CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/7/2024

Letterform Archive Press presents 'The Complete Commercial Artist: Making Modern Design in Japan, 1928–1930' with Gennifer Weisenfeld

Thursday, March 7, from 6–7:30 PM, Letterform Archive Press presents The Complete Commercial Artist: Making Modern Design in Japan, 1928–1930 author Gennifer Weisenfeld in conversation with Letterform editor Chris Westcott. Weisenfeld will share art from the original volumes and explore the global exchange of ideas and practices that informed designers’ new approaches to lettering, illustration, design and display.

Toward the end of the 1920s, Japanese designers pursued a radical new vision for their profession. Engaging modernist and avant-garde trends from abroad, refashioning local graphic and calligraphic forms, and using the latest tools and techniques, they poured fresh colors and expressive forms into all facets of consumer life, from streetscapes to the printed page. The Complete Commercial, a 24-volume design compendium published by the country’s leading designers, captured the spirit of the age with thousands of playful and inventive designs.

GENNIFER WEISENFELD
Gennifer Weisenfeld is Walter H. Annenberg Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University. Her field of research is modern and contemporary Japanese art history, design, and visual culture. Her first book, Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905-1931 (University of California Press, 2002) addresses the relationship between high art and mass culture in the aesthetic politics of the avant-garde in 1920s Japan. Her second book, Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 (University of California Press, 2012, Japanese edition Seidosha, 2014) examines how visual culture has mediated the historical understanding of Japan’s worst national disaster of the twentieth century. Her third book, Gas Mask Nation: Visualizing Civil Air Defense in Wartime Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2023) explores the anxious pleasures of Japanese visual culture during World War II. She has published extensively on the history of Japanese design, including a core essay for MIT’s award-winning website Visualizing Cultures on the Shiseido cosmetic company’s advertising design. She has a forthcoming book on the history of Japanese commercial art and design titled The Fine Art of Persuasion: Corporate Advertising Design, Nation, and Empire in Modern Japan (Duke University Press).

Salon Series 47
The Complete Commercial Artist: Making Modern Design in Japan, 1928–1930, with Gennifer Weisenfeld
Thursday, March 7: 6–7:30 PM PT
In-person at Letterform Archive and online via Zoom
Register here