Isotype (picture Language) - Diffusion and Adaptation

Diffusion and Adaptation

As more requests came to the Vienna museum from abroad, a partner institute called Mundaneum (a name adopted from an abortive collaboration with Paul Otlet) was established in 1931/2 to promote international work. It formed branches containing small exhibitions in Berlin, The Hague, London and New York. Members of the Vienna team travelled periodically to the Soviet Union during the early 1930s in order to help set up the 'All-union institute of pictorial statistics of Soviet construction and economy' (Всесоюзный институт изобразительной статистики советского строительства и хозяйства), commonly abbreviated to IZOSTAT (ИЗОСТАТ), which produced statistical graphics about the Five Year Plans, among other things.

After the closure of the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in 1934 Neurath, Reidemeister and Arntz fled to the Netherlands, where they set up the International Foundation for Visual Education in The Hague. During the 1930s significant commissions were received from the USA, including a series of mass-produced charts for the National Tuberculosis Association and Otto Neurath’s book Modern man in the making (1939), a high point of Isotype on which he, Reidemeister and Arntz worked in close collaboration.

Otto & Marie Neurath fled from German invasion to England, where they established the Isotype Institute in 1942. In Britain Isotype was applied to wartime publications sponsored by the Ministry of Information and to documentary films produced by Paul Rotha. After Otto Neurath’s death in 1945, Marie Neurath and her collaborators continued to apply Isotype to tasks of representing many kinds of complex information, especially in popular science books for young readers. A real test of the international ambitions of Isotype, as Marie Neurath saw it, was the project to design information for civic education, election procedure and economic development in the Western Region of Nigeria in the 1950s.