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The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917-1946
By Victor Margolin
University of Chicago Press 6 3/4" x 9 1/2": 259 pp.; 107 b&w illustrations; $39.95
No historical period holds greater allure for graphic designers than the ambitious decades threading around the World Wars. In this age of hope and calamity, the esthetic and conceptual revolutions that form the basis of modern graphic design erupted, leaving behind an international legacy of forms and strategies that continue to shape design practice and education today. Among the century's boldest theorists of typography and printed media were Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, and Laszlo MoholyNagy. Victor Margolin's important new book, scholarly but accessible, interprets the work and ideas of these men and the complex worlds in which they lived.
The work of these men? Some readers might worry that Margolin's book is an old-fashioned monument to individual genius, handily packaged in a three-for-one volume. Because the literature on design has grown increasingly sophisticated over the past 15 years, serious readers expect to see design analyzed thematically rather than biographically, its achievements placed in a cultural context. In The Struggle for Utopia, Margolin has achieved something remarkable. He has documented the unique contributions of three individual designers, but rather than presenting the story of each man as a discrete, self-sustained narrative, he has woven together the issues that shaped their work in a series of critical essays. The book leaves us with a subtle sense of the differences among three artists as well as the grand struggles that they shared.
A central concern for Margolin is how the political commitments of each artist changed in relation to the shifting social landscape during these volatile decades. We...