Enric Crous-Vidal

This is an exhibition of posters and publications by Enric Crous-Vidal. The exhibits from his early avant-garde period include the Tratado sintético de caligrafía and the magazine Art, together with posters, leaflets and designs for letters and vignettes conserved by the Museu d’Art Jaume Morera de Lleida and various private collectors. From his Paris period, when the avant-gardist had given way to the professional designer and student of specifically typographic problems, the exhibition explores the relationship between typography and cultural tradition. The exhibits relating to this second period come from private collections, especially that of Señora Crous-Vidal, and from various libraries in France. This exhibition forms part of the IVAM’s programme of reviving the memory of Spanish graphic design and is also a further stage in the study of the avant-garde in Lleida to which the Museu d’Art Jaume Morera de Lleida has devoted itself during recent years. It also complements work begun in 1987, with the exhibition that the Caixa de Lleida devoted to the group of artists associated with Art, and the digital recovery of various typefaces designed by Crous-Vidal, which the Bauer organisation commenced in 1999. The exhibition catalogue reproduces the works displayed and includes a selection of texts by Enric Crous-Vidal as well as articles by Esther Ratés, about the magazine Art, and by Patricia Molins, the curator of the exhibition, who analyses Crous-Vidal’s biography and bibliography. Enric Crous-Vidal (Lleida, 1908 – Noyon, 1987) is a pioneer of Spanish graphic design and an exceptional figure because of the wide range of his interests and the vast scope of his output, despite the short period that he devoted to it. Between 1931 and 1935 he worked in Lleida as an advertising designer with his own studio, and he created Art, one of the few Spanish avant-garde magazines of that time. After the war he sought exile in Paris, where he lived from 1947 to 1955. During this second period he succeeded in learning the craft of typography and achieved something that almost no other Spanish designer managed to do in the pre-digital era: to witness the casting in metal of letters and vignettes that he himself had created. During both these periods he sought and established relationships with other artists and designers whom he appreciated and with whom he collaborated, always aiming for public insertion of his ideas and work from the position of a non-individualist intellectual and aesthetic activist. This activism led him to promote his ideas through groups, programmes, exhibitions and schools, and he carried out a significant parallel activity as a theorist and publicist of his typographical ideas in texts which he conceived as manifestos. We would have to turn to times closer to our present age to find another figure in the field of Spanish graphic design with the power of leadership and the theoretical determination that guided Crous-Vidal. Basically self-taught, he did not come to the world of graphic design by the normal paths—the artist turned illustrator for financial reasons, or the printing expert with a skilled touch and ambition—but as a result of his conviction of the importance, modernity and independent nature of advertising and typography. In 1931 he created the Studi Llamp in Lleida, and there he began working as an advertising designer. With the income that he earned there by making posters and pamphlets, and with the pay that he received as a corporal in the army, in 1933 he launched the magazine Art, involving in it individuals such as Josep Viola, Leandre Cristòfol and Antoni G. Lamolla who were later to become the most interesting representatives of the avant-garde in Lleida. Of Surrealist inspiration and with daring but confused ideas, in its first issue the magazine confessed its cosmopolitan, combative aim (the first editorial pointed out that the photoengraver had forgotten to include the word “anti” in the title). In it Crous-Vidal published his poems and articles on advertising, typography and printing, and he carefully designed the titles and headings, with methods that sometimes came close to visual typography and with forthright characters which, despite their sobriety, already gave a foretaste of the interest in complex development and movement which distinguished his later typographical period. The magazine opened its doors to all aspects of the avant-garde, from dance and talking films to experimental photography, lighting and architecture, and among the items it published was a long review of the international contemporary art scene, translated by one of the magazine’s leading contributors, Antoni Bonet. In his memoirs (partially published by Josep Miquel Garcia), Crous-Vidal recalled the magazine as the work of “smugglers of foreign tongues” and “active cultural terrorists”, which was why it did not succeed in interesting other better-informed avant-garde media and was not well accepted in Lleida (the appearance in the magazine of the words “Ilerda es una merda” [Lleida is shit], criticising the mediocrity and meanness of their fellow-citizens, clearly did not help to attract support for the magazine’s continuity). However, Crous-Vidal’s skilful exploitation of publicity managed to make the magazine a platform for avant-garde art in Lleida and for his own work, which he exhibited in 1931 at the Galeries Laietanes in Barcelona and the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, as well as in his native city. After the war, during which he had worked to safeguard the artistic heritage, he sought exile in France, where his knowledge of printing enabled him to help the Resistance to forge safe-conducts and other documents, and he assisted in the reconstruction of solar clocks in Tarn-et-Garonne. In Paris he consolidated his knowledge of graphics by working for the Draeger printing company, producing designs in the elegant, objective style characteristic of the company before the war. There he came into contact with Maximilien Vox, now recognised for his work in the classification of typefaces, who undoubtedly encouraged him to develop his interest in lettering in the field of typography, in characters cast in lead. Vox was also the editor of the magazine Caractère, an important specialist publication with luxurious special issues in the summer and at Christmas, in which Crous-Vidal published various articles in defence of a graphic style that linked up with the Mediterranean tradition, and where he also presented the typefaces that he designed, cast by the Fonderie Typographique Française from 1951 onwards and given names such as “Flash”, “Paris” or “Île de France”, as well as vignettes in which he emphasised the importance of decoration and arabesque in printing. With his work—which included posters for Air France, Perrier, fashion stores, textile and paper designs but concentrated particularly on the design of typefaces—and with his publications, including Doctrina y acción and Riqueza de la grafía latina, published in France and immediately partially translated into Spanish in specialist magazines, during those years Crous-Vidal defended the need to construct a model of Latin graphemes inspired by the elegance, corporeality and movement of the old Mediterranean typefaces, and contrasting with the sobriety and static quality of the new Germanic and especially Swiss typefaces (Vox, who defended similar ideas as a member of the School of Lure, called this the defence of the arabesque against the square). Crous-Vidal’s theories reached a wider audience, particularly in France and Spain, where the Fundición Tipográfica Nacional cast some of his letters and the professional press echoed his ideas, but they were defeated by the final thrust of the proposals of the Swiss School, which had been dominant since the mid-fifties, and especially by the spread of the Univers typeface designed by Adrian Frutiger, more flexible and useful than the semi-calligraphic letters cast by defenders of Latin graphemes, which were suitable only for headings and posters. Disappointment at this defeat led Crous-Vidal to give up his militancy in the graphic arts (for his vehement nature had always made him conceive his work not merely as a professional but as a militant) and devote himself to painting. Yet he was a man who always fought with enthusiasm and generosity (“And when some people ask ‘Why strive so hard?’,” he wrote, “we can only reply ‘We are not like the miser who buys nothing but moneyboxes’”), and his legacy can now begin to be evaluated, at a time when the proposals of the so-called Swiss School are being questioned and on various fronts of graphic design and typography fighting is going on to oppose “aesthetic poverty” (Émigré) and the world-wide trivialisation of individual creative proposals by indiscriminate copying.