Page 23 - Studio International - February 1972

Look, no frontiers other spheres so often insists on clearly Flemish artist whose reputation was largely

polarized antitheses, none the less favours made there. Not only is there a high standard of
John Willett blurring over the particular demarcation line book- and type-design; the Germans today are
between literature and art. Kokoschka, Klee and perhaps the only people who treat book
Kandinsky, for instance, to take an obvious illustration as something normal, not just for a
alliterative trio, wrote plays and poetry where specialized market of rich bibliophiles and/or
Bonnard, Braque and Brancusi did nothing of children.
the sort; and more recently, beginning with the Another unique feature of their tradition is
Dadaists, German writers, artists and printers the survival, right into modern times, of the
have trampled over this whole area from many Gothic Fraktur, or black-letter, which means
different directions. One aspect of the special that the German printing industry, with its rich
German talent for such matters is surely history (back to Gutenberg) and its famous type
related to the printing and printmaking tradition foundries, has long had two very different kinds
in that country; one need only think of the of letter to choose from, the one based on the
woodcut lettering of the Brücke artists or the pen and the other ultimately on the chisel.
wordless picture-stories of Frans Masereel, the Given this, together with the persistence of an
individual handwritten script—now said to be
To anyone who feels that the most interesting dying out—any German with an eye for such
discoveries today are being made in the area matters has always known that he had a choice
where the visual and the literal overlap, the of letter forms, and that the alphabet was not
Germans appear to play a rather special role. simply to be taken for granted. Here the early
The case for feeling this way in the first place twentieth-century `characterologist' Ludwig
would take too long to argue, but essentially it Klages is a relevant figure, both for his insights
rests on the contribution of visual models and and for the pseudo-scientific terminology in
insights to our thinking—the Crick-Watson which he cannot resist wrapping them up. In his
`double helix' is an example—and on the growing book on handwriting, for instance, he takes two
need of modern technology for people who can settings of a poem by Klopstock, one in roman
recognize patterns as well as manipulate characters and the other in gothic, and analyses
numbers or words. In all kinds of ways we now the comparative effects on the text. Moreover
must learn to economise intellectually; that is, he does this almost in the same breath as
to take in information by the quickest means, to discussing questions of gestural expression.
clear our memories of unnecessary junk, to It is illuminating then to turn to the work of
identify relationships without elaborate verbal the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
expositions. And it looks as if the best hope of German writing masters, with its extraordinary
achieving this is by using whatever seems most mixture of Gothic constriction and expressive
expressive, vivid and exact from the three freedom, so much richer than the stiff
supposedly distinct realms involved : art, correctness which came over English and
literature and mathematics. French handwriting. This expressiveness was
Artists, of course, tend to be extremely
uneasy at the thought that they may be doing
anything useful; indeed it is one source of their
feeling of superiority over architects that they
so faithfully believe they are not. But it is in the
end these utilitarian possibilities that justify
much of the exploration of the whole zone
between art and letters (or figures). Such
explorations have taken various forms; concrete
poetry is clearly one of them; so is the gestural
pseudo-calligraphy of Kline or Hartung or the
pseudo-graphology of Jack Smith; so is collage
(pop or otherwise) with its use of written
elements; so is all study of letter forms, from
Robert Indiana to Wim Crouwel; so, of course,
is typography proper; and so are the evolution
of new visual symbols and of written or graphic
notations for things that could not previously be
expressed, such as electronic music. What is
special about investigations of this area at
present is that they seem to go along with
developments on the technical side : with
flow-charts and topology and film-setting and
optical character recognition. Some of the paths
pursued may seem to be dead ends, but as an
area it is very much alive.
For various reasons the Germans seem
particularly qualified to explore it. It is a curious
thing that the German temperament, which in
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