Стиль и дизайн (english)

US Style and design 20th century Pop Art, Commercial PhotographyThe twentieth century isthe first century of self-conscious, total design at every level of our livingand environment. Care and vision in application of design have come to bedemanded in every aspect of modern life from our kitchens and bathrooms, toour factories and workshops, from our clothes and domestic objects, to thepackaging of pocket calculators or the structuring of plastic dining chairs.

Although the word hasbeen used since at least the fifteenth century, when Italian writers spoke of disegno in describing the quality of line possessed by an image or artifact,in all essentials design is an industrial or post-industrial concept. Withthe introduction of mass-production, the people who invented ideas for objectsbecame separated from the people who made them who, again, were separated fromthe people who sold them.

The industrial revolution also created the concept ofthe market. Personal need, or the whims of a patron, were replaced by a moreabstract demand the tastes of a large, amorphous body of consumers.The modern designer cameinto being as an intermediary between industry and the consumer. His role wasto adapt the products of industry to the mass market, to make them more usefuland durable, perhaps, but to make them more appealing and commerciallysuccessful, certainly.

Commercial success is the touchstone of achievement indesign, although designers in different cultures have often taken differentviews as to how the achievement is measured or the success validated.So, design in businessand advertisement means much. The story of style in the applied arts since themid-to late fifties has been dominated by various new forces, including socialand economic factors and certain aspects of technical and scientific progress.

Now we have computer design, web design, advertisement design for exampleconsumer-product branding design and the whole fashion of different types ofad, colors and so on. The late fifties saw thebirth of advertising as we know it today, a high-powered business dedicated tothe development effective marketing techniques it involved new design conceptsand a whole new professional jargon of product packaging, market research,corporate images and house style.

The POP Art movementembraced the work of a new generation of artists of late fifties and earlysixties of both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain, in addition to theIndependent Group, there were Peter Blake, Allen Jones. In USA Jasper Johns,Tom Wesselman, Claes Oldenburg and other formalized the language of productpackaging, from beer cans to Campbell s Soup tins of strip cartoons, fast food,advertising hoardings and pin-ups.

Pop Art at oncereflected and glorified mass-market culture and injected a new vigour into theapplied arts. Pop and the art styles which were its natural successors, notablyAmerican Hard-Edge Abstraction and the Hyper- or Photo-realist school of around 1970, suggested a new palette o colours andgave a fresh, ironical edge to the imagery of popular culture. The Pop ethicposi lively encouraged designers to exploit vulgarity brashness and brightcolour, and

to use synthetic or disposable materials in contexts in which theywould formerly have been unacceptable. Pop has had a lasting effect on designin a wide variety of media, including interiors, graphics and fashion.Pop has spawnedfurniture in bright, primary-coloured plastics and in boldly printed fold-awaycardboard it has inspired, notably in Britain and Italy, witty sculpturalfurniture in brash, synthetic materials reminiscent of the sculptures of ClaesOldenburg. The fashion and furniture shop

Mr Freedom, opened in London in 1969 by Tommy Roberts, was a veritable shrineto the Pop cult, with lively furniture designs by Jon Weallans. Italian Popfurniture was one aspect of the Italian design community s wide-rangingintellectual approach which, since the sixties, has made Italy the mostprogressive country in many areas of the applied arts.The influence of Pop canbe seen in graphic design in the sixties in the work of the

American PushpinStudios, founded by Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast. Pop and theHyper-Realists also inspired the slick airbrush work of a number of graphicartists working in the seventies and eighties, notably the British artistsPhilip Castle and Michael English. Pop imagery is still, today, a part of thestaple diet of graphic design.Pop s most notableimpact on the world of fashion was in

London in the late sixties and earlyseventies, and in Italy in the achievements of Elio Fiorucciin the seventies.Fiorucci brought fun into fashion, and his shops, first in Milan and theninternationally, became known for their Pop-inspired clothes and graphics.And it s influence canbe seen also and on a graphic design in

USA. POP is everywhere, we see everydayobjects and images of American popular culture Coca-Cola bottles, soup cans,sigarette packages and comic strips. Commercial photographyCommercial photographicimages are a major ingredient of our visual life, assimilated from magazines,hoardings and such contexts as brochures, catalogues, calendars, packaging andpoint-of-sale promotional material. Commercial photography thrives as a meansof creating highly polished images

of a stylized, glamourized and idealizedview of the World in order to sell a product or a service.The major categories ofcommercial photography are advertising in its countless guises, includingproduct photography and photo-illustration, fashion, beauty and certaincategories of photography which are neither reportage nor aspire to be fineart, yet which can be fascinating social documents of considerable aestheticquality.Irving Penn hascontinued to be a master in each of these

genres and has set standards to whichmany aspire. His career has spanned forty years, during which his work, fromhis early fashion and still-life compositions to current still-life productstudies such as his series for the cosmetics manufacturers Clinique, has shown aninimitable vision and consistent aesthetic rigour.Ben Stern, though farfrom being Penn s artistic equal, became the archetypal commercial photo grapherin the fifties and sixties, running a vast studio in

New York and showingconsiderable skill and versatility in interpreting the briefs of art directorsand clients.In the sixties theprofession of commercial and, in particular, fashion photography became greatlyglamourized the successful young photographer became a popular folk hero, asif the camera were a passport to the illusory world which it could depict Antonioni s film Blow-Up 1966-7 defined the role model. Among themost interesting magazines to be launched in the sixties,

the photography ofwhich captured the youthful excitement of that period, were the British Nova,which commissioned some of the best fashion photography of its day, and theGerman Twen, brilliantly art directed by Willy Fleckhaus.In the sixtiesadvertising played a secondary role to editorial photography in magazines. Todaythe reverse seems true, for the character of many magazines is dictated by themarket needs of advertisers and many photographers bemoan the greaterrestrictions

this imposes. The seventies and eighties have, nonetheless,brought forth a new roll-call of talent. Outstanding contemporary figuresinclude Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin, who have dominated the field of fashionphotography Hans Feurer, Arthur Elgort, Denis Piel and others, a few of theless celebrated but talented fashion photographers advertising and glamourphotographers such as

Francis Giacobetti, James Baes Commercial photographers play a greatrole in our consumer society, creating the images of a life-style to which weare constantly encouraged to aspire. They create glamourized images of womenand give a heightened visual appeal to the products which are economic mainstayof our society, be it a hamburger, a perfume or an automobile.