Csaplár Ferenc szerk.: Lajos Kassák / The Advertisement and Modern Typography (1999)

On the Road to Elementary Typography

even from industrial art. It is not a lyrical composition, nor is it a decorative surface. This is why, for instance, a wellmade poster may provide one with aesthetic pleasure, among other things, while an artistically successful painting can never immediately strike us to change our minds about something, it can never evoke in us the hunger for the new or the sensational. Visitors to an art gallery enjoy the passive aestheticism of subjective art, but if we look at posters on an advertising pillar, it is not the fact that the posters are next to each other but the fact that they are in competition that dominates in our eyes. A good advertisement, be it visual (poster, fly-bill, brochure, or luminous writing projected into the night) or acoustic (the scream of a siren, or the ringing of a bell), steps on to the stage with the raiding tempo of a conqueror, with the legion of marketed goods lining up behind. It is not a servile mediator of something exterior to itself but a power complex standing between production and consumption. Sociology and psychology are fundamental to a good advertisement. Nuances of mood or illustrative loquacity are contrary to the essence of advertising, they impede a direct effect and a convincing suggestion. A good advertisement is not analytical and definitive, it synthesises: it unites time, content and material. It is this elementary simplicity and purity of a good advertisement that stops us for a moment now and then in a clamorous and motley street, that takes us into a store never heard of before, that makes us open an unknown book by an unknown author, that wakes us from mundane listlessness, lowly blindness and deafness, with its elementary colours and dynamic articulation of form, it makes us inquisitive and determined. The advertisement is one of the most characteristic expressions of the current state of our economy and our society. The neon signs of a big city, the advertisements that line the roofs, the shop windows, the conspicuous characters and harsh exclamation marks on a glass pillar in a boulevard have more to say, and do so more objectively, than any garrulous and reactionary and dull-witted Baedeker; as a calm and simple object, a typographically well-made brochure from a department store with its clear-cut and easily identifiable type and with the dark and light spatial divisions of its paper surface, is much more effective at creating demand and inspiring confidence than any individual artistry; the unexpected shriek of a horn will forever fix in our memories the automobile yard or the cinema, in front of which we heard this "senseless" but strikingly simple and evocative sound. The type of advertisement characteristic of our times, the attributes of which are more and more a harmony of elements, marked simplicity and the ease with which it is reproduced, comes into being not through aesthetic aims but in the name of objective power and moves in the direction of human progress. • Advertising is an applied art, an advertising artist is a social creator. If we wish to survey the state of Hungarian advertising art with a critical eye as well as the direction it is taking, we shall unfortunately find that only minor elements are comparable to the theoretical and practical considerations discussed above. The majority of those who make advertisements work with an industrial artist's training and a purely individualist approach, and the printers who work in the typographical area of advertisement making, seem also to assert their artistic ambitions rather than strive for an objective development of the printing industry or for the materiality of their typesetting solutions. I am grateful to the editor of Magyar Grafika (Hungarian Graphic Art) for offering me the chance to publish a selection of my designs in supplement and this article on my theoretical and practical observations. The theoretical concerns of my advertisement designs will be clear from my article, and it will also be clear that I take responsibility for my work-which I have always done with a purpose in mind-and that I am prepared to argue for it should anyone care to take issue over my designs or the theoretical observations in my article. Many printers and many of my colleagues will probably not share my views. Others might argue against my drawing a sharp dividing line between industrial art and the art of advertising, and still others might object to the letterheads I have published as typesetting specimens. Others might deem the effort I have outlined as constricted, dogmatic and one-dimensional, they might be afraid that I do not consider enough options, and might protest against the dulling and industrial uniformity of the whole craft. If such critical positions are taken, I can, ab ovo, state that they will arise not out of a sense of professional improvement but out of a misplaced conception and a misinterpretation of creative art. Because, as I have already said, creating advertisements is not primarily an art, and one of the basic mistakes Hungarian designers make is that instead of striving for the artistic shaping of the given material they struggle for pictorialness and self-enclosed creative art in both poster making and typography. Ninety-five per cent of posters seem to be intended as impressionist paintings, and even typeset letterheads and business cards stress pictorialness. Most creators of advertisements think of their task not as the elementary formation of the given text but as the decoration of the surface of the paper. Though there is an essential difference between the starting point and the final creation of a picture. A picture is perfect if it constitutes a self-enclosed, indivisible unit, while a poster, in contrast, is nearest to perfection when it is capable of making, with the most active force and the most effective form, an object not present real and when its creation proves not its own aesthetic uniqueness but the goodness, cheapness and unquestionable necessity of the article it advertises. I do not wish to further deliberate on this issue within the confines of this article. I have summarised my opinion on the creation of advertisements, and, by mentioning certain problematic questions, I have tried to spark a more in-depth discussion of the subject matter. If a debate were to ensue, I myself would gladly discuss certain issues in greater depth and professional detail. MAGYAR GRAFIKA (HUNGARIAN GRAPHIC ART), MAY-JUNE 1928, PP. 144-148. 12