Paul Renner and Futura: The Effects of Culture, Technology, and Social Continuity On the Design of Type for Printing

[Member par…]

For me too, and many other Czechs. Which Thousand Year Empire would you rather live in?

[Member Cha…]

I'm glad to see this discussion picking up.
Futura’s name is distinctly un-German.
It could well be that the name expresses a pan-European point of view, which then begs the question of why did D&P use Europe as the name in France.
Interestingly, the name was suggested to Renner by Fritz Wichert -- a pronounced modernist, who was the director of the Frankfurter Kunstschule. And the suggestion seems to been a development parallel to giving the name Futura to the cyborg in Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" -- to my eyes a German film, but in the modernist, Weimar, sense Mr. Shinn expresses. My reading has indicated to me that German writers frequently make use of "latinische" expressions when they want to make a philosophical or scientific point.
Perhaps there was a little too much of the Geist of ancient Rome in Futura for Jan Tschichold …
The NSDAP program of monumental authoritarian "Roman" building and ceremony didn't begin until well after Tschichold was forced into exile. When Tschichold worked with Renner in the late 20s -- and damned Futura with faint praise -- NSDAP tendency was for Heimat aesthetics.

[Member Nic…]

I was thinking of Tschichold's comment in 1946:

“[The Third Reich] could not bear the genuine modernists who, although political opponents, were nevertheless unwittingly not so far from the delusion of ‘order’ that ruled the Third Reich. The role of leader that fell to me…signified…an intellectual guardianship of ‘followers’ typical of dictatorial states.”

That partly explains why he no longer wanted to be the poster boy of the New Typography.
Notwithstanding Heimat, the capitals of Futura and Kabel take their shape from "Trajan", which is the style of ancient, dictatorial Rome. Hence the taint. Just a theory.

[Member par…]

Well, I should have been more precise. It is the totalitarian aspect of modernism which I meant. Out with the old, and in with the new, as of noon today, so to speak. This intertwined with an uncanny revolutionary zeal and willingness to purge.

On their own, I'd say that in my example, Gill is the one more reminiscent of monumental roman capitals, not Futura, which to my eye comes across as strict, stern and clumsy.

On the cultural level, it might be relevant that the Roman state was a republic in its heyday, just like Weimar, and that there was a degree of autonomy and religious freedom within it, and that the Renaissance movement and humanism owe much to Roman inspiration. And, to me personally, the tension between blackletter and roman typefaces still echoes that clash. Then there is the sad fact that the fascist movement derived its iconography from the Roman Empire directly.

That aside, to my mind, Gill says humanism and respect, and Futura says revolution and upheaval. Caveats: please do not bring the personal habits of Mr Gill into this, and as for slavery, humanism eventually removed it from the Roman tradition before the nazis brought it back.

[Member Cha…]

I was thinking of Tschichold’s comment in 1946.
Well cited. What interests me about Futura, and Gill Sans for that matter, isn't how they were thought of in the aftermath of World War II, but rather what thoughts brought them into existence. The ideas that pre-figure their creation.
I feel that, despite the effects of historicism, designs are bound by historical contingency to their place and moment of creation. In that sense, Renner was a German book designer working in the reality of the Weimar Republic, where a large part of the work done was to make Germany more solidly a part of modern western European culture.
I believe that any internationalist effects of Futura were part of his program to once again make German typography meaningful on the international stage. And in that sense it is a German typeface that applied then current technology to an underlying structure derived from Arts & Crafts lettering.

[Member Cha…]

… there is the sad fact that the fascist movement derived its iconography from the Roman Empire directly.
It wasn't just the fascists. Don't forget that many of the pseudo-classical departmental buildings in Washington, D.C. were built during the 1930's. Often imperial style is appropriated to validate imperial ambitions.
Republican Rome was indeed the model cited by the independent Italian republics -- especially Florence and Venice -- during the 15th century. Of course they appropriated an imperial letter, the Republican capital is often a bit more stark than Trajanic capitals. It is beautiful after all. But they too appropriated the trappings of the Roman republic to serve to authenticate their authority and express their sense of their own importance. There is certainly that sense of boastful assertion of destiny in both Futura's name and style.

[Member par…]

There is certainly that sense of boastful assertion of destiny in both Futura’s name and style.

I wholeheartedly agree.

[Member Ble…]

Well... difficult...
I am not sure to be able to explain in my special pidgin english, what I exactly mean. But I try...

"Perhaps there was a little too much of the Geist of ancient Rome in Futura for Jan Tschichold, i.e. the proportions of the capitals—and that was too close to the Nazi taste. (Although he did say that his disenchantment with the modernist agenda was due to its totalitarian overtones.)"

What you have to understand, is: Fonts from the years around 1930 up to 1935 were symbols of the spirit of Germany. But there were not only one national feeling group, there were more of it. The first group saw themselves represented in fonts like:

Tannenberg
http://www.bleisetzer.de/cms/front_content.php?idcat=57&idart=539

Gotenburg
http://www.bleisetzer.de/cms/front_content.php?idcat=57&idart=453

Element
http://www.bleisetzer.de/cms/front_content.php?idcat=57&idart=521

National
http://www.bleisetzer.de/cms/front_content.php?idcat=57&idart=543
Please see picture #3. In the printed catalogue of National what I bought was a little label from a guy of Ludwig & Mayer, the foundry: "Best regards to the local chief of NSDAP Franz Siegelmeier. It shows that L&M saw this font as a recommendable font for Nazi publications.

Futura was _not_ showing the character of above listet fonts.
It was a typical font of a patriotic german, but one of the brave german guys. Life is _not_ black or white, there are 256 grey scales. Not all who were in opposition to the Nazi were socialists. There were although national konservative or national revolutionary people in opposition. The most konservative people were national thinking, but they thought the Nazis being uneducted underdogs - see Ernst Rowohlt and authors of his company (Verlag).

Futura was a pre-answer to these martial fonts coming up after 1933. Futura is like Paul Renner was: a humanist and a konservativ thinking german. Its a prussian font. And after 1871 when Deutsches Reich was foundet, Prussia had the responsibility for whole Germany.

By the way: He was not the only one. Think about Rudolf Koch. Or Rudo Speeman, who e.g. designed Gavotte:
http://www.bleisetzer.de/cms/front_content.php?idcat=57&idart=669
But he went to war 1939 as a volunteer, because he was a brave german.

Georg
_______________________________________________
„Ich bin ein Preuße, kennt Ihr meine Farben...“

[Member Ber…]

My posited explanation for the non-German identity of Futura is that it has been the ‘inspiration’ for a lot of local sanses (Century Gothic, Nobel, etc.), whereas Gill has been pretty much left alone in this regard.

. . .
Bert Vanderveen BNO

[Member Ble…]

"I feel that, despite the effects of historicism, designs are bound by historical contingency to their place and moment of creation."

I totally agree. I always think about a font embedded in its historical epoche. I try to understand this epoche and try to answer myself the question, if this font is a "good or bad one", trying to see it with the eyes of someone living in this epoche. How else could it be? Its nuts to critizise e.g. Futura from a view of 2009. Its better to come closer to Futura from 1925 or so. What was new seing it from 1925? What was the mainstream feeling of fonts in this time? So my thoughts come automatically to your next announcement:

"In that sense, Renner was a German book designer working in the reality of the Weimar Republic, where a large part of the work done was to make Germany more solidly a part of modern western European culture."

Not in Germany. No one forgot the fatal contract of Versailles and was willing to excuse it to France, UK & US. This is why Hitler's decisions to militarize Rhine Area again, to reintegrate Austria, to stop the payments of the Versaille's contract got an acclamation of the german population. Germany did not want to be integrated wherever. All european nations were stand-alone national thinking ones. Germany wanted to take its place in Europe and the world of the "big nations". The epoche was minted by imperialistic thinking in all european nations, Gemany, too.

And so were the before listed "german fonts". Giving Futura a special place within the german font answer to itsself, like I wrote before.

Georg
_______________________________________________
„Ich bin ein Preuße, kennt Ihr meine Farben...“

[Member Cha…]

Perhaps there was a little too much of the Geist of ancient Rome in Futura for Jan Tschichold, i.e. the proportions of the capitals—and that was too close to the Nazi taste.
I am writing this at 2 AM and I am not a night owl, but your thoughtful post deserves a prompt reply.
There was also, perhaps, a bit too much of the individual identity in Futura. What the purist modernists, as Tschichold was prior to 1933- 36, called for was neutrality of voice, transparency of identity, sublimation of individual aspiration to the continuity of the community. It is very helpful to remember that Jan Tschichold was not really very supportive of Futura before the NSDAP electoral victory in 1933. In other words, he didn't like Futura very much before the excesses of absolutist dictates became apparent. I suspect that he didn't like Futura in 1932 because it called too much attention to its style when what he wanted then were visually neutral typefaces, and in 1948 because it was to dismissive of historical features that he had subsequently come to appreciate. We can, after all, change our minds and still be correct.

[Member Cha…]

whereas Gill has been pretty much left alone in this regard
So, that leaves the question: What is Gill?
My contention is that the two are basically cut from the same cloth--Arts & Crafts lettering. However, the shears used have a slightly different bias. Renner's scissors cut a face that sought to remove every vestige of obsolete technology, e.g. pen trace. Morison through Gill, on the other hand, sought to maintain the visible authority of antiquity.
This reveals a dilemma at the heart of our understanding of the value of scriptal history. Do we better honor the intent of expression by preserving visual artifacts of no longer relevant technologies, or do we modulate such artifacts in order to best express the essence of character within current aesthetic and cultural parameters? I don't know the answer, but, personally, I think that this was the question that Renner faced. Further I believe he opted for the more stringent standard, not for aesthetic effect but because of a drive to be theoretically consistent. Hey, maybe this is the absolutism the chilled Jan Tschichold.

[Member Nic…]

What was new seing it from 1925?

Paul Renner was an artist, book designer, and educator who also wrote, spoke, and organized/agitated.

Like many people everywhere at the time, including the same-age Erbar and the much younger Tschichold, he started out an historicist and got modernism in the mid 1920s. (Historicism had been the progressive graphic movement since the turn of the century, with the influence of Morris and the private press movement.) But he wasn't the only 1920s designer to have a go at designing a sans; Goudy even preceded him. Renner described Futura as a "typeface of our time", not "of our country" or "of our world"; being up to date was important to him:

"For the Modern is an idea, an unending task, never to be entirely resolved. We seek it on a narrow ridge, which drops away on one side into thoughtlessly adopted convention and on the other side into the modish, which is mostly a somewhat foppish exaggeration of the Modern at any one time. This ridge is no comfortable middle way.
--1947, quoted from Christopher Burke's Paul Renner

Historicism was the modern thing to do in the first two decades of the 20th century, and the Arts and Crafts movement, which Renner participated in professionally as a book designer, did provide some of the formal and theoretical underpinnings of Modernism.

So there is nothing particularly Germanic about Renner's modernist "renewal" (as Burke calls it), except that Weimar was a hotbed of turmoil and polarization, with artists from many countries converging on the scene there, so it did provide a cauldron of creativity that produced extreme results, and Modernism was nothing if not extreme. So when he decided to construct a modern, geometric, reductive typeface, Renner took it all the way, and rationalized its appropriateness for the German language, arguing that the Carolignian script, basis of the humanist alphabet, was in fact Germanic, because Charlemagne was Karl the Great, and fraktur was a later French bastardization of the script.

So the geometric minimalism of Futura, in comparison to other sans faces of the era, was due to:

- The culture of extremism in Weimar. The geographical location of Weimar, between Constructivism in the Soviet Union, and De Stijl in the Netherlands, provided an apt center for the development of modernist graphic design, with Gropius' post-1923 concept of the Bauhaus providing a symbolic and social focus. However, in the same German environment, the Erbar sans and Kabel were not solely dependent for their modernity on looking as machine-made and simple as possible, but addressed and defined other qualities.

- Renner's background as an artist and intellectual, and being a member of that social set, provided an awareness of reductive modernism in art and theories such as Purism, and a sympathy for it.

- Renner's considerable professional status: in his late 40s when he designed Futura, he was a man with a solid track record in graphic design and education, and no doubt significant gravitas in person--these qualities meant that the folk at Bauer took his weird geometric experiment seriously, and were prepared to spend many years working on it, and with him, to make it commercially viable. In comparison, neither Bayer's universal alphabet, nor Tschichold's unicase made it into type. Gill Sans benefited from a similar provenance and sponsorship. Kabel too, must have been a no-brainer for Klingspor, given that it was the "skeletal" derivative of the already successful Koch Antiqua.

Ultimately, all type faces are type styles, and what comes first is something purely visual and crafted, rationalized post fact, not before. Really, in terms of genesis, the "modernistic" Benton and Hess face Broadway is not that much different from Futura: proceeding from reductive majuscule signage lettering, a matching lowercase adheres to the same strict formality.

Of course, historical contingency does play a part in shaping types, because every designer lives somewhere, sometime. But it is not a direct influence in a way that gives type forms inherent moral or political qualities--which is the association that people often look for, especially with Nazi-era DIN and Futura. The letters are just shapes, after all. Contingency means how a designer carves out a living, with the successful work being economically practical, and commensurate with the physicality of how he draws and designs for media.

For some reason, Renner was able to excise the trace of the hand from Futura in a way that other 1920s sans serif type designers were not, or didn't want to. At the time, his cultural environment fostered that--but it was the same German environment that nourished the more mannered though no less modern sans serifs of Jakob Erbar and Rudolf Koch.

The modernity of 20th century sans serif faces is not quite so epochal as the modernity of contemporary art. The sans serif had been invented 100 years earlier, and in continuous usage. It was standard practice for successful type designers to work in many genres, including sans. For this reason, one should be wary of borrowing historical contingencies from other fields of art and design and applying them to type. Should not Morris Benton, the author of News Gothic in 1908, inventor of the sans/serif megafamily Clearface, the ultralight Lightline Gothic, the geometric Bank Gothic, the reductive Broadway, the socially-committed Century Schoolbook, &c., &c., be considered a modernist?

My contention is that the two are basically cut from the same cloth—Arts & Crafts lettering.

I don't think so. The idealized geometric shapes of Futura are a completley new and opposite concept to the hand-made quality of Arts & Crafts and Gill Sans. In type, such plain geometry demonstrated the smooth machine finish, becoming at that time symbolic of functionalism. This was the change that Gropius instituted at the Bauhaus in 1923, and what distinguishes the bent steel tube chairs of Breuer from the bent wood chairs of Thonet.

...he opted for the more stringent standard, not for aesthetic effect but because of a drive to be theoretically consistent.

Design isn't either/or, it's both/and. The goal is to make something work well and look good, which involves resolving conflicting criteria. It's hard to marry theory and style, to satisfy both masters, to walk the narrow ridge, but Renner and Bauer pulled it off with Futura, creating a design that fused and transcended style and theory.

[Member Ind…]

(thanks Nick, have not read something so well explained in a long time)

[Member par…]

Yep.

[Member Cha…]

Nick thank you for your thorough critique. It is very helpful.
The idealized geometric shapes of Futura are a completely new and opposite concept to the hand-made quality of Arts & Crafts and Gill Sans.
I think that Renner was less a modernist than someone who came up in the arts and crafts movement and was trying to reconcile his life experience and book designing expertise with modernism as it was consolidated from all the other "isms" of the early Weimar republic. He held this view into the thirties. In 1931 he wrote: "It [the book trade] owes its recovery much more to the revival of the old craft than to constructivists and Dadists."

There are two aspects to Futura's geometry. The first is embodied in the form and the second is a result of its visual austerity.

As to the first, Renner wrote in 1922 that 'the inscriptional Roman capital which stands at the head of European scripts is composed of triangle, circle and square.'

He uses this quote from Typografie als Kunst twice for proofs of Futura. The first instance is in the sample he prepared for Ehmcke's 1925 book on new German type

and the second is from December 1927, after the initial release of the face.

Renner didn't set out to rationalize the upper and lower case alphabets by drawing them geometrically. The geometry was already there in the system of proportions based on the relationship between the circle and the square. This point was also made by Edward Johnston, Rudolph Koch, and Rudolph von Larisch. Before World War I, Renner derived his instructional method for lettering from contact with Johnston's student Anna Simons. His brief description of starting Futura includes mention that he started out, 'just as he has his students do.'

What he did do, with the assistance of his former student and Bauer employee, Heinrich Jost was strip away any artifacts of the hand.

His view that "[Variation in stroke thickness], which script took from the wide-cut nib, are, like all other handwritten elements, not necessary components of these language marks," was modified by the work of Heinrich Jost. Jost apparently convinced him that a tapering reduction in stroke weight where bowls join stems wasn't an effect of the pen, but a necessary optical correction. While Jost was a student in the school Renner directed before World War I, Renner had employed Hans Cornelius to teach his students about the physiology of sight. The untapered perpendicular joins of the bottom of the b and d to their respective stems is sometimes cited as an example of the calligraphic, non-geometric quality of Gill Sans.

The key to this insistence on austerity and removing traces of the hand doesn't lie in attitudes about constructivism and the modern. It is revealed in Renner's discussion of Edgar Dacqué's primalist theories. Here's an example. "… fraktur is not actually of German origin. It is the last ornate offshoot of Gothic scripts…". The key words are "last ornate offshoot." Dacqué held that all creatures that had ever evolved had within them a primal human germ that acted as a generative force. In different eras different species developed. These species failed to achieve ideal form because they were conditioned and limited by the environment in which they emerged. Because of these limits these branchings were ultimately dead-ends that could never achieve the ideal form "sought" by the primal force. Renner applied Dacqué's idea to the history of European scripts. So when letters are created in a time of wide-nibs, they fail to achieve their ideal form because of the limitations of the tool that physically define them.

To be true to his own time and best express the primal letter, he believed that Futura could exhibit no artifacts of other eras.

[Member Nic…]

I suspect that the origin of Futura occurred to Renner in an instant: a mental pattern-matching of the circle+square+triangle of the Roman inscriptional capital with the same elemental forms exhibited in various modern art movements.

That the type which merged these ideas should be a monoline sans followed automatically from the reductive modernist component, as well as through his experience in calligraphy--as you say, "as his students do", i.e. starting out with the monoline skeleton.

The key to this insistence on austerity and removing traces of the hand doesn’t lie in attitudes about constructivism and the modern.

On the contrary, when modernism was the style, he produced the stripped-down Futura. Subsequently, he produced two more types, Ballade, a busy "broad-nibbed" gothic (blackletter) style, and the extremely chirographic Renner Antiqua.

So it seems to me that Dacqué's theory is a rationalization for what Renner wanted to realize in modernist times, and when the bloom was off that rose, he moved on to produce a fully-fledged gothic and an Antiqua.

As he abandoned Dacqué's theory after his modernist fling, this indicates that his relationship with modernism was the driving force in Futura's monoline simplicity.

However, it could be argued that Ballade and Renner Antiqua are attempts to redeem the wide-nibbed letter, firstly by giving a gothic style significant roman letterforms (Ballade), and secondly, vice versa, by "gothicizing" his Antiqua, a condensed, squarish, profusely serifed type.

If he were so dedicated to theory, and the commitment to produce types true to his own time, why would he embrace less ideal type-forms that were notably anachronistic? Perhaps he wearied of fashion, and could no longer deny the feel of the broad-nibbed pen in his hand.

[Member Cha…]

Good observations. I agree that for Renner, particularly the landscape painter who could never bring himself to completely disengage with the publishing industry, "the feel of the broad-nibbed pen in his hand" was important.

[Member Ble…]

Does this belong to this thread anymore?

"This thesis reviews the circumstances that led to what Paul Renner called �the inflation of historicism,� places his response to that problem in the context of the Weimar Republic, details how the German attributes with which he began the project were displaced from the typeface that emerged in 1927, demonstrates that Futura belongs to a new category of serif-less roman fonts rooted in Arts and Crafts lettering, and considers why the specifically German aspects of the project have gone unrecognized for over seventy years. Renner�s writing is compared to ideas prevalent in early twentieth-century German cultural discourse, and Futura�s design process is placed in the context of Renner�s personal experience of Weimar�s social and economic crises. Objective measurements are employed to establish the relationship between drawings attributed to Renner and are used to compare features of Futura with other fonts of the period."

Georg
_______________________________________________
„Ich bin ein Preuße, kennt Ihr meine Farben...“

[Member Ble…]

https://typography.guru/forums/topic/70296-forwarding#comment-357987
Georg
_______________________________________________
„Ich bin ein Preuße, kennt Ihr meine Farben...“

[Member Dav…]

Charles Leonard: if you are still there on the forum, could you please send me an email?

thanks,

David Rault (davidrault -at- gmail)

[Member pic…]

I’d also be interested in talking again with Charles, since I did not visit the thread after he replied last year. I’m tracking this again… :)

[Member Cha…]

David & Claudio -- I am still around. Working on improving the soil on my farm and exploring how the early 20th century German debate on the relative roles of civilization and culture bears on Renner's mind-set c. 1925.

[Member pic…]

Working on improving the soil on my farm

Literally? :-)

I will to contact you via PM.

[Member Cha…]

Claudio, yes literally. You'll be pleased to know that I am using an Italian tractor.