Godina izdanja: 1996
ISBN: 2-07-011257-8
Oblast: Dizajn
Jezik: Francuski
Autor: Strani

ROBERT MASSIN

LA LETTRE ET L`IMAGE - la figuration dans l`alphabet latin du VIII siecle a nos jours

Predgovor - Raymond Queneau

Pogovor - Roland Barthes

Izdavač - Gallimard, Paris

Godina - 1996

304 strana

31 cm

ISBN - 2-07-011257-8

Povez - Tvrd

Stanje - Kao na slici, tekst bez podvlačenja


"Letters were first images. As we know, the word `alphabet` was formed from the letters aleph and beth, which respectively represent, in their ancient spelling, a bull`s head (upside down ) and a house, the layout of which borrows from an Egyptian hieroglyph where we can recognize our lying b. However, in all periods, there is revealed the constant concern - secret or avowed - to search in the design of the letters for this lost figuration . And everything happens as if the users of the Latin alphabet (whether poets, calligraphers or painters, but also teachers, children or sociologists) refused the geometric dryness of its outline, as if they were striving to return instinctively to the childhoods of writing and to rediscover, buried under the sediments left by millennia of civilization, word-images, speaking drawings, sign-things, `painted words` primary writings. [...]Our aim will therefore have been to take into account this sustainability across time and space, with the help of sometimes daring leaps and unforeseen connections. [...]Of this approach (which will seem singular to some), we will not find mention in dictionaries and encyclopedias, nor (except very fragmentarily) in the histories of art and communication. It is this gap that this book fills, by offering an encyclopedic sum that offers us tasty and playful examples of this animist conception of the world.` (Massin)


Massin was born in 1925 in Bourdinière-Saint-Loup, a commune in the Eure-et-Loir department in north-central France. He began working as a designer following World War II. Massin`s immediate influence in the 1950s was innovative French book designer Pierre Faucheux. Faucheux emphasized the idea that each new book should be a new object determined by type choice, proportion and déroulement, the development of a visual concept over several pages. Faucheux also emphasized the idea that the choice of typeface should have some relationship to the meaning of the text. These ideas are apparent in much of Massin`s most famous work.

For over twenty years Massin acted as art director of Éditions Gallimard, one of the leading French publishers of books. An early, important work for Massin at Gallimard was his 1963 design for Raymond Queneau`s Exercices de style, a book of 99 retellings of the same story, each presented different graphically. Another famous design appeared in 1964 in Massin`s graphic interpretation of Eugène Ionesco`s play, La Cantatrice chauve (translated as The Bald Prima Donna or The Bald Soprano). The book was a major work of expressive typography, presenting the dialogue of a single play through hundreds of pages of innovative graphic compositions. Massin not only used mixtures of typefaces and new compositional methods to present dialogue, he also formally manipulated dialogue by stretching and bending.

In addition to a large body of visual work, Massin also wrote several books including La Lettre et l`Image (Letter and Image). (His entry in the French Wikipedia presents a more thorough bibliography.) Writing in Eye magazine in a review of a book on Massin, Jan Middendorp credited La Cantatrice and La Lettre et l`Image as follows: `These two masterpieces of typographic eccentricity became hot items among designers and art directors on both sides of the Atlantic, and were especially influential in America, where they helped trigger the post-functionalist approach of graphic design that eventually culminated in the eclecticism of the late 1980s and 1990s.`


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