Herbert Matter
Herbert Matter (April 25, 1907 – May 8, 1984) was a Swiss-born American photographer and graphic designer known for his pioneering use of photomontage in commercial art. The designer's innovative and experimental work helped shape the vocabulary of 20th-century graphic design.
Biography
Born in Engelberg, Switzerland, Matter studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva and at the Académie Moderne in Paris with Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant. He worked with Adolphe Mouron Cassandre, Le Corbusier and Deberny & Peignot. In 1932, he returned to Zurich, where he designed posters for the Swiss National Tourist Office and Swiss resorts. The travel posters won instant international acclaim for his pioneering use of photomontage combined with typeface. He went to the United States in 1936 and was hired by legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch. Work for Harper's Bazaar, Vogue and other magazines followed. From 1946 to 1966 he was design consultant with Knoll Associates. He worked closely with Charles and Ray Eames. From 1952 to 1976 he was professor of photography at Yale University and from 1958 to 1968 he served as design consultant to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. He was elected to the New York Art Director's Club Hall of Fame in 1977, received a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography in 1980 and the AIGA medal in 1983.
As a photographer, Matter won acclaim for his purely visual approach. A master technician, he used every method available to achieve his vision of light, form and texture. Manipulation of the negative, retouching, cropping, enlarging and light drawing are some of the techniques he used to achieve the fresh form he sought in his still lifes, landscapes, nudes and portraits. As a filmmaker he directed a film on his friend Alexander Calder (with music by John Cage) for the Museum of Modern Art in 1952.[1]
Close friends of Matter and his wife Mercedes were the painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, fellow Swiss photographer Robert Frank and Alberto Giacometti. Matter's wife Mercedes was the daughter of the American modernist painter Arthur Beecher Carles, and was herself the chief founder of the New York Studio School.
"The absence of pomposity was characteristic of this guy," said another designer, Paul Rand, about Matter. His creative life was devoted to narrowing the gap between so-called fine and applied arts. Matter died on May 8, 1984, in Southampton, New York.[2]
Bibliography
- Herbert Matter: Modernist Photography and Graphic Design (paperback) by Jeffrey Head. Design and typsetting by John Hill. Exhibition catalog published by Stanford University Libraries 2005.
- "History of Writing Non-Alphabetic Systems of Writing," Baseline International Typographics Magazine, no. 41, 2003, pp. 33–36 by Jeffrey Head
- "Herbert Matter: The Art of Photo-Graphics" by Kerry William Purcell, Baseline, No. 49, 2006
- "The Crafty Linotyper" (extract), by Kerry William Purcell. Eye, No. 55, 2005
- The Visual Language of Herbert Matter (2009), documentary film on the life and work of Matter[3]
References
- ↑ Lua error in Module:WikidataCheck at line 28: attempt to index field 'wikibase' (a nil value). Works of Calder at IMDb
- ↑ The Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz gives Springs, East Hampton, New York, as his place of death.
- ↑ Lua error in Module:WikidataCheck at line 28: attempt to index field 'wikibase' (a nil value). The Visual Language of Herbert Matter at IMDb
- Herbert Matter in German, French and Italian in the online Historical Dictionary of Switzerland.
