Virtual Typography

1.6

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Job:01212 Title: Basics typography (AVA)

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From visual poetry to modern typography: 1.6 Concrete poetry

1.5 Bauhaus and De Stijl

Concrete poetry

Following the Second World War, modern typography

helped to promote the recovering industries. But modern

typography itself did not develop much further. Many of

the avant-garde movements mentioned suffered from

the requirements of commercial industries. While the

diverse interpretations of the modernist design principles

sooner or later fell victim to the conservative constraints

of the commercial world, poetry allowed various post-

war typographers to escape commercial restrictions.

Concrete poetry, which emerged in the 1950s, is often

considered a late version of visual poetry. But most

concrete poems are fundamentally different in their

modus operandi. While visual poets challenged the

words semantically, concrete poets visually interpreted

their syntax. Concrete poets use the patterns of words,

letters and punctuation marks to make statements.

The word patterns are usually non-fi gurative. Using

methodical structural processes to alter the arrangement

of letters or words on a page, concrete poets relied on

the experience of reading to convey a second level of

meaning. As basic as the messages sometimes were,

concrete poetry allowed readers to experience the

process of reading per se, and exposed conventional

reading as a highly stereotypical activity.

Selected works – Joshua Reichert

Reichert was born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1937.

He worked as a printer in his home town until studying

at the Art Academy of Karlsruhe from 1956 to 1957. His

studies incomplete, Reichert opened his own printing

workshop in Stuttgart in 1960 but moved to Munich a

year later. Along with his personal work, Reichert designs

typographic information materials such as posters and

announcements. He has become famous for his unusual

visual poems, which he sometimes produces by pressing

old wooden type on sheets of paper simply laid out on to

the fl oor. The posters shown here illustrate how Reichert

manages to challenge the functional aspects of typography

to the extreme. Reichert’s aesthetic arrangement of words

complement their meaning.

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