The New Typography

their carefully thought-out optical impact expresses the content of the
poem. The types generate a hitherto unknown visual strength. For the first
time typography here becomes a functional expression of its content. For
the first time also an attempt was made in this book to create "visible­
poetry," instead of the old "audible-poetry," to which in any case nobody
had listened for a long time. It contained all the audacity of Futurism, which
at that time had had an effect like a bomb; but even this effort, the first sig­
nal of the new art that was to come, long remained the only one.
The war caused these movements of aggression, the revolution proclaimed
by Futurism in its manifestos, to have a far stronger effect, in fact stronger
than Futurism itself really wanted. It also brought to an end the old scheme
of things and helped to free us a little from the "canker of Professors,
Archaeologists, Know-ails, and Antiquarians" on whom the Futurists had
declared war.
The young generation to whom the war had given importance, and who
were disgusted with the rotten individualistic culture of the pre-war period,
threw themselves into the Dada movement as being expressive of their own
ideas. The tendency of this movement, deriving from a few anti-war intel­
lectuals who had fled to Switzerland, was negative. Its leaders in Germany
published in June 1917 a prospectus Neue Jugend (New Youth), which is
one of the earliest and most significant documents of the New Typography.
We find in it already its most typical characteristics: freedom from tradi­
tional styles of composition, strong contrasts in type sizes, design, and
colour, type set at all sorts of angles, all kinds of type, and the use of pho­
tography. Overheated impotence against the capitalistic war found literary
expression in political articles: "Men must be made of india rubber," "Pray
with head to the wall," "Work work work work: Triumph of Christian
Science," and so on. The external form of the paper reflects the chaos of
the period. In France, where some of the Swiss Dadaists were hiding, Dada
took on a more lyrical character. It made propaganda for ''L'Art abstrait,"
Abstract Art; it had no political aims. In typography it broke completely
with tradition and made uninhibited use of every kind of typographical
material which, like the example shown on p. 57, sometimes made a "cha­
rade of dynamic values" (Kurtz). This interesting work can only be appreci­
ated in a purely painterly sense: most genuine printers. unaware of its
strong painterly qualities, which of course are utterly untypographic, can
only view it with incomprehension.
In the period after the war the creators of abstract painting and construc­
tivism worked out the rules for a contemporary style of typography in prac­
tical work. The same aim that had led to "absolute" painting- design com-