Exhibit celebrates photographer and graphic designer Herbert Matter

By Barbara Palmer

Herbert Matter: Modernist Photography and Graphic Design, an exhibition on the work of the Swiss-born graphic artist and photographer (1907-1984), will open Thursday, Oct. 20, in the Peterson Gallery on the second floor of the Bing Wing of Green Library.

The exhibit is the first in 25 years to showcase both Matter's photography and graphic design work, said Jeffrey Head, curator of the exhibit. With material selected from the Herbert Matter archive, which fills more than 350 boxes and was recently acquired by Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources, the exhibit also serves as an overview of a career that spanned nearly six decades and encompassed photography, photomontage, fashion and advertising design, filmmaking, exhibition design and teaching.

Although considered visionary by photographers and graphic and industrial designers, Matter is not well known outside the design and photography industries.

Why does Herbert Matter matter?

The designer's innovative and experimental work helped shape the vocabulary of 20th-century graphic design, Head said. Born in Switzerland and initially trained in painting, Matter worked in Zurich and Paris before moving in 1936 to New York City. His first clients in New York were the Museum of Modern Art and the publisher Condé Nast. Matter later would work for clients and employers including the Guggenheim Museum, Knoll Furniture, the New Haven Railroad, arts & architecture magazine and designers Charles and Ray Eames. From 1952 to 1976, Matter taught at Yale University, where he helped to shape the university's photography and graphic design program.

Matter's constant experimentation led to refinements in composition, typography and printing techniques that still influence contemporary design, Head said. "[Matter's] techniques became part of a new visual narrative that began in the 1930s and which have since evolved into familiar design idioms such as overprinting—where an image extends beyond the frame—and the bold use of color, size and placement in typography."

Matter also was a pioneer in such photographic techniques as infrared photography, multiple exposure and collage, and the exhibit offers visitors insight into his artistic methods. Production elements, such as sketches, layouts, cutouts and masks, are placed side-by-side with Matter's final products.

"This wasn't done in PhotoShop," said Becky Fischbach, a graphic artist and exhibits designer and preparer at Stanford University Libraries. "This was done in the darkroom, with masks, knives and imagination."

The exhibit also illustrates Matter's vast range, with highly stylized fashion magazine covers and furniture catalogs followed by examples of his exquisitely sensitive photographs of the work of sculptor Alberto Giacometti. (Matter photographed Giacometti's work over a 20-year period.) The exhibit also includes frames from films including Matter's 1949 The Works of Calder, which he directed, filmed and edited for New York's Museum of Modern Art. The first color film about the sculptor Alexander Calder, it was scored by composer John Cage.

Despite their vintage, posters Matter created in the early 1930s for the Swiss National Tourist Office, which used his new photomontage technique, seem so fresh that a designer recently reprised them for a trendy wristwatch ad campaign. And Matter's blurring of the boundaries of commercial and fine art was years ahead of its time.

"With his bold forms and technically innovative combinations, Matter helped to break down the boundaries between art and design, painting and photography, advertising and visual communication," said Barry Katz, professor of humanities and design at the California College of the Arts and consulting professor in the Stanford School of Engineering.

The exhibit, which is free and open to the public, will be on display through Feb. 11, 2006. Exhibit cases are illuminated Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 1 to 6 p.m. The gallery is accessible whenever Green Library is open and hours vary with the academic schedule. For library hours, call 723-0931.

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