Graphis 1946-- weekend purchases

Graphis No. 13: crazy 19th century-inflected lettering by Imre Reiner

Graphis No. 16: pendulum oscillations resulting from sound and music, rendered with a pen
"Apparatus devised by Professor Alfred Gysi of Zurich."

pendulum oscillations rendered with a pen, by Professor Alfred Gysi
These reminded me of Spirograph— loved that toy!

"Satrap" from Persistent Faces, 1945, by William Steig

"Conviction of Being Unique" by William Steig.
Shockingly Charles Addams-like.

"I can't express it" from The Lonely Ones by William Steig.

"My true love will come some day” from The Lonely Ones by William Steig.

“Revenge is sweet” from The Lonely Ones by William Steig.

I was impressed by this ad for a printing firm—very avant garde for 1946, no?
I wouldnt have been surprised if it was from the 1950s or early 60s
(See below about clichés*)

This ad, on the other hand, is completely retardataire for 1946.
The illustration, the type, the entire concept looks about 15 years behind design-wise.

Two exquisite full page ads for Schwitter AG., an art production house and cliché* (plate) maker.

An undisciplined sampling from two copies of Graphis I picked up for a song last weekend at the fantastic Black Cat Books in Shelter Island. Graphis, the tri-lingual “international journal of visual communication” started in Zurich in 1944 but moved to NYC in the late 1980s. I remember the occasional copy of Graphis in the office back in the day; it was always too glossy for my taste. The date of these issues is 1946, the tone is highbrow professional and impossibly snooty, by way of tortuous translation. Reading this preamble in the article on William Steig literally made me gasp:

It would seem that of all Americans who have devoted themselves to the brush or the pencil or the chisel, hardly any have ever found their way to a contact with the higher regions of art as achieved by artists of other nationalities.//

*I found out about clichés! How could I possibly not have known this before? In printing, a cliché was a cast printing plate—also called a stereotype. Remember, metal type was set one letter at a time, thus it made sense to cast a phrase used repeatedly as a single slug of metal. “Cliché came to mean such a ready-made phrase. The French word cliché was said to come from the sound made when the molten stereotyping metal is poured onto the matrix to make a printing plate...”