International Poster Gallery

plakatstil, plakat or poster style

Artists working in Scotland's Glasgow School, Austria's Vienna Secession, and Germany's Deutscher Werkbund also were transforming Art Nouveau's early modernist spirit. These schools rejected curvilinear ornamentation in favor of a rectilinear and geometric structure based on functionalism.

A key outgrowth of these modernist efforts was the German plakatstil, or poster style, which was begun in 1905 by Lucien Bernhard in Berlin. For a poster competition sponsored by Preister matches he took the novel approach of drawing two large matches and writing the brand name above them in clean, bold letters. The stark simplicity of the design won him the competition. Bernhard's minimalized naturalism and emphasis on flat colors and shapes made his work the next step towards creating an abstract - and modern - visual language.

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