Life
Tschichold was the son of a provincial signwriter, and he was trained in calligraphy. This artisan background and calligraphic training set him apart from almost all other noted typographers of the time, since they had inevitably trained in architecture or the fine arts.
Tschichold's artisan background may help explain why he never worked with handmade papers and custom fonts as many typographers did, preferring instead to use stock fonts on a careful choice from commercial paper stocks. After the election of Hitler in Germany, all designers had to register with the Ministry of Culture, and all teaching posts were threatened for anyone who was sympathetic to communism.
After Tschichold took up a teaching post in Munich at the behest of Paul Renner, both he and Tschichold were denounced as "cultural Bolshevists". Ten days after the Nazis surged to power in March 1933, Tschichold and his wife were arrested. During the arrest, Soviet posters were found in his flat, casting him under suspicion of collaboration with communists. All copies of Tschichold's books were seized by the Gestapo "for the protection of the German people". After six weeks a policeman somehow found him tickets for Switzerland, and he and his family managed to escape Nazi Germany in August 1933. Apart from short visits to England in 1937-1938 (at the invitation of the Penrose Annual), and 1947-1949 (at the invitation of Ruari McLean, the British typographer, with whom he worked on the design of Penguin Books), he lived the rest of his life in Switzerland. Jan Tschichold died in the hospital at Locarno in 1974.
Read more about this topic: Jan Tschichold
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“City people try to buy time as a rule, when they can, whereas country people are prepared to kill time, although both try to cherish in their mind’s eye the notion of a better life ahead.”
—Edward Hoagland (b. 1932)
“He was discontented and wasted his life into the bargain; and yet he rated it as a gain in coming to America, that here you could get tea, and coffee, and meat every day. But the only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these, and where the state does not endeavor to compel you to sustain slavery and war and other superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly result from the use of such things.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The life of the wealthy is one long Sunday.”
—Georg Büchner (1813–1837)