2025/06/20 by Karien A.M. van den Bergh · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Art, Politics, and Modernism #Fashion and Cultural Textiles #Public Spaces through Art
paper · doi:10.1093/jdh/epaf019
openalex publication_date 2025/06/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Information is crucial to any democratic society. Its availability and accessibility—to whom, where, and how—undeniably influences the way we act, live, consume, behave, or vote. In History and Legacy of Isotype, Christopher Burke and Günther Sandner demonstrate how the distribution and visual translation of information aided the emancipation and education of the newly forming mass societies of the twentieth century. Emerging from politically charged times—the interwar period marked by the rise of fascism—this method of pictorial statistics left its mark on today’s strategies for the wide dissemination of information. Isotype, originally conceived as the Wiener Methode der Bildstatistik (Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics), was initiated by sociologist and political economist Otto Neurath for the Gesellschafts- und Wirtenschafstmuseum (Social and Economic Museum). Established in Vienna in 1925, he proposed to “transform” social and political affairs into visual charts by implementing and designing pictograms. Although initiated by Neurath, the museum’s multidisciplinary team employed as much as fifty people—including statisticians, designers, cartographers, and historians of art, technology, and social history (p.33). Among them were principal figures Marie Reidemeister (later Neurath), who contributed to the visual translation of information from the start, and Gerd Arntz, who worked on the design of the pictograms and charts from 1929 until their separation in 1940. As Neurath perceived information as imperative to democratic societies, he aimed to make it available and accessible to a broad public by using the museum to showcase pictorial statistics within the public domain of so-called “Red-Vienna” in the newly formed First Austrian Republic.