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Period

1910s graphic-design styles

Styles that began in the 1910s, by the year the atlas gives for when each took shape. Stylogeny describes 16 of them. The earliest began in 1910, the latest in 1919. Of these, 1 is still in use.

← 1900–1909 1920s →

The 16 styles

Oldest first. Each has its own page: its design choices, where it comes from, and real works.

Art Deco1910–1939 · Western Europe, North America, Global / networkedThe glamorous modern style named after the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs, which disciplined ornament into geometry: sunbursts, chevrons, stepped forms and sleek stylised figures rendered in lacquer-smooth colour with metallic accents.
Russian Futurist Book1910–1920 · Eastern EuropeThe cheap, small-run books of the Russian Cubo-Futurist poets and painters, from Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov to Goncharova, Larionov and Rozanova.
Shanghai Modern & Yuefenpai1910–1949 · East AsiaThe commercial art of treaty-port Shanghai.
Taishō Roman & Lyrical Illustration1910–1940 · East AsiaThe lyrical illustration (jojōga) of late-Meiji to early-Shōwa Japan, led by Takehisa Yumeji: willowy, large-eyed women in kimono drawn with an Art Nouveau contour, set among camellias and kimono patterns and lettered by hand.
Arnhem Land Bark Painting & Rarrk1912–present · OceaniaPainting in ochres on flattened stringybark by Yolŋu, Kunwinjku, Kuninjku and other clans of Arnhem Land, carrying ceremonial designs into portable form; collected from 1912, painted through art centres since the 1970s.
Hungarian Revolutionary Poster1912–1919 · Central EuropeThe political posters of Hungary's revolutions.
Vorticism & BLAST Typography1914–1920 · Western EuropeLondon's short-lived rival to Futurism, launched by Wyndham Lewis with BLAST (dated 20 June 1914; War Number, July 1915).
Suprematism1915–1925 · Eastern EuropeKazimir Malevich's non-objective art, unveiled with the Black Square at the 0.10 exhibition in Petrograd in 1915, reduced painting to pure geometric planes floating in white, infinite space.
Dada1916–1924 · Central Europe, Western EuropeBorn in wartime Zurich at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 and spreading to Berlin, Hanover, Cologne and Paris, Dada used chance, absurdity and provocation against the culture that had produced the war.
De Stijl1917–1931 · Western EuropeA Dutch movement formed around Theo van Doesburg's journal De Stijl and Piet Mondrian's Neoplasticism, which sought universal harmony through the most elementary means: horizontal and vertical lines, rectangles, the three primaries and black, white and grey.
Kultur-Lige & Yiddish Avant-Garde Book Design1917–1924 · Eastern Europe, Central EuropeThe Yiddish modernist book of the Kultur-Lige, the secular Jewish culture league founded in Kyiv in 1918, and its circle: El Lissitzky, Issachar Ber Ryback, Iosif Chaikov, Boris Aronson and others, who sought a new Jewish art in the shtetl synagogues and tombstones they had recorded and in Cubo-Futurism and Suprematism.
Russian Constructivism1917–1934 · Eastern EuropeConstructivism rejected art for art's sake in favour of the artist-engineer building useful things for the new Soviet society.
Wendingen & Amsterdam School Typography1918–1932 · Western EuropeThe graphic language of Wendingen (1918–1932), monthly of the Amsterdam architects' society Architectura et Amicitia, and its editor H.
Basel Object Poster (Swiss Sachplakat)1919–1955 · Central EuropeThe Swiss descendant of the German object poster, made in Zurich and above all Basel from 1919 to the early 1950s.
Bauhaus1919–1933 · Central EuropeThe German school founded by Walter Gropius in 1919 moved from Expressionist craft ideals to a programme of 'art and technology' after 1923, when Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer and Joost Schmidt made its printing and advertising workshops a laboratory for functional communication.
ROSTA Windows1919–1922 · Eastern EuropeHand-stencilled satirical news posters made by the Russian Telegraph Agency during the Civil War and hung in empty shop windows, first in Moscow, then in Petrograd and provincial towns.

The design choices they share

The choices these styles make more often than the 359 styles in the atlas as a whole, most telling first.

Diagonal axisin 12 of 16
Lithographyin 11 of 16
Letterpressin 9 of 16
Dynamic asymmetryin 10 of 16
Non-representationalin 9 of 16
Angular & zigzagin 8 of 16
Rotated & vertical settingin 8 of 16
Utopian & idealisticin 8 of 16

Where they come from

Their branches

All periods