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Josef Müller-Brockmann
'I would advise young people to look at everything they encounter in a critical light . . . Then I would urge them at all times to be self-critical'
Josef Müller-Brockmann was born in Rapperswil, Switzerland in 1914 and studied architecture, design and history of art at the University of Zurich and at the city's Kunstegewerbeschule. He began his career as an apprentice to the designer and advertising consultant Walter Diggelman before, in 1936, establishing his own Zurich studio specialising in graphics, exhibition design and photography. By the 1950s he was established as the leading practitioner and theorist of the Swiss Style, which sought a universal graphic expression through a grid-based design purged of extraneous illustration and subjective feeling. His 'Musica viva' poster series for the Zurich Tonhalle drew on the language of Constructivism to create a visual correlative to the structural harmonies of the music. Müller-Brockmann was founder and, from 1958 to 1965, co-editor of the trilingual journal Neue Grafik (New Graphic Design) which spread the principles of Swiss design internationally. He was professor of graphic design at the Kunstgewerbeschule, Zurich from 1957 to 1960 and the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm from 1963. From 1967 he was European design consultant for IBM. He is the author of The Graphic Artist and his Design Problems (1961), History of Visual Communication (1981). He has contributed to many symposiums and has held one-man exhibitions in Zurich, Bern, Hamburg, Munich, Stuttgart, Berlin, Paris, New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Osaka, Caracas and Zagreb. In 1987 he was awarded a gold medal for his cultural contribution by the State of Zurich.
Yvonne Schwemer-Scheddin: You are the protagonist of the Swiss School and stand for objective, radically minimalist geometric design. You invented the grid system for graphic design and were the first systematically to outline the history of visual communication. For Le Corbusier, order was the key to life. George Braque said, 'I love the law that orders the creative.' For Berthold Brecht, order covered up a deficit. What does order mean to you?
Josef Müller-Brockmann: Order was always wishful thinking for me. For 60 years I have produced disorder in files, correspondence and books. In my work, however, I have always aspired to a distinct arrangement of typographic and pictorial elements, the clear identification of priorities. The formal organisation of the surface by means of the grid, a knowledge of the rules that govern legibility (line length, word and letter spacing and so on) and the meaningful use of colour are among the tools a designer must master in order to complete his or her task in a rational and economic manner.
Y S-S: What do you regard as your best work?
J M-B: The white reverse sides of my posters!
Y S-S: What was you most creative period?
J M-B: My most creative period was in fact my worst because at the time my work was still illustrative. But this period of discovery and clarification eventually led to the rich productivity of my forties.
Y S-S: You were influenced by Carl Jung, but then lost interest. Why was that?
J M-B: As a young man I was intrigued not only by psychology but also by graphology. When I met people who interested me I would read their handwriting and was rarely wrong in my judgements. But this gift began to disturb me, especially in my dealings with clients, where it would unnecessarily prejudice discussion. So I abandoned it overnight. Later I paid the price for giving up these analyses when I took on partners and employees whose handwriting would have given me an early warning of trouble ahead.
Y S-S: What is the source of your efforts to clarify everything and aspire to what is eternally valid? Is it a protest against death, or a fear of looking behind the picture to the unconscious?
J M-B: The unconscious is part of the support structure: everything that is stored there comes to light in the work process. What I try to achieve in my work is to communicate information about an idea, event or product as clearly as possible. Such a down-to-earth presentation is barely affected by present-day trends. But it is not so much a question of making a statement that will be valid for all time as of being able to communicate information to the recipient in a way that leaves him or her free to form a positive or negative opinion . . .
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