DESIGN JOURNAL 5

     The art that attracts me the most is Ukiyo-e. I did little research online. It is Japanese art that are popular during the 17th to 19th centuries. I was born in Hong Kong, a city very close to Japan. I always saw a lot of Ukiyo-e art in the Japanese restaurants and I went to a museum in Japan to see this art. They are very special. It gave me a feeling of peaceful but have strong spirit, calm but colorful, sharp color on a plain background, lots of moving lines like music. I especially like the wave pictures as below example.

The Wave Hokusai Ukiyo-e

Two Beauties with Bamboo
Utamaro, c. 1795

     Käthe Schmidt Kollwitz (1867-1945) was a German female expressionist who had great empathy for the suffering of women and children and the miserable conditions of the poor working class. xpressionism was a movement in Germany before World War I that was characterized by the major tendency to depict not objective reality but subjective emotions and personal responses to subjects and events. Many of its artists such as Kollwitz rejected authority and felt deep empathy for the poor and social outcasts, who were frequent subjects of their work. They believed art was a beacon pointing toward a new social order and an improved human condition. Kollwitz illustrated the poor conditions of women and children on posters through figurative paintings with great emotional power. Her figurative paintings and woodblock prints were forged with thick and raw strokes that became bold statements for alienation, anxiety and despair. Die Brücke (The Bridge). Examples of her paintings are as below. 

     

      

     John Heartfield (1891-1968) was a Berlin Dadaist. Dadaism is a movement that react against a world gone mad, the artists such as John Heartfield in that movement claimed to be anti-art and had a strong negative and destructive element. For example, they rebelled against the horrors of the world war, the decadence of European society and the inadequacy of religion and conventional moral codes. Through a synthesis of spontaneous chance actions with planned decisions, they further rid typographic design of its traditional precepts and continued the concept of letterforms as concrete visual shapes, not just phonetic symbols. The Dadaist claimed to have invented photomontage. Heartfield held strong revolutionary political beliefs against the Nazi party and created many artistic activities such as visual communications in order to raise public consciousness. He used an English name as a protest against the German militarism and the army in which he served during 1914 to 1916. Example of his works are as below. 

     Saville Lumley’s “Daddy, What did YOU Do During the War?” poster (Fig. 14-30) was created in 1915 during World War One. It was a patriarchal society at that time, that male controlled the power. Britain used this kind of posters through mass media as a propaganda to make those men who stayed home or did not volunteer to feel guilty and shameful. This poster reminded those men who do not want to feel shame about themselves to stop staying at home, but joining the great war. 

     

     The 1942 poster to recruit blood donors by Abram Games (Fig. 14-67) was created during world war two. This poster tends to affect people's emotion and sympathy for the soldiers by putting a falling soldier in the middle. Nobody want anyone to fall especially those who are fighting for the country. At the same time, he put the soldier inside the shape of a medical bottle that made people connect the soldier's survival with the medical bottle that there is way to save the falling soldier. Then, the bottle is on the hand of a "blood donor". Therefore, the most important message from this poster is very clear to the public that blood donors are important in saving the soldiers' life by simply giving a helping hand to the soldiers, that is blood donation. The communication starts from the top, which makes people feel uncomfortable. Then to the bottom, which provides a simple solution to people who feel uncomfortable with the situation and make them feel peaceful if they do follow the instructions.