PDF Ebook Art Deco in Estonian and Latvian Graphic Design Journals
Journalism gives good information to historians about the lifestyle and cultural standard of an era. Not only the text but also an appearance of a journal (cover design, illustrations, vignettes, etc.) contain a lot of information.
Graphic design journals and magazines have beenpublished in Europe, the USA and other countries since the 19th century.The journals covered graphic design, typography, illustration, advertising, photography, book publishing and other related subjects such as the mechanical aspects of publishing. Many of these journals demonstrate beautiful graphics and are an excellent source of information about the artists as well as about the everyday life of people. It is important that they include a far wider range of visual materials than is normally embraced by art history. They are reflections of relations of power, aesthetic objectives, changing theories of art and even the religious conceptions and rituals of society.
In the pre-television era, written press was intended for a very wide audience. As almost the only channel of mass media, it had an immense influence on shaping people’s tastes and preferences, thus guiding the political arrangement and cultural life of society. Media was also a tool for exercising power thanks to the rather privileged access of politicians and government officials to journals and magazines.
From the point of view of culture, media is the primary source for defining social reality and the most widespread expression of the collective identity or Zeitgeist.
The German word Zeitgeist means the spirit of time and refers to the cultural trends and tastes that characterise a given era. The field of graphic design on the whole is characterised by immediacy and a short life-span,on which P.B.Meggs (1998:xiii) and M.Rickards (1988: 13) have focussed in their research. Thus journals are passing documents of everyday life, the contents of which are often not meant to last longer than a week or a month.A typical person throws them out after reading. The journal is always directed to the contemporary consumer,it reaches almost everyone in the society.From this stems the link between its contents and the vision of the social, political and economic life of the society that often enables it to express the Zeitgeist of the era more closely, by telling more than other means of human expression, such as the art of painting. We see and read the human story in journals.
The years of prewar national independence (1918–1940) in Estonian and Latvian art are characterised by a national-inspired approach to form and decoration. Development took place in parallel in both countries, as cultural contacts were close. In the first part of the present article the author provides an overview of the development of the national style in Estonia, to the study of which the author has dedicated 7 years. The best studies of Latvian artistic developments in the first half ot the 20th century are written by M. Brancis (1994),S.Grosa (1999) and J.Howard (2004).But they mainly concentrate on jugendstil or art nouveau, and do not explore the era of art deco. That is why in the present article the author takes one step forward and looks at the works in the style of art deco, trying to assess their artistic maturity in the cultural context.
The era of art deco in Estonian and Latvian graphic design journals can conventionally be divided into two. The best works in the art deco style are from the second half of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, when preconditions for the development of journalism were good and the freedom of activity was great. On the basis of the works of the second half of the 1930s, both in Estonia and Latvia, a consequent direction of state national propaganda through art into public consciousness can be observed.The cover picture is no longer a work of “art for art’s sake”. It has been given the high-minded objectives of shaping a citizen who thinks independently and is self-aware,which,ultimately,should have improved the culture and quality of life of the whole society. The individual contribution of the artist was subjected to function, the ideological basis of which was the futuristic belief in a better tomorrow, the method for which was proto-totalitarianism.
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PDF Ebook Art Deco in Estonian and Latvian Graphic Design Journals
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