The New Typography

enthusiastically taken up - indeed, people were actually proud of this tin­
niness. Like the profiteers of our own postwar period. people of that time
had lost all sense of what was genuine; like us. they were blinded by the
phoney glitter of those horrors.
The whole era is characterized on the one hand by a slavishly and entirely
superficial copying of every conceivable old style. and on the other by a ca­
priciousness in design without precedent. A town hall. for example. might
be built to look like a pseudo-Gothic palace (Munich) or a "Romanesque"
villa.
Similar conditions flourished in other countries. though not nearly to the
same extent. Sickened by them towards the end of the eighties in England.
William Morris took the wrong perspective of fighting against machines and
machine-production. Morris visualized the ideal as replacing machine-work
by a rebirth of handicraft and a return to earlier times. By his action he
interrupted natural development. and became the father of the "Arts and
Crafts" movement. He was also the first producer of an artist-designed
type, Morris-gothic. well known even in Germany. In it he followed closely
a gothic model. With his type he printed books in which everything was
made by hand. With this he gave impetus to a movement whose last off­
shoots. the German private presses. were for the most part killed only by
inflation. As creator of the first artist-designed typeface Morris is the pro­
totype of the "book-artist," who first appeared in the history of book pro­
duction at about the beginning of the present century, chiefly in Germany.
There is no question that book design in the last decades of the 19th cen­
tury had become feeble and insipid. The thoughtless copying of a style. for
example the German Renaissance in Munich. did not provide an answer.
For this reason. Morris's views were undoubtedly stimulating. It is chiefly
thanks to him that ':Jugendstil" (Art Nouveau) came into being.
Jugendstil was the first movement to deliberately try to free itself from imi­
tation of historic styles. The Arts and Crafts school style of the seventies
and eighties had to be defeated; form must emerge purely from purpose.
construction. material. The products of such logical creation were to fit
harmoniously into the forms of modern life. The search for new forms finally
extended from objects of everyday use to the interior as a whole. to archi­
tecture. even to a world-view of life. The leaders of this movement were
painters. e.g. van de Velde, Eckmann. Behrens. Obrist. and others in Ger­
many. Hoffmann in Vienna. and others all over the rest of Europe. The
movement as we know collapsed shortly after the turn of the century. A
characteristic of the movement was that it tried to give the new feeling for
life. as it was then believed to be. a sovereign expression. The heroic