Robert Massin

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Robert Massin (born October 13, 1925 in La Bourdinière-Saint-Loup , † February 8, 2020 in Paris ), known as Massin , was a French graphic designer , book designer , typographer and author. In the 1960s he set new standards in book design with his experimental, emotional typography, in which he used the newly emerging photo typesetting technique.

life and work

In the late 1940s, Massin began working as a freelance graphic designer and typographer for book clubs. a. for the Club français du livre and the Club du meilleur livre. He learned the graphic craft from Pierre Faucheux , the most influential graphic designer in France at the time. Massin designed numerous book covers. From 1958 to 1979 he was artistic director at the French publishing house Gallimard . Laetitia Wolff's monograph, published in 2007 by Phaidon Press in London, lists his drafts in chronological order according to individual binding and cover design, serial cover design and book interior layout. Books that he has written and edited are listed separately - an impressive lifetime achievement, presented on eleven pages in 6pt font size.

As an author, Massin published La Lettre et l'image (German letter images and pictorial alphabets ) in 1970 and Les Cris de la Ville (German dealer calls from European cities ) in 1978 for Gallimard. His diaries were published in 1996 by Robert Laffont in Paris under the title Journal en désordre .

His position as artistic director at Gallimard brought him together with the literary avant-garde of those years, the playwrights and poets of the absurd theater (including Ionesco, Tardieu ). These dramatists of the absurd dealt with the problem of the validity of communication and language. Her pieces demonstrated a non-communication between people and the absurdity of language. Massin has worked with writers such as Eugène Ionesco and Raymond Queneau to create milestones in book design.

Raymond Queneau: Cent mille milliards de poèms ( Eng . Hundred Thousand Billion Poems )

Queneau's hundred thousand billion poems are a kind of "combinatorial poetry", a kind of TextAutomat. The 14 lines of verse of the 10 sonnets are cut into individual strips. By folding away individual strips, a new sonnet is created over and over again. The reader can form 10 14 different sonnets. “If you calculate 45 seconds to read a sonnet and 15 seconds to turn the pages, 8 hours a day, 200 days a year, you have to read for more than a million millennia, and if you read 365 days a year all day reads, for 190,258,751 years, without taking into account the bruised, the leap years and other trifles. "Queneau writes in his introduction - he calls them" instructions for use "- to the book. Massin's book design is a congenial interplay of content and form. The interactive book object is reminiscent of children's books: Illustrated images of people are cut into three separate strips - head, body, legs - and can be combined in any way so that the most diverse, funniest characters emerge.

Eugène Ionesco: La Cantatrice chauve (Eng. The bald singer )

Every double page of the book becomes a theater stage. In 1964, Massin demonstrated how text and images can be theatrically staged in a book. Each person in the piece, six in number, is assigned its own font, its own font style. What the voices of the actors on the theater stage are, the writings on the double page of the book are. Photos of six actors are printed in hard black / white contrasts and, together with the typography produced in the photo typesetting, are hand-mounted on cardboard, page by page. Each spread is then reproduced for printing. Typography in this book no longer takes place in a rectangular lead frame, typography has lost its lead-heavy fetters. "It [Massin's typography] showed how it would continue with typography in the future, once phototypesetting was widespread (...)".

Publications as a designer (selection)

  • Raymond Queneau: Cent mille milliards de poèms. Gallimard, Paris 1961 (German one hundred thousand billion poems. With an afterword by François Le Lionnais translated from the French by Ludwig Harig . Typography Hannes Jähn , Frankfurt am Main 1984)
  • Eugène Ionesco: La Cantatrice chauve. Gallimard, Paris 1964.
  • Eugène Ionesco: délire à deux. Gallimard, Paris 1966.
  • Jean Tardieu: conversation-sinfonietta. essai d'orchestration typographique. Gallimard, Paris 1966.

Publications as author (selection)

  • Robert Massin: La lettre et l'image. You signe à la lettre et de la lettre au signe. Gallimard, Paris 1970, (German letter pictures and picture alphabets. From characters to letters and from letters to characters . Ravensburg 1970, ISBN 3-473-60144-6 , translated by Philipp Luidl and Rudolf Strasser)
  • Robert Massin: Les Cris de la Ville. Gallimard, Paris 1978 (German dealer calls from European cities . Munich 1978, ISBN 3-7765-0269-X , translated by Ulrike Bergweiler)

literature

  • Laetitia Wolff: massin . London / New York 2007, ISBN 978-0-7148-4811-2 .
  • An essay by Robert Massin, in: Felix Studinka (Ed.): Ralph Schraivogel. Poster Collection Volume 9, Baden 2003, ISBN 3-03778-016-9 .
  • Hans Peter Willberg: Book Art in Transition. The development of book design in the Federal Republic of Germany. Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 3-7657-1282-5 , p. 17.
  • Jason Godfrey: Bibliographic. 100 Classic Graphic Design Books. London 2009, ISBN 978-1-85669-592-3 , p. 50.
  • Herbert Spencer (Ed.): The Liberated Page. An anthology of major typographic experiments of this century as recorded in 'Typographica' magazine. San Francisco 1987, ISBN 0-938491-05-9 , p. 10.
  • Michel Wlassikoff: The Story of Graphic Design in France. Corte Madera 2005, ISBN 1-58432-220-X , p. 208.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Vincy Thomas: Massin, maître du graphisme et de la typo, est mort , livreshebdo.fr, February 9, 2020, accessed on May 30, 2020.
  2. ↑ Laetitia Wolff: massin . Phaidon Press, London / New York 2007, ISBN 978-0-7148-4811-2 , pp. 201-211 .
  3. ↑ Raymond Queneau: A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems . Two thousand and one, Frankfurt am Main 1984.
  4. ^ Hans Peter Willberg: Book Art in Transition. The development of book design in the Federal Republic of Germany . Frankfurt am Main 1984, p. 17 .
personal data
SURNAME Massin, Robert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Massin (stage name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French graphic designer, book designer, typographer and author
DATE OF BIRTH October 13, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH La Bourdinière-Saint-Loup
DATE OF DEATH February 8, 2020
Place of death Paris