emblazoned the brand in everyone’s memory. By chance, Bernhard tapped
into the power of simplicity and created a paradigm of modern
functionality. Later Bauhaus inventions were hardly more reductive. He
modeled much of his subsequent work on that poster, and though many of
his designs were good, he never really surpassed Priester for ingenuity. And
why should he? The Sachplakatwas not merely a style, it was a tool for
spreading the word. It would become dated over time, but only in the same
way that one tool might be superseded by a better tool.
As the one who discovered Bernhard, Growald felt he had the
right (and certainly he had Bernhard’s permission) to encourage others to
work in this manner. He formed a loose-knit “school” of kindred artists
known as the Berliner Plakat. Some members followed Bernhard to the
letter; others veered off in their own directions, adding a touch of humor or
a typographical flourish. As a charter member, indeed the school’s foremost
innovator, Bernhard became involved with many of what was also known as
the Plakatstil(poster style).
Bernhard’s Sachplakatmight very well be credited with providing
the model of objectivity that was ultimately adopted later by the progressive
segments of the advertising industry. In the 1930 s dramatic still life
photography, responding to the call for a machine art for a machine age,
heroicized the industrial product in much the same way that Bernhard
celebrated mere matches, spark plugs, and gear shafts. Photographers took
Bernhard’s notion a step beyond the sentimentality endemic to the drawn
or painted image and were therefore even more modern in the formal
sense. But Bernhard also prefigured pop art in his popularization of the
object. The success of the Priester Matchposter rested on figuratively
rubbing two sticks together that ignited a new methodology. Without
Bernhard’s pioneering effort, it is possible that objectivity as method and
style would have taken much longer to catch on.
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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