Diagonal from bright equality and contrast 1956/1975
Oil/canvas, 120 × 120 cm
© Richard Paul Lohse Foundation | ProLitteris, Zürich

Richard Paul Lohse was born in Zürich in 1902. The young Lohse dreams of becoming a painter. However his wish to study in Paris is thwarted due to his difficult economic circumstances. In 1918 he joins the advertising agency Max Dalang where he trains to be an advertising artist. Lohse, the autodidact, paints expressive, late cubist still lifes. In the 1930s his work as a graphic artist and book designer puts him among the pioneers of modern Swiss graphic design; in his painting he works on curved and diagonal constructions.

In 1937 Lohse, with Leo Leuppi, cofounds Allianz, an association of Swiss modern artists. In 1938 he helps Irmgard Burchard, with whom he is married for a brief time, to organise the London exhibition “Twentieth Century German Art”. His political conviction leads him into the resistance movement where he meets his future wife Ida Alis Dürner.

1943 marks a breakthrough in Lohse’s painting: he standardises the pictorial means and starts to develop modular and serial systems. In 1953 he publishes the book “New Design in Exhibitions”, and from 1958 he is coeditor of the magazine Neue Grafik/New Graphic Design. Important exhibitions and publications bring Lohse’s systematic-constructive art and constructive graphic design worldwide acclaim. He died in Zürich in 1988.

Helmhaus Zürich allianz, exhibition poster, 1954
© Richard Paul Lohse Foundation | ProLitteris, Zürich

Lohse started off as a graphic designer when the development of photomontage and typomontage by the Constructivist avantgarde was cut short in many parts of Europe by political events. Out of the pictorial discoveries of Constructivism, he developed a form of Constructive design that helped to give form to the concept of Swiss graphics, which was to have a global impact on design in the 1950s. Lohse did not confuse graphic design with the self-satisfied expression of the artist’s subjectivity through the graphic medium. Rather he found means of giving objective form to differentiated content. (Jörg Stürzebecher, 1999)

More informations on his official website : www.lohse.ch

(Via Createmake)

[tags] Richard Paul Lohse, graphic design, painting, swiss style[/tags]