| Abstrakt: |
In the late 1950s, Czechoslovak book culture breaks away from the conventional understanding of illustration and book design and shifts more significantly towards more experimental approaches. The 1958 World Exhibition in Brussels (Expo 58) brought several innovations and meant a significant impetus to the field of design -- both graphic and industrial. In the field of graphic design, the "Brussels style" can be characterized as a return to modernist design which began to appear in Czechoslovakia just before Expo 58, for example on the covers of cultural and literary magazines (Tvar, Plamen, Domov, Reklama, etc., in Slovakia -- Mladá tvorba). The Brussels style is typical with its asymmetrical composition, plane colour scheme, geometric layout accentuating dynamics, work with the contrast of colours and lines. Pastel colour tones are used. The Czech art historian and curator Marta Sylvestrová characterizes the message of the Brussels style in graphic design: "The whole concept of graphic design, every component of form and space, material and technique, word and image -- everything is subject to the overall expression. Line, plane, texture, tone, colour, and typography became a means of intuitive, emotional expression, forms abstracted into geometric forms and subordinated to an expressive manifestation corresponding to an artistically impressive design conceived on geometric stylization." Besides the geometric-structural nature, less restrained typography was applied, too. Other influences also penetrated book design and illustration in the 1960s: neosurrealism, psychedelic style, the use of frottage, collage, photomontage. The introduction of fragments of reality in connection with hand-drawing was a reference to avant-garde principles working with motif appropriation, intervening various found and selected images. An important element of the book visual form was the juxtaposition of images and visual word-image relationship. The artistic feature that is beginning to assert itself is the letter -- a character. A pictorial arrangement of text or letters composed in the form of an illustrative scene, this is the method enlivening a book as an added value. In Slovakia, the line of continuity of the interwar avant-garde is not as clear as in Czechia. Still, we discover it, for example, in the work of Ladislav Csáder, as well as older authors: Rudolf Fabry, Alojz Riškovič, Viliam Weisskopf, Ivan Július Kovačevič. In the early 1960s, authors of the middle-aged generation: Rudolf Altrichter, Marián Čunderlík, and Emil Bačík; as well as graphic artists of the upcoming generation: Pavel Blažo, Karol Rosmány, Juraj Deák, Róbert Brož, Milan Veselý, etc. An abbreviated drawing stylization and work's caricature character are beginning to dominate illustration. The magazines resonated with the work of the American artist Saul Steinberg who was presented at Expo 58 in the US pavilion by largescale collages and drawings. His style was often uncritically adopted, and he became established especially in the Czech context (e.g. Adolf Born, Miroslav Šašek, Svatopluk Pitra, Vratislav Hlavatý, etc.). In Slovakia, his influence was manifested in the work of Marián Vanek, Viliam Weisskopf, and Igor Kostka. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
