Featuring the article “Paul Rand” by Laszlo Maholy-Nagy.

The Constructivist movement in Europe originated in countries with undeveloped industry…Russia, Hungary and Holland. The marvels of technical civilization as they were described in reports about the U.S.A. were a great incentive for the young painters, sculptors and architects of those countries. The message about American organization, production processes, life standards, created a Utopian picture in the mind of these young European artists. Their imaginative picture of America governed their thinking and their work. They admired exactness and precision, smooth functioning, the skyscraper, the highways, the immense span of bridges, the power plants of Niagra Falls, the autos an d airplanes of America. They tried to be as contemporary and efficient in their own work as the Americans and without sentimentality for the old and traditional. They tried to be the children of a new age, as they believed the Americans to be.

When I came to this country I was greatly surprised to find that we Europeans were to a certain extent, more American than the Americans. I found that our imagination went too far. It is true all this technological progress was developed on the highest level in this country but the Americans “did not care” too much for it. They created their high civilization by instinct, introducing invention after invention into their daily routine. However they did not attach any philosophy to it as we did in Europe. For them the nostalgia remained for the “good old” traditional art.

This was a strange experience for me, as I felt that our efforts in Europe to live up to the contemporary status of the Americans proved to be without a real background. It took me a long time to understand the Victorian dwellings and the imitations of Colonial architecture or the old fashioned advertising. Fortunately I soon saw that a new generation was rising with the potentiality and discipline of that America imagined by us in Europe.

Among these young Americans it seems to me that Paul Rand is one of the best and most capable representatives. He is a painter, lecturer, industrial designer, advertising artist who draws his knowledge and creativeness from the resources of this country. He is an idealist and a realist, using the language of the poet and the business man. He think in terms of need and function. He is able to analyze his problems but his fantasy is boundless.

I like to recall my visit to his home where I expected to find an advertising artist but found a creative designer with an abundance of interests and an ability to express himself, not alone with color and line on a plane surface, but also in space. His designs of furniture are delicate and witty. Note the book shelf made from one-by-twos with a blackboard on the front…the whole can be folded flat together with case; the coffee table with legs of find filagree; and the desk lamp with the parabola shaped white reflector. There I suddenly understood the spatial quality of his beautiful drawings and abstractions, his reliefs for the magazine “Apparel Arts”, his fortunate combinations of carefully planned typography, the wit and fantasy of his gay color schemes and earnest compositions. See in the following pages the range of his achievements: Christmas jollity and mid summer spirit; his own apartment with the aura of the earnest and the graceful; his refreshing optimism in these confusing days.

L.M.N, Oct. 16, 1940.

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