TAB Event - "Modern German Posters 1890-1933" Exhibition

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At Utsunomiya Museum of Art
Media: Graphics, Other, Art Talk

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The art magazines "Pan" and "Yugent" were launched at the end of the 19th century, and Bauhaus graphic design in the 1920s was already well known in Japan back then. However, there has never been a large-scale exhibition in Japan of the development of German graphic design, especially one organized around the history of German posters.
In light of this, this exhibition aims to trace the development, characteristics and appeal of modern German posters through the presentation of over 170 posters, fliers, magazines, books and postcards that have been carefully selected from both Japanese and foreign collections.
This exhibition is divided into five chapters, and the first highlight is a group of works from the 1890s to 1900s, when artists were strongly influenced by fin-de-siecle art movements such as Symbolism and Separatism, pursuing dramatic modes of expression. The naext chapter introduces a uniquely German advertisement style known as "Sacher Placard" (presentation poster), which flourished during the 1900s and 1910s owing to its clean alignment of letters.
Introduced in the chapter entitled "Propaganda" are expressionistic works created during World War I and the postwar era (from 1914 to the early 1920s) that speak of the social unease of the times.
In contrast to these works, posters produced after the mid-1920s depicted modern cities and new lifestyles in a grandiloquent and imposing style. Also on view in this chapter are modern graphic works - typography, Constructivist pieces created by working with a limited palette and abstract forms, innovative posters made with cutting-edge photographic and printing methods- all of which were practiced by the Bauhaus school, which operated between 1919 and 1933.
The final chapter attempts not a comparative look at the formative influences between Japanese and German design, but rather an examination of how German graphic design was introduced to Japan with a focus on several influential media and people involved in this diffusion process, the appointment of German designers in the Japanese advertising industry, and the holding of the World War I war poster exhibition in Japan.

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