Art Deco and the rise of graphic designers
In the course of the 1920s and 1930s, the work of poster design was increasingly taken over by graphic designers, who were now specifically trained.
The Zurich School of Arts and Crafts introduced a graphic arts course in 1906 and a specialist class for applied graphics in 1918. The Basel General Vocational School offered courses in design and specialist classes in typographic typesetting and printing as well as applied graphics from 1915.
These schools provided important impetus for the development of commercial graphics and played a key role in the emergence of a distinctive poster language in Switzerland, which can be seen in the context of international art developments.
Ernst Keller, the first graphics teacher at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts from 1918, trained hundreds of graphic artists for over 40 years and was regarded as the ‘father of Swiss graphic design’ who laid the foundations for the ‘Swiss style’ that would later become internationally renowned.
In many Swiss posters of the interwar period, the influence of the French Art Deco poster master A. M. Cassandre is unmistakable: his dynamism characterises the style of many posters, such as those by Johannes Handschin or Eric de Coulon.
Other graphic artists who influenced Swiss poster art up to the Second World War and beyond included Hermann Alfred Koelliker, Emil Ebner, Charles Kuhn, Karl Bickel, Alex Walter Diggelmann and Erwin Roth.
