Wednesday, April 28, 2010

The radical design of Gerd Arntz






Gerd Arntz (1900 – 1988) was a German Modernist artist and activist inspired by social and political issues. In his twenties, Arntz left his bourgeois roots to commit himself fully to the proletariat struggle, influenced by anarchism and council communism. His earlier works portrayed social inequities, exploitation and war in black & white woodcuts used on prints that was published in radical anarchist magazines in Germany and abroad. It was in these magazines that Otto Neurath, the spearhead of modern pictograms first discovered Arntz and recruited him to Vienna’s Museum of Society and Economy to further develop ISOTYPE. ISOTYPE, or the International System of Typographic Picture Education is a method of communicating complex information in a pictorial form. For Arntz, this form was well suited to conveying the causes of capitalism to an audience often alienated by most art.

LINKS:
Gerd Arntz Web Archive
Gerd Arntz on Wikipedia
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