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Description
Gothic vs. Modern: Letterforms and Graphic Design in Weimar Germany
A lecture by Paul Stirton (Bard Graduate Center)
Wednesday, May 5, 2026
38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall
gallery@bgc.bard.edu
$15 General | $12 Seniors | Free for people associated with a college or university, people with museum ID, people with disabilities and caregivers, and BGC members
No late seating; admittance is not guaranteed after 6 pm.
In 1922 the young designer Jan Tschichold traveled to Offenbach to meet Rudolf Koch, the presiding genius of German Schriftkunst (lettering art) and designer of the finest Gothic typefaces. This was a telling moment, revealing two competing views of letterforms in modern German culture, contrasting historicism with modernism, nationalism with universality, and the expressive as opposed to the machine aesthetic of Constructivism. Following this event, Tschichold turned away from Koch, looking instead to El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters, and László Moholy-Nagy, pioneers of New Typography. In this talk, Paul Stirton explores these debates of the 1920s and beyond, tracing the development of two opposing views of modernity in German culture.
Professor Emeritus, Editor in Chief of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. Paul Stirton’s current research and publications are mostly concentrated in two areas: architecture and design in Britain and Central Europe (primarily Hungary) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has a particular interest in graphic design, interiors, and print culture, although his recent work has been concerned with public monuments and cultural transfer or emigration. Stirton’s approach to this body of material is largely concerned with the relationship between contemporary theoretical and critical writings and the actual objects themselves. This dialectical relationship between texts and things lies behind the selected writings of the English architect-designer E. W. Godwin, which he edited with Juliet Kinchin (2005), and various articles and essays of his on Hungarian designers, such as Károly Kós, Lajos Kozma, and Laszlo Peri.
Image: Jan Tschichold, cover of Typographische Mitteilungen (Typographical Studies), 1925
Date & Time
Tue, May 5, 2026 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
Venue Details
Bard Graduate Center
38 West 86th StreetNew York, New York 10024
