Wolfgang Weingart
Wolfgang Weingart: The Simpler the Assignment, the more Difficult the Solution.
Wolfgang Weingart was born in 1941 in Germany and for the first thirteen years of his life he lived near Lake Constance, close to the Swiss border. In 1954, the family moved to Portugal and lived in Lisbon for two years. In 1958 Weingart began a two-year course in the field of applied art and design at the Merz Academy in Stuttgart, Germany, and was keen to learn about the art of reproduction. In 1960, he began a three-year typesetting apprenticeship in Stuttgart. By this time, typography in Switzerland – as represented by the names of Karl Gerstner, Emil Ruder, Armin Hofmann, Siegfried Odermatt, Carlo Vivarelli, the Basel school and the design magazine Neue Grafik – had earned worldwide prominence.
In 1964, Wolfang Weingart moved to Basel, where he enrolled as an independent student in the Kunstgewerbeschule Basel, a school much influenced by Armin Hofmann’s precise handwork with a fundamental theme: the Line. Meanwhile, applications to study in Basel from Swiss and foreign designers were increasing. An international graduate design programme was introduced and subsidized by the Swiss Department of Education, spearheaded by Hofmann and Ruder. The first students came from the US, Canada, England and Switzerland. In 1968, Weingart began teaching typography courses at the Basel School in 1968. Designers abroad were eagerly investigating the rationale of Swiss Typography, which along with the typography of the Basel School, played an important role from the fifties until the end of the sixties. Swiss Typography and its philosophy of reduction became part of the education programme of many design schools internationally. Weingart’s vision was to breathe new life into the teaching of typography by re-examining the assumed principles of its current practice.
Wolfgang Weingart published various articles on typography and had a thirty-year collaboration with TM, a monthly publication in typography, which reached a worldwide audience and was highly praised.
Wolfgang Weingart died in July 2021 at the age of 80 – A kind and interesting person and a unique designer has passed from this world.
Posters:
Weingart designed his first posters in 195 that were executed with a spray technique. Years later in Basel he received commissions to design more posters. Silver, yellow and orange were his favorite colors and his posters have distinctive characteristics; an irregular, wide border that holds the individual images together, framing the composite picture, and rough, fragmented dot screens.
Published by Birkhäuser, THE SWISS POSTER 1900-1983 was the first comprehensive volume to document the traditional historical and political role of artist-designed posters in Switzerland. The obligations by the publishers were to include the image of the Matterhorn, to use Times New Roman and no full-size color proof would be possible before the actual printing run. (With the approval of Wolfgang Weingart, 2009)
Publications in Switzerland, Germany, Lebanon, Japan and the USA.
Since 1972 lectures in Europe, USA, South America, Asia, Australia and New Zealand.
1978 – 1999 member of the AGI
Teacher, typographer, designer, graphic artist and autodidact.