Alvin Lustig – Design magazine, special issue on Black Mountain College, April 1946
In Graphic Design, we deal with the design of the printed page for a specific use, involving technical, economic, psychological and formal considerations. The last few years have seen a widening of the scope, opportunity and potential maturity of this field, so that the phrases “advertising design” or “commercial art” which suggest a superficial and compromising activity, are no longer adequate or necessarily true.
The aim of the course at the Black Mountain Summer Institute was to emphasize that graphic design is slowly emerging as a serious art on its own terms, allowing for considerable creative freedom and maturity, and offering the artist a valid and constructive position in society. The basic difference between the graphic designer and the painter or sculptor, is his search for the “public” rather than the “private” symbol. His aim is to clarify and open the channels of communication rather than limit or even obscure those only dealing with the personal symbol. The secondary difference is that the designer functions under a set of strictly conditioning factors which affect not only technique but also conception, whereas the artist performs free from external restraints. Those who believe that the artist should only be preoccupied with his own personal vision, developed in complete freedom, will probably not accept the activity of the designer as art. Nevertheless, the great periods of the past have demonstrated that the personal and the mass symbol can coincide in a vital manner, and that works commissioned for specific occasions, and conditioned by psychological and technical factors can still be called art. It is this tragic split between the public and private experience that makes both our society and our art fragmentary and incomplete. Synthesis is the great need and graphic design attempts to carry on the efforts in this direction that modern architecture has already begun in the plastic field.
“The basic difference between the graphic designer and the painter or sculptor, is his search for the public rather than the private symbol.”
Graphic design, like architecture, is an industrial process and demands complete mastery of all the technical conditions, as the designer depends entirely on a set of skilled workmen he has never met, to carry out his plans.
Specifically, the course began by demonstrating its relationship to the basic design classes of Albers, and attempted to show methods of extending and developing these discoveries into the graphic field. The intricacies of typography, engraving and printing processes were discussed, hastily however, because of the shortness of the course. This was followed by an explanation of “approach” to a graphic problem and the psychological factors involved in “selling” not only the public, but the client who is paying for the work. The pitfalls and dangers, both personal and external, that make good work in this field still rare, were pointed out. The class worked on new problems to develop a certain amount of technical proficiency, and then spent the bulk of the time solving a specific problem that involved all that had been discussed previously.
Considerable time was spent in discussing methods by which the designer can learn to translate and synthesize the formal discoveries of experimental paintings as well as the new visual frontiers opened up by science, the electron microscope, stroboscopic and x-ray photography. It is in the maturity and richness of this synthesizing task that the ultimate measure of the designer can be found. If he succeeds in being only superficially derivative, he will fail completely in helping to close the gap between art and society. If on the other hand he does as Picasso himself suggests, “. . . take up our researches and react clearly against us”, he will make a contribution to a field that I am convinced history will eventually honor with the name of Art.
