Warren Lehrer, who added color, textures, and even more chaotic
typographic interplay to the Massin model. In recent years neo-
expressionist and deconstructive typographers have furthered the “type-as-
voice” idea. But Massin’s work, despite the ignorance of many artists and
designers who perhaps unknowingly stand upon his shoulders, remains the
hallmark of these typographic contortions.
Massin’s second significant work, Letter and Image,is an
encyclopedic anthology of illustrated and expressive letterforms that took
him fifteen years to compile and edit, and incidentally was one of the first
volumes to address the history of eclectic type before the widespread,
postmodern interest in design history starting in the 1980 s. When first
published in America by Van Nostrand, the book was a fixture on many
designers’ bookshelves, though few actually made the connection between
this and The Bald Soprano.Dover Books had long published clip-art
collections of lost and found passé typographic specimens, but Letter and
Image was the first treatise to provide the historical context and intellectual
underpinning to truly understand how metaphoric letterforms in Western
culture developed into distinct languages that were more than mere
accessories to pictures.
Moreover, “the publication provided an alternative to the
rationalist history of typography propagated by the Bauhaus-influenced
Modernists,” writes Latetia Wolff. And though many who bought the book
did so to “borrow” ideas (as I did), the anthology of over one thousand
examples, including Apollinaire’s Calligrammes(the wellspring of expressive
typography), Medieval illuminations, and sign, graffiti, advertisement, and
package lettering, articulately describes the holy marriage of the pictorial-
letterform and its roots. Massin was not the only designer of his time to be
interested in this relationship—certainly in America, Push Pin Studios
prefigured postmodern pastiche by decades—but he was the first to codify
the history, if not the tenets, of what might be labeled “typographic
pictorialism.” Therefore, what Jan Tschichold did for the New Typography,
Massin did for a new eclecticism through Type and Image.
The word “pastiche” means imitation, takeoff, or spoof, and the
connotations are not always positive. The modernists abhorred pastiche as
nostalgic artifice, but Massin built a vocabulary (not simply a style) on the
reapplication of vintage graphic forms, which he applied to books and book
covers when he was art director for several postwar French book clubs,
including Club Français du Livre and Club du Meilleur Livre, among
others. Some designers argue that even the most classical texts and their
covers should be reinterpreted in a contemporary design idiom. But Massin,
whose interest in classical letters dated back to his boyhood when he learned
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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