Concert Posters of Josef Müller-Brockmann: Willy Rotzler

Zurich Tonhalle Poster Juni-Festwochen 1951.
The concert poster is probably everywhere the stepchild of commercial art. Those responsible for the arrangements of a concert generally commission someone to print it at the last moment. Frequently, the order is placed with a small printer's establishment that can produce the necessary large lettering, and deliver the limited number of posters required at very short notice. Managers are usually satisfied with an announcement advertising the time of the concert and details of the programme. Names of conductor and soloist are prominent in black type. The graphic artist rarely designs such posters and so practically ignores them. These concert posters with their ponderous and frequently ungraceful lettering set in a great variety of type-sizes and even different kinds of type are uniform productions. They are perfectly alike and are nearly always printed on white or yellow paper, occasionally on cheap blue or green paper. They are not exactly «bad». yet without much thought for the design, they show, however, traces of classic title composition.
The concert posters of the Zurich Concert Society, the Tonhalle Gesellschaft» belong to this category. however, the directors of this famous concert hall which three concerts are often held simultaneously, recently started to improve some of their concert posters. Josef Mueller-Brockmann, a young Zurich graphic artist, was asked to undertake the work what at first sight appeared somewhat unproductive, attacked his task seriously not only with a view to finding some temporary if brilliant solution but with the firm determination gradually to develop an idea of his own.
During the first stage of his poster reform the artist was guided by the following considerations: He felt it was possible to arrange with the printer who had delivered the posters before the reform, for the production of good typographical solutions if the number of letters and type-sizes used were reduced to a minimum and the text logically distributed over these few sizes. Thus, generally speaking, smaller sizes were to be used, also the text groups that are most important for concert posters. Again, a clear formal solution had to be found with this reduced material that no longer covered the surface of the poster in order to give the latter the character of a well-planned printed work. Finally, it was necessary to discard the usual colours.
The first series of reformed concert posters was designed along these lines and printed on light grey paper. These posters were remarkable by reason of their economic use of type-sizes, the absence of mammoth lettering, the strict arrangement of axes and the occasional use of horizontal and vertical bars. The appearance of precisely these graphic elements cleanly shows that already at this stage Josef Mueller-Brockmann was determined to make of these concert posters graphic compositions in which distinctly separate optical elements were harmoniously placed.
These concert posters were most effective. They were conspicuous in being «different» and «interesting», and the matter might have ended there. Mueller-Brockmann, however, went a step further. He was well aware that in the case of the concert poster the purely formal solution is not the last step but that the matter concealed in the optically well-arranged words requires to be included in the composition. This means the contents of the concert programme, music, must have its place in the formal solution. Thus, the second series of concert posters originated. This was an intermediate step.
The graphic interpretation of the concert programme and the text of the poster were two independent elements of almost equal value. The poster surface was therefore divided into halves, one for each element. Below was the lettering on light paper; in comparison with former solutions still further reduced and more severe. Above on a black background, the «picture». For reasons of economy, the lino cut reproduced in one process with the text was found to be the best technique. This « picture », the graphic interpretation of a concert programme, was for Mueller-Brockmann an unexpected and novel task which, however, is not new. It was, namely, the transposition of music into the language of the artist.
Apparently without any knowledge of similar experiments in interpretation the artist was faced with problems dating from the early nineteen twenties which concerned the form of the abstract film in particular. (Mention should here be made of the work of Viking Eggeling, Hans Richter, later of Cavalcanti and others, and even of Walt Disney.) The first of Mueller-Brockmann’s solutions in this direction was a composition of strongly rhythmatized lines crowded into a narrow zone in the black surface, an attempt to give an «extract» from a piece of music, such as distinctive beats. The second solution was in a certain sense a retrogression. It was an attempt to catch the effect of the musical presentation in the form of an arabesque-like human silhouette. Both posters were conspicuous because of their novel and unusual solutions.
In his third series of posters Mueller-Brockmann gives his idea worthy expression. Starting from the view-point that music is the most abstract of all the arts and can only be interpreted two-dimensionally in abstract form he developed the «picture» idea still further. He abandoned the sharp distinction between typography and graphic composition. The poster surface once again became a unit and the text was again reduced. A new and second element was added to black, another colour for each new poster. In conceiving this, the most mature of the series of concert posters, the artist each time chose one striking work on the programme and by a subjective graphic interpretation of the same made it into an optically effective composition with abstract form elements in two colours executed in a two-colour lino cut.
For the first concert Debussy was the inspiration for a composition of vague, as it were, wind-borne elements; for the second concert Mozart gave rise to the idea of rhythmatizing vertical bars; for the third concert Chopin provided the opportunity for a cadence of growing segments of circles. The artistic importance of each poster designed for this year's June Festival in Zurich increased enormously. The concert poster suddenly opened up new vistas in the sphere of poster art. True, every interpretation of a musical work including that of the graphic artist is necessarily subjective. And it is just this point that caused a discussion on the appearance in Zurich of Mueller-Brockmann’s posters.
Objections to this kind of subjective interpretation were raised by professional musical critics who announced that romantic music, for instance completely ruled out any interpretation through the medium of abstract art. Such opinions pass over a very important fact. The true music lover does not go to a concert simply to hear certain work but to listen to a subjective interpretation of it by a conductor or a soloist. It is the interpretation of it that gives life to music. The interpretation of music through the medium of abstract art is legitimate and needs no further justification. Everything, however, depends on the form of the graphic interpretation which may have a certain pleasing quality. The question cannot, however, be profitably discussed until the beholder of the poster and the concert-goer have become familiar with the interpretation of the basic in compositions of abstract formal elements.
By his method of development Josef Mueller-Brockmann has freed the concert poster from stagnation, and as far as we know, he is the first to give it this form. In so doing he has given poster artists a new and exacting form. And not only this, he has also mobilised the public cognizant of the relationship music has to abstract art. Perhaps this way of «educating the beholder in art that of greater significance than the way that a large number of convincing, effective abstract posters were created with the last series of concert posters. Due recognition should be paid to clients for their courage in supporting this unusual idea.
Published in Gebrauchsgraphik Vol, 22, No. 9, 1951.