coherent future, the buzzword that best
sums up contemporary graphic style is
"life-style." Design itself has become a
commodity: more than ever before, deco-
rative graphic design is assigned the task
of seducing the customer into buying
products.

From the Victorian era to the present,
graphic design has had to serve various
economic and cultural masters, and thus
there have been numerous ways in which
graphic styles have evolved. Certain styles
were developed for aesthetic reasons (Art
Nouveau), while others were politically
motivated (Dada). There are those based
on the need for corporate identity (Swiss
International), on commercial requisites
(Post-Modern), and on moral and philo-
sophical foundations (the Bauhaus). Some
were influenced by the fine arts (Art
Deco), others by industry (Plakatstil).
Some national styles became international
movements (Futurism). A few styles
enjoyed long duration--two or three
(Constructivism, Expressionism, Sur-
realism) exert influence even today--
though most were comparatively short-
lived. And many historical styles have
been revived, reinterpreted, and misused
by succeeding generations.

Graphic designers today freely rum-
mage through a big closet of historical
styles looking for ones that are adaptable
for their purposes. Sometimes, as they
reprise a vintage graphic style, it will be an
appropriate and graceful use--the prod-
uct image is enhanced by being linked
to another place and time. More often,
designers without distinctive visual char-
acters of their own attempt to adopt a
once viable style without regard for the
factors that brought it about in the first
place.

As early as 1856, in an essay titled "The
True and False in the Decorative Arts,"
Owen Jones condemned the contempo-
rary practice of trying to make "the art
which faithfully represents the wants, the
faculties and the feelings of one people
represent those of another people under
totally different conditions." In the sixties
a revival of French Art Deco gave rise to a
hybrid decorative manner in American
design. While creative practitioners took

2. Vassily Komardenkov. Storm Cavalry. Cubo/
Futurist design for a book of poems, 1920.
Courtesy Ex Libris, New York

the time to understand Deco's formal
aspects, to make them unique and even
expressive, most designers carelessly mim-
icked Deco's lightning bolts, raybands,
and display typefaces. At best they pro-
duced a nostalgic conceit that said little
about the time in which it was produced
and less about the product or idea being
newly presented. More recently, the radi-
cal form language of Russian Construc-
tivism endured a similar "reappreciation."
Instead of using the style to influence
and shape a new vision--in the way
Constructivism inspired the Swiss
rationalist design of the forties and fifties
--contemporary designers employed
Constructivism's dynamic asymmetry and
primary colors as casual toys, copying the
surface qualities without regard for origi-
nal intent. This tendency, however
lamentable, may be regarded in one way
as a logical and inevitable response.
Although style divorced from its raison
d'être by time and circumstance is just an
empty shell, some designers may see it as
a tempting refuge when faced with the
necessity for original thinking.

Of course, this kind of appropriation
is not unknown in art history, which is
marked by periods of innovation and
then--years, decades, even centuries
later--of reappreciation or revival. Along
with the revivals that are merely shallow
borrowings and those that honestly
attempt to reestablish forgotten standards,
there are still others that prove to be
gateways to new discovery. The Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood of English paint-
ers, for example, sought in the nineteenth
century to emulate the purity of Italian
religious painting during the Early Ren-
aissance. To a period of predominantly
realist art, the Brotherhood brought back
the important and virtually neglected ele-
ment of the imagination and thus was able
to make a meaningful historical contribu-
tion. About the Pre-Raphaelites' direct
influence on Surrealism, Marcel Duchamp
said that they "lit a small flame which is
still burning despite everything." Her-
mann Broch, on the other hand, argues
that a preponderance of neo-this and neo-
that in any period of art really signifies
that the false or fraudulent is pervasive.
Broch applies such a judgment to the Neo-
Gothic and Neo-Baroque of the late nine-
teenth century, despite their impact on
architecture, fashion, and applied arts.
Such stylistic contrivances, he says, are
nonstyles, because they do not truthfully
represent their time and place.

Although Art Nouveau was, in fact, the
first true modern international style, the
term Modernist is commonly reserved for
the antibourgeois, utopian art movements
of the early twentieth century. The design
innovations of the Modernist movement
were the ones most obviously woven from
whole cloth rather than patched together
from imitations of the past. The unprece-
dented Cubist experiments of Picasso
and Braque from 1908 to 1913 stimulated
painters, fashion designers, and graphic
artists for decades to follow. For designers
the Cubist letter/image collages, in which
word fragments were made by juxtapos-
ing unrelated letter forms, suggested an
original and expressive method of typo-
graphical communication. Employed for
poetry, manifestoes, and exhibition
announcements, these types were essen-
tially advertising tools, their ultimate pur-
pose the propagation of a new vision.
Their marriage of word and image even-

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