AH!

By Gregory Vines

Armin Hofmann’s work never really fit easily into the cool, functional, design genre known as the Swiss International Style. His work goes beyond being a part of a mere style. The beauty of it is that it refuses to be put in a category at all and thus cannot be copied. However, what you can take from his work is the spirit with which it is created. You can try to understand the formal issues and contexts it addresses and you can seek to embody this in your own work.

When he taught, his object was never to create young shadows of himself, but rather to give his students a basis with which to define their own way. Like all of us, he too had his mentors. At the General Trade School of Zurich, Alfred Willimann and Ernst Keller were among his teachers who impressed him with their approach to designing. Influences from his schooling can be seen in Hofmann’s use of typography and especially his use of ligatures, a small but interesting aspect that reoccurs in his poster work and also in his logotypes and signage systems.

Although I never asked Armin about this, certainly one important experience must have been his apprenticeship as a lithographer. Besides learning discipline, handwork and craftsmanship it undoubtedly refined his sensitivity for tonal values, color and materiality. How else can one explain the rich range of tonality in such great images as Wilhelm Tell, Giselle, or the series of posters for the Stadt Theater Basel?

In his work with architectural graphics, he went beyond architects’ conventional use of red, blue and yellow to create subtle color atmospheres.

Simplicity is the most stunning aspect of his posters. But they are playful, intelligent and visually arresting as well. Look at the 1958 poster for Junge hollaendische Bildhauer in which a tall narrow “H” overlooks the ?????at landscape of Holland or, in 1965 the poster for the Stadt Theater Basel depicting different kinds of theatrical feet.

Many of his critics complain that his posters are always black and white! Although this is not true, they presumably never took the time to consider that his use of black and white was a reaction to the frivolous use of color evident at the time. The color richness and abstraction level found in such posters as Baumberger’s PKZ, 1923, Matter’s fleigt in die Schweiz, 1935 or Stoecklin’s Bianca, 1941 gave way in the 50’s and 60’s to a less differentiated and banal use of color. It is through his reactionary reduction and abstraction that these black and white posters actually achieve their own kind of colorfulness! For Hofmann, there was no separation between his teaching and designing. He saw both as an ongoing linear process of experimentation, learning, and growth. I can remember a classmate doing a color study as his first project in Armin’s class. He wanted to design a poster for his next exercise. After spending many days trying to come up with an idea, Hofmann finally went over to him and said, “Why don’t you make a poster from your color study?” At that moment I realized one does not need to jump all around the design palette, but rather that one single observation or result leads to another. It was so simple. Perhaps an example of this from Armin’s own work is the two posters for the Stadt Theater Basel in 1955 and in 1962. Both use the same imagery—an eye and an ear—but one is a drawing the other, a photograph.

On another occasion, a friend of mine over-heard Hofmann in discussion with a classmate say, “Once you touch quality, you never forget it.” Maybe, the most important task in his teaching was bringing each student to this indefinable moment. Although, not everyone made it that far, he never gave up trying. The letterpress and hand cut linoleum posters are explorations of the relationship between an idea and its realization. In some cases he even used cut paper, which was exposed directly onto the offset plate. Such simple physical limitations offered a creative resistance that forced him to be precise, clear and inventive with the imagery. Today, in working with digital media we are separated from the tactile experience of creating an image. What skills and knowledge are needed in today’s design education to master the challenges of new media? A question that Armin Hofmann, twenty years after his retirement from teaching, is still deeply concerned about.

In school Hofmann always emphasized the need to be aware of what was going on outside of the classroom. His own interests span art and literature, music, theatre and politics. As a young man, he not only played a music instrument but amateur soccer as well. Like many Swiss, Armin has a strong love for the mountains and I remember the walks he would take his students on in order to expose us to the other part of Swiss culture. Naturally, along the way there was usually a church or small chapel that had some fantastic ceiling or wall painting. A little known poster Schweiz kleines Land grosse Landschaft, 1965 is a powerful black and white image of cloud shapes merging with mountains and meadows. He once said that if one had a choice between designing a poster or taking a walk in the mountains, take a walk in the mountains.

In the 80’s I often met Armin at poster auctions bidding on his own posters. He did so because he didn’t have any left; he had either given them away or had never printed extra copies for himself. For me it was a wonderful down-to-earth picture of an unpretentious teacher, artist and man.

Gregory Vines was born the same year that Armin Hofmann started teaching in Basel. He is an educator and designer in the Visual Communication Institute/The Basel School of Design at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland, Academy of Art and Design.

Armin Hafmann

Poster / Wilhelm Tell / 1963

Poster / Stadtthater Basel 63/64 / 1963

Logotype / Stadtthater Basel

Poster / Stadtthater Basel 67/68 / 1967

Poster / Stadtthater Basel 64/65 / 1964

Poster / Stadtthater Basel 60/61 / 1961

Poster / Stadtthater Basel 65/66 / 1965

Poster / Switzerland-Small Country / Bib Landscape / 1965

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