Air Corps U.S. Army^343
Joseph BinderThe modern poster had its start in
Paris a few years before Viennese
designer Joseph Binder ( 1898 – 1972 )
was born. Yet he became one of its
later pioneers, introducing a cubist-
inspired style that employed sharp
edges of color to define forms. Binder
emigrated to the United States in the
late 1930 s. His long-running
campaign for A&P Coffee ( 1939 ) and
emblematic posters for the New York
World’s Fair ( 1939 ) and particularly
the U.S. Army Air Corps ( 1941 )
defined a modern American graphic
style.
Binder rejected any direct
influence from his contemporaries:
“I always worked alone—no one ever
influenced me,” he claimed. But he
was inspired by industrial progress.
He was born in Vienna a year after the secessionists disrupted the
complacency of the bourgeois art establishment. His hometown became a
wellspring of modern art and design. At the beginning of the twentieth
century the influence of industry was reflected by the contemporary
Austrian architects Otto Wagner, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Josef Hoffmann,
and Adolf Loos. Nourished in this environment, Binder was instinctively
drawn to and understood the requisites of posters. “We live in modern
times of life and mind. Everything moves faster today,” he wrote in an
unpublished memoir. “In poster design we need the same speed to put the
message across effectively.”
Binder opened a design studio in Vienna in the early 1920 s. It was
large because the original drawings for the six-foot-four-inch by twelve-
foot-seven-inch posters had to be produced in actual size and covered a
whole wall. From 1925 to 1929 he was a freelance designer for the Julius
Meinl Company, Vienna’s leading importer of coffee, tea, and related
products, for whom he created advertising, trademarks, and labels. His