group of magazine studies can be placed within a branch of Bibliographic and Business History, such as F. L. Mott, A History of American Magazines, vol. iv, Harvard University Press, 1957; D. Reed, The Popular Magazine in Britain and the United States, 18801960, British Library, 1997; J. Tebbel & M. E. Zuckerman, The Magazine in America, Oxford University Press, 1991. Design-oriented interpretations have stressed stylistic innovation at the expense of a more deeply integrated analysis of the magazine as a part of cultural history. An exception to this would be R. Poynor, Typographica, Laurence King, 2001. Magazines have also been used as a rich source of evidence by historians of the interior, for example, N. J. Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier, Yale University Press, 1991; L. Tiersten, Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in n-de-sicle France, University of California Press, London, 2001. A study that treats publication design as an object of equal signicance to interior and architectural design is Colomina, Privacy and Publicity. Recent inroads into the understanding of prescriptive literature for the home as a specic form of visual and literary representation were made in a special issue of this journal, edited by G. Lees-Maffei, Domestic design advice, Journal of Design History, vol. 16, no. 1, 2003. 4 For Futura see C. Burke, Paul Renner: The Art of Typography, Hyphen Press, 1998, ch. 4. 5 The exhibition catalogue was edited by the organizers, B. Rasch and H. Rasch, Der Stuhl, Verlag Fr. Wedekind, 1928. 6 K. Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian avant-garde and the First World War, 19141925, Thames and Hudson, 1989. 7 M. Meskimmon, Visions of the Neue Frau: Women and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany, Scolar Press, 1995. 8 See S. Muthesius, Communication between traders, users and artists: the growth of German language serial publications on domestic interior decoration in the later nineteenth century, Journal of Design History, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 720. and J. Kinchin, Designer as Critic: E. W. Godwin and the Aesthetic Home Journal of Design History, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 2134. 9 The Studio, The Studio Ltd, London, 18931963. Its subtitle was an illustrated magazine of ne and applied art.

10 Art et Dcoration: revue mensuelle dart moderne, Libraire Centrale des Beaux Arts, Paris, 18971939; Dekorative Kunst, F. Bruckmann, Munich, 18971929; Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, Verlagsanstalt Alexander Koch, 18971932; Innendekoration, Verlaganstalt Alexander Koch, 18901944. 11 Furniture Gazette, Furniture Gazette, London, 18731893, becoming Furniture and Decoration, 189399 and The Builder, The Builder Publishing Ofce, London, 18421966. For an extensive commentary on and analysis of this eld of publishing, see T. Keeble, The domestic moment: design, taste and identity in the late-Victorian domestic interior, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Royal College of Art, London, 2004. 12 S. Randa, Alexander Koch: Publizist und Verleger in Darmstadt, Reformen der Kunst und Lebens um 1900, Wernersche erlagsgesellschat, 1990. 13 For a broad discussion of the magazine in the USA, see Tebbel & Zuckerman, op. cit. 14 Beetham, A Magazine of her Own; N. Walker, Shaping our Mothers World: American Womens Magazines, University Press of Mississippi, 2000 and M. E. Zuckerman, A History of Popular Womens Magazines in the United States, 17921995, Greenwood Press, 1998. 15 H. H. Berlepsch-Valendas, Will Bradley: ein Amerikanischer Wohnungsknstler, Moderne Bauformen, vol. 4, 1906, pp. 11024. 16 M. P. Verneuil, De LEmploi de la Couleur en Impression, in Art et Dcoration, vol. XI, 1902, pp. 112 and La Photogravure, vol. XI, 1902, pp. 8592. M. P. Verneuil published in the Penrose Annual in that same year. 17 Alexander Koch was born on 9 November 1860 in Kln am Rhein. Son of a singing tutor, Professor Ernst Koch, and Mathilde Haberland, when he was 14 he moved from Cologne to Stuttgart as his father was called to the Conservatoire. He attended Handelsschule in the city and aimed to become a salesman. His apprenticeship in the type foundry Otto Weisert in Stuttgart introduced him to printing. He also worked for Flinsch of Offenbach am Main through which he established business contact with the wallpaper factory Carl Hochstaetter. He married Hochstaetters daughter Annemarie and entered the business. In 1887 he founded his publishing company, Alexander Koch Verlag. In the next decade he started several publications. Koch died on 5 January 1939. For this and further biographical details, see Randa, op cit. 18 Tapeten-Zeitung 1888, see Randa, op. cit., pp. 525. 19 A. Koch and H. Werle, Das vornehme deutsche Haus, Innenrume, Mbel und Dekorationen. Entworfen von Architekt Hermann Werle, Motivenwerk fr Architekten, Mbelfabrikanten, Dekoratre, Dekorationsmaler, Kunstgewerbetreibende aller Art und kunstsinnige Private, Kunstgewerblicher Verlag Alexander Koch, 1896. 20 R. Ulmer, Jugendstil Darmstadt, Eduard Roether Verlag, 1997. 21 For a subsequent historical interpretation, see the catalogue Ein Dokument deutscher Kunst, Darmstadt, 190176, E. Roethert, 1976, 6 vols. 22 For the wider context of Kochs reform ideals, see the exhibition catalogue K. Buchholz (ed.), Die Lebensreform: Entwrfe zur Neugestaltung von Leben und Kunst um 1900, Institut Mathildenhhe, Husser, 2001. 23 The Wertheim special issue was published as Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, vol. VI, no. 6, March 1903. 24 Innendekoration competition 3, 1892, Randa, op. cit., p. 66.

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Graphic Change
25 Randa, op. cit., p. 71. For commentary on contrasts between French and German furniture traditions, see N. J. Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier, Yale University Press, 1991. 26 The portfolios appeared as Meister der Innen-Kunst I. Baillee Scott, London, Haus eines Kunstfreudes, text by H. Muthesius, 1902; Meister der Innenkunst I. Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Haus eines Kunstfreundes, text by H. Muthesius, 1902 and Das Haus eines Kunstfreundes. Ein Entwurf in zwlf Tafeln von Leopold Bauer, Wien, text by F. Commichau, 1902, all published by Alexander Koch, Darmstadt. 27 Das Interieur, Wiener Monatshefte fr angewandte Kunst, Verlag Anton Schroll, 190015. 28 For commentaries on Riegl and the decorative arts, see S. Muthesius, Alos Riegl: Volkskunst, Hanseiss, und Hansindustre pp. 135150, and J. Masheck The Vital Skin: Riegl the Maori and Loos pp. 151182, in R. Woodeld (ed.), Framing Formalism: Riegls Work, G&B Arts, 2001. 29 W. Benjamin in Louis-Philippe, or the interior, Paris, capital of the nineteenth century (1955) published in English translation by E. Jephcott, in P. Demetz (ed.), Reections, Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, HBJ, 1979. 30 R. Barthes, Camera Lucida (1980), Fontana, 1982, p. 98. 31 J. Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, MIT Press, 1990, p. 13. 32 Ibid. p. 137. 33 J. Scanlon, op. cit. 34 35 36 37 38 39 Ibid. p. 53. Colomina, op. cit. Silver, op. cit. Colomina, op. cit., p. 160. R. Warden, The Open Hand: Essays on Le Corbusier, MIT Press, 1977, p. 134. Das Neue Frankfurt, editors E. May and F. Wichert, Verlag Englert and Schlosser, 192631. For commentary, see C. Mohr, Funktionalitt und moderne: das neue Frankfurt und seine Bauten, 19251933, R. Mller Verlag, 1984 and R. Hpfner & V. Fischer, Ernst May und das Neue Frankfurt, Ernst, 1986. This concept was rst developed in relation to English literature of the inter-war years by A. Light in Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars, Routledge, 1991. It drew attention to the paradoxical application of modern technologies in publishing to convey conservative values. This is pertinent in the case of Das Schne Heim and much magazine publishing aimed towards a middle-class readership in this period. The term can be usefully applied to both form and content of the magazines. S. Gnther, Das Deutsche Heim: Luxusinterieurs und Arbeitermbel von der Grnderzeit bis zum Dritten Reich, Anabas, 1984. Machine Art, catalogue, edited by A. Barr and P. Johnson, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1934. C. Moriarty, A backroom service? The photographic library of the Council of Industrial Design, 19451965, Journal of Design History, vol. 13, no. 1, 2000.

40

41 42 43

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