Erik Nitsche: The Reluctant Modernist
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The life and work of the quietly pivotal Swiss modern design Erik Nitsche, who's clients ranged from the MOMA to RCA in a career that spanned the 20th century.
Eric Nitsche may not be as well known today as his contemporaries, Lester Beall, Paul Rand, or Saul Bass, but he is their equal. Almost 90 years old, this Swiss born graphic designer is arguably one of the last surviving Modern design pioneers. Although he never claimed to be either a progenitor or follower of any dogma, philosophy, or style other than his own intuition, the work that earned him induction last year into the New York Art Director’s Club Hall of Fame, including the total identity for General Dynamics Corporation from 1955 to 1965 and the series of scientific, music, and world history illustrated books, which he designed and packaged during the 1960s and 1970s, fits squarely into the Modernist tradition.
Yet Nitsche’s approach was not a cookie-cutter Modern formula that so many designers blindly followed at that time. It was a personal fusion of early influences (classical and otherwise) and contemporary aesthetics based on fast pacing and dramatic juxtapositions. Rather than adherence to Modernist orthodoxy, Nitsche insists that the methodology that most closely resembles a Modern manner, clean, systematic, and ordered, developed because of his restlessness at doing mostly illustrative work during the early part of his career.
Although he might not own up to the fact that he had played a formidable role in the Modernist legacy, Nitsche does not deny that he was as good — certainly as prolific, if not more so — than any other designer of his age. He also speculates that had it not been for his asocial tendencies ("I preferred to do the work, not talk about it") and a few poor business decisions along the way (he says he turned down a job at IBM that later went to Paul Rand), he might be as well known today as any of the other acknowledged pioneers. In fact, he worked for many of the same clients, including Orbachs, Bloomingdale’s, Decca Records, RCA Records, Filene’s, 20th Century Fox, The Museum of Modern Art, Container Corporation of America, the New York Transit Authority, Revlon, and more. Judging from the sheer volume of work bearing his signature or type credit, there are few others who can make this claim.
Both his General Dynamics work and book packages had a profound influence on younger designers during the 1960s and 70s. Seymour Chwast, co-founder of Push Pin Studios, compares his tattered, well-thumbed copy of Dynamic America, the ambitious corporate history that Nitsche edited and designed between 1957 and 1960, to Herbert Bayer’s landmark Geo-Graphic Atlas for its innovation in the area of information graphics. And Walter Bernard, principal of WBMG, routinely shows slides of Dynamic America in lectures describing his early influences. Bernard also credits the book’s exceptional cinematic pacing as having radically changed the way that he achieved kinetic flow in his own books when he was a designer for American Heritage in the early 1960s.
Nitsche’s books, annual reports, and other sequential printed material rely on meticulous attention to the details of page composition, the elegance of simple type presentation, and the expressive juxtaposition of historical and contemporary artifacts on a page. His method exerted an impact on a portion of the field that had become too reliant on rigid Modern formulas, which in turn limited variety and fluidity. Yet this reluctant Modernist was so absorbed with creating and producing his own wares that he had little time to reflect on what he was actually doing to change the attitudes of other designers. Even today he is surprised to hear that his work made an impression.
In fact, during his long career Nitsche neither sought the limelight nor participated in design organizations (other than an invitational membership into the Alliance Graphique Internationale — AGI). Although his work started appearing in European graphic design annuals and magazines back in the early 1930s, Nitsche did not engage in the social politicking that might insure his place in the design pantheon. His induction into the Art Director’s Club Hall of Fame came as a pleasant surprise. But nevertheless, he says that it came too late to ‘do me any good,’ implying that had he been inducted earlier he might have benefited by attracting new clients, which is not the usual outcome anyway. Nevertheless, his induction validates the major contribution that has gone largely unheralded except for those aficionados who know (and collect) his posters and books.1