Eye Magazine

One night in January 1959, I carefully peeled off a poster from outside the Zürich Tonhalle, the city’s iconic concert hall. On its background of solid red were black rectangles set at an angle and text below set in lowercase Akzidenz bold. The design followed the demands for Concrete art laid down by the Dutch artist and polemicist Theo van Doesburg in 1930: ‘Nothing is more concrete, more real than a line, a colour, and a surface,’ he proposed.

The red poster’s designer was Josef Müller-Brockmann (see Eye 19), not an artist. But among the artists in Zürich were a number making Concrete art, and most earned their living as graphic designers. Two of them, Max Bill and Richard Paul Lohse, are names that will be found in all the histories of graphic design. Bill is the better known. Painter and sculptor, his activities extended not only to graphic design but to the design of exhibitions, books, consumer products, furniture and among his graphics a strikingly innovative brochure for a medical supplier (see Eye 16). He was also an architect, writer, theorist, and co-founder and first rector of the Ulm School of Design in Germany. From this perspective Bill can be seen to stand for ‘the unity of art, craft and technology’, the professed aim of the Bauhaus, where he briefly studied …

Richard Hollis, writer, designer, London

Read the full version in Eye no. 107 vol. 27, 2025