2011/03/01 by Keith Bresnahan · 3 citations
Arts and Humanities · #Visual Culture and Art Theory #Graphic Design and Typography #Art Education and Development
paper · doi:10.2752/175470810x12863771378671
openalex publication_date 2011/03/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
The decades surrounding the Second World War saw an intense wave of interest in pictographic communication, with social scientists and graphic designers promoting the potential of universal pictographic “language” to bring about international understanding and co-operation. This article explores the historical relationship between pictographic design and internationalist politics in this era through the work of Rudolf Modley, a pioneering designer of information graphics whose career spanned from the socialist experiments of 1920s Vienna to humanist advocacy projects in late-1960s America. Tracing the complex relationship between visual communication, commerce and politics in mid-twentieth-century design, this article further reflects on the decline of the pictographic project after the 1970s, when pictographs at once gained a broad global currency and lost their political thrust just as the dream of an international visual language was ironically realized in the triumph of a global traffic in mass-consumable images.