University of California Berkeley
Regional Oral History Office University of California
The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California
Books and Printing in the San Francisco Bay Area
Wolfgang Lederer
BRIDGING TWO WORLDS IN GRAPHIC DESIGN, EDUCATION, AND ILLUSTRATION
With an Introduction by
Steve Reoutt
Interviews Conducted by
Harriet Nathan
in 1988
Copyright 1992 by The Regents of the University of California
Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading
participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of
Northern California, the West, and the Nation. Oral history is a modern research
technique involving an interviewee and an informed interviewer in spontaneous
conversation. The taped record is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity
and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The resulting manuscript is typed
in final form, indexed, bound with photographs and illustrative materials, and
placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and
other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material,
oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete
narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in
response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved,
and irreplaceable.
************************************
All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement
between The Regents of the University of California and Wolfgang
Lederer dated December 21, 1989. The manuscript is thereby made
available for research purposes. All literary rights in the
manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The
Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. No part
of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written
permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University
of California, Berkeley.
Requests for permission to quote for publication should be
addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library,
University of California, Berkeley 94720, and should include
identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated
use of the passages, and identification of the user. The legal
agreement with Wolfgang Lederer requires that he be notified of the
request and allowed thirty days in which to respond.
It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:
Wolfgang Lederer, "Bridging Two Worlds in
Graphic Design, Education, and
Illustration," an oral history conducted
in 1988 by Harriet Nathan, Regional Oral
History Office, The Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley, 1992.
Copy no .
Wolfgang Lederer, 1991
Photograph by Thomas Lederer
Cataloging Information
LEDERER, Wolfgang (b. 1912) Graphic designer
Bridging Two Worlds in Graphic Design. Education, and Illustration. 1992
xi, 161 pp.
Family and citizenship in Austria, Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the United
States; background in art, music, theater; professional education in art,
graphic arts and design, book crafts at Leipzig, Paris, and Prague;
Naziism; Vienna book publishers; to New York, 1939, and San Francisco,
1941; US publishers, package design, book jackets, greeting cards; Arts and
Crafts movement; California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, 1941-1980:
teaching advanced design and advertising art as chair, Department of
Graphic Design and director, Division of Design; free-lancing: California
wine industry, labels, publications, illustration work, designing journals
and prize -winning books.
Introduction by Steve Reoutt, artist and professor.
Interviewed 1988 by Harriet Nathan for the Books and Printing in the San
Francisco Bay Area Series. Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft
Library, University of California, Berkeley.
The Regional Oral History Office would like to express its
thanks to the following individuals and organizations whose
encouragement and support have made possible this oral history
memoir of Wolfgang Lederer.
Mariedi Anders
Harold A. Berliner
T.B. and Joan L. Brown
Priscilla and Michael Bull
Dr. Elaine Dallman, Women- In-Literature, Inc.
Editorial Board of Representations
Dale Hamilton Cotton and Maria Poythress Epes
Alfred Fromm
Hans U. and Lily R. Gerson
Hellmut E. and Claudine Gerson
Alfred E. Heller
Maria Luise Huntington
Kenneth and JoAnn Lavey
Andrew and Janet R. Lederer
Thomas F. Lederer
Michael Manwaring
Edward Nathan
Dunbar and Annegret Ogden
Kurt E. Ostwald
Alton R. Raible
Steve Reoutt
Edward W. and Maxine G.A. Rosston
San Francisco Study Center
Paul and Dorothy Schmidt
Melvin A. Schuler Jr.
Lore S. and H. Hans Shaper
Karl and Maria Strauch
University of California Press
Patricia R. Walsh
Oliver P. and Peggy Webb
Jean R. Wente
Mrs. E.B. Wienand
TABLE OF CONTENTS --Wo Ifgang Lederer
PREFACE i
INTRODUCTION- -by Steve Reoutt iv
INTERVIEW HISTORY viii
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION xi
I FAMILY AND EARLY YEARS 1
Parents' Background and Interests 1
School System in Germany 3
Life in Saarbrucken 5
Exhibitions: Posters, Typography 7
II LEIPZIG AKADEMIE; ACADEMIE SCANDINAVE, PARIS (1931-1934) 10
Training of Artists and Crafts People 10
Leipzig Akademie for Graphic Arts and Book Production 11
Comment on Two Systems of Art Education 12
Classes in Drawing, Applied Arts, Lettering 13
Concerts 13
Observing Nazi Beginnings (1931-1933) 14
A Chief Rabbi of Prague 15
Leaving Germany 16
Painting in Paris 17
The Experience of Paris 17
Nazis and Normalcy 18
III HUGO STEINER-PRAG AND OFFICINA PRAGENSIS (1934-1936) 20
Steiner-Prag's Multiple Abilities 20
Graphic Arts in Czechoslovakia 21
A Teacher's Insight 23
Good Work and Decent Work 23
Assistant to Steiner-Prag 24
The Saar Vote and Family's Experience (1935) 25
IV VIENNA, AND A PROFESSION 27
Finding Book Publishers 27
A One -Man Show 28
A Meeting, and Hitler in Austria 28
To Prague, and an Affidavit for America 29
Hitler in Prague, and Time to Leave 31
Choosing America 31
The van Loon Letter 33
V GETTING STARTED IN AMERICA (1939) 35
Looking for Work 35
Dale Carnegie's Advice 36
Independence 37
A Room Near the Elevated
First Job: Package Design 39
First Book Jacket 41
Technical Requirements 42
Salter, and the American Book Jacket 43
Simon and Schuster's Pocket Books 43
Columbia University Press 44
Jackets, Jackets, Jackets 44
Work Processes 45
Oddities in America 46
American Book Design 49
Selling Christmas Cards 50
Salter, Kredel, Eichenberg 50
WPA Murals 51
Drawing Bridges, and Meeting the Police 52
An Invitation to Visit San Francisco 54
VI THE CALIFORNIA COLLEGE OF ARTS AND CRAFTS (1941-1980) 55
Attractions of the College 55
Teaching Advanced Design and Advertising Art 56
Assignments and Grades 57
Setup of the College 58
How the College Began 59
Hanni and Her Family 60
Students, Attitudes, and the College Calendar 60
The Arts and Crafts Movement 63
American Attitude Toward Change 64
Arrival of the GIs (1945-1946) 64
Basic Design Classes in a Foundation Program 66
Hiring Faculty and Creating the Graphic Design Program 66
Communication Arts 68
Focus on the Student at the Desk 68
Participation and Need for Control 71
Background and Feel for Materials 72
Catalog Description of Basic Courses 73
College Growth and Program Changes 74
Schools and Clear Choices 76
Talking to Administrators and Board Members 78
Design and the Visual World 79
The Approach to Design 81
Responsibility of the Designer 83
Student Responses: American and European 83
Fighting Shoddiness and Recognizing Limitations 85
The Average Student or the Elite 85
More on Attitudes and Issues in Graphic Design 87
Breadth of Viewpoint vs. Style 90
Design and Responsibility 91
Debate with Jo Sinel 92
Order, and the Danger of Absolutes 93
Teaching and Human Experience 94
Subject Matter, Nonobjective Art, and Illustration 96
Personnel Changes and Reorganization 98
VII LIFE IN ART, AND FREELANCE WORK 99
One -Man Shows 99
Europeans and the California Wine Industry 100
The Clients' Concerns 103
Words and Illustrations 103
Graphic Design and Inherent Conditions 104
Wine Labels and Product Use 105
Clients and Their Styles 107
Varied Design Tasks in the Wine Industry 108
Career Changes ,
and the Realm of Books 110
VIII BOOKS, CARDS, AND QUALITY OF PRODUCTION 111
Back to Book Design 111
The Glories of Letterpress 112
Travels and Graphic Design (1955) 113
Volunteering in Graphic Design 115
Fascination with Magazines 116
Designing .Representations 118
Vitality of American Graphic Design 120
Books and Illustration 123
Outlets for Illustrations 125
Attitudes Toward Book Design 126
Working with Book Publishers 127
Choice of Typeface 130
Working with Authors 131
Some Practical Factors 132
Hermann Zapf and the Development of Type Faces 133
Literary Architecture and Its Awards 134
Collection: Cry California Articles 137
Giovanni and Lusanna 138
University Press Style 138
Harold Berliner, Letterpress and Fine Editions 139
Finding the Appropriate Style 141
Concern for Quality 142
APPENDICES 144
A. Wolfgang Lederer- -Biographical Data Sheet 145
B. Wolfgang Lederer- -Items Deposited in The Bancroft Library 146
C. Interview with Wolfgang Lederer from Snappy Patter. AIGA San 151
Francisco Newsletter, Volume I Number 4 1990
D. Interview with Wolfgang Lederer from California College of 154
Arts and Crafts Review. Winter 1971
INDEX 159
PREFACE
The art and business of printing in the San Francisco Bay Area are
significant in the history of printing in the United States and have been
an integral part of the cultural development of California. This series
of interviews with people who have been participants in and observers of
the recent history of San Francisco Bay Area printing stems from a 1958
interview by Francis P. Farquhar with Edward DeWitt Taylor. It has been
carried forward in the interest of recording details of the movement and
analyzing factors in its development.
To the series have been added interviews concerning other related
aspects of the San Francisco Bay Area book world: writing, illustrating,
and designing books, collecting, and selling them as well.
The Regional Oral History Office was established to tape record
autobiographical interviews with persons prominent in recent California
history. The purpose of oral history memoirs is to capture and preserve
for future research the perceptions, recollections, and observations of
these individuals. Research and preparation of a topic outline precede
the interview sessions. The outline is prepared in conjunction with
close associates and other persons in the memoirist's field, as well as
with the memoirist, who in turn may use the suggestions as aids to
memory, choose among them, or add new topics.
The tape-recorded interviews are transcribed, lightly edited by the
interviewer, and reviewed and approved by the memoirist. Index and other
materials are added. Final processing includes final corrections,
photographic reproduction, binding, and deposit in The Bancroft Library
and other selected libraries and collections. The volumes do not
constitute publications, but are primary research material made available
under specified conditions for the use of researchers.
The Regional Oral History Office is under the direction of Willa K.
Baum, Division Head, and the administrative direction of The Bancroft
Library, University of California, Berkeley.
Ruth Teiser, Series Director
Books and Printing in the San
Francisco Bay Area Series
Willa Baum, Division Head
June 1992
Regional Oral History Office
The Bancroft Library
University of California, Berkeley
ii
Books and Printing in the San Francisco Bay Area
Interviews Completed June 1992
Dorothy and Lewis Allen, Book Printing with the Handpress. 1968.
Valenti Angelo, Arts and Books: A Glorious Variety. 1980.
Brother Antoninus, Brother Antoninus: Poet. Printer, and Religious. 1966.
Mallette Dean, Artist and Printer. 1970.
Edward Grabhorn, Recollections of the Grabhorn Press. 1968.
Jane Grabhorn, The Colt Press. 1966.
Robert Grabhorn, Fine Printing and the Grabhorn Press. 1968.
Sherwood and Katherine Grover, The Grabhorn Press and the Grace Hoper
Press. 1972.
The Hand Bookbinding Tradition in the San Francisco Bay Area. Interviews
with Leah Wollenberg, Stella Parti, Duncan Olmsted, Stephen Gale
Herrick, and Barbara Fallen Hiller, 1982.
Carroll T. Harris, Conversations on Type and Printing. 1967.
James D. Hart, Fine Printers of the San Francisco Bay Area. 1969.
Quail Hawkins ,
The Art of Bookselling: Quail Hawkins and the Sather Gate
Book Shop. 1979.
Warren R. Howell, Two San Francisco Bookmen. 1967.
Andrew Hoyem, A San Francisco Fine Printer, in process.
Haywood Hunt, Recollections of San Francisco Printers. 1967.
Lawton Kennedy, A Life in Printing. 1968.
Wolfgang Lederer, Bridging Two Worlds in Illustration. Graphic Design, and
Education. 1992.
Oscar Lewis, Literary San Francisco. 1965.
David Magee, Bookselling and Creating Books. 1969.
Ill
Walter Mann, Photoengraving. 1910-1969. 1973.
Josephine Miles, Poetry. Teaching, and Scholarship. 1979.
William J. Monihan, S.J., Librarian and Dedicated Bookman. University of
San Francisco. 1947-1988. 1989.
Bernhard Schmidt, Herman Diedrichs, Max Schmidt, Jr., The Schmidt
Lithograph Company. Volume I. 1968.
Lorenz Schmidt, Ernest Wuthmann, Stewart Norris, The Schmidt Lithograph
Company. Volume II. 1969.
Ellen Shaffer, Self-Portrait of a Bookwoman. 1992.
Albert Sperisen, San Francisco Printers. 1925-1965. 1966.
Jack W. Stauffacher, A Printed Word Has its Own Measure. 1969.
George R. Stewart, A Little of Myself. 1972.
Edward DeWitt Taylor, Supplement to Francis P. Farquhar Interview. 1960.
Adrian Wilson, Printing and Book Designing. 1966.
IV
INTRODUCTION --by Steve Reoutt
When Steve Reoutt was writing the Lederer
Introduction, he spoke of knowing what he wanted to
say and working to say it in his "own voice," to
sound like himself. As the conversation developed,
he and the interviewer observed that the interview
form itself provides a time -honored means of
conveying the speaker's own voice and choice of
words. The decision followed: this Introduction is
in the form of an interview.
Reoutt: Since Wolfgang Lederer will have covered various aspects of his
teaching and professional work in his oral memoir, I will not go
into any detail in those areas. Also, having read many letters of
recommendation (and this introduction is a recommendation of
sorts) I will try to avoid the cliches and stock phrases which
crop up abundantly in this form of writing.
I first met Wolfgang over thirty years ago when he was my
teacher in Design. He was always dressed in a white, long-sleeved
shirt with a narrow dark tie. He was always bringing posters,
brochures, clippings, packages, all kinds of stuff to illustrate
lectures, which took place in virtually every class.
Nathan: Why do you think he brought so much stuff to class?
Reoutt: When you are teaching in a visual field, words are often
inadequate, so students need to experience seeing actual examples
of drawings, design, illustration. In architecture, one can best
experience it standing within the actual space of the building,
within the three dimensions.
Drawing has its own language, vocabulary, syntax, like music.
The visual arts have their own language that one can understand
only by looking.
Nathan: As a student what else did you notice about his teaching style?
Reoutt: Wolfgang was always on time, organized, formal, seemingly stern.
He never missed any of his classes.
Nathan: What did he do that seemed formal to you?
Reoutt :
Nathan:
Reoutt:
Nathan :
Reoutt :
He addressed his students as either Mr. or Miss. No one ever
dared call him by anything other than Mr. Lederer. He had a kind
of European manner that I am familiar with. In my own upbringing
I have always addressed my elders formally, in the plural rather
than the singular. In French the formal address is "vous," "tu"
is familiar.
How does your own style of teaching compare with Wolfgang's?
Wolfgang was very serious; no joking.
I am now roughly the same age as he was when I was his
student. Times change. I am more informal with students. We use
first names, go out together to smoke, chit-chat.
I cannot now pick out some specific words or principles or
skills he taught me. All that has blended with the many more
things learned from him since, as our friendship developed.
What have you learned from him as a friend?
[laughs] So many things, a lot quite intangible; learning some of
life's wisdom (not how to operate a piece of machinery), but more
complex learning, about attitudes.
I can see modulation of my opinions of painters, other
people's work. Over a span of time, I would notice that I began
to see things in a clearer light, due to what I heard Wolfgang
say. These were the kinds of lessons: no false airs,
straightforward, unassuming.
Also over the years he has been a very active person; both he
and his wife Hanni live life. Last year they went to Europe.
They couldn't do everything as they used to, but they pushed to
the maximum; that didn't stop their enjoyment. Wolfgang has not
given up, he's very much alive.
I could at this point enumerate Wolfgang's many admirable
qualities such as his unaffected, natural, genuine manner; his
warmth, enthusiasm, sensitivity, willingness to help. I could
mention his good humor and charm, his interest in music,
literature, the visual arts.
Nathan: Yes. Can you say a bit more about his enthusiasm?
is it expressed?
For what? How
vi
Reoutt:
Nathan:
Reoutt:
Nathan:
Reoutt:
Nathan:
Reoutt:
When he discusses the work of designers, artists, illustrators,
his teacher Hugo Steiner-Prag, he expresses liveliness, the
feeling is quite unmistakable. Some teachers are bored: "Oh boy,
here it starts again." That is the kind you don't want.
With Wolfgang, the talk is always about the matter at hand:
like the Design Department and its improvement. His seriousness
is unmistakable, and his concern. I still feel, when I go to have
dinner with Wolfgang and Hanni, that they are very much involved.
It's fun for me. We are not bored, not making small conversation.
Wolfgang is an alive human being.
Yes. Wolfgang showed me a painting he obviously liked very much:
a last and a shoe. When I admired it, he said that it was your
work.
I gave it to Hanni in the summer of 1988. I'm not sure of the
occasion, maybe a birthday. I have also given paintings to
Wolfgang, and vice -versa. I have several of his.
Would you care to comment on the interpretation that each form
shapes the other, perhaps like a teacher and a student? Was that
in your mind?
No, I did not think of that meaning, but when I talk to my
students, I tell them that pictures may have many meanings, and
the artist may not be aware of them. A viewer brings his own
viewpoint that he can read into the picture, so pictures can have
This is especially true of pictures
Modern eyes are different. When
we look at those old paintings, when we look at history, we bring
our own lamps .
a great range of meaning,
painted one hundred years ago.
I see. Now that you have observed Wolfgang over many years, do
you have more to say about his individual style?
It must have been the early '80s. Wolfgang had already retired
from teaching. I was walking to the faculty parking lot with
Robert Harper, for many years the school librarian. He mentioned
that Wolfgang had been in the library the day before, and we
chatted about him over the space of a hundred yards or so. I do
not remember any of the conversation, except that we concluded
that Wolfgang was one of the last of his kind- -they don't make
them like that any more- -a dying breed; words to that effect.
(Well, so much for cliches.)
Nathan: What were you thinking about when you said "the last of his kind"?
vii
Reoutt: His European upbringing, it doesn't exist any more here or in
Europe. There is not that kind of educated person, with the broad
scope of interests. Wolfgang knows Shakespeare, Goethe, the
Russian 19th century novelists. He studied Latin. He hated it,
but he knew it. His education had strictness. There was a
courtesy; manners nowadays are different. As life changes, things
are bound to change also.
Nathan: Wolfgang had mentioned that he thinks of himself as a man who
spans two cultures, the European and the American. How does that
strike you?
Reoutt: I believe that is still true. We were talking about summer
vacations. I said that in the summer I wake up, make a fire, have
some coffee, read a book. Wolfgang said, "I envy you." He said
that even now he has to work a full day before he can sit down and
read a book for enjoyment.
Nathan: You have know each other as teacher and student, as colleagues,
and as friends. How did this come about?
Reoutt : I was fortunate that the end of my undergraduate days ,
after an
interruption of six years, would lead to a much, much closer
relationship with Wolfgang when he invited me to teach in his
department in 1967.
Two years went by when we were both on the faculty of the
California College of Arts and Crafts, and I still called him Mr.
Lederer, perhaps because of my Russian background. One day I
wrote him a letter and said, "May I call you Wolfgang?" He
replied, "Of course." Now that I know Wolfgang well, I know that
he would not have wished to create a barrier of formality. He is
one of the warmest people I know.
Over these past twenty- four years, Wolfgang has become such a
friend as you count on the fingers of one hand. Here I must also
count his wife, Hanni ,
who has been indispensable to Wolfgang. I
don't quite see how he could have managed without her. I know he
would have, but I don't see just how.
Steve Reoutt
Professor of Design
California College of Arts and Crafts
April 22, 1991
Oakland, California
viii
INTERVIEW HI STORY--Wo Ifgang Lederer
Wolfgang Lederer is the twenty- fourth memoirist in the oral history
series on Books and Printing in the San Francisco Bay Area. In art,
graphic design, teaching, and the responsibilities of citizenship, he
recognizes that he is a man of two worlds: European by birth and
education, and American by choice. A voluntary refugee from Hitler, he
has analyzed the educational, artistic, and political traditions both of
his European heritage and those he found in America, achieving a personal
balance that links the best of each into a single system.
Changes in the political map of Europe have made Wolfgang Lederer in
turn an Austrian, German, and Czech citizen; in his fourth citizenship he
is American. He learned and practiced drawing and painting, graphic
arts, typography and book production in Leipzig, Paris, Prague, and
Vienna, cultivating skills even as he moved ahead of Hitler's forces
before a daring escape to the United States in 1939.
He pledged himself to fight shoddiness in his own work, and expects
his students to do the same. He has won acclaim in book and journal
design, illustration, drawing, lettering, in greeting cards and
broadsides, and a wide range of work for business and industry. Students
call him inspiring, based in part on his way of connecting rigorous
standards of quality with an appreciation for innovation and spontaneity.
When Wolfgang Lederer compares his own early school days and rigid
education with the more open American style, he embraces the American
public school system, recognizing its problems and responding to its
promise .
He saw Disney's Snow White in Prague, and perceived that "America
cannot be all that wild, with people . . .
only money-grubbing and
everybody at each other's throat. There must be a sort of, almost
childlike, sense of acceptance and friendly attitudes and most of all, a
wonderful sense of humor." He expected friendliness, courtesy, and
humor, and he found them all.
When he came to visit and then remain in the San Francisco Bay Area,
he found the book publishing scene less vigorous here than in New York.
He developed ways to combine his own art and design work with a long
association with the California College of Arts and Crafts, where he
served as chair of the Department of Graphic Design, and Director of the
Division of Design.
ix
Wolfgang Lederer understood the arts and crafts movement and
approached graphic design with respect. When the interviewer spoke of
"commercial art," he asked quietly, "May I correct you?" The term seemed
to him to denigrate graphic design as "something not quite decent," in
contrast to fine art, which was. He said, "I hope ... I have conveyed
that in everything we graphic designers are doing .... we should be
imbued with a tremendous sense of responsibility, because what we are
doing is, in terms of influence on the public, much more widespread than
in general what the so-called fine artists are doing."
His sense of commitment and responsibility applies equally to
designs for Alfred E. Heller's quarterly World's Fair: books, watermarks,
and illustrations for Harold A. Berliner, who publishes fine editions;
journals and wine labels for the California wine industry; and
illustrations for a toy store's newsletter.
Book design was his greatest joy and first love, and has developed
into a post-retirement second career. For the University of California
Press he has designed books like Literary Architecture and Giovanni and
Lusanna. that have brought him and the Press honors and acclaim. He
greets such recognition with surprise and gratitude, but no false
modesty. He makes sure that all his work is excellent, but nevertheless
he can still be startled by praise.
Wolfgang Lederer provided five interviews for this oral history
memoir: on March 2, May 23, June 15, July 5, and July 26, 1988. Before
the sessions, the interviewer provided a suggested outline of questions
based on conversations, published materials, and a review of some of his
work. The interviews were taped, transcribed, lightly edited, and
submitted with a few questions for his review and approval. He reviewed
the material with care and made a number of improvements.
For each interview he sat at the diningroom table in his Kensington
home, an alert man of seventy-six, trim, and with a scholar's eyeglasses
and small grey beard. He spoke readily and easily, having planned the
major points to be covered in each session, and at ease in responding to
questions. A number of ideas sparked his enthusiasm, from the mastery of
Hermann Zapf's letter design, to the wit of the folk art and toys in
Santa Fe's Girard collection. His demeanor was modest but confident, and
while he referred wryly to the remnants of German speech patterns and
accent, now slight and pleasing to the ear, his speech was fluent and
colloquial, and his style that of one thoroughly at home in this country.
His wife and companion Hanni has provided the garden and the
flower-filled deck beyond the French doors, the vases of fresh flowers,
tea and pound-cake and dinners without number. Her kitchen also holds
cabinets of books and toys so the grandchildren can help themselves.
Adult dinner guests summoned to the Lederers' table quickly scan
their places to find the individualized place cards that are miniature
works of art. He has created each one, and the guests tuck them away
safely even before they take their seats and shake out their napkins.
As a supplement to his oral history memoir, Wolfgang Lederer has
prepared a collection of examples of several types of his work, including
some that demonstrate stages of development in a piece of graphic art.
He has also gathered examples of publications he designed. The
collection will be deposited in The Bancroft Library for use in research.
A list of the items is appended.
The oral history memoir of Wolfgang Lederer was supported by
contributions from more than thirty friends, family members, colleagues,
clients, and former students. Their contributions are deeply
appreciated. Particular thanks are due to Harold A. Berliner, Claudine
and Hellmut E. Gerson, Steve Reoutt, and Jean R. Wente, for their efforts
in making the Lederer memoir a reality. Steve Reoutt also contributed a
perceptive introduction to the memoir of his former teacher, his
colleague, and his friend.
Harriet Nathan
Interviewer/Editor
June 1992
Regional Oral History Office
The Bancroft Library
University of California, Berkeley
xi
Regional Oral History Office University of California
Room 486 The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California 94720
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
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Wolfgang Lederer
IN THE LATE 80S THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF GRAPHIC ARTS
noted, "The focal point of graphic work is no longer
exclusively New York City. California has evolved into
a significant design force... .The California look indi
cates stronger individual styles, color vitality, and free
dom of spirit." This shift has come about, in part,
because of Wolfgang Lederer, founder of the School of
Design at California College of Arts and Crafts and
faculty member from 1941 to 1980. His design philoso
phies and management of the department over the
years laid the foundation for training a core of design
ers on the West Coast who now are being recognized
nationally and internationally.
The arts and crafts tradition which founder Frederic
Meyer had established at CCAC supported Lederer's
approach. 'The idea that the arts belong together, and
you don't have to say this is where one thing starts and
another ends, appealed to me very much," Lederer
explains. "When Michelangelo painted the Sistine
Chapel, he was given a project where he had to fit into
certain architectural shapes, he had to make it visible
from a great distance, he had to illustrate certain stories
from the Bible, and it had to be understandable by the
people. How is that different from what other commu
nicators do?"
Lederer says that design always comes back to com
municating certain basic things about society, and in
order to have a vision behind the design, the designer
must understand society. "When you talk about the
world in which the graphic designer lives, it is a world
that the designer must understand in all its phases. If
you take art as one of the most visible expressions of
society in a certain time, whether negative or positive,
then you realize that the graphic designer cannot be a
person who is apart from the world, whether it is
political life or personal life, etc. Students must be
brought in touch, not only in the means of doing their
work, but also with their world."
Guiding design principles that Lederer stressed in
his teaching and in his personal practice were clarity in
presentation, regardless of style, method, or execution;
clarity of type, so that the type works with all the other
elements in the given space; the discipline of careful
observation; the deep traditional roots of design; and
"decency" in design, i.e.
being responsible to the large
groups of people who will see the work. "It is not
necessary to use vulgar words or vulgar design con
cepts just to attract attention," he emphasizes.
Lederer's career began with education in the book
arts in Europe. Studying at the Academy of Graphic
Arts, Leipzig, the AcademieScandinave, Paris, and the
Officina Pragensis, Prague, he learned from European
masters, designing books that were works of art cre
ated with someone else's words.
He emigrated to the United States in 1939 to escape
the growing Nazi threat in Europe. On a trip to San
Francisco in 1941 Lederer met Frederic Meyer, founder
and President ofCCAC, whowas familiar with Lederer's
work and had an opening as an instructor of two
classes: commercial art and advanced design. Lederer
accepted a teaching position, and a long association
had begun.
Gradually broadening the scope of classes and cur
riculum, Lederer became Director of the Design Divi
sion. In the meantime, his signature style simple,
clean, "not flamboyant or showy" began to attract the
attention of the University of California Press and the
burgeoningCalifornia wine industry. Winemakers were
becoming more aggressive about promoting their prod
uct and for twenty years Lederer was the Art Director
for Wine Publications and Western Farm Publications
in San Francisco.
Although he has been retired since 1980, Lederer has
been "as busy as ever" designing for UC Press, Presidio
Press and Chronicle Books. His influence also lives on
in his students.
"I still practice what he taught me," says Bill Yamada
'73, Executive Vice President and Creative Director of
Wells Rich Greene/ BDDP in New York. "He was ahead
of his time (in the design field) in asserting that concept
and ideas drive the design, and in fact, were crucial to
any design project. You must have a vision."
Clarity and discipline were the hallmarks of the
Lederer style, both in design and in teaching. "I can still
hear him say 'Make the round things round and the
square things square,'" says Ken Lavey '48, Creative
Director and Vice Chairman of Lavey/Wolff/Swift in
New York. "He has a keen awareness of the dynamics
of design; he exposed students to all types of tech
niques, styles and design and insisted that our cre
ations begin with fine craftsmanship and work up to
the final artistic product.."
It is
appropriate that thedepartment Lederer worked
so hard to build is now in the hands of one of his
students. Recognized around the world for his work,
Michael Vanderbyl '68, is Dean of the School of Design
and principal in Michael Vanderbyl Design. Even as he
trains the next generation of designers, Vanderbyl ac
knowledges the foundation laid by Lederer. "Histori
cally, the department of design is based in the arts and
crafts philosophy ofCCAC," hesays. "Dueto Wolfgang's
leadership, those roots are very strong."
I FAMILY AND EARLY YEARS
[Interview 1: May 2, 1988]
Nathan: Shall we talk a little about your family and the early years
and perhaps the experiences that shaped your interests?
Parents' Background and Interests
Lederer: Well, I was born in 1912 in Mannheim, a German city of about
200,000 inhabitants, in which my father had a position at the
Municipal Theater as a conductor. The theater and orchestra
at that time still had a tie to the court of the principality
of Baden. It had a long and famous tradition; the young
Mozart spent a year there in hopes of securing a position at
the court. The role of conductor in such a municipal theater
was different from the high-pressure situation we know here,
inasmuch as such a theater was totally supported by the city
and state, and for that reason was allowed much more leeway in
operation. It also was a position that he had for a whole
year with paid vacations, and it was renewed year after year.
The main conductor next to him was Arthur Bodanzky, who went
to New York before the outbreak of World War I, as conductor
of the German wing of the Metropolitan Opera.
Nathan: What sorts of musical events took place in that theater?
Lederer: The theater was devoted to opera, operetta, ballet, and plays.
It covered the whole spectrum of theatrical activities,
performed year-around by a resident staff of singers, actors
and musicians. Theaters of that kind existed in great numbers
all through Germany. There were (and still are) maybe sixty-
five of them in Germany, ranging in size, scope and quality,
depending on the size of the city, and on what it could
afford.
My father came from Prague, and as such I was born an
Austrian. Only later on my father, since he Icnew that the
children--! have two brothers- -would live and make our careers
in Germany as he did himself, acquired the German citizenship.
That citizenship he bought after we had, after the First World
War, become automatically Czechoslovakians . So that actually
the American citizenship is my fourth citizenship, which has
influenced my whole outlook on the world. I do not have a
very strong sense of coming from a certain country, although
my cultural background is certainly, very definitely,
influenced by everything that happened in my education in
Germany .
My father was Jewish but had adopted the Christian
religion as a very automatic act that everybody who wanted to
make a go in the theater world did. It never meant anything
to him one way or another. He always professed to be a Jew,
and later on, since we were brought up Christian, also refused
to participate in the regular ritual of confirmation. In
other words, he did not come to the church. He felt that was
not his place to be. But apart from that, religion had no
particular influence on his life.
In his background were merchants, and his father had, as
a young man, together with his brother, made a trip around the
world, at which point they also landed in San Francisco. The
brother liked it so much here that he stayed, which meant that
when I came to America, there were three elderly cousins of
mine.
Simply to indicate his upbringing and to give the
background of his musical career, he was a very precocious
child and very ill-suited for the school life as it was then.
He recruited the help of the young Gustav Mahler, who was at
that time a conductor at the Prague Opera House, to persuade
his father to take him out of school. So he entered the
conservatory when he was fifteen, where his conducting
instructor was Felix Mottl, a man who was famous in Bayreuth.
His instructor in composition was Dvorak. So there are some
famous names in the background.
My mother came from a totally different world. I could
describe it probably best by simply saying it was the world of
the Buddenbrooks .
Anybody who has read that book by Thomas
Mann knows these north German Protestant merchants, who had
prominent positions as senators in the city government, were
the characters of the book and the types of people in my
mother's background. In addition to that, there was always a
sprinkling of art, but never in the visual fields. In
literature, one of my ancestors was a translator of all the
works of Shakespeare. The translations were published,
although they never became popular.
Another one went with Schliemann to Troy. The most
prominent was the poet, Kotzebue. Kotzebue's sister played
with the young Goethe as a child. In later years, Goethe
asked her to write something into his album, which was a
traditional thing to do, and he wrote for her a lovely and
beautifully worded thank-you note which is hanging right here
on the wall. That's a very precious possession for me.
What reached me of all this, meant actually that music,
literature, and my parents' great interest in the visual arts
influenced my youth considerably, but strangely at the total
neglect of the mercantile side of all this background. In
other words, all practical matters about money and finance, or
anything of that kind, simply did not enter into my awareness.
They weren't even considered as something that one should
really talk about. It was considered not very refined. To
this day, matters of money are totally foreign to me.
On the other hand, there was in addition to that, with
many artists coming into the house as friends or visiting
artists and so on, a great deal of life in music and beauty.
I grew up with the idea that the only thing that really
mattered in life is art.
We lived in Mannheim through the First World War. Tales
of battles, the sight of wounded men, deprivation of food are
an essential memory of my early childhood years. Mannheim,
having a war industry, was attacked by planes with bombs --
French and English- -and so in the night very often we had to
go down to the basement and stay there until the all-clear
alarm was sounded.
School System in Germany
Lederer: I started school in Mannheim with a system that may warrant
some explanation. The schools were definitely divided
according to social lines, or you might say income lines.
Children whose parents could not afford to pay for higher
Nathan:
Lederer:
education went to the general school until they were fourteen.
They became then apprentices, or worked in shops, or other
jobs that were open to them without the so-called higher
education.
We went from ages six to nine to a private school which
kept us from getting in touch with the "lower classes." I
have to make the sign of quotation marks there, because it is
a definite indication of the distinctions that existed at that
time. After these three years, we transferred to the
Gymnasium, which is a school of higher learning with a
curriculum that included three languages. It started out, to
my infinite pain, with Latin, which I had to take for nine
years, an effort that made me hate everything connected with
that area to this day. Then, after two years, French was
added, and after three years, we had the choice to either add
English or Greek. In our case it was decided that the third
language would be English, which came in somewhat handily
later on. At least it offered some background.
My school experiences were essentially very unhappy
because I was not made for that kind of life. It was all very
regimented with tremendous demands, so it seemed to me, or so
it was for my kind of intellectual setup. It was even worse
later on when in 1922 we moved to Saarbrxicken where the
schools were even more old-fashioned and backward, with
beatings for not only disobedience but also for not knowing
the vocabulary that was assigned to us, or the irregular
verbs, or things of that kind.
I must say, as a balance, if this is meant to be a
description of the school life of that time, that other people
had better experiences. For instance, my older brother
reacted totally differently, and he in fact, just to call it a
story in two ways, regretted that my parents didn't send him
to the Greek section later on, which he felt would have been
more valuable to him. Yet, I have remained skeptical about
accumulated knowledge as the measure of an educated mind after
experiencing how so many of the very people who had received
this higher education in Germany later failed to recognize the
stupidity and vileness of the Nazi doctrine and how so many of
them followed it blindly.
Were the girls and boys separate?
It was strictly separated. Later on in the last three years,
girls could be admitted. There was a sprinkling of them in
the school, but they were more or less oddities there.
Maybe also in going ahead with a tale, I might say that
coming to America, nothing, but nothing, impressed me more
positively than the difference in the schools. That, to my
mind, remains the great dividing line. As I know, not
everything is right, and whatever is not right that happens in
the schools or does not happen at times, still does not change
my feeling that that is the crucial thing that sets America
apart from Europe. What people can get in the schools- -even
if they do not get good learning or heaps of information- -they
still get a better sense of how people should interact. That
to my mind is absolutely crucial.
It helped that when I came to America --and I'm now
somewhat anticipating already later events--! had a girlfriend
who was a high school teacher. And from what she told me
there, I was absolutely goggle-eyed. Later my brother and his
wife came to America and both became high school teachers at a
private school in Putney, Vermont. My son has now been for
twenty years a high school teacher in California. So that has
expanded and enriched considerably my observation and my
awareness of the difference in the schools here and as I knew
them in Germany.
I sense that the way I had experienced school, as an
oppressive institution, makes evident that it was detrimental
to shaping young minds, or that it influenced bad character
traits to a great extent because in defense against so much
oppression, we became oftentimes mean and arrogant. We tried
to cheat whenever we could. As a matter of fact, I believe
one couldn't get through the school with all its demands
without cheating unless one happened to be a learning genius.
When I later on heard the hordes of Nazis in the streets,
and these young people shout in unison, "Fuehrer, you command;
we obey," then I knew where that came from: from a system
where to obey without any questioning was a goal in itself.
Life in Saarbrticken
Lederer: Now I have gone a little bit ahead in the tale, but my father
was in 1921 given the leading musical position in Saarbrvicken,
which was the main city of the Saar district. By the Treaty
of Versailles it was meant to be left to a plebiscite for the
people to decide in 1935 whether they wanted to belong to
France or whether they wanted to belong to Germany. It is a
territory rich in coal mines adjoining France, and that
Nathan :
Lederer:
brought up the question of who should benefit from its riches.
But the people there were German, and they had no longing to
belong to France .
When we came to Saarbrucken I was eleven, and in my young
years of adolescence, the big counterweight against the
dreariness of the school was to live the life of a son whose
father was the chief conductor in the city. In other words, I
could go to the theater any time ;
I could go to all the
concerts. While I would by no means say that the concerts
were always without boredom, for me it still was all on a
level of interest and glamour because my father was the person
in charge. And I can still see myself sitting there and
waiting for the end of a long piece and the applause to come,
[laughter]
But in the process, of course, I got very much imbued
with music and with theater, and by that token also with
literature and with art. We were, as a matter of course,
taken to art galleries and museums, and I can still remember
things that I saw when I was only nine years old- -certain
paintings that have stayed with me. So that was a fertile and
enriching background to all my growing up, particularly, also,
for the great interest in literature that I developed.
Since I had started drawing very early, my parents kept
little drawings from when I was five- -I guess all parents do
this --but they kept them for a longer time. When I saw them
at a later age, I saw that they had already something in them
of a more than ordinary lively sense of observation and an
ability to reproduce from observation.
Was that spontaneous? Was there anyone who encouraged you?
It started out being very spontaneous, but it was also very
much encouraged, particularly by my father who secretly had a
tremendous yearning to be a painter. I might even say that
from an educational point of view, I am aware that it was much
too much encouraged. In other words, natural spontaneity of
development that I believe in now, was hampered by far too
much observation by admiring adults, attention to what I was
doing, particularly when I got a little more mature- -thirteen,
fourteen, fifteen.
I directed myself at such early stages for that reason,
also, towards the greatest masters in the field of
illustration and imitated, without any kind of understanding
of what's behind it, their ways. That was something that I
later on had considerable difficulty with. When people ask me
what they should do when they have talented children, I'm
always inclined to say, without having studied the psychology
of children's drawings, "Leave them alone. Give them pencils,
give them paper, but leave them alone and don't make too much
ado about it." That comes from my personal experience.
Later on, while I was still at the Gymnasium, I took some
serious drawing classes which were very good, with interesting
people that were stimulating, adding to my awareness of what
art is all about. The last three years of Gymnasium are
roughly comparable to junior college here. All this ended
with a formidable examination, called Arbiturium, that took
several days .
After all these nine years the school still had to find
out if one had learned anything. The number of fields of
study was so large that if a teacher wanted to flunk somebody,
he could do that. I was in a class of seven, and only four
passed the examination. It was a very cruel system. And
later, when so many people who had successfully gone through
this system failed to see through the follies of the Nazi
doctrines, this makes me forever doubtful about accumulated
knowledge as a measure of a developed mind. But once I had
the examination behind me, I felt that my life started because
I was liberated and could devote myself to the things that I
really wanted to do. It also meant, of course, that 99
percent of what I had stuffed into my head in those years
vanished within half a year.
Exhibitions: Posters. Typography
Nathan: I was thinking about the posters that advertised musical and
theatrical events. Did they strike you as especially
interesting when you were a child?
Lederer: Why certainly. As a matter of fact, my father managed to let
me do some of them. So I designed some posters for the
theatrical events- -sure- -again, with a great deal of innocence
of what the real problems were, but he was in a position that
he could push that a little bit. Whether that was right, I do
not know. But in any case, I did it, and it added to my
experience .
I may add here that when I was seventeen I had the good
fortune to see an international exhibition of poster design
that offered me a true revelation: here were artists who
conveyed a specific advertising message by images that were
both striking and beautiful. This as the possible aim for an
artist remained an underlying thought for myself and in my
future teaching.
I remember to this day from that exhibition certain
posters by Cassandre, Carlu, and Colin that I became
acquainted with at that time- -the three great French geniuses
in the history of poster design. When I was ready to start my
formal training in the arts --by now I knew the field I wanted
to go into- -I saw an exhibition of work of the great E.R.
Weiss, one of the important figures in contemporary typography
as a type and book designer.
What this exhibition revealed- -which again was to me so
very important- -was that he showed his type design, his
lettering design, his book pages, but showed also paintings,
drawings, and illustrations. That was the answer to what I
was looking for: I wanted to be in all these things, and not
be in any way specialized. I think I had a rather down-to-
earth realization that one also has to make one's living, and
I wanted to practice something with which I could do that.
These two exhibitions showed to me that one can be a true
artist, live up to one's highest ideals, and still do
something that answers everyday needs, whether it's in posters
or advertisements or in design and illustration of books.
Whatever the field may be, it offers opportunities for doing
things in the arts. It was strengthened by another
experience. During a summer vacation in my study years I
worked in Saarbrucken in the studio of an excellent young
designer who at that time carried out a commission to design
advertisements for the Container Corporation of America. That
was my first acquaintance with that organization, whose
beautiful series of advertisements was carried out by famous
artists, designers, sculptors, painters, illustrators. I
collected them when I came to America, and used them as
inspiration, and as great examples for my students. I might
add that these advertisements are also an illustration of the
variety of work that so many artists did. The strict
divisions that characterize the professional standards of
painting, drawing, design, illustration did not yet exist.
What today sets the work of the "fine artist" apart from that
of the illustrator or designer, was then not known.
Nathan: You saw that the ideal and the practical parts of your
interests could come together?
Lederer: That to me was a very crucial thing, because I said something
at the beginning, that I never developed a sense for money or
for practical things. On the other hand, I obviously had
enough common sense to realize that unless you are a great
genius, you cannot live on art alone, and I wanted to do
something where the applied and the purely creative aspects
would come together.
The field for which I felt most genuinely made was the
field of book illustration. I had already started during my
school years, later on, again with a rather naive disregard
for problems and difficulties, to illustrate great works.
These were whatever I happened to read or whatever we happened
to read in school, whether it was Shakespeare or Flaubert or
Dostoevsky- -whatever. Some of these things I did probably
were not even bad, only that, as I hinted at in the beginning,
I think I started out too early with the end rather than with
the beginning.
10
II LEIPZIG AKADEMIE; ACADEMIE SCANDINAVE, PARIS (1931-1934)
Lederer: The choice of the school in which to make my beginning of my
professional training was rather naturally given by the fact
that my father's friend of early years was Hugo Steiner-Prag--
an artist who also hailed from Prague. This man, one of the
prominent people in the field of illustration and book arts,
and typography in Germany, had in later years a great deal of
influence worldwide and, at an early age, became a professor
at the great Akademie in Leipzig, Germany.
Training of Artists and Crafts People
Lederer: This institution was devoted explicitly to the graphic arts,
to graphic design, and to the book crafts. It combined all
the arts as background to these fields ,
and included the
training of the crafts people. So that within the building of
the Akademie, a very big three -story building, people who
wanted to learn how to operate powerpresses were learning side
by side with the artists who gave them work to be transformed
into the printed product.
As a matter of fact, there is a basic idea that to a
great extent sets European and American operations apart. The
crafts people in Europe were definitely design- trained. This
meant that I did in Europe, later on, designs which I sketched
indicating just the basics of space and arrangement, choice of
type and such matters. Apart from that, the execution was
left very much to the interpretation of the crafts people who
came up in what they produced with exactly what I had seen in
my mind's eye.
In other words, the sketch was something like an
impressionistic indication much more than a meticulous
blueprint. I still remember that it was even emphasized to us
11
In our training that we should not over- indicate because, "You
are working with people who know much more about that side of
their particular craft than you will ever know." That is very
different from the way things are handled here ,
and also
required a tremendous amount for me to still add to my
learning when I came here .
Nathan: Do I understand then in the American system, everything is
spelled out very carefully?
Lederer: Very carefully because the crafts people are trained in their
craft. If they are good, they handle that superbly, but they
are not prepared to make decisions in matters of taste or in
matters of design. There simply is no time for that. There
is no tradition for that. I do not want this to sound like a
put-down on what the American crafts people are doing. I only
want to explain a difference in background and what, for that
reason, one could expect.
Leipzig Akademie for Graphic Arts and Book Production
Lederer: So the choice of the school was a natural one for the reason
that I should go to the school where Steiner-Prag was. This,
however, meant that I had to go through the institution's
educational system which, in general terms, required three
years of preparation before you could enter a so-called master
class --in other words, before you became beholden to one
particular person under whom you did then your advanced
studies .
In order to be admitted at the Akademie on the basis of a
submitted portfolio of work, you had to undergo an examination
of one week, which consisted of doing life drawing, and the
production of a poster. When you passed that, you were
accepted for half a year. After that half year, you were in.
That meant that while you had to, of course, go by the general
principle of the education, you had a considerable amount of
freedom in choices, particularly later on when you became
accepted by a professor who was then your master.
In that case, you could avail yourself of the resources
of the institution and- -to the extent that you understood it--
to use them well. But there was then no further supervision,
whether you were present in class or studio or not, or whether
you spent the time in the zoo drawing, or wherever. The place
12
was simply your place of resources, both in personnel and
equipment.
Comment on Two Systems of Art Education
Lederer: Once you were accepted as a master student by a professor, you
were there for as long as you saw fit to stay there. There
was no formal end; there was no examination at the end or
anything of that kind. If the professor wanted to write a
letter of recommendation for you- -fine --but nothing was in any
manner formalized. I think that is something that sets it
apart from other institutions of higher learning like
universities, although in all other respects, it had the same
ranking as a university.
Nathan: Is that out of the tradition of the atelier or artists' work
in the past?
Lederer: Well, no, the atelier offered an apprentice -master
relationship in the master's studio. In the art colleges in
America you get degrees and have to meet unit and course
requirements, whereas that German art Akademie had all kinds
of stipulations connected with getting in. But once you were
in, it offered a very free plan, and the manner in which you
availed yourself of the opportunities offered by the
institutions was entirely your own.
Nathan: Would you care to draw any judgments about these two different
styles that you are describing?
Lederer: Well, it required a very adult self-reliance on the part of
the student to live without this kind of guidance. Certainly
when I later came to know the setup at the college in Oakland
that I became connected with, it was first totally and
entirely foreign to me. I was utterly bewildered by it, and
the idea of grading creative work is something I never, never
came to terms with. It always seemed to me in some way rather
absurd to evaluate by a grading system something that is
essentially a matter of quite individual judgment and
preference. I coped with it, and I tried to make the best of
it and to do it fairly, but I cannot say that to the end,
after thirty-nine years, I felt comfortable with it. I expect
I'll talk more about this later on.
13
Classes in Drawing. Applied Arts. Lettering
Lederer: I never made it to the point that I could avail myself of the
Leipzig institution in what made it unique, because I went
there only for the first two years during which I took the
required preparatory classes, mainly drawing classes that were
as academically rigid as anything you can imagine .
Nathan: Were these from life?
Lederer: Yes. And they were imbued in the ideal of training of the
most minute observation of the surface, including many things
that I actually never saw, underlying anatomy, and all that.
If I tell somebody here nowadays, they just don't believe me
that we actually had six days a week when the model was in one
pose for four hours every morning. That meant twenty- four
hours on one drawing.
There must be people who have benefitted from that. For
me, it was a totally stifling experience, although I was not
sufficiently clear-minded at that time and too much still
imbued with the old school idea that you do as you are told,
to extricate myself from that. Apart from certainly learning
to observe well, it also meant a lot of just moving my hand up
and down with a piece of charcoal without really anything
happening .
In the afternoon we did a variety of things like learning
lithography, etching, woodcut, wood engraving in its
elementary steps, and beginnings of graphic design, doing book
jackets, packaging, and a good deal of lettering. Lettering
was a mainstay as background of all graphic design education
to the same extent as it has been or is also to this day in
some schools here. I know that when I came to New York, there
was the Cooper Union in which some great people are taught
lettering in a similar way. There they believed very strongly
in the whole idea of gaining understanding of letter forms as
one great source of education in form, design, meaning of what
the artist can work with if he works with a given form--
namely, that of the letter as we traditionally know it.
Concerts
Lederer: In addition to that, I went to an awful lot of concerts.
There were the famous Gewandhaus concerts under Bruno Walter.
14
I do not know to what extent I would have gained if I would
not have had this as a continuous distraction and
preoccupation with music- -in other words, if I had
concentrated my whole emotional feeling more towards my chosen
field. Music has always played a tremendously stimulating and
absorbing role, next to art.
Certainly this was a very good time in my life with the
political life, and what was brewing in Germany at that time,
very much in the background.
Observing Nazi Beginnings (1931-1933')
Nathan: So this was about '31- '32?
Lederer: That was between '31 and '33.
When I had visited in Munich a few years before, I had
oftentimes stopped by the publication offices where they
displayed the issues of the Der Volkische Beobachter, the Nazi
main newspaper. We read these things, and they sounded
incredibly, fantastically awful, but too awful to connect with
realities. That was a background. One knew about these
people. One saw them, one knew some of them who were
connected with these movements, but one had no contact with
them.
In addition to that, our political awareness, apart from
some sort of interest in newspaper reading, was always defined
by the fact that an active participation did not enter our
minds. Again, that belonged to the things that are really not
very refined. For that reason, while we had certain
preferences for leftist- liberal leanings, to be really active
did not occur to us. On the other hand, when Hitler came to
power, and the first little incidents happened, I became aware
that there was something so sinister and despicable that I
didn't want to be where that was happening.
For instance, a group of students from the Akademie took
it upon themselves to simply force entry into Steiner-Prag' s
home (he was Jewish) where his wife was, and wanted to
investigate his library for subversive literature. Well, they
came in there, and they saw a library of two thousand volumes
and were confounded and didn't know what to do with it, and
they took their departure. The mere fact that they could do
that- -the affront of the attitude was so impossible that to my
15
mind it revealed a bent of mind with which I did not want to
have anything to do .
I must say that among my colleagues with whom I studied,
the mixture of reactions was between detesting, ridiculing,
not taking very seriously, and all these kinds of shadings of
reactions, but certainly, I had no personal unpleasant
experiences whatever. My professor in drawing, who was very
fond of me, was thinking in an idealistic- -if one could call
it that- -but a befuddled way of Hitler doing something for his
beloved Germany. When I had made up my mind that I didn't
want to stay there, I went to him and wanted him to know what
my reason was. He said, "Oh, yes. You are doing absolutely
the reasonable thing. You go away for a year or two, and you
come back, and everything will be evened out."
I must mention all these things because I am so very much
aware that when I tell people how the beginning was , they are
totally ununderstanding of why there was not a rapid exodus of
everybody who was concerned. It has to be understood that all
this happened in gradual steps, that life went on extremely
normally for a very long time, so that even people who were
Jews still did not see what was really coming. For instance,
I myself being baptized, having been brought up in the
Christian religion, didn't feel personally in any way
endangered or affected, except that I didn't like the whole
thing. That's it, and of course the vociferous anti-Semitism
was part of it because I loved and respected my father. You
see, the so-called Nuremberg Laws that defined Jewish ancestry
by degrees, and made me a 50 percent non-Aryan, happened only
later. When I left that hadn't been out yet.
But in itself, the idea of Jewishness was not part of my
life. In addition to that, we lived in Saarbrucken which was
not a German city at that time anyway, so I had no practical
reason not to stay in Leipzig. Later on, Steiner-Prag was
dismissed, and that was already a beginning of the things as
they would then gradually go on.
A Chief Rabbi of Prague
Lederer: Incidentally, can I insert something here that belongs
actually in the beginning?
Nathan: Oh, yes.
16
Lederer: The Jewishness- -it was a very important tale in our youth that
one of our ancestors on my father's side had been a very
famous Chief Rabbi of Prague in the early nineteenth century.
There were stories that he came from Rumania and had to flee
his congregations there because he was too liberal ,
and that
they poisoned his wells, and other stories of that kind.
But the nicest story that we often heard, and it's quite
colorful, is that when he died, the Archbishop of Prague came
to the funeral in the golden caleche drawn by six white
horses. That's a wonderful story. As a matter of fact, I
later on even saw that golden caleche in action at a big
Catholic Eucharistic Congress in 1934 where the Archbishop of
Prague together with the Archbishop of Paris rode to the big
main city square where they held mass. Well, that's really an
aside, but I think the Rabbi Rapoport belongs in this story.
I will show you a picture of him later on.
Leaving Germany
Nathan: Good. What made you decide that you had had enough of school?
Lederer: I didn't have enough of the school. I had enough of the
prevailing atmosphere of Germany. I did not want to be where
these things went on, where students in the same school where
I went to had had the affront to go and break into the house
of a friend- -the whole thing. I went to a concert, to the
Gewandhaus ,
and I found the door was closed, and in front of
it stood the conductor Bruno Walter in conference with certain
people because they didn't let him go in and conduct his
concert any more. Things of that kind.
Hitler visited the city at one point, and to see and hear
these masses and masses of people Heiling and shouting and
venerating this person who was to me the epitome of the lowest
kind of a human being that one could imagine, and all the
others around him and these Storm Troopers. Everything that
they did and stood for and acted in was emotionally despicable
to me long before really awful things happened.
17
Painting in Paris
Lederer: I did not leave the school; I left Germany. When I went to
Saarbrucken, I went to a place that was not touched by this
thing yet, being the capital of a territory that had been set
apart, but I made my study area first in Paris because I was
through with a preparatory schedule of drawing at the Akademie
which was meant to be followed by one year of painting.
Paris, being close to Saarbrucken, seemed to be a good place
to study painting. So I went there and enrolled in a school,
the Academic Scandinave ,
where the painting teacher was a
great painter, Othon Friesz, one of the early members of the
Fauves, a very great painter, a great personality. The San
Francisco Museum of Art owns one of his paintings.
When I started painting there at that private school , you
attended a class, and you painted the whole week. On Friday
the great man made an appearance for an hour or two and went
from easel to easel and spread the gospel. When he came in
and looked at my things, I knew that what I was doing was far,
far below the level of a man of his ken. I was not a painter
in the true sense. So after a few such experiences, I quit.
The last session I had there was when I had painted, the whole
week, a large nude, and Mr. Friesz pointed to a little speck
on the side of a thigh and said, "C'est pas mal." That did
it. [laughter]
The Experience of Paris
Lederer: I saw the light, but it was wholesome because it finished this
whole area for me. I knew that I was not a painter, that I
had to direct myself towards other things in the arts. I used
the time in Paris to best advantage, by simply drawing in the
streets and in the parks. I spent an endless amount of time
in the Louvre studying paintings, making drawings from
paintings, and somehow used the whole wonderful experience of
Paris as a watershed to loosen up again, to forget about all
this academically built-up encroachment on my mind.
I think one cannot be a person with eyes without seeing
Paris as a tremendous experience. The light, the structure,
the rhythm of the city, the way things are placed in Paris
taught me that it sometimes does not matter whether a building
is good or not so good. I don't think the Paris Opera is a
Nathan:
Lederer:
18
very great piece of architecture, but the way it stands there
is magnificent, and that goes for everything in Paris.
I tried to think whether there were any special
exhibitions in Paris; I cannot recall a single one in
particular. The whole city of Paris was a great exhibition of
art for me.
So I think what must filter through to your mind by
simply walking those streets and imbuing yourself with the
rhythm and the proportions of all the buildings, is in itself
a tremendous education for any visually minded person, in
addition to experiencing what the light in Paris does in tying
colors together- -what color harmonies are doing. In Paris you
don't see anything that is jarring in spite of the greatest
amount of contrasts. So I was very, very enriched by this
experience, although I lived a very restricted life because it
was much more expensive there to live, and my father had to
support that.
So you were a poor young artist in Paris?
Well, I don't want to over-dramatize that, but I wasn't
affluent by any means. I certainly did not starve, although I
did not eat too well, either, [laughter]
Nathan: I see. Well, that was a good balance.
Nazis and Normalcy
Nathan: Were you aware of any political unease in Paris at the time?
Lederer: No, I was not aware of anything. I know that I was there at
the time of the Daladier uprisings, and there were shootings
on the Place de la Concorde. 1 found that very upsetting but
yet, it did not then affect me personally. Meanwhile, I read
about the crescendo of terrible things happening in Germany,
but I must always emphasize that all that still went under
some kind of umbrella of normalcy that made the full impact of
what was later to come- -I speak now about the Holocaust- -
really not evident.
Somehow there was in most people too much ingrained the
thought or the sense that the Germans are a civilized people:
19
that cannot happen there. In Leipzig there was a brother of
my mother's in whose house I visited. They were nice to me.
At one time there was a birthday party, and there was a
birthday cake, and on top of that was a Hitler figure like the
couple on a wedding cake.
Nathan: How bizarre.
Lederer: Things of that kind. These were, after all, my uncle and my
cousins. One cousin of mine, when I finally left, put his arm
around my shoulder and said, "I can understand so well how you
must feel with this being called Jewish now, and I know that I
wanted to enter the students' duelling fraternity (you know
these battling students in Germany), and I was rejected there.
I can, for that reason, fully understand how you feel about
that." Well, I could only tell him, "This is a little bit
different .
"
[ laughter 1
20
III HUGO STEINER-PRAG AND OFFICINA PRAGENSIS (1934-1936)
Nathan: You were in Paris from '33 to '34. Then you went to Prague?
Lederer: Then I went to Prague because in the meanwhile, Hugo Steiner-
Prag, who as a young man had added the German spelling of the
word "Prague" to his birth name of Hugo Steiner, had gone back
to that city to which he was as an artist very much beholden.
Images of the old Prague play a role in all his work and have
remained a background to all the illustrative work that he has
done. He was a highly erudite, skillful, imaginative
personality, and interestingly enough in two quite different
fields.
Steiner-Prag's Multiple Abilities
Lederer: In one way, he was an illustrator with a great deal of leaning
towards the fantastic, the in-between world of dreams and
mystery. When the Limited Editions Club of New York
commissioned him to select one work of Shakespeare for a
series of illustrations, each being done by a different world-
renowned illustrator, he selected Measure for Measure because
the setting there is Vienna. He simply changed that Vienna to
Prague, the opposite thing that happened in the Amadeus movie
where Prague was represented by Vienna.
At the same time, he was highly inventive and skillful in
controlled design. Very inventive decorative design was used
on book covers, book bindings, and title pages. His work
included, of course, also typography and lettering. With a
great sense for literature, and love for books, he became one
of the most prominent people in book design; he also did a
great deal of work as designer for the stage.
21
And lastly, being a man of a highly developed sense of
management, he arranged and organized international exhibits
of book arts, both in Leipzig and later on also in Prague.
They have become landmarks in the history of book design. So
I have to talk at some length about him. He is not as well
known in America now, because there are other names that have
come more into the foreground. On the other hand, he ended
his life in the United States. He has a permanent place at
the Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey that has a
Steiner-Prag room with a collection of his work and writings.
His work was shown, after his death in San Francisco, at
the deYoung Museum and the School of Fine Arts. At that time,
I gave talks about his work at the museum and at a number of
other places. But I am going a little ahead of myself there.
In any case, when he had to leave Germany, he managed to
create an organization of backers in Prague for a school to be
called Officina Pragensis, which was to be guided by
principles and directions very much like his classes at the
Akademie in Leipzig. It was natural for me to become his
student there. The city of Prague is a wonderful old town.
Below the Hradsin castle, which is located on a hill
overlooking the city, he installed his school in a seventeenth
century mansion. In addition to its location, the school
offered the stimulation of students from two contrasting
cultures living there side by side: the strong, vital, earthy
one of the Czechs and Slovaks, and that of the Czechoslovakian
Germans with their rich traditions of the old Austrian Empire.
As an organizational feat, this was unsurpassable, as he
had come without any money, had gotten the people to back his
plans, promising them a collection of lithographic prints, and
projecting that this venture would be of great interest for
the graphic arts in Czechoslovakia. Fortunately, he knew from
his youth some Czech language, sufficient for him to make his
points and to talk to the Czech people, and of course could
talk to the German population from the old Austrian Empire
there .
Graphic Arts in Czechoslovakia
Nathan: Had Czechoslovakia been a center for fine printing and book
publishing?
22
Lederer: Yes, Czechoslovakia had an excellent arts and crafts school
and has always had, as a matter of fact, a very forward-
looking kind of graphic design attitude which is very original
and very alive and unfettered by over-much emphasis on
tradition. The Czechs had a certain kind of freshness and
youthfulness in what they were doing, and some wonderful
illustrators like Cyril Bouda and Karel Svolinsky were active
there. I admired them very much. Only it was all of a
comparatively small scope. After all, Czechoslovakia was not
a huge nation, but the vitality of the Czechs as a people was
very impressive.
Prague , apart from being a beautiful city with a wealth
of mostly eighteenth century Baroque buildings, holds part of
the city that is kept in the old style . That alone is a
wonderful experience. What also added of course to the
vitality- -and that also appeared then later on in that school-
-was the confluence of cultures: this young Czech-Slovak
culture which under the Austrian Empire had been very much
under the thumb and that now came very much forward, and the
rich German tradition of the Austrian Empire that was still
alive there. The life together of people from such different
backgrounds of cultures made for an unusual mix of cultures in
that city.
It is one of the tragic ironies that the many German Jews
in Prague who were so totally and entirely beholden to the
German culture and maintained that German tradition against
the powerful youthfulness of the "now in the saddle" Czechs,
were later on driven out or annihilated by the Germans.
Well, I started at that school into which, of course,
Steiner-Prag put in considerably more time attending to his
classes than he did at the Akademie in Leipzig. I think even
there he visited his class every day when he was there, but
having so many other activities, he, of course, oftentimes was
not in town. That was not something that was in any
particular way regulated; it was entirely up to whoever was in
charge of those master classes in Leipzig how much time to
give to students. In Prague he fully devoted himself to this
very small group of students, among whom I had the flattering
role as being the best.
23
A Teacher's Insight
Lederer: I flourished under that, and what, of course, I also blossomed
under was this artist- teacher's insight in what was hidden in
a person. He had a sense for people that was uncanny, and
made it tremendously interesting in later years to also
discuss the students and their foibles, their ways and their
talents, and how he managed to distill from the bent of the
talents the area in which they could be most constructive for
themselves in whatever field they were.
He helped me considerably. I had come from Paris with
heaps of sketches, and he showed me how I could translate what
I had done into book jackets or wrapping paper, stationery
boxes, or whatever it might be. To me this was a wonderful
revelation. Suddenly I knew where to go, what to do, where I
belonged. That experience is what has shaped me. I have to
talk so much about the man because in the development of my
profession I modeled myself entirely after him. This is what
I wanted to do: this is what I wanted to be, whatever
differences in talent and temperament there were .
This made for me for a wonderful time, also being
surrounded by so many people, young or old, with whom I felt
entirely at ease. I flourished there; I loved the city. If
there is any place in Europe to which I feel I have a sense of
belonging, it's only Prague. However, when I visited there a
single time after the war, I found the city only a beautiful
shell; the appearance was unchanged but the spirit and the
people I had known there were gone.
Good Work and Decent Work
Lederer: So what can we talk more about the school? Well, everything
in the school was dedicated to doing good work. There also
enters something that may warrant expanding. To do good work
meant to a great extent also doing decent work. That means
work to which you bring everything that you can by way of what
you put in and nothing left to be handled, well, haphazardly.
In other words, to do shoddy lettering or not well-spaced
lettering, that really was looked upon as some sort of a moral
slight. You have let your craft down. Things of that kind
were not tolerated.
24
Now in Europe, a teacher in such an art school was blunt.
We were not coddled. We were not being told every second time
that we got together that we were really great geniuses, or
that we have something to offer that would set the world agog.
If occasionally the word, "it's good, it's well-done," would
fall, it was pretty nice. But if something was done casually,
not as good as you possibly could do it, you certainly got to
hear that. That is an approach that I could not use later in
my teaching in America. Students are simply not used to that
kind of attitude and are generally very much used to and in
need of support.
In a European school you simply had to have enough
confidence in yourself. Otherwise you could be very much
annihilated by what you were told at times. I know that I at
one time in Leipzig went to Steiner-Prag with my life
drawings. He looked at one and pointed to a knee, and said,
"That knee is inexcusably lazily drawn." That sure got me
down.
When he started that school, he did all the teaching, and
he had one young woman who assisted him, and that was it.
Assistant to Steiner-Prag
Lederer: In the second year when I was there, she wasn't there any
more, and so he appointed me to be his assistant, which meant
that I helped with the routine kind of teaching or supervising
or being available to answer basic questions. By that time,
after a year of intensive work with him, I really understood
the basic things pretty well. Having been so interested in
what he was doing in that respect, also observant, I had
picked up a good deal. In addition to that, he wanted to
offer drawing, too, and he gave that to me as something to
teach.
Nathan: Were there more students coming?
Lederer: Oh, yes, there were more students coming in, but still the
school could only be so large due to its physical limitations,
so that I think at one point, when it reached something like
thirty, it was really crowded. That happened later on. At
the beginning, he tried to keep it reasonably compact.
25
The Saar Vote and Family's Experience (1935)
Lederer: Now in January '35, the Saar district was given a chance to
vote and voted for Germany, which meant that my father, as a
Jew, lost his position. That indirectly meant for me that
there was no financial support coming any more, and so I moved
into the school which was not terribly "ritzy," as there was a
couch for me somewhere in the school that at night was
transformed into a bed. That was the place where I lived, but
I could stay with Steiner-Prag, who had a little menage with
his wife adjoining the school. I earned a little bit here and
there, but essentially it was very limited.
In order to tell the story of the Nazis, there is a very,
very odd situation to be told if you want this to be part of
this tale which is reflected in what happened to my father.
My father had been sent to the Saar district in order to, as
the newspapers called it all the time, help uphold the German
culture there. That he had done this very well had been
touted in the newspapers all over all the time. When Hitler
came to the Saar district, my father was retired. He was
retired according to the letter of the law. His pension was
paid to the last day of the Nazi Reich every month in Germany.
In other words, there is a story that totally contradicts
all the things that happened ordinarily, and it is these kinds
of absurdities, you might almost call them that, which saved
my father's life. He moved then, in order to be somewhere
where he would not be known, to Berlin with my mother and
younger brother and lived in a very unnoticed life. He was
known by only a few people and lived through this whole horrid
period where his friends, right and left, vanished- -where you
never knew whether that knock on the door would come in the
night. Later on came the knocks of the bombs. Through all
this, he survived.
At the very end in 1945, he was arrested and was taken
away for interrogation. At that moment, my mother used a
means that we knew about that was available: that was the
personality of the famous conductor Furtwangler who had been
his colleague in Mannheim, had remained on friendship terms
with him through the years, and had a highly influential
position in Germany. He had said at the beginning of the Nazi
period: "If anything happens, let me know." So my mother went
to him, and whatever he did, I do not know. But after a day
or two, my father was free.
26
So that ended that story. I should add to it that I saw
my father ten years later, and at that time he was close to
eighty. My mother had died a few years earlier. We did not
feel inclined to revive all these past events, so a lot of
details of how it actually all went, how my father's rescue
came about, I do not even know, and I never asked about it.
Thinking about these interviews, it occurred to me that it
would be interesting to know more details. There is also a
book in which some of these things are described. It's a book
about Furtwangler himself,
1
showing that he did certain things
to help Jewish people and used his authority to that avail.
Shortly after this event, the war ended. My father was made a
professor at the conservatory and had still ten good years of
being professor, conducting opera and concerts.
Nathan: I see. You suggested that you might want to say something
about your younger brother?
Lederer: My younger brother, Johannes, did not have a chance to go to
university because by the time he made his final exam at the
school, Hitler came. He stayed with my parents in Germany and
worked as a sales clerk, and after the war became an insurance
agent. He is a very talented photographer who in later years
had quite a bit of success as a photographer. He was not
persecuted during the Hitler years except for the end when he
was shipped to somewhere in Belgium for forced labor. He had
very unpleasant experiences there and even after the war, when
he was imprisoned by the Belgians as a German, as was my older
brother Felix in Italy, where he had survived the war years.
Details are not known to me, and, somehow, in the bliss of
seeing each other again after difficult years, they were not
being delved into. For that reason I cannot be more explicit
about them, but all these tales belong to what I can only call
absurdities and inconsistencies of the Nazi years and of the
war.
Daniel Gillis, Furtwangler and America (Woodhaven, New York: Manyland
Books, Inc., 1970), pp. 37-38, 117.
27
IV VIENNA, AND A PROFESSION
Lederer: After two years in Prague ('34-'35), I realized when I was
ready to really get going professionally, that with a quite
rudimentary knowledge of the Czech language and the narrowness
of the total field there anyway, my chances to make a real go
in Prague were very limited. I had picked up some work here
and there but still to make a living was another story, and
certainly to be assistant at the school could not support me.
So I ventured to Vienna, Austria.
Finding Book Publishers
Nathan:
Lederer:
Was this in 1935?
That was in 1936, and I found there a good number of
publishers who gave me work. Most of all, there were two
prominent German publishers who had emigrated and established
themselves with offices in Vienna with their authors as
background and with all their experiences. One was Fischer- -
the great publisher from Berlin of Thomas Mann as one of my
famous authors .
The other German publisher was Piper from Munich who had
not only published books but also the most beautiful art
reproductions made in Germany, which he could not continue in
Vienna, but he continued to publish books. He gave me
everything that he had, to do, so I had a really good field
for myself there working for these well-known publishers and
other established Austrian publishers. I was quite successful
and really doing the things that I wanted to do, which was
mostly work in connection with books.
Nathan: Did you have a studio of your own?
28
Lederer: Well, studio is a little bit too big a term for what I had. I
had a furnished room in which I lived and worked. The work in
Austria was paid very, very skimpily. The Austrian publishers
had very limited outlets and those from Germany, being
emigrants themselves, had hardly had time to establish
themselves and certainly could not work on a grand scale, so
the income level was very, very small and was only sufficient
to just sustain myself. But it was the kind of work I wanted
to do; it offered experience; it was a chance to do something
with what I had learned.
A One -Man Show
Lederer: It certainly was a time in which whatever talents I have, had
an outlet, and that in itself was certainly very, very good.
In addition to that, there was a very fine antiquarian
bookstore, Heck, on the famous Kartner Ring (the circle of
streets surrounding the inner city of Vienna- -former city
walls) that had also an art gallery. They gave me a one-man
show. I exhibited my watercolors and drawings of Prague, and
some of my illustrations.
In connection with thinking of these interviews, I pulled
out these reviews I got in the Vienna papers ,
and got quite
conceited about what they all wrote about my work at that
time, [laughter] Really it was amazing- -the repercussion that
I had at that time, which helped me very much because I had
already been spoiled a little bit, having been the prodigy
student at the school in Prague, when the school had its
exhibits, the papers also always mentioned my name in a very
special way. So all that was certainly very, very nice for
me.
A Meeting, and Hitler in Austria
Lederer: Another very important thing happened there: I met my future
wife, Hanni, there at a swimming party. We were not thinking
of marriage at that time, but certainly had a profound
interest in each other. We were together during whatever time
remained in Vienna for me, but the time was abruptly cut short
by Hitler's takeover of Austria. In March of this year (1988)
we "celebrated" the fiftieth anniversary of that event.
28a
Reviews translated by
Wolfgang Lederer
Exhibition Wolfgang Lederer, Vienna 1937
The 15th exhibition of the Cabinet of Graphic Art V.A.Heck is given to the
work of the painter and book artist Wolfgang Lederer, who, as a student of
Professor Hugo Steiner-Prag, first attended the Academy of Graphic Arts in
Leipzig and who followed his teacher to Prague, after studies with Othon
Friesz in Paris. The emphasis of the studies with Steiner-Prag, the complete
freedom in painterly handling, combined with high control in all matters of
book production, can be sensed also in the work of Lederer, who presents
his work here for the first time showing his numerous Viennese watercolors,
brush and pen-and-ink drawings, illustrations and book jackets. His fine
sensitivity allows him to find the right tone for very differing themes
in the work of Dickens, Flaubert and Brentano. His scenes of the life
in the streets of Paris are so keenly observed and well rendered that we
understand why numerous Viennese publishers (Tal, Bastei) have commissioned
work from the young artist. As charming designs of Christinas papers indicate,
he is Ksil able to work equally well also in other areas of applied arts.
In any case, this successful introduction forbodes well for Lederer's
future activities in Vienna.
Signed: Dr. il.A.-K. v.'iener Tageblatt.
Wolfgang Lederer, wv-o since one year lives in Vienna is only 25 vars
old; however, he is already well known abroad and introduces himself
here? with an exhibition of watorcolors, drawings and hook art: at the neck
Gallery. The former student at tho Academy of Graphic Arts in Leipzig, with
)thon Friesz in Paris, and with iiMftO Stoiner-Fra^ in Prague, where he
later taught at the Cfficina Pra.'-.ensis, is more than successful in this
endeavor. One ^ets to know him i ;i
1-
is coloristically strong watercolors
-2-
28b
of landscapes and flowers, his quickly but assuredly drawn sketches
of life in Parisian streets and theatres, in studies of all kinds in applied
graphic, as well as in his sensitive illustrations for Dickens and Flaubert,
as well as in bookjackets that meet all high demands as art while serving as
an eye catch. What one senses strongly in Lederer's work and what one enjoys
is a real talent for graphics happily combined with a taste that can never
be acquired, only cultivated.
Volkszeitung, Nov. 15/37
One-man show Wolfgang Lederer, Cabinet of Graphic Art, V.A. Heck
Wolfgang Lederer has been working for a year in Vienna, lie has created for
many publishers in Vienna very charming book covers and jackets, lie has a
solid background in drawing combined with a fine musicality of lines and colors
a cultured taste and the imagination of the born illustrator, who tells his
stories ^effortless grace and achieves always suggestive resultss - be they
spooky or cheerful. The onlooker can enjoy beautiful flower-pieces, vatercolors
such as dance rehearsal or street scenes of Paris and Prague. He is at his
best in illustrations for jjavid Copperf ield and Madame Bovary, calling for
big comissions as incentive for greatest development.
Occasionally a sense fcr elegance and beauty is evident - not often found
among talents now-a-days. On his watercolors of flowers, painterly
delicate and loosely handled, his art betrays a fine understanding of outlines
and overlaps. The promising start of an artist's career!
Neue Freic Fresse, Vienna
29
On that day, I had packed my suitcase at night, having
decided to leave Austria quickly and go back to Prague where I
knew at least there was the couch in that school where I could
put myself down on. Again, like before in Germany, it was
only a very strong instinct that compelled me not to wait any
longer. As a matter of fact, I left by streetcar, which is
almost a joke, because nobody else thought of it: I knew of a
car line that went to the border and just across the border to
Czechoslovakia. That made for the fact that when I got there
I could tell the Nazi guards at the border that I wanted to
meet an old study friend from Prague, and that we wanted to
paint here. That was it, and let me get out there. If I had
gone by train, I might have had considerably more difficulty
with experienced border guards.
To Prague, and an Affidavit for America
Nathan: You had just one suitcase?
Lederer: I had just my suitcase with a few belongings there. What
books or other things I owned, I left behind. So I was back
in Prague and back at the school ,
and I had to see what to do
next. What next in my mind was America. I had heard about
America being a wonderful place from a woman who had a fine
school in Vienna in the great tradition of the Viennese school
of design. Her name was Emmy Zweybrxick.
Working for the American Crayon Company, she spent every
several months of the year in the United States, promoting the
products of the American Crayon Company by giving
demonstrations and courses in schools all over the United
States. She had described America to me as a place where
things move on and are not so encumbered and difficult as in
Europe. That was the first inkling I had that America could
offer opportunities to me.
I wrote letters asking for help to my relatives- -they
lived by that time in New Yorkand I got a "nay," nothing
doing. I wrote to others, and I don't want to mention names
now, two close friends of the family, and I each time got a
"no .
"
Nathan: What were you asking of them?
Lederer: An affidavit. What people do not understand- -they wonder why
Jews stayed in Germany or Austria. It was because nowhere did
30
you get a permit to work. All these years when I was in
Paris ,
when I was in Prague ,
when I was in Vienna , I was
always registered as a student. I never worked in the open.
You asked whether I had a studio in Vienna; I was very careful
not to hang out my shingle. That was part of the whole story.
As a "student" I could live there; but as a foreigner, you
were not permitted to make your living there.
Nathan: An affidavit would have said--
Lederer: An affidavit would say that the person giving it warrants that
I will not become a burden to the United States, and it meant
some kind of financial obligation because we were not
permitted to take money out of Europe. So some financial help
had to be given. Even if I would take immediately a job as
dishwasher, I still would have to spend a few days living
there without income. It's an obligation. The people I wrote
to didn't want me to live there as a dishwasher and have the
feeling that they are heels because they let me do that. They
rather said the safe thing: "No."
It's also an indication- -because these families were
Jews --that they really did not see the extent of the real
danger, and in the meanwhile the impossibility for me to do my
work in Germany. If I had not gotten out, I could have worked
there in some kind of a lowly position just like my younger
brother who stayed there and worked in a shop as file clerk.
But I certainly could never have worked in my field. So I got
these three "nos."
In the meanwhile, Steiner-Prag had been invited by a
group of Swedes, who had staged an exhibit of Swedish book art
in Prague just around that time, to come to Sweden, to
Stockholm, to start a school similar to the Officina Pragensis
in Stockholm. So during that time when I was back in Prague,
Hugo Steiner-Prag went to Stockholm in order to arrange things
there --to talk to these people, to organize things, to get
that thing going there. I was in charge of the Officina
Pragensis.
So, for once, I was really "the school." I admitted the
students and did all the teaching, and at that time they
flocked in because there were people who realized that this
Nazi thing was approaching Czechoslovakia more and more- -like,
for example, a Jewish architect who wanted to learn something
about graphic design because he thought of emigration to
America. So the school was very, very full, and I was earning
quite well because I even took over some of the commissions
31
that Steiner-Prag could not take on himself while he was in
Sweden.
I must say- -and again, it's contradictory to what was
happening in the world and what was happening to many of my
friends left back in Vienna--! had a good time because it was
a very active time for me. I also assiduously kept away from
occupying myself continuously with the dangerous aspects and
with these terrible stories that were floating around out of
Austria and Germany. I tried to shy away from them because I
knew I had to keep my sanity.
Hitler in Prague, and Time to Leave
Lederer: I needed all my sanity because by the time Hugo Steiner-Prag
had established himself then in Stockholm, Hitler came to
Prague. So after Germany and Austria this was the third time
that I was confronted with him and saw him there. As a matter
of fact, it was a rather spooky sort of scene. Hitler, whom I
had seen in Leipzig before, even at very close range as the
subject of wild adulation by masses of people--! saw now from
the window in the school riding in an open car. Before his
coming the loudspeakers in cars with Nazis in them had
broadcast, "Make the streets free, the Fuehrer is coming."
Well, the Czechs took that very literally. There was not a
person in the streets. There was a big city square in front
of the school, where I can still see that car with Hitler in
it driving over that square with one lonely Nazi standing
there, saluting him and being saluted back by Hitler. No
masses of raised arms- -nothing of that kind.
Choosing America
Lederer: In any case, I was caught inside a territory annexed by the
Nazis. But there came an invitation from Steiner-Prag to go
to Stockholm to work with him there and help him in the
school --very inviting, familiar ground. But almost at the
same time, a relative of my mother' s- -that means, of course, a
non- Jewish relative --a person whom she had never before been
in touch with, responded with, "yes": he would give me the
affidavit.
Nathan: Oh, what a choice.
32
Lederer: Yes, it was a horrible choice to make. I made the right one,
thank God. I decided I had had it with Europe, and I would
take the chance. I mean: I know nothing about America, but I
take my chance. That's the risk I take. So after many, many
sleepless nights, this is the decision that I made, and
fortunately it worked out.
So I packed my things, but now came another difficulty,
and the difficulty was that I had to leave Czechoslovakia via
Germany because that was the only way I could get out. I
couldn't go via Russia; that was closed. Somewhere I had to
get out, and I decided I would leave from Italy by an Italian
boat. There were no airplanes to America at that time, of
course .
So I had to go to the by now German authorities in Prague
to say that I want to leave Czechoslovakia. That meant- -now
comes the greatest irony- -that I had to break myself out of
the obligation to serve in the German army. So I went to the
German Nazi Commander's office, where I found a crowd of
people there asking for the same thing. A loudspeaker was
announcing that anybody who was non- Aryan should simply go
away; no point to apply. I disregarded that. I went in with
my passport which I had prepared the night before, all night
long, transforming it into an old battered passport. I had
glued together the two pages which had the visa from the
American consulate for immigration, so that I could simply
say, "I'm leaving Czechoslovakia because I'm through with my
studies there. I'm going back to Germany."
That ruse worked, but it's a story that even today is
still difficult for me to tell because, I mean, he flipped
page by page --and the two critical pages stuck. So that part
worked, but there were more difficulties still to come.
Nathan: Did you need a visa for the United States?
Lederer: Of course. And the American consul was not a helpful person.
He made it incredibly difficult for the people who were
applying for visas there. Among other things, he required it
to be paid in American dollars, which were not for anything to
be had in Prague at that time . I happened to have saved them
from sales that Emmy Zweybriick had made for me in America of a
design for Christmas cards. For some quirk of a reason I had
kept some dollars, and so I could pay for my visa.
33
The van Loon Letter
Lederer: But the other thing was that the relative who had given me the
affidavit, who was a Wall Street millionaire, staunchly
refused to divulge his tax statements which were needed for a
legitimate visa. At that moment, I was fortunate that Hendrik
van Loon, who was a very well-known American writer, had seen
in London my illustrations for a book that an emigrated Vienna
publisher had wanted to bring out. Songs We Sing in Vienna
was meant to be something with German and English text that
would allow the travelers from abroad to follow these songs
that were sung in the famous wine taverns in Vienna.
Well, Hendrik van Loon liked these illustrations so much
that he thought, "I want to do something for that man," and
wrote spontaneously, unasked for, a letter to the consul,
telling him what a great asset I would be for America. The
publisher had written to me that the letter is at the
consul's. So I sent a note to the consul, saying, you have
that letter from Hendrik van Loon and so on. It did the
trick. I got the visa.
Nathan: Do you have any notion of why the consul was so unhelpful?
Lederer: People said he was just nasty. I have heard similar stories
again just recently in another connection where a consul was
so terribly uncooperative. It was very, very unpleasant. But
you know in this situation, you become terribly selfish. I
did not pay attention to what was going on around me. It was
only just that: I have to get out. Anything that helps me get
out- -I cannot pay attention to the tragedies around me. It's
very selfish. I am amazed about it in rethinking or reliving
it to what extent that was the case.
Well, the story is not entirely ended. I did not know
whether I really would get out because I had had
unpleasantness at the border between Czechoslovakia and
Germany, where they examined my passport. When we came to the
border between Austria and Italy- -beautiful in the mountains,
I have been there twice since traveling--! was taken out of
the train by two police officers and was interrogated for two
hours. I answered all questions- -that was early in the
morning at 4 o'clock- -and in the end the men asked me, "But
you don't have the military permission," which, of course, I
didn't have. For some quirky reason, I had kept in my pocket
the permission to leave Czechoslovakia which had the German
military stamp on it. It had nothing to do with getting free
from military service, but it had a military stamp on it. He
34
looked at it and took it for the permit he had asked for. So
it was a narrow escape. And that's how I got to the United
States- -almost.
When I came to the ship in Genoa, the officer said, "But
you don't have the permit to enter Italy." [laughter] Because
in my glee to be rid of that interrogation, at the border, I
simply had run across the railroad tracks. There was a little
choo-choo train that was just leaving to go across the border.
I didn't want to wait for anything else. I jumped in there,
but there was no passport examination anymore. So I never had
gotten the permit stamp to enter Italy.
Well, the officer on the boat was a nice Italian. I
threw myself on his mercy, and he let me go. I was on the
boat, and so I sailed with The Rex in eleven days and arrived
somewhat seasick but otherwise well enough for wear and tear
with $8 in New York. Ten dollars were all I was permitted to
take out, and $2 I had given to the steward. I had seen the
towers of Manhattan appear in the morning mist and was met at
the dock by my friendly savior- relative. That was in May of
1939.
35
V GETTING STARTED IN AMERICA (1939)
[Interview 2: May 23, 1988]
Lederer: I think last time we ended just when I arrived in America and
Manhattan and was received there by my sponsor, who was
fortunately a very wealthy man, and for that reason put me up
in a pleasant place and handed me some money. His help was
something I simply had to accept. I cannot say that I liked
that very much, and I tried certainly to get out of the
situation as fast as I possibly could, but it took about seven
to eight weeks before I could tell him that I had found enough
work to be on my own.
His help enabled me from the beginning to devote myself
to looking for work in my line, in which however I was
considerably handicapped by my very rudimentary English. I
had tried in the last weeks in Prague to study English, and I
could read it, but could speak it only a little. It certainly
was not enough to make a convincing presentation of myself,
most of all, not convincing to anybody who would want me to
handle a manuscript as a basis for a book or jacket design.
Looking for Work
Lederer: So I had to be patient, and I simply walked the streets from
one publisher to another, after I had first gone to a
bookstore and looked up names of publishers, in addition to
the few I knew. I simply went to everybody and showed them my
work in a portfolio.
These interviews were invariably pleasant. It was one of
my great early experiences in America that people were so
incredibly nice. Obviously they realized that the situation
in which I was, was not exactly easy, and they certainly
36
helped me overcome any awkwardness of the situation by their
pleasant attitude. It didn't mean that they gave me work, but
their attitude carried with it a good spirit that took away
any sense of being discouraged. I have remained appreciative
of that, and aware of it to this day. After each visit I left
with a long list of names that I had been given of people whom
I should look up, which I did. Sometimes in glancing down
from a window in the skyscrapers of Manhattan, I saw all those
masses of people on the street, and ever so often among them
someone with that typical black square designer's portfolio:
another person looking for my kind of work. By the way, I
decided then to break that portfolio monotony and made for
myself a small handy one with a bright red cover. Its
appearance was greeted by many of the people I called on with:
"Oh, that looks nice already" --a good start for a review of my
work.
The reaction to my work was always pleasantly positive,
but in some way hesitant. Many of the people came back to me
with the reaction, looking at my European work, saying, "Well,
that's of course what I would love to do, but we cannot do
that here." That kind of attitude was somewhat difficult for
me to take. If they said, "That's what I would love to do," I
wanted to say, "Well, here I am; why don't you do it?" But
that was not the next thing that they would say. The next
thing was, "But we cannot do it here." Maybe my work appeared
to be too subtle.
One thing that I found out in my contact with publishers
was an amazing and, to my way of thinking, totally
unwarranted, exaggerated respect for everything European.
This is something that World War II changed radically. The
whole attitude in America towards Europe in my observation has
changed considerably, and this feeling that we are here
playing maybe second fiddle to Europe has vanished.
Dale Carnegie's Advice
Lederer: I was also maybe helped in this job -seeking situation by
understanding their dilemma, which was that they liked my work
but did not know whether working with someone who had only
European experience and insufficient knowledge of English,
would not turn out to be troublesome. It may have been
helpful for me that by chance the last book that I had
designed in Europe, in Prague for a Swiss publisher, was a
German language translation of Dale Carnegie's How to Win
37
Nathan:
Lederer :
Friends and Influence People. It was offered there with a
slightly tongue-in-cheek attitude as a somewhat amusing text.
But I read it, and found in it a basic good wisdom: the wisdom
of approaching people not by trying to impose oneself with
one's problems on them, but to understand that they too have
problems .
Maybe realizing that the people on whom I called were
also in a fix created a certain rapport. It helped, of
course, that I did not have that sense of desperation that
other less fortunate people had, who, unless they got a job,
would be sitting on the street and starving. So I can only
describe this experience as interesting because I met all
kinds of people, and also a positive one, and very much a
learning experience. I will never forget that I arrived on a
Saturday afternoon. And on Monday I made my first visit, by
coincidence, to a newspaper man indirectly connected with book
publishing. I came to that office, and the man put his feet
on the desk and kept his hat on. So I knew that I was in
America because that's the way I had seen it in the movies,
[laughter]
But you did not put your feet on the desk?
I did not. No.
The work I got at early stages was of all kinds, but I
remember only one that really had nothing to do with what my
profession is. It was simply that I was recommended as
somebody who can read German and somehow get it over into
English, and I was asked to do, from some German special
journals, translations for a research project on the sex life
of fish.
So I went to the Museum of Natural History and waded
through German journals on fish life, and whenever there was
anything about their particular sex life, I took that and
translated it. But apart from that, everything that I did was
connected with my abilities or skills in doing art work of
some kind, which also included a stint of doing retouch on
photographs .
Independence
Lederer: In any case, all this led to being able after eight weeks to
tell my sponsor, "I don't need any further support." I moved
38
out of the place where he had put me up, which was some kind
of a young people's home where I could have contact with other
young people. As a matter of fact, they put up a little
exhibit there of my watercolors ,
and when I found that two of
them had been stolen, in my very optimistic frame of mind, I
took that as a very good sign: people in America are really
interested in what I am doing, [laughter]
I think I can hardly convey this unbelievable sense of
elation, of positiveness, of simply being here- -to have made
it. With that even all kinds of shortcomings really did not
play a great role.
A Room Near the Elevated
Lederer: I moved then into a typical narrow brownstone house on the
west side of New York, on 94th Avenue, close to Broadway, and
near the Elevated. I had a tiny room that looked into the
backyards, on the third floor, not realizing when I took it
that under the roofs of New York, this was a hothouse in the
summer- -broiling. I shared that floor on which I was with two
other people- -one an old, somewhat deranged lady and the other
one a young lady that somebody had put there to entertain
himself with. And for us three there was a little bathroom
with a trickle of a shower, and that was it --and lots of
cockroaches .
So it was not terribly elegant, but it was adequate, and
it was private. Nobody bothered what I was doing there, and
that was in itself much already, much better than the
situation, for instance, in Vienna, where I had rented a room
inside of an apartment of people who snooped into my private
life. I thought this privacy was absolutely wonderful.
Luckily, since the telephone was on the ground floor, the
landlady was a very intelligent person, and the messages I got
from some of my professional contacts were handled extremely
well by her. I always thought that people who called must
think I have a fabulous office with a topnotch secretary. It
sure was very far from that .
Nathan: Would you care to say the name of your sponsor?
Lederer: Yes. His name was Thomas Smith. He was very good and
generous to me, but he never invited me to his house. A few
times he took me out for lunch, which meant a more substantial
repast than my 25-cent cafeteria fare. It also meant that he
39
Nathan:
Lederer:
had me precede lunch with one or two Manhattans, which, on an
empty stomach, provided another extraordinary New World
experience for me. Mr. Smith died within the first year after
my arrival in New York. I don't even want to think of what
would have been my fate had he died a year earlier.
Yes. You are now in your little room,
you have a table?
Could you work? Did
Yes. I had a table which was somewhat rickety, but it was all
right, and my kind of work does not require very much space. I
had to organize it well and somehow manage it, but it was all
right. The one window of this little narrow room gave me
enough light, I could do my work, and it was quiet. It's all
I needed for my satisfaction.
First Job: Package Design
Lederer: The first job that I landed was with a French printing firm,
Makowski ,
that did exquisite specialized kinds of printing.
It was particularly geared to either the deep-embossed or
debossed kind of treatment of paper in printing- -very much
suited for very elegant work. This French printing firm
established an office and studio in Manhattan with the idea in
mind to use that studio as a come-on for the big cosmetic
firms: Elizabeth Arden, Charles of the Ritz, and others to
have special package designs created. Accepted designs were
sent over to France for printing and production.
There was a chief designer who was a Frenchman, and two
other designers- -one of them myself. This studio was an
oddity. It was located in a mansion on the upper East Side of
Fifth Avenue. We sat there in sort of a rococo salon, very
elegant. We had drawing desks, airbrush tank, and other
studio equipment in that salon. It was odd enough and
obviously colorful enough a setting that Life Magazine sent a
photographer over. The idea was that this might make a story,
but it never appeared.
So the photographer came in, and what amused me at that
time was that he made the room really interesting by creating
an unbelievable mess around our desks. Part of the mess were
some bottles of booze, [laughter] This was something we did
not indulge in, in actual fact, but it was meant to add flavor
to the story. As an aside, I must say that at that time
somebody gave me stacks of old Life Magazines, which I read
40
and studied from cover to cover. They were a fantastic
introduction to America for me. I learned not only language
from them, but also attitudes in America that they reflected.
I cherished that magazine also for its unbelievable
photography; no comparable picture magazine was known at that
time in Europe.
Nathan: Did you have letters of introduction?
Lederer: Yes, I got some letters of introduction from Steiner-Prag, who
had contacts with a number of American publishers from the
time when he had arranged international exhibits of book
design and had organized a collection of international book
design for the crafts museum in Prague.
On the other hand, I found out that I had already seen
most of the people by the time I got his list.
Recommendations ,
which play a very important role in Europe
were not really necessary here . I found out what days art
directors saw artists, and simply went there. Sometimes that
was somewhat disheartening because the information was ,
"We
see artists on Thursdays between 10 and 12," and when you came
there at 10 o'clock and were shown into a room, you found
yourself faced with some twenty other people with similar
portfolios and every eight or ten minutes the next person was
called in.
So it gave me the idea I wasn't the only person that was
seen, and the automatic response that they would keep you in
mind had to be understood as well meant, but not necessarily
to be taken literally. If somebody was really very much
interested, they had a good way of trying to hold on to some
kind of recollection by asking you to leave one piece of black
and white art with them. They would make a small photocopy
and attach it to a file card so that when they went to the
file catalog, anything pictorial would then serve as a
reminder of the person and of course also, in particular, of
the kind of work that this person would be doing.
When I was at my first job, I did mostly package designs.
They had to be worked out very carefully and detailed very
painstakingly, because we had to produce sketches that
imitated engraving into foil paper to show how it would look
printed. We did reliefs by building up with layers of China
white that subsequently we colored. I did one design that a
sales person brought in as a possibility for an elegant dog
kennel. That wrapping paper--! don't know what would be
wrapped in a paper from a dog kennel --had all kinds of dogs on
it, and each one was a bas relief.
41
We also designed some wine labels. In particular, we did
all kinds of designs for Christmas promotions. That was in
the sweltering New York summer, and there we were sitting with
our shirts drenched and with sweat running down- -we didn't
have air-conditioning at that time yet- -and did Christmas
trees and snow scenes .
Nathan: Did you have any occasion to use originality?
Lederer: To a limited extent, within the scope of those tasks. Most of
it was lettering, but it had to be well designed. I adjusted
myself to the needs of the particular job and of that
particular printing technique, giving the printing method a
chance to show off at its best. That was a challenge, and the
particular interest in creating these designs.
This job was fairly well paid, particularly according to
my needs, which I kept simply on the same modest level on
which I had started in the U.S. I had no inclination to
expand just because I earned more money. I think it was
simply a reaction to the uncertainty about how long anything
would last, which was somewhat built in in all work situations
as I had so far experienced them. It was also true in this
case because this job ended when the war broke out, the whole
thing, the studio and all that ended anyway.
First Book Jacket
Nathan: So you then--?
Lederer: So I started going back on my publishers' route, and I do not
know how long it took before I broke down the first publisher
to give me a book jacket to do. That was Macmillan. It was
partly a success of persistency; I simply latched myself on to
one person and kept calling that person every few days until
he finally said he had some work for me . I can say that from
that moment on the ice was broken, and I have always been
active as designer and illustrator. That was the nice thing.
There certainly have been lulls and stretches of time when I
did not do any particular design work, which I could always
use to do some other kind of art work, like drawing, painting,
illustrating, partly also with the aim to have new work to
show with which to approach publishers.
The very first job made obviously all the difference in
the world. Whether that is psychology or merely the fact that
42
I could tell other publishers that somebody else has taken the
chance and it worked out, that I do not know. Incidentally,
when I went to publishers, I very often found them in quarters
that looked from what I compared to my European experiences,
very humble. The top people who were in charge of design
sometimes sat in crowded offices together with many other
people, something that I had not known when I visited
publishers in Europe, where they were more personal. Many
publishing offices that I had visited there were actually in
homes so that there was more of a sense of comfort and
privacy.
Technical Requirements
Nathan: What was your judgment of the technical quality of the
reproduction of your designs?
Lederer: The reproductions were very good. What was baffling was the
working requirements that designers were often asked to
observe. On the very first job when the man gave me the OK on
the accepted sketch, he said, "Finish this as a key-line
drawing." I had never heard that word, and I certainly
refrained from asking him what is a key- line drawing in order
not to show that I'm not versed. I went to the public library
and got a big volume on printing.
At that time, these highly specialized technical
guidebooks that are now proliferating and are crowding the
shelves of all art stores did not exist. This whole
profession of the graphic designer as a specialist had not
come into its own. Key- line drawing meant a rather tricky way
of handling an artwork so that the artwork for two colors in
which the job was meant to be reproduced was all done on one
basic drawing with certain guidelines and instructions for the
platemaker as to what goes into one color and what goes into
the other color. All that was quite mystifying for me, but I
struggled with it and I did it and it turned out right. The
reproduction looked perfectly good, but there were working
methods that were unknown to me from my European experience.
As far as the quality of the books themselves- -if that is
also implied in your questions- -is concerned: most of them or
a good number of them seemed rather indifferently done
typographically, uninteresting, and without any particular
kind of care or finesse. The exception, of course, was a
genius publisher like Knopf, who not only knew how to find the
43
best American designers to help him but also was so conscious
of the quality and the meaning of a typeface that he always
had a special colophon in the back of his books describing
what the typeface was and certainly also giving the name of
the designer.
Salter. and the American Book Jacket
Lederer: Knopf, at that time, had engaged for very many of his book
jackets, the help of George Salter, a designer of renown in
Germany who had come to the states as a refugee from Hitler.
Salter had a tremendous influence on shaping the appearance of
the American book jackets; so that when I came, indirectly, I
benefited from the spade work that Salter, in connection with
Knopf and a few other publishers, had done there.
The distinguishing feature was that contrary to the
frequent idea of putting a picture on the jacket and then
adding somewhere, possibly done by somebody else, some sort of
loud lettering or type , George Salter created an integrated
design and an individual concept for each and every book for
which he did a jacket design. He also realized that good
books address an educated audience whom you do not have to hit
over the head by garishness. That is in no way contrary to
the concept that a jacket should be a selling device, but the
selling device for a mature book- reading audience can use a
different approach from the selling device that holds its own
in the visual onslaught of a supermarket.
Simon and Schuster's Pocket Books
Lederer: One of the publishers from whom I got work was Simon and
Schuster. Simon and Schuster were two very enterprising young
men who had started a publishing house. A Viennese publisher
had taken the book of Viennese songs that I had illustrated to
them and they wanted to publish it. Unfortunately, the
outbreak of World War II terminated that project, which could
have given my fortunes a great boost. But in any case, that
was a good contact for me. Simon and Schuster had just
started what became a true revolution in American publishing:
the 25 -cent pocket books.
44
By the time I came to them, they were maybe at, I do not
know, number thirty or something like that. They gave me one
cover after another to design, which was a lot of fun and a
lot of interest, because I could really do full illustrations,
painted and in full color. It was enjoyable to do. It always
amused me that after their first inquiry (which was some kind
of daring that I don't know how I had then) I backed out
because they offered me a cover for a mystery story. I said,
"I have no relation to mysteries." I don't know how I had the
effrontery to do this. I had turned them down, and they,
fortunately, were not turned off, and so they gave me others
to do.
The first book was The Light that Failed by Kipling.
That was in keeping with my style and background. Then they
gave me Dorothy Parker's stories; Little Men; Our Town by
Thornton Wilder- -really books that are very American in
subject matter and feel. But obviously they felt I could do
them, and I did.
Columbia University Press
Lederer: Another publisher that responded particularly well to my work
was Columbia University Press, where obviously a certain kind
of restraint that is natural to my way of designing came in as
a more acceptable thing than in many other publishing houses
where I realized that what they wanted was not for me.
Jackets. Jackets. Jackets
Nathan: When you worked for Columbia University Press, were you
designing the whole volume?
Lederer: No. As a matter of fact, that is something that I got Into
only much, much later. I had done that in Europe, but I did
not do it at first in America. In America I did exclusively
jackets, jackets, jackets. That was a time when few
publishers actually had the desire, or saw the need, for a
highly individual book design. Most of it was handled very
much by routine. With my general bent towards wanting to do
illustration and visual things, it actually suited me fine. I
liked to do book jackets as an outlet for creating images with
illustration, type, and lettering.
45
Fortunately, publishers did not ask me what my charge
would be ,
because trying to figure that out from what I had
gotten in Europe, I would have asked far too little. What
they offered me by way of an automatic contract they gave to
every designer was double or more of what I had gotten in
Europe. This made it very nice for me because it meant,
actually, I could live on two or three jackets per month.
Nathan: How long does it take to do a jacket?
Lederer: It takes me an awfully long time because I'm very slow. There
are other people who would work the same thing considerably
faster. It is part of my way of working that I need time. I
have later learned--! will talk about that lateralso to do
things fast, but if I want to do what I consider quality work,
I always need time.
Work Processes
Lederer: I took my time in order to do it as well as I possibly could
do it, not only by preparing many different sketches but also
by working them out well and trying to do the finished art
very carefully. In addition to that, I did an awful lot of
lettering for all kinds of jobs that I would now often handle
simply as typographical jobs. I didn't mind the time spent on
it, and in some way, it also added a certain feel of a
personal touch by having done lettering by hand.
Preparing quite finished sketches to show and then doing
the "mechanical," the finished artwork that goes to the
printer, can take from five to ten days. Some designers show
a number of "roughs," quite unfinished sketches, often in
small size, to convey different basic concepts. I prepare
quite detailed mock-ups, which I need to evaluate my own
design. The question is often, how many different sketches
should one show? I have gradually arrived at the idea that,
unless I have two or more ideas that truly differ from each
other, I simply make a choice of the one that I consider best.
That choice is not easy. In former years, I used students
occasionally as a test group. Now I ask mostly Hanni or my
sons. If you show several ideas, there is always the chance
that you confuse the clients, or get conflicting reactions if
more than one person is involved; these can be the publisher,
the author, the editor, the art director.
46
I cannot recall many instances of a design proposal being
turned down, but if that occurs, I have never attempted to
contradict a spontaneous reaction, but rather listen to find a
direction for a different approach. I have found that, while
"the client is always right" does not make sense, it is not my
experience that the client is always wrong. Occasionally, a
client wants a different background color, a wish that usually
can easily be accommodated without any loss. Working in the
book publishing field, my experiences may have been fortunate
because the reactions to my work as a rule come from highly
educated people whose responsiveness to literature and writing
has also generally given them an appreciation and sensitivity
for creative work in other fields.
What I said about the remuneration- -what was important
there was that at that time I still vacillated between my
desire to simply draw and paint, and the applied work, the
paid work as a background only to make it possible for me to
do this. So when there were lulls like, for instance, summer
months, and very little or nothing went on in publishing
preparation as far as my work was concerned, it didn't bother
me. I simply walked around in all parts of New York, made
sketches, and translated what I drew into paintings or more
elaborate drawings, of course, always with the idea that some
day I would want to show that in an exhibit and possibly also
sell.
I cannot describe all this as being very clearly reasoned
or thought out. A great deal of all this just happened. I
simply had enough of a backlog of money that I didn't have to
desperately look for paid work, and I filled that time with
drawing and painting, which I liked to do, and so things
somehow fell into place.
Oddities in America
Nathan: Had you met people socially?
Lederer: Well, I had very close friends from Prague who had come to
America, and we got together again. I had distant relatives
here. There was the conductor, Arthur Bodanzky, and his
family, known to me from his years in Mannheim. He died in
December of the year I arrived, but I had visited with him and
his wife in Vermont, where they had rented a very nice place
for the summer.
47
Maybe I should digress on that visit by two things that
struck me as rather unexpected in America: his place was
located in Vermont in an area that was "restricted" --no Jews
admitted. To hear about that was a rather startling thing for
me , coming from Europe and the experiences there ,
made even
more startling by the fact that I was there as a guest of a
man who was himself a Jew. What he explained to me (and I
would not say that this is terribly nice, but it was part of
what I heard early in this strange land, America), was that
this restriction referred only to certain types of Jews that
were socially undesirable and that obviously he didn't
consider very desirable, either.
Now, in retrospect, this gives me a bit of the horrors,
the same way as at that time there was this man, Kuhn, who was
such a rabid Nazi. Do you remember that?
Na than :
Vague ly .
Lederer: In any case, he extolled the Nazis.
I had some other young friends, Americans. One was the
son of a friend from my mother's youth. I said, "How is that
possible? That man publishes these rabble-rousing things? He
should be imprisoned." My friend said, "Oh, no. That's not
the way we do things in America; you cannot put a man in
prison because he says what he thinks . We find out that he
has done some sort of a tax evasion, and then he will be
imprisoned," and that's exactly how it happened, [laughter]
Nathan: Oh, you were learning the ropes.
Lederer: I was learning the ropes, right. But the other thing that
struck me in this lovely, beautiful Vermont landscape in which
I was driven around in the very, very ritzy Rolls Royce of Mr.
Bodanzky, I wanted to enter the beautiful woods and walk. I
was told, "One cannot go into these woods; there is no way;
there are no roads; there is no access." To be close to a
mountain with woods and not go on lovely paths, hiking,
exploring nature --that to me was an incredible oddity.
People so oftentimes ask what was the first thing that
struck you in America when you arrived- -these are a few of
these things. In fact, the very first thing visually that
struck me, the very day that I arrived, is that New York is
not white and gray as I had anticipated, but brown. That was
totally unexpected to me --the pervasive appearance of brown on
these dark brick houses, brownstone houses, and so many
buildings that were ochre.
48
But if it comes to the real difference --what really
struck me as fundamentally different- -although it took a while
before I would recognize so that it became clear to me, is
disorderliness here as compared to orderliness there.
In Europe, things are controlled and orderly. In
America, to the extent that one can generalize such things, I
found that appearances tend to be disorderly. A city is a
Jumble. I came from some of the city jewels of the world--
Vienna, Prague, Paris --but even smaller and less exalted
cities have a plan, an organization where certain kinds of
buildings were and how they were grouped; how various sections
of cities are set apart against each other. They are cleanly
and clearly interrupted by parks in between, whereas in
America, every city I have been to is a visual jumble. In
some way this is, of course, an expression of a country whose
people resent regulations, submission to imposed standards of
planning.
I did not find that disturbing. As a matter of fact,
it's the thing that intrigued me. When I went around drawing,
I could draw some dilapidated, falling together, red brick,
one -story buildings and behind them facades of glamour and
sheer facades soaring into the air. It's a fantastic sight;
it's just in that way really essentially totally different
from Europe. It is something that I think is still in my
system; I'm still aware of disorderliness today when I go
around San Francisco, a city I love.
But on the other hand, perversely, in the sixties, I was
in Switzerland, and I suddenly realized that I had a terrible
itching to do something about this pervasive primness,
[laughter] But I think it is important that a basic sense of
order is ingrained in me ,
I think, and it explains the
difficulty of students to accept that as an underlying
concept. In teaching design, it was a necessity to present
order as an underlying principle. We will probably come to
talk about that later on again.
These were really the most striking impressions, apart
from the pervasive friendliness of people that I found so very
alluring. I also very soon learned about the difference in
the schools that I have already mentioned last time.
49
American Book Design
Lederer: We are still talking about New York. Well, maybe I should
mention what I had known about American book design before I
came here. Very little. I knew some of the names that were
prominent here like Dwiggins ,
and Goudy; certainly I knew
about their work. I knew with great respect and awe about the
publications of the Limited Editions Club and that they paid
their famous illustrators $1,000 per volume, which was, of
course, in the thirties in Europe, rather much of a fantasy
figure .
And the other thing that I knew about American publishing
were children's books.
Nathan: Why is that?
Lederer: Because they were so wonderful. I had seen an international
exhibit of children's books. There was a small section of
Russian children's books that were illustrated by a few
exceptional artists, who in the earlier years after the
revolution did some wonderful work. But as far as large-
scale, rich production is concerned, America had it over all
of them in imagination, in exquisiteness of execution,
production, in richness of color.
That was quite, quite overwhelming, and I think this is
also where a good deal of big publishing efforts in America
went: producing something that was really attractive, enough
so to make the difference that parents wanted to buy one
children's book in preference to another one. They were very
beautiful, and they certainly had also used the help of some
very wonderful illustrators, as they have to this day.
Of course ,
what came through always in such books ,
and
came through as a forte, is the wonderful sense of humor that
Americans often have, which incidentally, also, for us had
come through in Europe in the Disney films.
Nathan: You were saying that you saw Snow White as a technical
accomplishment?
Lederer: Well, the technical accomplishment, of course, was quite
overwhelming at that time, but that was only a part of it.
When 1 saw it in Prague, I knew already that I wanted to come
to America, and certainly that film offered a very persuasive
50
argument, telling me that America cannot be all that wild,
with people only running and only money-grubbing and everybody
at each other's throat. There must be a sort of, almost
childlike, sense of acceptance of friendly attitudes and, most
of all, a wonderful sense of humor.
For that reason the Disney film- -at that time it was only
Snow White- -was a real ambassador that told me a good deal
about America and something very positive and very alluring.
Selling Christmas Cards
Lederer: As I mentioned earlier, I knew a designer in Vienna who always
told me, "You should go to America." She knew America from
having worked there. She also did something else- -she sold
some Christmas card of mine there when I was still in Prague.
I saw that there was a response to something that was subtle
and lighthearted, not cute and not heavy. So all that added
to my positive feelings about what I could expect in America,
which otherwise had seemed a very forbidding place in my mind.
When I was in New York, I did make contact with the
American Artists Group, which was venturing at that time into
new ways of doing Christmas card design that would be off the
beaten track. Let's just call it that. They accepted my
designs, and for many years, I did card designs for them.
Then, later on, after maybe thirty years or so, unfortunately
the wonderful attitude that they had had- -trying to really do
something out of the ordinary, something a bit more delicate
and not so commercial- -broke down. It got swamped away with
the general commercial tide, and this whole business was
overwhelmed to such an extent by the competition with the
gigantic production firms that they could not hold their own
against that.
But while it lasted, it was a very lovely outlet because
they did a beautiful job of reproduction, and you could do
something that you couldn't do anywhere else so easily.
Salter. Kredel .
Eichenberg
Nathan: That would have been around 1941?
50a
SEASON'S
GREETINGS
51
Lederer: It was in New York between 1939 and 1941 and continued later
from San Francisco, when I moved there. I should mention some
of my colleagues from Europe whom I met because they are
significant in my life. I have already talked about George
Salter. George Salter was very helpful in an area where he
himself was after all working and looking for work. I was in
a slight way able to pay him back later on when I arranged an
exhibit of his work in Oakland and gave talks about his work.
Another person whom I met was Fritz Kredel, who came from
the famous Offenbach Design School where Rudolf Koch had been
his master, and he had intimately worked with him. In New
York, Kredel was very active doing children's and juvenile
book illustrations, and also illustrations for the Limited
Editions Club, with unbelievable versatility and skill and
inventiveness- -a wonderful person to meet.
The third one was Fritz Eichenberg, who ten years before
my time in Leipzig had been a Steiner-Prag student and who was
also well established in Manhattan, mostly as a great master
of wood engraving, which he used for illustration. Being an
unusually skilled and extraordinary performer in this field,
he was also given a position at the Pratt Institute, where he
created a Graphic Arts Center that had a great influence on a
renewed interest for the graphic arts in America. Later, at
the college in Oakland, I had him visit at times as a guest
instructor and induced the college to give him an honorary
degree. We became very close friends. He is a wonderful
person and one who has with his work, teaching, and
publications, left a very definite mark on American graphic
arts and illustration. As for American designers and artists,
I did not meet any at that time.
WPA Murals
Lederer: What I saw of American art --apart from what I saw in avid
visits to the endless numbers of galleries of Manhattan on
Saturday afternoons , going from one to the other and getting
to know the work of Stuart Davies, Kunioshi, Reginald Marsh,
and Calder and whoever else was prominent at that time- -what
struck me as particularly unusual and impressed me very much
were these varied murals in the post offices. I only later
learned that this was all a result of the WPA projects. They
were not only very well done- -after all, some of America's
best artists like Ben Shahn were involved in these projects--
52
Nathan:
Lederer:
they also had recorded subjects from American history that
were very fascinating for me.
The mere fact that a post office would be used as a place
to put such interesting murals on the wall struck me as a
very, very good and positive way of using art. I have
maintained a strong feeling that art flourishes best if it has
a place where it belongs. I find the current art situation
where art is an isolated element related to the life of people
only by way of being an object that has entertainment,
intellectual or monetary value rather undesirable; the great
forms of art have always flourished when what the artist did
had a physical place and was part of people's lives. In this
WPA project I found that idea beautifully expressed, and a
return of that concept would be something that I would highly
welcome, not only for the sake of the artist but also for the
sake of getting the arts and the people together- -the way it
has so often been in past times.
I think that is really what I can say about my
acquaintance with American art and American artists as I came
to know them in the beginning. I certainly did see the work
of many contemporary artists in the galleries and also in the
museum- -there was already the Museum of Modern Art.
Did I understand that you had a showing of some of your
paintings and drawings in New York?
No. I did not have a gallery show. The one in the rooming
house that I mentioned in passing is the one where two
watercolors were stolen, [laughter]
Drawing Bridges, and Meeting the Police
Lederer: Well, talking about such incidents- -at one point I wanted to
make a series of lithographs of all the bridges of New York,
and so I went systematically after each and every one. At one
time I was standing on a bridge- -that was in '41- -drawing
another bridge across the way, when somebody tapped me on the
shoulder, and I looked around and there was a huge, burly
policeman who beckoned me to come along. When I turned around
there was another policeman waiting for me, and they took me
to the police car. I didn't put up any resistance. I didn't
know what it was all about, but next to them stood a man who
pointed to me, and I recognized that man as somebody who had
engaged me in a customary conversation, "Do you do this
53
drawing for fun?" that sort of thing. In the meanwhile, the
Germans had declared war and there was a war scare, and that
man had denounced me as drawing some important railroad
bridges.
I was taken to a prison and put behind bars together with
some noisy people, and I was utterly bewildered. I was not
given access to a telephone at that time. One officer
conducted some telephone conversations in front of me: "We
have 'this' guy here who now pretends he doesn't really
understand English so well," which was no wonder because I was
in the deep Bronx at that moment, [laughter]
Well, in any case, after a while, I was taken before a
judge in a regular courtroom, and the two policemen who had
taken me along were present and they were sworn in. I saw
they were raising their hands; so I thought that's the thing
to do here, and I raised my hand, too, whereupon the judge
shushed me down. It was not for me to swear in this
situation, [laughter] Maybe it convinced them that I was not
terribly, terribly expert as a spy. In any case, he asked me
whether I plead guilty, the accusation being that I had drawn
on the bridge. I thought, yes, that's what I had done, if
that's what I'm guilty of. I said, "Yes, I'm guilty," and
with that the whole thing ended.
They took me out. There still followed an investigation
by the F.B.I. When the F.B.I, man came, he asked me some
questions that were rather transparent even for my rather
inexperienced frame of mind. He took me in his car and wanted
to see the place where I live, and, of course, the moment he
entered that little room, he saw these big sketch books of
drawings and on top of the heap, there were all those of
bridges, one after the other. I told him that's what I have
drawn. That's what interested me. He asked me a few more
questions, but then after an hour or so, that also ended. I
do not know what the follow-up of it was or whether there was
continuing surveillance. It has remained to this day only a
funny story of what all can happen to a greenhorn.
Nathan: Caught up in the war scare?
Lederer: Well, sure, certainly.
Nathan: Are we nearly ready, then, to start you off toward the West?
Lederer: Yes, sure.
54
An Invitation to Visit San Francisco
Lederer: The summer of '41 was beckoning, and again I had planned to
spend the summer drawing and painting, when I got from
California a very nice invitation from the woman friend I had
had in Vienna. Her parents and two sisters had in the
meanwhile come to San Francisco as refugees from Hitler,
having been sponsored and helped in every way by Albert
Samuels, a very well-known jeweler with a store on Market
Street since before the big earthquake and who had been a
friend since many years. Being a family of very hardworking
and enterprising people, they had all gotten into various
kinds of work, had acquired a house, and had an extra room.
So they said, "Why don't you come out West and visit with us?"
At that time one could take a train, round- trip ticket,
from New York to San Francisco and back to New York for $100.
So I bought the ticket and very, very carefully figured out
that I would make a trip on which I would see just as much of
the United States as possible, which meant that I took the
trip to San Francisco through the middle of America and
planned to go back via the South to see New Mexico, Arizona,
New Orleans, and so on.
I arrived after three days, having stopped over in Salt
Lake City and in Chicago. I saw the Garden of the Gods and
all the landscape, the plains and the mountains that I knew
only from the Leatherstocking Tales, and the vast stretches of
desert. It was a very, very exhilarating and exciting and
wonderful kind of trip with the train and the amount of things
I saw in such a short time. I arrived in Oakland; I took the
ferry over to San Francisco where at that time Coit Tower was
by far the highest peak [ laughter]
-
-this was in 1941- -and met
my friend in the Ferry Building, and was then taken to her
family's home in the Richmond District of San Francisco.
55
VI THE CALIFORNIA COLLEGE OF ARTS AND CRAFTS (1941-1980)
Nathan: How long had you planned to stay in San Francisco?
Lederer: I would say six weeks probably, and I spent the whole summer
just drawing. I didn't think of making any professional
contacts. At one time during my stay, somebody, a friend of
that family, said, "Why don't you meet the president of the
California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland? I think it
would be interesting for you." Well, since they were nice
people, and it was a personal introduction, I went and met
this elderly gentleman, Dr. Frederick Meyer, who was the
founder and creator of the college. I showed him my work,
which he liked but said that he didn't have a job. I said,
"I'm not looking for a job," and that was it.
Then, two weeks before I wanted to leave, Dr. Meyer
called me up and said, "I have a vacancy here. Somebody who
was teaching design and advertising art cannot continue.
Would you be interested?" So I went there and talked to him,
and he said he would want me to teach two days ,
and that he
would compensate me to the tune of $5 a session- -that meant
$20 a week, $80 a month. I thought, "Well, how nice. I can
work two days and the rest of the time I can draw. So why
not?" After all, I had been teaching in Europe, and I liked
the place .
Attractions of the College
Lederer: I liked the place for several reasons: first of all, the
location was very pleasant in a green setting with rambling- -
not very impressive, but obviously suitable- -buildings . The
way I saw it, this college had underlying an idea that I was
familiar with and that in a way even appealed to me. That was
the adherence to the Arts and Crafts movement that was
56
embodied in its name ,
which meant that the arts were taught as
something that is related to life. Basically in philosophy, I
thought there is a school that is different from what I had
observed of other art schools. They were very often like, for
instance, the Art Students League, simply an assembly of
studios in which various prominent people taught but without
any kind of interlinking of ideas.
Teaching Advanced Design and Advertising Art
Lederer: Now when I was told that I was to teach one class of advanced
design, I asked rather innocently whether that would mean
drawing from life because I translated the word "design" from
my dictionary as "drawing." The design, as such, really has
no equivalent in German. To this day, when people talk about
design in Germany, the English word is used.
I was told that, no, this was not a class in drawing but
in design. I did not ask more questions, but I went to the
public library and got some books on design, which then I
realized had been embedded in our teaching in Leipzig and
Prague, and had been part of all studies, but not isolated as
a separate discipline. I also found out what the students
were doing in the preceding class. In any case, I made up
some kind of work plan that I thought would be suitable to be
taught as advanced design.
The other class that I was to teach was what was then
called commercial art and was very, very elementary, touching
on graphics applied to advertisements in the form of newspaper
advertisements or posters or things of that kind. In that
case the man who had taught the course before me could give me
some kind of lead of what he had been doing, so that I had a
model, whereas I simply improvised the other class, figured
out what could be a reasonable course. I decided that I would
gear my classes towards professional attitudes. In other
words, I planned assignments that allowed them at the same
time to deal with principles of design and handling, and the
need to think in terms of what specific response a task asked
for by its nature .
Nathan: Was this somewhat of a departure from the way these courses
had been taught?
57
Lederer: Yes, the design course had been strictly taught as a course in
decorative work, and that was not what I had in mind at all.
One very odd course being taught there was called "historical
ornament," in which the students studied history of ornament
and then "applied" it to objects of daily use. But that, of
course, to my way of thinking was absolutely not what one
should do, to simply add a particular ornament taken from a
past period to dress up an object.
What I had in mind was an appearance that grows out of
the usage of an object, be it a poster or title page or
advertisement, and emphasize what its appearance should be
under the conditions under which it is seen, rather than to
simply make it pretty by adding decoration. If you want to
call that philosophy, it was basically the idea with which I
started my teaching there. What totally petrified me was that
I had observed such a class and had seen that this was a
regular school class, in which the students sat on benches
with the teacher occupying a place in front at a desk. It was
something that I had associated with all my school experiences
and was entirely different from anything that I had
experienced in my own professional studies. The mere idea to
have to face a group of people who would stare at me, thirty
of them, and to lecture to them- -I can only say I was utterly
petrified.
Well, I prepared myself as well as I could and told the
students as badly as I could in my still halting and
insufficient English what I planned to do, and they stared
back at me. Again, from a human point of view, these first
weeks when I barged in there and presented the students with
attitudes and demands that they were entirely not used to were
a wonderful experience. These young people- -for one thing
they didn't have it easy with me, and for another they could
simply have walked all over me, and they did not do anything
of that kind- -far from it.
Assignments and Grades
Lederer: Maybe they realized that I meant well, that I wanted to help
them. Maybe they realized that I had something to offer. A
good instinct may have told them that. Their minds were not
cluttered, so they could see what was really there in spite of
all kinds of oddities and insufficiencies, and they were
basically kind. In any case, it worked out, and we did
establish a good rapport; although to their way of thinking I
58
was absolutely incredibly demanding. When we had discussed an
assignment, and they had made their first sketches, and I had
discussed them with them, I said, "Well, finish it now," and I
expected that the next time I came to class, they would show
me the completed work.
Nothing of that kind happened because I had not given the
task as an "assignment," and I had not specified at what time
It was to be turned in. My attitude was based on the
assumption that we had a mutual aim: we wanted to do this work
and work together, and, of course, you are terribly interested
to get the work done ,
so you will spend all your free time
completing it, and then we go on to the next thing. That was
the kind of approach I happened to have been acquainted with.
So again I learned that this had to be considerably more
organized and regulated, and then I had to learn to grade the
work. All that I gradually found out.
Setup of the College
Lederer: What was the most bewildering thing for me at the school was
the setup of the institution as a college, which offered a
college degree, combining the liberal arts with the creative
arts; and with the liberal arts offered on the same campus by
a special faculty. In all my acquaintance with art schools,
the general education, the liberal arts, was what you had
behind you. You simply didn't touch that any more when you
went to art school, you did art from morning to night, and
that was it.
Also new to me was the very limited time that the
students spent on each of the subjects that I taught them.
The idea was to acquaint students with all kinds of areas in
the arts and thereby have them acquire a feeling for their
interrelations. This was, at this school, taught by simply
getting everybody first in touch with everything the school
offered. I recall with pleasure that at one time I had in my
advertising design class as students Ralph Borge, Lundy
Siegriest, Charles Gill, Nathan Oliveira, all of whom are
prominent California painters now. It all meant that what I
was used to acquiring in a lengthy process, almost by osmosis
over a long stretch of time, had to be offered to these
students in a much more comprehensive course of study and in
such a way as to make it worthwhile as a survey.
59
Advanced studies there or elsewhere could build on this
broad base if students wanted to make a particular field in
the arts or crafts their lifetime pursuit. But this jumping
from one study subject to another was fundamentally different
from what I had experienced in my learning years ,
in which
only what related to your chosen field in the arts was the
subject of studies that could therefore be considerably more
thorough and far -go ing.
To me, all this meant a great deal of reading, soul
searching, questioning, talking to other people at the college
and finding out what was right, what I should do or how I
could do it better within a setup that was new to me.
How the College Began
Nathan: Did the president or the dean or other faculty members
exchange ideas with you?
Lederer: No. No, that was not done in the early years. Mr. Meyer, as
the president, guided the school in a rather authoritarian
manner. He came once in a while to my class and looked around
and over students' shoulders, but he obviously thought that
what I was doing was right. He was himself a German from
Hamburg who had come to America as a young architect before
the earthquake. He had started this school rather much by way
of an odd occurrence. He had published an article about the
British Arts and Crafts movement in a newspaper and had said
that there should be a school to teach along these ideas.
Some people misread that as saying that he was going to start
such a school. He was swamped with letters by people who were
very much interested in such plans.
That persuaded him to do it, and on a very small scale,
he started a school in Berkeley. Being a very enterprising
and energetic man, he badgered the people in Sacramento to
support that, claiming that he would give teachers in the high
school art classes a better training. He received support and
ultimately he acquired college credit; when the school
flourished, he moved it to the present site where it is now on
Broadway and College Avenue. He bought the Treadwell four-
acre private estate and transformed one of the main buildings,
Treadwell Hall, into offices, library and studios. On the
upper floor Mr. Meyer and his family lived.
This large, beautifully landscaped estate, which by now
has been considerably built up with additional studios, was
60
tended at that time by Mr. Meyer himself, with the help of a
gardener. When I took ray wife for the first time to the
campus, she said, "Oh, see this nice old gardener there." I
said, "No, that's the president of the college." [laughter]
Hanni and Her Family
Nathan: Well, maybe we should go back a moment. This is wonderful. I
just wanted to find out when you met Hanni and when you
married.
Lederer: Well, Hanni, my wife, is of course that friend from Vienna
whose parents invited me to visit in San Francisco.
Nathan: She was related to the Samuels family?
Lederer: No, no. Samuels was a friend of her parents'. He had visited
with them in Vienna and had always told them, "If anything
ever goes wrong here, I will take care of you all." When
Hitler took over Austria, he was true to his word.
He was then helpful in introducing them to various
people, and so my future wife got a job at The White House, a
big department store. She was good at languages, and so the
president of the store, a friend of Mr. Samuels, hired her to
work as an interpreter to help visitors to the store who were
expected from all over the world to come and see the World's
Fair at Treasure Island. Not many foreign language -speaking
people came to the store, so she was transferred to another
job, this one as a secretary, which was very hard for her as
her English wasn't that good yet. But she learned fast.
At the time when we got together again in 1941, we were
certainly not thinking of marriage; we just were very good
friends. Also, I thought of returning to New York. But then
I stayed in San Francisco, and in 1943 we got married.
Is that enough about the relation to my wife?
Students. Attitudes, and the College Calendar
Nathan: Yes. Would you like to say anything about the students at the
school?
61
Lederer:
Nathan:
Lederer:
Nathan:
Yes. Right. You help me very much if you ask such questions.
The majority of the students there were women. And so the
college was a little bit under the aura that for women it was
a nice school to go to; it was a good place for them to get
acquainted with the arts and possibly meet interesting young
men there. As a matter of fact, as I learned later on, my
first women students were terribly disappointed when as one of
the first facts of my private life, they learned that I had a
girlfriend already.
I see. That's quite natural. Should I gather that these
students were not really focused on professionalism?
Apart from those who wanted to go into high school art
teaching, with very few exceptions, they did not focus on a
profession; although some of them did develop into
professionals. In those years during the war, the majority of
students were women whose outlook for a career in graphic
design at that time was still quite limited. Of course, my
tendency, supported by Mr. Meyer, was very much to push the
professional practical aims of students. As a matter of fact,
in one of the early years that I was there, Mr. Meyer hired a
teacher for fashion illustration, a woman who was a former
graduate of the college. She had worked as advertising artist
at Livingston's, an apparel store in San Francisco. She was
forever grateful for the education she had gotten at the
college in its early beginnings and remained devoted to it all
her life. She was most supportive and helpful in all I did- -
her name was Carol Purdy.
She was from an old Berkeley family, a remarkable and
wonderful person who has meant much in the life of many
students, to many of whom she was a wise advisor, and an
inspiration for the rest of their lives. For me, with the
endless amounts of things I later attempted to do on the two
days I was at the college every week, I could never have
accomplished all that without her contribution. We had a
wonderful work relation.
Yes, I see.
came?
About how large was the enrollment when you first
Lederer: I would say under two hundred.
It was a small school, and there were about thirty
students in each class. This was quite a lot for two-and-a-
half-hour sessions to take care of, because it meant
lecturing, reviewing work, and demonstrating work procedures,
62
There were two terms, a spring and a fall term, and then a six
week summer session.
The summer session was attended by many high school art
teachers who wanted to refresh their skills or take special
courses. In that connection, I met as students a great number
of nuns from the Catholic schools. They offered to me a quite
new experience. I found them open-minded, interesting and
devoted to what they were doing, and, in addition, most of the
time they had an awful lot of fun. To them, this was a period
of freedom and of getting to know odd creatures like Wolfgang
Lederer. [laughter]
Nathan: Yes, that's part of their education, I am sure.
Lederer: Most of them were very nice and interesting to work with.
And, like most of the students, they were friendly, open-
minded, with a directness and naturalness that I found
immensely appealing. I can work well with students of all
kinds of background and levels of talent, as long as I sense a
devoted attitude towards their work and a serious desire to
grow in it. What I found difficult to take were sometimes
unprofessional attitudes- -childishness , or tears when I did
not laud the work. Altogether, if we again want to make a
comparison between here and there, Europe and America, I was
not in any way- -I could probably say to the last dayprepared
for, and I never was able to fully adjust to the incredible
need of students to be patted on the shoulders.
Nathan: Of course, praise.
Lederer: Praise. That is something that virtually did not exist in our
European education. If, occasionally, a word was said that
you had done something good, that was quite something, but
generally you were prodded to do better. This also always
interested me in the students' work- -to find out how they
could do it better. That they had made an effort, I took for
granted. But here students are so used to encouragement for
effort made, that I had often consciously, or conscientiously,
to remember that need for praise. I emphasized to my students
that enthusiasm for what they were doing in my classes should
not depend on my encouragement but should emanate from their
interest in the field in which they were working and from
their eagerness to grow in it. It can happen sometimes that
students produce extraordinary work in classes under the
inspiring influence of a fascinating teacher personality, but
that can become meaningless if they cannot maintain or surpass
that level once they are no longer under the immediate
influence of that personality. Altogether, I believe that it
63
is a matter of great good fortune for a young person to find
that he or she is so in tune with the thinking and personality
of a teacher that what is offered remains an inspiration for
life. In most cases, what can be expected is a step or steps
in development, a gain in insight or knowledge, an assistance
in growing.
The Arts and Crafts Movement
[Interview 3: June 15, 1988]
Lederer: We talked last time about coming to the college and the basic
idea of the college being, in its name, part of the Arts and
Crafts movement.
Nathan: Yes. Was that related to the movement in England?
Lederer: That was exactly the same thing. A book on the Arts and
Crafts movement in America that has recently appeared
1
has a
section devoted to the college because of its commitment to
that very idea. I think I can bypass explaining the Arts and
Crafts movement as such because that has been abundantly done .
To me it was important that the college had an underlying
idea. As it then happened in the following forty years, a lot
of that idea went down the drain and was not really clarified
any more. In other words, people ultimately even reached the
point that they very reluctantly accepted this term as being
connected with a movement that by that time was considered
passe, and was even by some people who came new to the faculty
looked upon with a great deal of suspicion, with the
pejorative term, "craftsy," being employed. That was the very
thing that they did not want- -something connected in their
minds with old ladies in tennis shoes who weave baskets or do
things of that kind.
To my mind, it is a very potent idea that all artists
have an understanding of their craft, a relation to the
materials with which they work and of the conditions under
which the work is seen or used. That connection is something
that I felt has remained totally valid and particularly, of
course, also in the field of design. We always have to talk
'The Arts and Crafts Movement in America (Art Museum Series, Princeton
University Press, 1972).
64
about the "how" in addition to the concept of the "what." It
is interesting to me that with many changes going on right now
under a new administration at the college, the roots of the
institution in the Arts and Crafts movement are strongly
emphasized after they had been downplayed for such a long
time.
American Attitude Toward Change
Lederer: Behind such changes in attitude is, of course, the willingness
to change. Everything that I had experienced in Europe- -not
that I was aware of it, but in retrospect I realize that
whether it was in politics or in the education system- -it was
always based on vested ideas. A change was something that
only came about very slowly and reluctantly and sometimes not
at all. Whereas in America I was absolutely amazed at the
willingness of people to jump from one thing to another,
change the whole thing upside down at a moment's notice or
simply because an idea seemed good, say, "Let's do it."
I find this, particularly also in the political life,
very good and refreshing because the possibility for change is
always around the corner. As far as building up anything in
an educational situation, of course, it is fraught with
pitfalls and difficulties. The readiness to make changes for
change's sake can lead to giving up good things and throwing
overboard ideas and procedures that had been arrived at with a
great deal of effort and a great deal of thought. In that
respect, I experienced over the years a tremendous amount of
zigzagging, going back and forth. The going was not always
very easy, particularly also since my work setup allowed me
only a very limited amount of time to devote, in addition to
teaching, to also working on the build-up and organization of
a design department for the whole college.
Arrival of the GIs (1945-1946')
Lederer: But again I'm actually a bit ahead of myself because what I
really have to tell is that after I had been there (I started
in '41) through the years of World War II with almost no male
students present, there came in '45, '46 the unbelievable
onrush of GIs. That meant a change in the setup that altered
the college for good because it meant suddenly there were not
65
only these quantities of people but it also meant that they
came with a totally different attitude from the students that
had been there before.
Nathan: What was the new attitude?
Lederer: Well, the new attitude was that these were people who had
matured in a war and who knew what life was all about. They
were not searching or only marginally interested in the arts
and trying to find out what they could possibly do in these
fields. They came with a mind bent to go in as direct a line
as possible toward something with which they could build their
lives. In addition to that, the GI Bill offered opportunities
for higher education to people who formerly would have been
stranded in whatever kind of jobs they could land without
incentive or means for higher education being available.
So the student body was totally new with needs to which,
of course, an institution like this small college had to
respond. When I started out, we had maybe 200 students; at
the climax of the GI period, we had up to 1500 in the same
place. That meant that, at a tremendous pace, leftover army
buildings were bought and put up as studios on campus,
facilities were acquired in locations nearby, faculty was
hired, and the whole curriculum was changed to meet the needs
of these people.
Nathan: Did you find that the GIs were interested in any liberal arts?
Lederer: They were interested in everything. By and large, for them it
was a tremendous adventure. That's the way I sensed it. It
was the adventure to be suddenly thrown in with these strange
beings, the professors, artists, craftspeople, and designers
who had all kinds of ideas that they had never come across.
It was an opportunity to get into areas they had not thought
it would be possible to get into in the normal course of
things. A vitality and the spirit of discovery pervaded
everything. It was really quite wonderful. It also meant, of
course, a tremendous amount of pressure for a new
administration after Dr. Meyer had retired. Things had to be
done very, very fast. Decisions had to be made on how to cope
with the new situations. At that point, and I do not even
know which year that was, I was made Chairman of the Design
Department. That was an administrative decision, and again
the way these things went at the college, not strictly- -how
should I say- -in the usual way of academic institutions.
At a later time, the position was changed to Director of
the Design Division. I was in charge to organize a program
66
which allowed the later additions of Interior and Industrial
Design. There was also a graduate program, leading to a MFA
degree. I usually discouraged applicants who desired to enter
that program in continuation of undergraduate studies,
advising them to get a job as a more suitable way to deepen
what they had acquired in the past four years. There were,
however, a number of instances where professionals, after
several years in the field, had a desire to change their
outlook, explore certain directions, and such applicants were
welcome. I can recall some very wonderful experiences with
some of these exceptional students.
Basic Design Classes in a Foundation Program
Lederer: Expanded studies in basic design became part of a two-year
foundation program that all students, regardless of their
major, had to take. In the two following years, those who
wanted to become graphic designers or illustrators took a
required work load of classes that offered development steps
in the design disciplines necessary for the profession, to
which in later years also those of Interior and Industrial
design were added. I had an assistant to help with those
organizational activities but continued to teach the advanced
professional classes. Considering that I was on campus only
twice a week, that meant a great load of work and
responsibilities on these two days. Department meetings, or
those with individual teachers, were held during lunch hours
and in the evenings .
Hiring Faculty and Creating the Graphic Design Program
Lederer: You asked me how that was with hiring additional faculty.
Well, the additional faculty came either from people I
happened to know in the profession and whom I could ask
whether they would be interested to participate. And there
were always people who applied and who were interested to
teach whom I either knew from their professional work or who
showed in portfolios or on slides what they were doing. I
interviewed them, explained to them what was to be done, and
then introduced them into the faculty. This is by and large
the same procedure that prevails in all academic institutions;
only that again because of the particular setup of this
67
college, everything was done in a less, let's say, involved,
cumbersome manner.
If I refer to the specific setup, that also means that,
as a private institution that maintained itself on what the
students paid as tuition, the college was in no position to
pay salaries comparable to state institutions or organizations
of that kind. That meant that teachers could not, or did not,
make their living exclusively from what limited opportunities
the college could financially offer.
Nathan: Were you looking for any particular characteristics in the
people you hired?
Lederer: Well, quite certainly, in the first place I looked for real
quality in their own work as well as attitudes toward teaching
and an understanding of our aims. I did not look for big
names. That's a common fallacy. Big names, of course,
attract students and are an advertising medium, but they are
not necessarily the best teachers. I tried to find out how
they would relate to students or whether they had had
experience in that respect, anything that could give me a clue
in that way. Of course, they were only accepted for a limited
time until they could prove they could do it well. Whether
they taught well one saw in students' exhibits, one found out
in which way they participated in meetings, one listened to
the students talking about instructors. All that is not as
easy as I maybe make it seem right now. It's a known
difficulty to find out who is a good teacher, but in the
plastic arts there is something to look at in reviewing the
students' work, that ultimately reveals something about the
guidance and direction offered by a teacher.
What I tried to build up was a very definite program of
progression which should allow for new faculty members who
came in to be confronted with a definite program for that
class. This is, of course, contrary to very many people's
thinking who feel every teacher should present what he or she
feels inclined to do. But in a coordinated education that is
meant not just to offer a bird's eye view of a variety of
personal attitudes and individual ideas, teachers have to be
aware of the level of their class as a link from the
comparatively easy- to -grasp thing to the more complex level so
that students can have a guidance for growth. What also had
to be avoided, of course, is deadly repetition- -one person
offering the same thing that another had already done.
68
Communication Arts
Lederer: In spite of this insistence on a coordinated progression in
the nature of assignments, the personality of individual
teachers still colored what each teacher offered. Their
reactions to the way the program was set up were welcome, and
new ideas were incorporated. We had meetings about such
questions so that we should all see eye to eye. With forever
changing demands in the profession and with the rapid growth
of the faculty, my aims did not by any means always work out.
Still, a few main ideas, an emphasis on quality, a work ethos
that individual convictions and not the attitudes of the
market place must ultimately guide what we present to the
students, these ideas remained. Also our aim was not to
develop specialists in a narrow field or with a limited
outlook for what a momentary fashion might dictate.
Essentially, design, as we taught it, embraced the whole field
of communication arts: communication in words, images, and
illustration. It covered a very broad area, not a narrowly
specialized one.
It also allowed us to have in the same classes students
of very different bends and talent. This is very crucial.
Maybe I should talk about that at this point, as an idea of
teaching in this field. What I tried to do, also in keeping
with what was inherent in the name of the Arts and Crafts
movement, was to let students get a full idea of all the
possibilities that exist in these communication arts and at
the same time guide them to find responses to specific tasks
that are in keeping with their particular talent.
Focus on the Student at the Desk
Lederer: In other words, if they were strongly illustratively oriented,
they could handle the assignments with emphasis on
illustration, but it did not mean that they should not
understand how typography or lettering interact in instances
with illustration. Vice versa, the purely design-oriented
people who cannot do illustration should understand
illustration enough so that maybe later they could understand
how to guide an illustrator or a photographer with whom they
might work. That meant essentially emphasis on individual
instruction.
69
That is the tradition with which I had grown up. I knew
how it is for the instructor to come to a student's desk and
to talk about what a student had done, what you thought could
be better, what's right or wrong and so on. This could also
lead to pulling the class together if something of a general
nature occurred, and then one could talk about that to all the
students. Of course, any student in the class was always free
to participate, but the talking was directed to the individual
whose work was under discussion.
Nathan: Do I understand then that the students were not in competition
with each other?
Lederer: They were in competition with each other to the extent that
they all had the same assignment in one class. When the
assignment was completed, they could see that other people had
done it in different ways. Competition per se, in other
words, that one has really done it very well, and one had done
it very badly, that I found simply did not enter. If somebody
had done something very well and had answered a problem
splendidly, well certainly one would hold it up and say, "This
is very, very good." But essentially that was not the point.
The point was to make individual students realize their
potential to the best end. The range of abilities within such
a class --at that time, there were no entrance requirements
except some very general scholastic tests at the beginning- -
was incredibly large and, likewise of intellectual capacities,
was extremely varied. To my mind the only way to really reach
these students was to talk to them individually.
I came to realize only later on when students spoke up
that I had difficulty with this approach because the students
were not used to it. They were used to being given an
assignment to work on. After the completion, the work was
displayed, and the so-called class crit [criticism] took
place. In other words, the pieces were there to be seen, and
the instructor would then analyze the merits or nonmerits of
various pieces. To my mind, or simply to my ability, this
procedure is not very good because it leads to generalizations
that are not sufficiently potent. Also, too many people are
left out, indirectly, because if you talk to an individual
personally, eye to eye, you see how that individual reacts.
Is the reaction, "I don't know what you are talking about," or
is the reaction, "Eureka, now I have it"?
If you have thirty people in front of you, nothing of
that kind happens, and you talk simply in general terms. So I
maintained that individual procedure to the end, although in
70
response to the urging of the students --and as I ultimately
even sensed it, obviously the students had a need to be
involved in more of a mass thing--! did also offer occasional
class crits.
Nathan: You were saying that in this individual conversation,
understanding occurred- -
Lederer: --at the desk--
Nathan: --at the student's desk. Could a student come up to you and
initiate the conversation?
Lederer: Oh, anytime- -
Nathan: --if there were a problem or--?
Lederer: Oh, certainly, anytime. Well, it would all have to fit in.
The sessions were two -and -one -half- hours . There were twenty-
five students, so after a general talk or demonstrations, to
review conscientiously all the students' work that I wanted to
review in progress, I was running against time.
Maybe this is a good moment to relate one experience that
could, in my opinion, not have happened in a general
discussion. When I was a student in Prague, I had once
prepared a series of book jacket sketches for a book by Zola,
L'Oeuvre (The Masterwork) . I spent my weekend on that and
thought I really had something great. Steiner-Prag came to my
desk and said, "I don't like that." I mean that's the way it
was in Europe; you did not soft-pedal your opinions. He
simply said, "I don't like that." Then he was called to the
telephone, and I had to wait for ten minute stewing there
about why he did not like it. That was followed by a short
talk that revealed to me what illustration is about. What I
had presented was the scene of a studio. The way I thought it
would be was a big studio that the artist as described in that
book would have. There was a model or no model in another
sketch, and messiness- -in any case, the way I had imagined it
as dramatic and interesting for that book. It's a book,
incidentally, about a fictional figure of a painter based on
Zola's friend, Cezanne.
Steiner-Prag explained to me, "Don't you remember that in
that story the studio is in this and this part of Paris?
Don't you know how the buildings look in that part of Paris?
What is the architectural structure of the upper roofs?"
71
Nathan: Mansard roof?
Lederer: The Mansards. "What would the influence be on such a studio?
How would the light be? Where are the skylights placed?" All
that he said developed to me the feel of what the illustrator
does, namely that he does not repeat what's already in the
book but expands on it. That talk was maybe five, seven
minutes at my desk, and it changed my outlook. Again, 1
cannot think of this being said to a whole group of students
in these terms ,
none of whom would have known what this book
was all about, who Zola was, had never been in Paris, what the
whole thing was that he was talking about. He was telling
this to me, who had read that book with enthusiasm and was
acquainted with it in all its aspects. That's what I mean,
that it can only happen that way, and sometimes it's very
surprising.
The other day I had a call from a former student who
quoted something that I had told her about her work which had
made a great difference in her development. It sounded like
something that I could only have said in such a personal way
in talking to her individually. It could never have happened
in a general class crit.
Participation and Need for Control
Lederer: Some teachers use class crits also in the manner of a general
forum simply as an open discussion. That, to my mind, can go
too far, and expose students- -who pay so much for attending
the classes conducted by a person with experience --to a good
deal of loose rambling for which not enough time was
available. I much preferred the idea that the students would
search out in asking questions whatever I had not succeeded to
convey to a juxtaposition of their own thinking. I had once a
quite rambunctious student who argued with me on everything I
said until one day I suggested to him that he might possibly
benefit if he would give a fraction of the energy that he
spent proving me wrong to find out whether there might not be
something that's right in what I said. With that said, he
changed his attitude completely, and I never had a more
devoted student.
What I sensed was that the students very often needed
what possibly exists in Europe in an indirect way, and what
I'm thinking of is the coffee house. Students in the studios
in Paris or Berlin or wherever art schools were, would after
72
classes get together in a coffee shop and talk everything to
pieces. And what do I know, the professor may have joined
them there. The whole process of discussion of art and ideas
became something loose and unstructured simply in order to
hash out ideas. But at most art schools like this one, which
is essentially a commuter college, that same thing could not
happen; students and faculty dispersed after classes to far
separated places.
In developing the Design Department, there came then
another very important development (Am I too specific maybe?),
Nathan: No.
Background and Feel for Materials
Lederer: That was over the need to create a program that was not
profession oriented, and that was meant to serve the whole
school as a background. That is something that happened in
most art schools in the 50s due to the influence of the
Bauhaus School in Chicago. The old German Bauhaus ,
a famous
school, had been dissolved by the Nazis, and some of their
best teachers had come to America. They had a great deal of
influence here --Walter Gropius, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Herbert
Bayer.
Moholy-Nagy was invited to create a school in Chicago.
That school never was quite the same as the original Bauhaus
in Germany because it was created and influenced by industry
and by commercial interests. For that reason, its true
creative, experimental character never could unfold to the
fullest. But the school established principles of teaching
that had been employed in the original Bauhaus in Dessau,
among them that there should be a study of all the materials
used in creating works in the plastic arts. People should get
a feel for all the materials with which they would work.
Classes at the Bauhaus therefore were taught by both an
artist and a craftsperson. Well, from all this what filtered
down to the art schools in America was that they should have
courses in which students, regardless of what their future
aims were- -sculpture or painting or graphic design or crafts- -
should get familiar with what is color, what is form, what is
structure, and in which way the properties of various
materials used influence the form that is created. Underlying
73
was the idea that all the arts have a common source- -a
language .
To incorporate these ideas within the basic design
courses that had been taught in a sequence of courses that
were to stretch over two years, was a considerable task. But
since it sailed under the name of basic design, it became my
responsibility. It entailed a great amount of work because
these classes were to respond to the needs of all majors that
were offered at the college, the various crafts, painting,
sculpture, and, of course, those of the professional design
areas, with multitudes of all sorts of different aims. It was
a big chore. I had an assistant, but as far as the program
itself was concerned, and the formulation of the courses, and
the planning- -all that was my responsibility.
I would like to insert here a brief description of these
basic courses that was published for many years in the
college's catalogs.
Catalog Description of Basic Courses
The premise on which the Basic Studies program has
been developed at CCAC is that there is a language
of the Visual Arts and that an understanding of this
language forms a basis for whatever studies, forms
of expression and explorations in arts or crafts or
design a student may want to engage in. The nature
of these studies while continuously vitalized by new
developments in arts, science and technology and
colored in the presentations by individual teacher-
personalities, is not determined by current trends
in art and esthetics. The Studies are meant to lead
to a discovery of these resources that contribute to
the creation of art in all its manifestations, of
all times, all places, all cultures. Furthermore,
these studies are to educate by leading to an
awareness of the thinking and attitudes that
determine the artist's work and his development, his
relation to materials and tools, his work habits and
his desire for independent exploration.
Such Studies although they will cover essentially
the same ground for all students will not lead to
uniform results. Individual students with their
vastly differing intellects and sensibilities,
74
Nathan:
Lederer :
backgrounds and education, interests and abilities,
will extract, carry over into their future work and
retain what reveals itself as meaningful to them.
On the other hand, these Studies provide a common
ground of experiences to which all teachers in the
following years, regardless of their disciplines,
can refer. Ideally, these studies should tie
together the many strands of interests represented
in the College and create interrelations between the
studies in various departments.
Were you essentially full-time at the college then?
I should have been, but I was there only on Tuesdays and
Thursdays from the beginning to the end. I had my studio at
Wine Publications in San Francisco, and I certainly wanted to
maintain my work there because that was the only way I could
do it. I would not even have thought it was right to teach
full-time because it would have gotten me out of touch with
the experiences that shaped the background of what I was
teaching.
College Growth and Program Changes
Lederer: So that gives you a summary description of a lot of struggles,
ups and downs, and difficulties as they occurred. With so
many new people coming in to teach suddenly at the college, of
course the intimate cohesion that at my beginning there
existed came to an end. I would certainly not want to say
everything worked out right and smoothly always, the way it
should, but the effort was serious, and ultimately one had to
come to terms with living in an imperfect world here, too.
Well, then at the same time the programs towards
specialization in graphic design went on, and ultimately led
to splitting graphic design and illustration as separate
majors. Furthermore, we added a section of industrial design
and even one for interior design.
Nathan: Was that related to the architecture?
Lederer: Architecture wasn't there yet. Interior design could not be
thought of without some kind of architectural understanding;
that was introduced the same way that industrial design
required a great deal of engineering know-how. Industrial
75
design was dissolved after some fifteen years of struggle with
that subject, trying to really do something with it. I asked
to have it dropped when I realized that we could not do it
Justice for lack of space and equipment.
I am altogether aware that in much of what I did in
dealing with the faculty in my department, I used more --let's
call it with a nasty word- -dictatorial ways than is often
desirable in our democratic society. But that was simply the
only way for me to cope with a practical or time problem, in
order to get anything done at all. I must say that I became
aware of that only when I met a former colleague at a party
after I had retired, who insinuated that jokingly to me. I
thought back and thought, "Well, he probably had a point
there .
"
But it cannot have been too bad because throughout my
relations with the faculty remained excellent, and the
instances of unpleasantness were exceptions. My colleagues,
together with alumni, sent me into my retirement with such
warm expressions of affection, appreciation and
acknowledgement that they totally overwhelmed me, and I still
hear from quite a few of them now after ten years. Maybe I
wasn't quite such a bad tyrant after all.
Nathan: Would it be true that all of the faculty in a sense practiced
the same pattern that you did, they taught part time and also
practiced their specialties?
Lederer: Yes. Well, it is actually very much what you have in most art
schools. Painters spend their time in their studios,
sculptors in their sculpture workshops. In our case, all the
teachers were practicing designers, with the exception of
Carol Purdy, about whom I talked earlier, who could rely on
many years of experience as a professional.
Should I talk a bit more about my procedure of teaching,
my philosophy?
Nathan: Yes. I think that would be very useful. Somewhere along the
line as you talk about your philosophy, eventually you might
want to say something about how developments in technology
affected teaching.
Lederer: Developments in technology, like the technical changes in
printing and in the production techniques, had of course to be
introduced. The changes in the design and handling of type,
so firmly established for five hundred years since Gutenberg's
invention that led to printing from movable type, have been
startling in the past thirty years and required that we teach
76
a new way of thinking about type as part of design and
printing production.
Nathan: --or even color, the color separations?
Lederer: Color separations and all technical and practical matters were
introduced to the extent that they can be grasped in classroom
presentations and demonstrations. They were expanded by field
trips to design studios and printing plants. A real working
familiarity with any of these processes can, however, only
come from continued learning and practice on the job. Too
much is often expected in this respect from hiring
professionals to teach, as they are not aware of a student's
capacity for grasping all the information that comes from all
sides during the few years in college.
Nathan: Right. Are you ready now to go back to philosophy and
teaching?
Schools and Clear Choices
Lederer: I always thought that seniors in high schools with interest in
the arts would benefit if a clearly pronounced profile of
various art schools would be available to them so they could
choose the school that could respond best to their talents,
temperament, or aims. I feel very strongly that the art
schools in America all try too much to do the same thing. For
example, if a person wants to become a graphic designer, that
student may not want to be distracted by all kinds of
philosophies, may not want more teaching of literature, but
may want a school where he or she can learn graphic design in
order to graduate in three or four years and get a well-paid
job.
The Art Center School in Los Angeles does a topnotch job
of preparing people for the profession. Nothing else. They
made that very clear when they even advertised at one point:
"Come to us. We have no library." Proudly. "You do not have
to read books when you come to us. It's all practice." To
me, this was pretty shocking, but still, there it was and it
was pronounced clearly. It would certainly not have been my
choice as a school. But few art schools present their image
so unmistakably.
In the meanwhile, due to government support for
institutions with college degrees, too many institutions try
77
to hang on to the addition of the term "college." By now the
Art Center is also a college, managing that by association
with a university for liberal arts classes. But that does not
make a truly integrated program.
This is understandable, due to the pressure of economic
conditions. Schools have to live on students, which is
different from the state-supported schools in Europe. That is
a big question and goes, of course, for the whole cultural
life in the United States, including museums and symphonies
and opera.
But you asked for my philosophy in teaching design and
illustration. I have already spoken about the need of
preparation for the profession in which alone a student's
further growth can come about. In the broadest sense all art
education- -and I make there no distinction between the so-
called fine arts, craft, and design- -can only prepare a ground
from which to grow. Their education should help students to
develop in whatever direction they want to go later on. Like
all education it should also lead a student to grow as a human
being by gaining insights into more than just the needs of the
profession as it is being practiced at this very moment. I
mentioned the Art Center School as following a different
concept, and I fully accept the possibility of such a
different attitude, even if it is not mine. But I think that
within any art school a coordination of dominant ideas about
goals of education should prevail so that with all the variety
of individuals as teachers the students are offered guidance
instead of confusion.
At this very momentfrom what I hear, since I'm still in
touch with people and friends and alumni at the college--!
hear that they are very strongly steering towards getting a
more clearly defined profile for the college.
Nathan: I see. You mentioned also that when the GIs came flooding in,
that the top number of enrollment was something like 1500.
How did it stabilize?
Lederer: It stabilizes now around 900. When we had meetings, trying to
define what we would consider the ideal number for the kind of
program we have and the kind of facilities we have, that was
the number that we came up with. So that the college can
still keep the feeling of cohesiveness among the faculty, and
yet have enough of a student body to support what fortunately,
78
ultimately came about- -an adequate scale of faculty
compensation.
This college has lived for eighty years without any state
or city support, and that, in itself, is a quite extraordinary
achievement. As far as the customary support by society
leaders in the community is concerned, the place of the
college in Oakland put it at a disadvantage compared to San
Francisco with its traditions and tremendous background of
culturally oriented wealthy people there.
In the East Bay, on the other hand, Berkeley has always
had a community whose cultural interests had a focus in the
university. So it's a quite remarkable thing in the history
of American schools that this college could exist that long,
supported almost exclusively by tuition.
Talking to Administrators and Board Members
Nathan: You were speaking about your relationship with your faculty
and with the students; would you care to say something about
your relationships to the administration and with the board of
trustees? Did you have any particular relationships there?
Lederer: Well, I always tried to explain what we were trying to do to
the administration as best as I could, and I cannot say that
they ever were in my way, but I certainly often did not get
very much real support. Like, for instance, in quests for
better studio facilities; that became a rather sticky thing at
times when the quarters for teaching design and all the
equipment were absolutely insufficient. There were the usual
promises, and nothing happened. It depended, of course, very
much on individuals and their particular bent of interest and
experience.
There was one president who had a background in design
and a great deal of interest in that area. For a while I
thought, "Now we are getting somewhere," but he did not stay
very long, and so it went with a great deal of up and down. I
cannot say that, apart from expressed appreciation or good
will, enough happened to vigorously support the development of
the Design Department, which for many years actually was the
main breadwinner for the college. The faculty assembly had
always one faculty representative on the board. I was that
elected member of the board for two years. My relations there
were very good, although I had once an unpleasant repercussion
78a CCAC News
Fall 1991
WOLFGANG LEDERER FOUNDER, CCAC SCHOOL OF DESIGN
In
the late 80's, the American
Institute of Graphic Arts
noted, "The focal point of
graphic work is no longer
exclusively New York City.
California has evolved into a signifi
cant design force. ...The California
look indicates stronger individual
styles, color vitality, and freedom of
spirit." This shift has come about,
in part, because of Wolfgang
Lederer, founder of the School of
Design and faculty member from
1941 to 1980. His design philoso
phies and management of the
department over the years laid the
foundation for training a core of
designers on the West Coast who
now are being recognized nation
ally and internationally.
The arts and crafts tradition
which founder Frederic Meyer had
established at CCAC supported
Lederer's approach. "The idea that
the arts belong together, and you
don't have to say this is where one
thing starts and another ends,
appealed to me very much,"
Lederer explains. "When Michelan
gelo painted the Sistine Chapel, he
was given a project where he had to
fit into certain architectural shapes,
he had to make it visible from a
great distance, he had to illustrate
certain stories from the Bible, and it
had to be understandable by the
people. How is that different from
what other communicators do?"
Lederer says that design always
comes back to communicating cer
tain basic things about society, and
in order to have a vision behind the
design, the designer must under
stand society. "When you talk
about the world in which the
graphic designer lives, it is a world
that the designer must understand
in all its phases. If you take art as
one of the most visible expressions
of society in a certain time, whether
negative or positive, then you real
ize that the graphic designer cannot
be a person who is apart from the
world, whether it is political life or
personal life, etc. Students must be
brought in touch, not only in the
means of doing their work, but
also with their world."
Guiding design principles that
Lederer stressed in his teaching and
in his personal practice were clarity
in presentation, regardless of style,
method, or execution; clarity of
type, so that the type works with
all the other elements in the given
space; the discipline of careful
observation; the deep traditional
roots of design; and "decency" in
design, i.e. being responsible to the
large groups of people who will see
the work. "It is not necessary to
use vulgar words or vulgar design
concepts just to attract attention,"
he emphasizes.
Lederer's career began with
formal education in the book arts
in Europe. Studying at the Acad
emy of Graphic Arts, Leipzig, the
Academic Scandinave, Paris, and
the Officina Pragensis, Prague,
Lederer spent five years learning
from the European masters and
designing books that were his
works of art created with
someone else's words.
He emigrated to the United
States in 1939 to escape the grow
ing Nazi threat in Europe. On a
trip to San Francisco in 1941
Lederer met Frederic Meyer,
founder and President of CCAC,
who was familiar with Lederer's
work and had an opening as an
instructor of two classes: commer
cial an and advanced design.
Lederer accepted the teaching
position, and the beginning of a
long association had begun.
Gradually broadening the scope
of classes and curriculum, Lederer
became Director of the Design
Division. In the meantime, his sig
nature style simple, clean, "not
flamboyant or showy" began to
attract the attention of the Univer
sity of California Press and the bur
geoning California wine industry.
Winemakers were becoming more
aggressive about promoting their
product and for 20 years, Lederer
was the Art Director for Wine Pub
lications and Western Farm Publi
cations in San Francisco.
Although he has been retired
since 1980, Lederer has been "as
busy as ever" designing for UC
Press, Presidio Press and Chronicle
Books. His influence also lives on
in his students.
"I still
practice what he taught
me," says Bill Yamada '73, Execu
tive Vice President and Creative
Director of Wells Rich Greene/
BDDP in New York. "He was
ahead of his time (in the design
field) in asserting that concept and
ideas drive the design, and in fact,
were crucial to any design project.
You must have a vision. He would
not allow us just to be technicians,
because we were in his classroom
to improve our minds."
Clarity and discipline were the
hallmarks of the Lederer style, both
in design and in teaching. "I can
still hear him say 'Make the round
things round and the square things
square,'" says Ken Lavey '48, Crea
tive Director and Vice Chairman of
Lavey/Wolff/Swift in New York.
"He has a keen awareness of the
dynamics of design; he exposed stu
dents to all types of techniques,
styles and design and insisted that
our creations begin with fine
craftsmanship and work up to the
final artistic product. By sheer per
sistence and discipline he brought
out the best design work in me."
Thomas Morley '61, describes
Lederer's influence as very pro
found. "He helped guide me in the
direction most suited to my abili
ties book and publication
design. I studied typography with
him. As a teacher, he was also very
important. I modelled my
subsequent teaching after his
approach." Morley taught at the
Maryland Art Institute. His first
job in publishing was as designer
of the much admired American
Heritage Dictionary. Summing it
up, Morley said, "Finding one's
way in the professional world is
not an easy task. Wolfgang helped
me in that search."
It is appropriate that the depart
ment Lederer worked so hard to
78b
build is now in the hands of one of
his students. Recognized around
the world for his work, Michael
Vanderbyl '68, is Dean of the
School of Design and principal in
Michael Vanderbyl Design. Even as
he trains the next generation of
designers, Vanderbyl acknowledges
the foundation laid by Lederer.
"Historically, the department of
design is based in the arts and
crafts philosophy of CCAC," he
says. "Due to Wolfgang's leader
ship, those roots are very strong."
Just as a good designer under
stands the world in which he
functions, so does the CCAC
School of Design understand the
contribution of Wolfgang Lederer
in its evolution. Regardless of style
or influence, "good design always
stands on its own," says Lederer.
Hallmarks of the aforementioned
California design all hallmarks
of so many of Lederer's students
are echoes of his teaching and
design principles: clarity, concept,
and craftsmanship.
79
in a meeting when I felt honor bound to make the faculty's
point more strongly, and they didn't cherish that too much.
But these are all asides.
I was maybe a bit too sympathetic in my reaction to
economic problems that I don't understand myself, [laughter]
I will gladly admit that as a shortcoming on my part. If I
had been able to understand the economic situation of the
college better, maybe I could have made my points more
forcefully. Whether that would have been successful is
another question. What in contrast to my experiences is
happening right now is simply due to the fact that there is a
very enterprising and very energetic president who has a good
deal of understanding for all matters concerning the role of
design and is able to push them in the right direction.
Design and the Visual World
Nathan: That was really interesting.
I didn't want you to lose your thoughts about your
philosophy of education.
Lederer: Well, when we come back to a philosophy of teaching itself, I
always felt that I want to give my repercussions to what a
student presents as much as possible based on not just my
personal feelings, but based on what I would say are the
reactions of human beings to the visual world. I tried to
enrich my own mind by reactions to what we see and experience
in all forms of plastic art, all periods of art, all
techniques of art. In other words, when I said something
about whether an appearance or way of handling is right or
wrong in a student's work, apart from specifics, when we
talked about aesthetic choices or judgment of placement or
judgment of color, in the back of my mind I evaluated that
against what I had experienced in looking at prehistoric cave
paintings or against Gutenberg's Bible, or Picasso's Guernica.
I attempted to evaluate by using the experiences gained from
an immersion in the plastic arts of all times, and not only
those derived from a narrow area within a limited field as
practiced at this very moment.
That is what I feel one can really talk about, as an
approach that is diametrically opposite to the idea of
teaching design as a fashion. It is this evaluation that made
it difficult for the students and for myself. If you are
80
somewhat educated in the arts , you can always find in the back
of your mind a period or an artist or a particular work that
has been done that contradicts what you are saying, and has
done it beautifully or effectively. So you have to be very
careful in the choice of your examples. It makes it
undoubtedly difficult for the student to understand that if
you show an example from a different field or an earlier time,
you are talking about something that can show ways of handling
that are applicable to learn from in our time.
It is much easier to be taught, particularly in the field
of design--! would not want to talk about fine arts, because
it is out of my area of teaching- -and much more easily
grasped, if you present only what the great practitioners in
that particular field at this moment are doing. That's the
thing to do if you want to be successful. Now, if you are a
famous name designer, like Vanderbyl, you do that indirectly
because the students know you and your work, they can see it
in any graphic design publication, whether it's Japanese or
European or American. There he is, with his influences on the
image of design as it is practiced today.
If you are with Lederer, it's different, also because I
wanted something different. I wanted to get the students away
from the emphasis on the way their work should look, and to
clarify the design problem behind the assignment they were
asked to work on. So I presented the students, when I gave
them a poster assignment, with examples of posters by
Toulouse-Lautrec, or Cassandre or any one of the many great
artists of the past who had done something fabulous with that
particular design problem. I wanted the students to see it
not to find out how their poster should look, but as an
example of another artist coping with a similar problem.
So that was my idea. I had a vast collection of
wonderful examples elucidating almost any point that could
come up in an assignment or in a student's work. My
collection included much of the best work of contemporary
and past illustrators and designers. Whatever I showed them--
I did not want the students to think (although they did think
it too often) that this is what I wanted them to do. I was
trying to elucidate concepts, while the students often took
what they saw too directly as an illustration of the way their
work should look.
81
The Approach to Design
Lederer: Maybe this is appropriate: I could give you an example of how
I approached the whole idea of teaching advertising design.
At the very first session, I gave an assignment for the next
session, with only one day in between: do a hitchhiking sign.
It is a simple form of communication. You want to be taken
along to go maybe to Sacramento, and you stand at a corner.
When the students brought in what they had come up with, it
sparked a whole discussion about "What is design?"
In order to be effective, a hitchhiking sign has to be an
arresting image, which somebody who drives by at speed can
grasp. That is number one. What form of lettering was used?
What color? What have you used to support your idea? Can all
that be taken in in that short a time? In other words, the
whole question of "Do you like the image or do you not like
it?" falls by the wayside with this as the overriding
principle.
How is the image organized so that all parts can be seen
together? And again, the idea of composition as something
that should make a "balanced" image becomes subordinated to
the question: Can one see all parts together in a short
moment? There enters psychology: the question, who would want
to take you along? How do you convey that you are maybe a
person with whom it would be fun to ride? So this little
assignment led to a discussion of what we are talking about in
design in endless variations, with endless specifics. Design
starts out by defining what the problem is, rather than what
picture do I want to make. That's the essence of the whole
field. If the students could grasp that, they were on the
way. Whether they could also answer the problem
imaginatively, whether they could do it in a spirited way, all
that came later.
Practical questions about usage of the sign entered. If
a student came and had prepared a sign that could be easily
folded and maintained, all the better. That student had
obviously given thought to the idea that he/she might often
want to go to Sacramento. The essence of the whole discussion
was for the student to grasp that a designer is not there to
make pictures for enjoyment, or to express himself --a term,
incidentally, that I detest- -but to communicate under given
conditions .
I could elaborate on the subject of communication by
showing how Giotto, with simple gestures of figures on a
82
Nathan:
Lederer :
fresco high up on the wall conveyed scenes from the holy text
to the illiterate, or how the overly ornate interior of a
baroque Mexican church shows the possibility of a better world
to the poor peasant. With examples of this kind, I tried to
get across that the effort to communicate belongs to the
artist's endeavors and that the emphasis on it in illustration
and design is in no way demeaning.
It may sound as if with this approach to teaching design
and illustration, I had gotten my students away from what they
were heading for, namely, what is called "the real world."
But, actually, in my own work I was continuously involved with
the real world, and what I had my students work on were
problems from those experiences. When they participated in
contests sponsored by commercial organizations, they were
always successful in competition with other schools. At one
time the St. Regis Paper Company had a national contest for
package design, an important competition with very good
prizes. The judges selected students from my classes for the
gold, silver, and bronze medals. Incidentally, at that
occasion the first award winner and I were flown to Chicago
for three days as guests of that company. It was the only
time in my life that I have flown first class.
Should I give another example?
Yes, this is very good.
I had students do covers for series of books. In other words,
if you go to the bookstore and recognize there is a book in a
series in which you have already known another book, you liked
it, and you liked its presentation; you recognize it as part
of that series. At the same time, you recognize that this is
a volume that is new within that series.
Again, the student was confronted with a clearly stated
problem and had to analyze how to balance the elements of
continuity against the elements of newness. The success of
what he or she was doing was not evaluated on the basis of "I
like it or don't like it" because of its aesthetics, but
simply on the basis of whether it answered the stated problem:
To what extent did the repeated elements of appearance of
cover design emphasize the series balanced against the new
aspects of that volume?
83
Resoonsibilitv of the Designer
Lederer: Ultimately there must be also a discussion of the
responsibility of the designer as part of educating future
professional designers or illustrators. I did not accept the
old idea that if you are working for clients, you do what they
want. You listen to clients to find out what their needs are
and as a designer you answer the needs with your particular
skills. But if the client wants something that you cannot
live with, there must also be the word, "No."
A telling example for students: I saw once a book jacket
for Lust for Life, the biography of Van Gogh, a pocketbook
edition on which a redhaired painter was shown, painting a
lush female nude. Now Van Gogh never painted any nudes. If
he had painted one, I am sure it would not have been a lush
one. That was a total falsification. This is where one has
to draw the line, and I felt it was very important to impress
that on students.
Student Responses: American and European
Lederer: Well, I think that covers that area, unless you have any
particular question there. Let me see--l made a few notes.
Well, there are a few questions that you asked me about the
nature of the students and their respective responses --Europe
again versus America.
Nathan: Yes. Were there Asian students when you were teaching as
well?
^
Lederer: --Asian students, oh, certainly.
Nathan: I wondered whether there was a difference in the culture?
Lederer: As a group- -I'm very loath about generalizations- -but as a
group Asian students certainly had a tendency to be very
highly disciplined. That generalization, I think, can stand
because it really goes back also to their double education,
the two schools that they attended and other culturally
ingrained traditions that make them respond to education. So
I could single them out.
There were a good number of black students, and, in my
experience, they represented the same broad spectrum of high
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intelligence and low intelligence, and great talent and little
talent, like all the other students but with considerable
professional difficulty to be expected later on, that white
students in that way did not have to meet. The same thing was
true, of course, though to a large extent changing now, of the
women who took those classes. These are things that there was
no way of gainsaying. It simply was a fact of the life at one
time.
You asked at one time about the responses of European
students versus those in America. What set American students
apart is that they feel much freer to debate the merits of
what you offer them and not behind the teacher's back, as I
had known it. And then that they expect things to happen
quickly. In Europe, people are used to the concept that
everything takes time. I remember that when I started at Arts
and Crafts, there was Marguerite Wildenhain, a great potter
teaching ceramics . She was also fairly new at the college ,
coming from Germany. She told me once in great desperation,
"Well, where I was brought up, we had to spend a whole year
simply to get acquainted with what clay is, and here I am
asked to teach in one term how to make ceramic bowls."
In a positive way, on the other hand, there is the
tremendous readiness of Americans to pick up things. This is
what I have experienced in meeting young people who suddenly
take an interest in graphic arts and pick up things by
observing other people's work, by studying books, by going to
an evening class, and by simply trying it out. It is amazing.
There is the development of a great practitioner and one of
the greatest names in American book design, Adrian Wilson. I
don't know how it is today, but certainly it was unthinkable
in my time, growing up in Germany: he simply by coincidence
got acquainted with a printing press and typesetting
equipment, fell in love with the equipment, with the whole
aura of all that is around it and, being highly imaginative,
wonderfully intelligent, incredibly dedicated, developed it to
such an extent that it is totally miraculous.
So there are always these two things --in one way this
wonderful idea of Marguerite Wildenhain, that you should
intimately and slowly get to know the very thing with which
you shape the objects that you devote all your life to. On
the other hand, there is this readiness to pick up and do--
often with wonderfully fresh results and successful ventures
into the new, unhampered by too great dependence on the way
things had been done traditionally.
85
I am full of admiration for people who simply jump into
something new and do it enterprisingly and very often very
well. I think these are basic differences in the process of
learning, and it would be wrong for me to pronounce one or the
other as the right or wrong way.
Fighting Shoddiness and Recognizing Limitations
Nathan: Would this be the place to say a little about bridging two
cultures ,
and what the message was that you wanted to bring
from the European culture to the Americans, to your students?
Did you feel any mission at all?
Lederer: Yes, that's a good question. My early youthful idealism
certainly had a sense of mission. What I still strongly
believe is that education at an art school should emphasize
that it is worthwhile to do whatever you do as well as you
possibly can. In other words, fight shoddiness--shoddiness in
thinking, shoddiness in execution. I think that's what I
tried to show to students, who after all in the majority are
not great geniuses, and without any false humbleness, I
consider myself belonging to that group. Also, that we are
all limited and that we have to make the most of what we can
do within our limitations.
As a matter of fact, this is a phrase that somebody said
at one time. I think Braque ,
that all development in art is
based on recognition of one's limitations. I oftentimes have
quoted that to students, and most of the time they took very
unkindly to it. [laughter] That word, "limitations," did not
sit very well with them. I still feel that it is what all
great artists really have done. If somebody has a little
contribution to make by having a superior sense of design or
color or whatever it may be, if that is set forth by a desire
to let it shine forth as well as it can, I think this is a
good goal to strive for, and its realization has meaning,
regardless of how large or small a person's creative gifts
are .
The Average Student or the Elite
Lederer: In spite of the name designers who were at one time my
students, and whom I like to proudly mention, I believe that
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Nathan :
Lederer :
Nathan:
the real test of the success of a school of art or design is
what has been achieved in guiding the average student to a
realization of his/her potential, rather than stressing that
somebody who had a tremendous lot on the ball also went to
that school. The highly talented people- -one might well
imagine --would have gotten so much out of their own resources
and means of finding guidance by example or reading or
observing, whatever it may be, that the contribution of the
school cannot have been that essential. Whereas the
contribution of the school to the average student is, of
course, very big when it allows that student to find his/her
place.
Philosophically, in very broad terms, it brings up for
anybody who is involved in education the big question, "Where
do you draw the line?" In other words, when do you start
creating a proletariat in design or in the arts? Do we flood
the market with people who are not good enough to do really
excellent things? I think this is a real question. As a
human being, I cannot accept that some people be condemned for
non-participation as long as they do what they do to the
utmost of their creative, technical, and intellectual
resources .
This touches on an area that I can hotly debate to this
very day when I get together with younger colleagues. There
are some of them who find my attitude totally unacceptable.
Do they wish to go for the elite?
Absolutely. They would want to, already at the beginning, by
rigid entrance requirements and portfolio submission, create
barriers for the only modestly gifted people to even start out
there. There are people I have discouraged from going on in
the field, but when I discouraged them, it was always on the
basis of my observation of their lack of psychological
readiness to be part of a field that makes certain demands on
human beings that I sensed they were not made for. There I
felt a responsibility to point that out to them. If they
felt, "Let him talk, I want to fight that thing through," my
response was, "More power to you."
Could you talk a little bit more about the individuals who you
feel are not suited for commercial art, perhaps.
Lederer: May I correct you?
Nathan : Sure .
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More on Attitudes and Issues in Graphic Design
Lederer: I would not like the word "commercial" to be used, because
"commercial art" is a term I abhor. I know it used to be
called that, and it has always left a wrong connotation with
the idea of our work. There is fine art, which sounds as if
it were something decent [laughter] ,
and there is commercial
art, which sounds like something not quite decent. I know
that in the public's mind that is something rather widespread.
The graphic designers at the college, for instance, were very
often going around with a chip on their shoulders or with a
defensive feeling. Their colleagues in fine arts saw them as
people who sell out.
I hope with everything that I have said already, I have
conveyed that in everything we graphic designers are doing, we
are imbued- -or I certainly think we should be imbuedwith a
tremendous sense of responsibility, because what we are doing
is, in terms of influence on the public, much more widespread
than in general what the so-called fine artists are doing.
Nathan: Thank you. Now, may I rephrase this?
Lederer: Please.
Nathan: Were you saying something about those you feel, your students,
who may not be suited for graphic design?
Lederer: Oh, yes.
Nathan: Could you sense this when you worked with a student?
Lederer: You do, when you get to know them. I gave a class assignment
to design a poster for wine, something I happen to be familiar
with. There was a student who said he would not want to do
that because he was definitely against alcohol, and I
certainly respected that. As a matter of fact, I knew a very
prominent art director in a big agency who refused to have
anything to do with tobacco advertising.
Such convictions are possible. On the other hand, if a
person is continuously in conflict with the nature of work
that is to be the answer to a specific assignment, then this
person is not made for that field. Or if the demands about
certain limitations- -to use only two colors; or to have to
work in a particular format- -bring a person's creative juices
to a standstill, then that person has to find other outlets
for his or her talents, no matter how great they are, rather
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Nathan:
Lederer :
than try to become a graphic designer or illustrator for
publications.
If I sensed that kind of attitude, I certainly pointed it
out to the student. On the other hand, if he or she seemed
basically right for the field and balked at the idea of what I
call "give and take," then that person, too, had to accept it
and take it, not as a sell-out. The word that was anathema so
very much to students was "compromise." Yet I still have to
find the designer, the prominent designer, who not at one time
or another has given in, including such a monumental genius
like Frank Lloyd Wright. His early designs for the Guggenheim
Museum looked different from what he ultimately did, quite
obviously under the influence of discussion that had gone on.
Where you draw the line is purely a matter of personal
conscience, like everything else that we are doing in life.
Even if we wanted to do the best, there are situations when
our resistance wears down or where we try to accommodate
certain demands that we cannot agree with, simply in order to
see a project finally come to fruition. But I can only say
that this is ultimately a matter of personal conscience,
temperament, needs, whatever you might call it. It certainly
is something that should be aired.
Those instances where I consciously talked people out of
getting into the field were well -received, and some people to
this day keep reminding me of it with a great deal of
gratitude. I also believe that all this probing and
discussing is part and parcel- -now we are going back to
talking about education- -of what I described as the kind of
education that an art college should offer, and thereby widen
a young person's outlook towards all aspects of life.
Yes, I see. When you spoke of needing to cultivate and
develop each student as a human being, how did you feel about
letting your students get to know you as a person? Was that a
part of your approach to teaching- -that they would understand
you and your standards?
Well, I think if you talk to people, what you are comes out
with every word you are saying. Certainly, students are very
alert to whatever quirks a teacher may have [laughter]. I do
not see how that could possibly not enter. An impersonal
approach is not possible, not if you are really feeling warmly
and strongly about what you are saying. You are talking about
the very things that are close to your heart.
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Nathan:
Lederer :
As a matter of fact, at the end of my very first term
when I had met these new American students, I felt so humble
in front of them in some ways . I knew that I had approached
them in a way that was not what they were normally accustomed
to. I gave them a little talk about what this had meant to
me, and how it had been for me and what I think the outlook
towards our work should be . Afterwards , a girl in the first
row said to me, "It was just like in church." [laughter] So
if you talk about being warm about or personal about what you
are doing, quite certainly that must come through.
So, you see, when we get from conducting classes to
meeting the demands of the profession, we get to deeper
questions of what the meaning of all education is. I felt the
meaning of the education should be that individuals are
enriched for whatever it may be they might be doing the rest
of their lives.
At the same time, I would only find it right that they
tried to use their naturally given abilities, even if limited,
to the greatest extent possible to make a contribution that
could fit into this world. That the demands of this world are
not always necessarily the best, we all know, and yet I think
that in a small way, anybody can contribute by doing something
that is, if not great, at least decent. Now, again, whether
decent is sufficient or whether it should not really be
excellent, that is a to-be-or-not-to-be question.
Thinking of your humanistic view, if I can call it that, did
you feel any responsibility to try to help your students get
jobs, or to introduce them in the field?
Very definitely. If they were students who I knew would fit
certain organizations, I would recommend them that they apply,
or if I knew of somebody looking for somebody, I would call
that person to describe a suitable student. That happens
still to this day. I had a good sense to recommend only
people who really seemed to fit an organization. For me this
was a nice way of doing to others what had been so very
helpful in my early experiences in America.
The nicest story in that respect is that I had a very
good, highly talented student, Ken Lavey, who went to New York
and who didn't know anybody there. I sent him to a person who
had a firm for pharmaceutical design in New York, Mr.
Froehlich, whom I had met when I was working in New York. Ken
Lavey got a job with him, the usual apprentice kind of
relationship, and within a few years was vice president of
that organization, [laughter] By now, Froehlich has died, and
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it is now Lavey, Wolf and Swift- -a prominent and excellent
design organization that handles pharmaceutical packaging and
promotion all over the world.
Only in recent years has the college systematically
attempted to follow the careers of its graduates. For lack of
a list of those who graduated with a major in design or
illustration, I want to add here just a few names that could
serve as examples of different directions in which various
students who got their degrees from the design department
developed in the professions. Art Abel, advertising agency
art director, San Francisco; Robert Bechtle, advertising
designer, now a leader of the Photo -Realist School of
Painting, Oakland; Michael Bull, realistic illustrator, San
Francisco; Tomie de Paola, world-famous children's book
illustrator, New Hampshire; Maria Epes ,
art director, book
designer, artist, New York; Mel Furukawa, advertising and
children's book illustrator, New York; Lowell Herrero, for
years one of the most sought-after humorous advertising
illustrators, San Francisco; James Lambert, illustrator and
book designer, New York; Ken Lavey, design director, Lavey,
Wolf, and Swift, package and promotional design, New York;
Steve Reoutt, designer, illustrator, art director; Michael
Vanderbyl, graphic designer, dean of design, California
College of Arts and Crafts.
Breadth of Viewpoint vs. Style
Nathan: So you were able to evoke something different from very
different people.
Lederer: Totally different. That's the whole point, you see. As it
happens in some schools, when you go to students' exhibits,
you know who their teachers were. If these teachers happen to
be pacesetters today, as it is being practiced today in
design, that kind of pronounced style is a strength for that
moment. But the question is, how does it go on?
I started my classes by telling my students, "Style
doesn't interest me very much." Now that's a very risky thing
to say, but I added it doesn't interest me very much because I
have not the faintest idea how the practice of design will
look by the time you graduate. I still maintain that's right.
Michael Vanderbyl was certainly not educated by me to do
what he is doing today, [laughter] But somewhere it had to
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start, and what all schools can really only do is prepare a
ground from which to grow.
So whether it's designers or illustrators or graphic
design-oriented people or package designers, they all came
from classes that were oriented toward a broad viewpoint.
Design and Responsibility
Lederer: You asked me a moment ago whether, coming from Europe, I had
some sense of a "mission" when I started teaching here. Maybe
it was that I tried to instill in all students a sense of
responsibility towards themselves, a desire to do things
properly, to do things as well as they possibly could. I
wanted them also to become aware of their responsibility
towards their communities or country, wherever their work
would be seen.
I used to do a good deal of talking in this way in the
early days of my teaching, but later on I toned that down
because it didn't seem to sound quite right. It sounded a bit
like preaching. But I still feel that designers have a
tremendous responsibility by contributing to the quality of
life in the world in which we live, because their work is seen
by many more people than the work in museums. It is on the
billboards, in magazines, in books; it's in the street, on TV;
it's everywhere.
If designers could bring to our disorderly world a
greater sense of order and beauty, then they would really do a
great thing. I think I did not preach as much about that any
more because I came at times to think of it as rather
hopeless. The avalanche of poorly done illustrations, books,
billboards, packages, et cetera, that we are flooded with is
so great that I sometimes despair whether anything can be done
to stem that tide. I am satisfied if it at least happens in
some enclaves, or certain areas where people respond to it.
And I still feel very, very strongly about that. With the
abundance of talent and creative ability available, quite
particularly also in this country, I cling to the hope that
some day young people can be educated to direct their energies
towards not only saving our environment, but also to direct
their talents toward making it more beautiful, and that this
should include to a much greater extent what reaches our
visible world in all forms of printed matter, on TV and in the
life of our cities.
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Debate with Jo Sinel
Lederer: I remember an evening with round table discussion at the
college of a group of commercial artists, as they were called
then, talking about their field. The way this field was
presented for the students rubbed me terribly wrong. I felt
beholden to get up and have my say. In my English- -it
probably sounded at that time even more like German than
English than it does now- -in any case, I expressed my dismay.
Then a gentleman in the audience with bushy eyebrows got up
and said, "Well, that was a very eloquent, idealistic
viewpoint expressed, but, of course, Mr. Lederer doesn't
realize the facts that we are confronted by the attitudes of
industry and commerce in this country."
Well, he made a very strong, wonderfully worded
statement, and I felt I had to rebut that. That went on for a
little while, with me jumping up and the other responding,
until somebody in the audience said, "This seems to have
become a debate meeting between Mr. Lederer and Mr. Sinel."
What I did not realize was that I had confronted Jo Sinel, who
is known in the history of American design as "the father of
industrial design." He was a very important and influential
man who for the first time taught industrialists to accept
design as a crucial part of their whole scheme- -the sort of
thing that, later on, in a flashier way, Raymond Loewy did.
Jo Sinel really was the first one. After this rather
acrimonious debate between me and this experienced
practitioner, we met later on again and became good friends.
As a matter of fact, we were both at the International Design
Conference in Aspen, where he got up in front of the great
audience from all over the world and berated the participating
designers for the poor work that they were doing as compared
to the excellent work that he had recently seen in a student
exhibit of my students at Arts and Crafts.
Nathan: How wonderful.
Lederer: He became very interested and later taught in the industrial
section at the college. He even had the plan that he wanted
the students whose work he had seen, to stay together and form
an alliance as a design group that should be headed by me,
with him as a sponsor-promoter; but organizationally that
never got off the ground. There was no money, the students
were too impatient, and I didn't have the time to devote to
anything of that kind.
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Nathan: Is he alive still?
Lederer: No, he died. When he introduced himself in this little
impromptu talk in Aspen, he did it as "Jo Sinel, independent
designer." He wanted to emphasize his being alone rather than
working in a big group with an organization as it is common
today .
Nathan: That was interesting recognition.
Lederer: You asked how to prepare students to compete in the
marketplace- -what do they need to know?
They have to be good. What they have to know about the
marketplace is what they have to soak up by being interested
in business. If they detest business, they cannot work well
in that area. In later years, when the hippie movement was
very strong, there were always students who wanted to explain
to me that to do advertising meant doing shoddy things. I
always told them: "That's why you are here. You have an
education so that you realize when something is shoddy, you do
not accept it. Advertising is communication. It's telling
people what's available." In many areas, we depend on
advertising for information.
Order, and the Danger of Absolutes
Nathan: We were speaking a little more about orderliness, and you had
another thought?
Lederer: Well, I mentioned in general terms how difficult it is to make
statements in front of a class and you have to make
statements, you cannot qualify everything because it would
create confusion, even if at that same time at the back of
your mind, you always know of contradictory experiences.
While orderliness as a basic thought is so very strong in my
mind, I also know, of course, of the danger of orderliness
running into boredom.
Nathan: Predictability and--?
Lederer: Predictability or repetitiousness or designs just being
orderly but boring to look at.
The other tremendous difficulty I have with orderliness
is, of course, the horrid experience of orderliness in
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Nathan:
Lederer :
Germany. We cherished orderliness in our surroundings but
have to come to realize that the same orderliness was used in
Germany in the disposition of human beings in gas ovens. That
is the other side of the medal. I say all this in order to
emphasize that while I tried to convey things of a broad
nature as a basis of an education in a direction that I had
experienced and that had enriched me and been meaningful, yet
I was always aware of how things can go wrong. It made me
skeptical about being too definite about principles.
That, of course, makes teaching so difficult. On the
other hand, you cannot educate by qualifying everything you
state. The same thing is true in college education as in
children's education. You set certain goals that you find are
admirable because deep down you believe in them, even if there
have been adverse experiences. Now, I do not know whether any
statement of that kind belongs into the oral history. I
really rely on you there, whether you think that it is too
pompous or too big sounding. Please tell me.
This is an integral part of your character as a teacher and as
an artist. It's worth saying. I don't think it's pompous.
It certainly is something I have continuously struggled with--
being torn between things that came naturally to me and that I
would pronounce, holding up the banner even if I had seen them
fail.
What you said a moment ago encourages me to tell you that
there were also things that I felt quite certain about, so
that I repeated them very often over the years. Maybe I
should quote a few of these.
Teaching and Human Experience
Lederer: One subject that came up often in classes is "good
composition." I tried to tell the students always that there
is no such thing as a "good composition" in art and design but
only an arrangement or order of all elements that supports
what the artist wants to bring out. A composition is good if
it does that.
I tried to emphasize that we can only react to what we
see as human beings. If ants or birds have an art, it must be
based on different kinds of reacting because they see things
from different angles than we. If I call a vertical line a
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line of firmness that has a basis in our way of standing, and
the horizontal a line of rest, that is not a personal
interpretation but a reaction as a human being.
Kandinsky has pointed out in a book that I often quoted
that to put a horizontal into a rectangle means that you have
created a subject matter, because you have created the concept
of sky and ground. It's interesting that this observation
comes from the artist who is generally considered as the
originator of nonobjective art.
What I very often came across was that students tried to
justify a confusing appearance in a design as arousing
curiosity and for that reason, intriguing. I told them,
"Confusion is not intriguing." [laughter] It is the same in
an illustration; lack of clarity in representation is not
subtleness. I used as example the illustrations of Odilon
Redon, so full of subtleness and mystery, yet how clearly
stated they are.
At my retirement farewell party, a well-known designer
who had been in my class recalled my appeal not to make
designs which lacked definition by telling the audience, "When
I work, there is something in my ears that Wolfgang has said:
'Make the round ones round and make the straight ones
straight .
' "
[ laughter ]
To talk about letter forms offered a wonderful source to
study forms that are not naturally grown but are manmade and
have an established tradition of appearance. The letter "A"
upside-down is not an imaginative interpretation of an "A."
It is not an "A" anymore. In analyzing design, I often
discussed the number of means employed: how many forms, how
many directions, how many colors, how many contrasts. All
these are basic means of design. Depending on the richness of
the total concept, all these means can be used but not all of
them with the same emphasis if they are not to create an
endless jumble. That's something that one can point out in
teaching visual design. The student can learn to use more or
less of one or the other element for the sake of letting one
or the other speak.
There is a wonderful illustration by Matisse in his book,
Jazz, showing in the suggestion of cut-out shapes and in very
strong flat colors a carriage drawn by horses. The subject
matter in this case is only a means to tie the play of forms
and colors together. If this were meant as an illustration of
an actual scene, having as its theme the same subject, the
colors and shapes would be all wrong. If it is the interplay
96
of all elements and what they do for each other that justifies
the abstraction and simplification used. A discussion of
whether forms and shapes are right or wrong, whether I like
them or not, would be totally pointless.
I tried to pick out a few things here to illustrate the
idea of teaching design by distilling essential judgments from
our natural reactions as human beings. That's what I would
always try to bring out. If you see a rhythmical line, and
that rhythmical line has to overcome contrasting elements, and
it overcomes them, we find that that rhythmical line is more
interesting- -the way we find a horse running over a hurdle
more interesting than a horse just running along.
I often used the example of a landscape of fields by Van
Gogh, going very much into the depth. Van Gogh used in the
foreground a very intense vermilion for some poppies. He used
exactly the same red on some roofs that are far, far in the
background. It is impossible to see these two reds as equal,
because you experience the one as belonging to the foreground,
the other one as all the way in the background. So you relate
differently to them. It indicates that what we see in an
image is enriched by our experience in its subject matter.
Subject Matter. Nonobiective Art, and Illustration
Lederer: I do not believe that what we look at can ever be free from
associations in the same way as we hear music. I even
maintain that our reactions are enriched by the suggestion of
subject matter, also in modern art, where the subject matter
has become frequently a subordinated concern.
Nathan: Are you suggesting that the painting is its own subject?
Lederer: The painting is its own subject. Right. A nonobjective
painting can be a tremendous thing, like a Josef Albers or
Rothko, and can be in its own right wonderful, because it has
within it the scheme of forms that are free of associations
like squares, or almost free of associations like a square and
pure color. It can have an unbelievable richness to it. But
as soon as subject matter enters, something else enters. For
anybody who does illustration, it is important to come to
terms with the question of subject matter, because the
illustrator has to see his place in the world of visual
experiences that today are very much influenced by experiences
in nonobjective art. What is usually taught in illustration
97
happens to be largely based on experiences in the Western
world. It is an outgrowth of the Renaissance and the
experiences of observation of nature, perspective,
foreshortening- -all matters that come from the Renaissance.
But that should not exclude an awareness that there is in
the world of the past and present as much illustrative work
being done that comes from totally different worlds, let's say
the Japanese, Persian, African forms of illustration, which
are just as valid. But the Western world is the world in
which we happen to live, and in which I had to assume the
students would want to work later on as professionals. In
teaching, I could only offer something based on the Western
world, although if a student with a totally different
background had shown up, I believe I could have coped with
that, too, by relying on what I know of basic human reactions
to the visual world that exist in spite of differences in
cultural backgrounds. Which brings up the question--! don't
know whether that belongs in here- -of free choice of courses
for students, which was brought in in the 70s in response to
students' insistent urging.
Nathan: Is this concerning core curriculum?
Lederer: That's right, yes. Interestingly enough, while the course
requirements and sequence of courses were taken apart in the
last ten years while I was still there, they have now come
back full fling. We talked about changes being undertaken
quickly and sometimes also too quickly. I am sorry for
students who happened to be at a school or were studying
during the years when these old things were just being taken
apart, before it had been found out that the new ones really
didn't work too well. There are quite a few students who were
left with a mixed-up sort of education.
Nathan: That is a hazard.
Lederer: For that reason, holding in the reins may be in the long run
still the better thing, although the new thing might sound
very adventurous: "It sounds interesting, let's try it."
[Interview 4: July 5, 1988]
Nathan: Today, do you have more to say about the college?
Lederer: Yes, I did not know whether I talked about how it ended for me
towards my retirement.
98
Personnel Changes and Reorganization
Nathan: No, I don't think you did.
Lederer: All right. In my last five or six years there, I gradually
reduced my teaching activities, and also passed on the
chairmanship to a former, very gifted student, Steve Reoutt,
whom I had brought into the department as a teacher of graphic
design and illustration. After his graduation, he had a
career mostly in the East. Both he and the recently appointed
dean of design have moved as professionals into directions
that are quite different from mine. Yet, it allows me a
pleasant sense of continuation to remember that at one time I
helped them on their way when they were in my classes.
99
VII LIFE IN ART, AND FREELANCE WORK
Lederer: Now I have actually to jump back and go back to my beginnings
in California. In the nearly forty years I was at the
college, I was there only two days of the week and the rest of
the time I was doing my own work. When I started out, I
thought of my own work mostly as drawing and painting, and
this is also what I did for a while. I made drawings of a
good many city scenes of San Francisco, and of people and also
developed a great interest in the ballet as a subject. When
the interest in ballet in America started, Harold Christensen
had a school on Van Ness Avenue, where I had gotten permission
to sketch, and also in Katherine Dunham's classes.
One -Man Shows
Lederer: I had two one-man shows during those early years. One was at
the old Elder Gallery and consisted of drawings and
watercolors, mostly of New York and of San Francisco. It was
very well reviewed, particularly by Alfred Frankenstein, the
art critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, who commented that
"...he is a latter-day Suydam, but a Suydam with a bang."
The other show was at the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, in which I showed illustrations and graphic design.
Again, I had very good reactions. This show, by the way, was
arranged by Douglas MacAgy, assistant to the director, Grace
McCann Morley. He later became director of the San Francisco
School of Fine Arts, where he had a great influence in setting
the scene for Abstract Expressionism in California. I also
showed with the San Francisco Art Association. All pointed
towards establishing myself in a broad way in the Bay Area.
I should mention that I was rejected by the army when the
war broke out because of my poor hearing. I tried to get into
100
a war-related work by taking a special drafting course for
engineering drafting, but I found out that was absolutely not
something I was made for. I felt, as a matter of fact,
downright humiliated by finding there are all kinds of people
who had never held a pencil in their hands before, who
suddenly were able to do these mechanical drawings with a
great deal of skill and understanding that somehow totally
escaped me.
After two years in San Francisco, I got married to my
friend from Vienna, Hanni Hirschberg, whom I had come to visit
here originally. Now, with children coming, the college was
by no means sufficient anymore as a source of income.
Europeans and the California Wine Industry
Lederer: I had become acquainted with Alfred Fromm and Otto Meyer, who,
with a tradition of wine production in Germany, had been asked
to develop the promotion of the products of the Christian
Brothers Winery.
When I had come to New York originally, I was surprised
to see in the subways big posters that talked about the
drinking of wine as an accessory to pleasant living, as
something to complement meals. I couldn't understand these
posters in the least. They didn't advertise any particular
wine; they only talked about the pleasure of drinking wine.
Coming from Europe, to see that one would have to advertise
the enjoyment of wine was a very odd thing. It was at that
time that the wine industry in America really began to assert
itself and tried to influence the consumption of wine in
competition with hard liquor. After all these years, it is
very evident how successful this campaign has been.
There was a third person, also a refugee from Germany,
E.B. Wienand, who had taken over a publication called Wines
and Vines. E.B. Wienand wanted a new cover design for that
magazine. He felt that the old one was not attractive; a
typical European attitude, you might say. He had just taken
on a new publication, and the first thing he wanted was that
it should look good.
So I designed that, and gradually there were more tasks
for that magazine, design of advertisements, and advice on
typographical questions. Soon he started a second
publication, the American Wine Merchant, and needed
101
considerably more help since, like all trade publications, the
magazines existed on sold advertising space. I produced
layouts for advertisements to help with the sale of
advertising space.
Nathan: Were both these journals intended to cover California, or were
they national in scope?
Lederer: They were both national and had totally different emphasis.
Wines and Vines talked generally about growing vines and
producing wine, and American Wine Merchant generally about
ways to promote, sell merchandise, and advertise wine. After
three years, I was made art director of Wienand's
organization, called Wine Publications, which by then had a
third publication added, called the Grape Grower. Once a
year, Wienand published the Annual of the Wine Industry. So
there was a great deal of work, handling these three monthly
publications, graphically, with editorial design,
illustrations, and the layouts for advertisements.
In addition, this activity got me in touch with various
people in the wine industry. Over the next twenty years or
so, I did a great variety of work -- trademarks , packages,
brochures, advertisements, labels, flyers, name it- -for the
Christian Brothers winery, Paul Masson, Charles Krug, and
other wineries. A few labels I started from scratch, in other
instances existing labels required revisions or additions. My
new design for Charles Krug was very successful, and its logo
is still used after all these years with some slight
transformation.
This activity provided me with necessary income- -my two
sons, Tom and Andrew, were born in 1944 and 1946 --and also
offered interesting activities of a great variety. I built up
a storehouse of practical experiences, particularly in the
areas of advertisements for trade journals, package and label
design, brochures, and also in producing camera-ready art.
Nathan: Did you work in color?
Lederer: Yes, depending on the nature of the work. The publications,
with exception of the cover, were all black and white except
for occasional two-color advertisements. The cover of the
Annual was a full-color design, which I handled with a very
complicated system of color separations for four different
inks by producing four separate black and white renderings
that coordinated in overprinting to achieve the necessary mix
and blending of colors .
102
One would not do that today because in the meanwhile, the
handling of the four-color process has been simplified to such
an extent that this exorbitant amount of work with these
separations would not be warranted anymore. But at that time,
there was a great deal of penny-pinching necessary in the
production. So I did a good deal of technical work, too, to
help these projects along.
This was not the kind of work that I really wanted to do
most, but since there was hardly any book production in
California at that time, it was certainly a field in which it
was possible to do a great variety of work and work of good
quality. Working with and for E.B. Wienand, I worked with a
highly cultured person. He happened to agree with me,
although we never had any philosophic session on that. By
tradition or upbringing, we agreed that whatever one presented
to the public should bear the stamp of quality and should be
decent- looking.
We worked contrary to the idea, "Simply hit them over the
head as long as they get the message." And, I think that in
the process we really proved our point. The advertisements
sold, the journals flourished; so the stress on quality in no
way interfered with the aim of the publications --to make money
for the company.
There were other people I worked with, and they all
enriched my acquaintance with working procedures in many
fields. For instance, I worked with Irving Marcus, who had a
reputation as a famous football star way back, but by now was
a very good writer and editor at Wine Publications, a man who
had occupied himself with the production of printed pieces
since his youth. He had a very clever, shrewd, down-to-earth
mind that gave me a good deal of insights in many areas of
work that I would not have gotten otherwise. We became
friends, and in turn, I met in his home a number of his
friends who, with varied professional backgrounds, contributed
very much to my understanding of American life, in particular,
also of the political scene. It was the beginning of a fuller
understanding of many areas ,
and also the beginning of some of
our long- lasting friendships in this country, which up to that
time had been rather restricted by newcomers' natural tendency
to find access easier to people who had backgrounds and
experiences similar to their own.
Another person of interest at Wine Publications was Tom
Weber, a photo- journalist ,
who later became well-known as a
roving reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, where he
wrote provocative articles from various corners of the world.
103
The Clients' Concerns
Lederer: What I was often confronted with- -the very problem I tried to
explain to my students- -was how to deal with the clients, how
to work in the face of sometimes unreasonable demands as far
as the quality of the design or the sense of the design was
concerned. I learned in the process that the one thing to
avoid in contact with clients was to talk about design with
them. What I tried to talk about were practical matters, the
things that concerned them. In other words, if you advertise
something, where do you advertise it? To whom do you
advertise it? What are the surroundings on the page? What
are the viewing conditions? What sets your message apart? If
you can do this, you get the client to accept you not as a
decorator, or as a person who wants to palm off art ideas on
you, but as a right-hand man who knows what this particular
printed piece is meant to achieve.
I find the process of producing something and wanting to
sell it and thereby make a living a totally honorable kind of
activity. Like any human activity, it's often shoddily
handled, but that does not mean that in itself it is a shoddy
activity. That also applies to advertising. To tell people
that something is available, to describe it in attractive
terms so that they would want to look at it closer, is in no
way a bad thing. I depend on it in many areas. Most of my
information on new tools, available paper, or equipment, comes
from advertisements .
If I say this now, I must certainly forget a host of
negative experiences, but you can have those in any field. I
certainly objected strenuously to the idea that, as it is
sometimes thought, "If you are an artist, you do what you want
to do. If you are a designer, you do what the client wants
you to do." This is pure stupidity. The client has needs,
and they should be understood, but the client cannot tell you
what you should do. If a client wanted to show me the way he
wanted the design of whatever it was to look, then I wouldn't
play. It doesn't make any sense.
Words and Illustrations
Lederer: I have always found that a good client is the surest way to
producing good work. A good client relies on you as the
person with the experience to translate his needs into a
104
Nathan:
graphic image. We are dealing with communication, and we, as
designers, happen to be interested in communicating by visual
means. That goal starts with words. For that reason, a full
understanding of what copy is to convey is extremely
important.
And I'm now not talking about books. That is a chapter
all of its own. I found often, when we had sessions where
people were groping for clever slogans, I might simply ask:
"What do you want to get across?" A simple answer to that
question often made the best slogan. I must add here that in
discussing approaches to advertising, I have confined myself
to the type of advertising with which I gained a personal
working acquaintance in these publications. There exists
another vast area, in which the big advertising agencies play
such a tremendous role, and that is the building up through
advertising campaigns of images that in the public's mind set
products clearly apart that actually differ in name only.
Many aspects enter into the making of these sometimes gigantic
and long-drawn-out campaigns and go beyond my personal
experiences. Personal experiences are the only thing I want
to talk about here .
You were saying that copywriting intrigued you, and you became
interested in the words?
Lederer: Yes, the words. Well, my interest in illustration also
started with the words, with the words of authors. But in the
case of advertising, the connection is, of course, much more
direct. It has to be as direct as possible. On that basis, I
could involve myself with more than just doing the visual
amplification of the words, but considered the words an
integral part of the whole design.
Graphic Design and Inherent Conditions
Lederer: All this goes back to the basic idea that our work as graphic
designers starts from certain conditions that are inherent in
the nature of the task. We have to understand the nature of
the task to the fullest in order to come up with a creative
response that answers the needs of that task. But I do not
consider that a confinement.
105
Nathan:
Lederer :
If that is a confinement, I consider it a welcome one,
because instead of having to sit down at my desk and try out
500,000 possibilities, there is a certain area within which to
work. There is a crucial difference in approaching your desk
as somebody who wants to make a drawing based on something
that appeared in his or her mind in the night and wants to
develop that, or whether you want to respond to the specific
task.
I am trying to put a bit complex story into a nutshell,
but it's still the basis on which I would educate young people
towards design or illustration. If they could grasp that
difference, if they could accept that, and if they found it
intriguing, then they were made for that field. If they have
lots and lots of ideas but find that given conditions were in
their way, then they have a problem. So I tried when I met
new clients to find out from them as much as possible about
their product or the direction of their message or outlook,
but I did not ask them, "Do you like this kind of design or
that kind of design?"
Did you find them forthcoming?
Well, that varies with as many people as you meet. All of
them, if you ask them questions that go to the heart of what
they are concerned with, will be forthcoming. They want to
get that across to you.
Wine Labels and Product Use
Lederer: I had once an experience, since you asked that question, that
was radically the opposite of what should happen. Somebody
gave me a long spiel that he wanted a wine label to be the
most refined and delicate and European kind of label
imaginable. I thought, well, now I have found my man, and I
can do the thing exactly as I would want it to be, namely with
a European tradition, which without making differences in
quality judgment, is a totally different one. I might want to
say something about that afterwards. But in any case, when I
presented my sketches, he threw up his arms and said, "How can
one see that from half a mile away in a supermarket?"
[laughter]
What I wanted to mention before is the changes in
approach that the wine labels themselves reflect in relation
to the nature of the change in the uses of the product. At
106
Nathan:
Lederer :
the beginning, wine labels were a mixture between the
traditions that one was familiar with from Europe, but at the
same time infused also with a desire to make its point in the
competitive market conditions as they exist here.
In Europe, a wine label is essentially a decorative
addition. People buy a wine by its name and even by the year,
because they know which wine and year were good ones . When
they put that wine on the table, the elegant label adds to the
feeling that you are drinking something precious. To convey
that is the essential task of the label. Whereas in America,
with wine being introduced at that time more or less as a
daily commodity, a different attitude had to prevail, and
people had to be made to see ,
to even discover the wine in the
store. In order to be successful in advertising, that label
had to be effective in a reduced size, clearly showing it as
different-looking from those of the competition, in black and
white.
At an early time, Jo Sinel, whom I mentioned before as a
very influential designer, designed some labels for Petri that
were absolutely stunning, but they were not different as eye-
catchers from a label for soap.
The interesting thing is that now with wine being so much
part of the "in" scene, the labels have swung back all the
way, and they feature sometimes the most delicate,
sophisticated, restrained designs which tell the customers
that this comes from a winery where they really know what they
are doing, and most likely they do it in their backyard,
[laughter] So there are differences in attitude that the
history of wine labels has gone through which is
sociologically an illustration of something that has been
going on in one particular area of a commercial development.
I might pause to ask you a question. You were becoming
involved in the development and promotion of wine at a very
early stage, and I wondered whom were you trying to reach
then? Were they people who drink beer? People who had never
drunk wine?
I tried to reach the people who were addressed in the
promotion that was set forth. The message and whom to reach
came from the client. In other words, if the promotion said:
"We are so big a winery that we can produce our wine
inexpensively, and, for that reason, it is for everybody," I
would try to bring that message out as strongly as possible
through whatever illustrative or design means I could think
of. If the message was, on the other hand, "We produce only
107
for a select group of people," the design approach would be
geared with a sophisticated audience in mind.
Advertising of wine was handled by large advertising
agencies with their copywriters as part of image-creating
campaigns. Advertisements for Wines and Vines or for the
American Wine Merchant covered more specific areas of
production, quality, and distribution, because these
publications went exclusively to the trade.
But as far as label design is concerned, there certainly
were definite differences to be considered. The Christian
Brothers wanted to reach a very wide audience. Paul Masson
was already then directed towards a much more select kind of
audience. That certainly made a difference. I hope that I
did make it clear that the difference is not one of taste in
the handling of the design. Jo Sinel's Petri label that I
mentioned just now is an example of an excellent design that
was definitely meant to say, "Wine is not a fancy thing," and
it did it extremely well.
Clients and Their Styles
Lederer: You had some very good questions: What sort of framework do
clients provide? Do you participate in decisions? Do you
offer alternatives? All these questions are impossible to
answer in general terms because the differences in how various
organizations approach the designer are tremendous.
Sometimes, it can be a one-to-one person thing, and sometimes
it is meeting with a whole group of people. Sometimes, they
are willing to spend a good deal of time with you; sometimes,
it has to be done in a very limited amount of time. So, one
cannot really make very good generalizations there.
The essential thing, I think, is that as a designer, one
has to be prepared to meet all kinds of people and to react to
different attitudes in different ways. I find that very
interesting, and contact with people stimulating. To deal
with different people means that even the same tasks, that in
themselves might seem the same thing --another label with
different words- -become each time a new kind of task.
Nathan: A very interesting and good answer: it is a different problem
each time.
108
Lederer: Yes, working with different people who have different
attitudes and aims.
Well, there are other tasks where the difference is
inherent in the nature of the task. I can work on fifty
different books with one design director or one publisher and
will have fifty totally different tasks because fifty
different authors speak to me. Even if it is not possible to
actually read each book that you design, some reading in the
manuscript provides insight into contents, style, and tone.
In that case, a variety of people as clients is not necessary.
As a matter of fact, in that case, I would even say sometimes
that is a blessing because you do not have to each time
readjust your thinking or your attitude or your approaches to
what you are doing to the reaction of a different person.
What I am saying here is something that works for me, and
certainly not every designer, by any means, works that way.
There are very excellent designers who present their work in a
much more demanding way and scare their clients by saying,
"Well, I'm the person who knows what you should have, and I
know how to do it well, and that is it." That can be very
effective. As a matter of fact, it can be helpful when
clients cannot make up their minds or are uncertain about
decisions. But you can only do what is given to you
temperamentally to do.
I certainly prefer what my experience has been, doing it
my way even if it kept me on a smaller scale of operation. I
also prefer a direct contact with a client to having a
representative who gets the work, brings back second-hand
information that he or she has tried to cull from the client,
and tells you what to do. Now, for many designers or
illustrators who find contact with people difficult, or that
it makes them nervous, or who don't want to spend the time on
it, to have a representative is excellent. A representative
can be very much the given thing for a person who specializes
in a certain type of work, like illustrators who work in a
certain style for which they are well known. In that case,
they are happy if they can stick to their desk.
Varied Design Tasks in the Wine Industry
Lederer: I am still thinking of certain tasks in the wine industry.
The wine-related tasks were so varied that even at one time I
designed an exhibition for the Wine Museum. Alfred Fromm had
109
at that time created that museum in San Francisco to show
there his collections of objects of an historical nature
connected with wine. I had already designed catalogues for
the wine museum, but at that time there was to be an
historical exhibition.
Nathan: I remember seeing the exhibit of wine vessels, cups.
Lederer: Yes, it was wine vessels and drinking glasses. I designed
large showcases for that exhibit with big three-dimensional
backgrounds and display stands giving these objects a
historical reference. It was a fun assignment of a totally
different nature from what I usually do. Obviously, with a
background and an understanding for the needs of design, one
can answer all kinds of demands.
As a matter of fact, currently it is very much the trend
anyway for graphic designers to also go into display design
and showroom design and things of that kind- -all of which can
be an outgrowth of their work.
Nathan: While we're thinking a little more about this, I had a note
about your serving as art director of Farm Publications.
Lederer: I did not go into that. Wine Publications was at one point
sold, and I stayed with E.B. Wienand, who then developed Farm
Publications, offering me the same opportunities to work in
the various fields of graphic design and communication and
advertising and cover design and layout for magazines, but it
was, as far as the aura of the subject matter was concerned,
much less alluring than wine, which has certain traditions and
romantic associations.
Working for those publications had definite limitations
in what could be done, particularly with the design of the
publications themselves. I handled each issue essentially as
an individual production; that means not with a standard
design into which everything would fall, although I
established a basic image for each publication. But, of
course, the nature of the stories was repetitious, the
printers and typesetters we worked with were not the greatest
and were geared to fast production. So what could be done was
achieved with a good deal of effort, but it could only go so
far.
Then this work also came to an end about 1965, through
outside circumstances that changed the course of my
professional life in a fortunate way.
110
Career Changes, and the Realm of Books
Lederer: That certainly meant a good deal of inner struggle for me,
including the struggle with the idea to go back East where the
book field was, but with a family now I did not have the
courage for such an undertaking. What held me back was
certainly also my Europeanness in wanting to go a safe and
prescribed path from one thing to another. I am certain that
most of the people I came to know who had grown up here would
have changed their path when it did not satisfy them anymore.
Ill
VIII BOOKS, CARDS, AND QUALITY OF PRODUCTION
Lederer: When Wienand retired and sold his business to a midwestern
firm, there was no further place for me in that, and probably
at the best moment possible, this area of my work ended.
Meanwhile, my sons, who had gone through college and both
spent two years in the Peace Corps, were on their own, so I
could do work that was less remunerative . What had seemed to
me such good pay when I started to work for publishers in New
York at my beginning in America looked different to me by now.
Back to Book DesJEn
Lederer: I went back into book design. I approached various publishers
and made contact, and over the years have done much work for
Chronicle Books, Presidio Press, Sierra Club Books, and
others, and particularly also for the University of California
Press. What had happened meanwhile was that some of the book
industry had moved West, while the main book production, the
main publishing houses, the main offices of most of the big
publishing houses still remained located in the East. There
were some publishers that started out here, particularly
college-book oriented publications. Those have grown since
then, and the publishing endeavors of the universities,
Stanford and California, that had at one time started as a
prestige kind of activity for the universities, had become
solid publishing enterprises.
Nathan: What other things are you thinking of now?
Lederer: Other things? Well, books.
Nathan: And fine journals and scholarly journals?
112
The Glories of Letterpress
Lederer: Journals and books with a level of production where a certain
class of style and quality of printing in itself is an issue.
Fortunately, I found almost at the beginning of my
commercially oriented endeavors a young printer, Harold
Berliner, who already in his school days had, as a side
avocation, started printing and had gotten his schoolmates to
help him with the production of Christmas cards that he sold.
I saw a little exhibition which featured some of his work and
sent him a few of my designs. I think I mentioned I designed
regularly Christmas cards for the American Artists Group and
others. He liked them very much and asked me to do work for
him.
Out of this humble beginning of doing cards, which he
printed and produced very beautifully, developed, together
with the growth of his typesetting and printing shop, a large
number of tasks for me over the years. This has been going on
for- -let's see, we roughly started in '45- -for over forty
years .
Harold Berliner has, in the meanwhile, increased his
shop's activities considerably and has a wonderful setup in
Nevada City. The shop handles a great variety of tasks,
partly on order, partly initiated by him. He has a vast store
of special molds for typefaces and ornaments and decorative
pieces that he has gathered over the years. He even offers an
extensive service of producing Monotype typefaces for
typesetters all over the country- -typesetters who, like him,
have an interest to uphold the glories of printing
letterpress, which by now, with the dominance of offset
printing and computer type production, is something that has
become a specialty, a craft rather than a commercial
enterprise.
It is wonderful to be part of these activities which,
amazingly enough, Harold Berliner always has maintained as a
side activity, being primarily a lawyer with a big law firm.
As a matter of fact, for a number of years, he was district
attorney in Nevada City. He is a tremendously vibrant,
active, and enthusiastic person. Sometimes, it meant that
projects took a long time to see the light of day, but it's
always wonderful when it happens. For me, it was a more than
welcome outlet as a side activity in addition to what I was
doing in my daily work. It led ultimately to the production
of considerably more than just Christmas cards. There were
brochures; there were posters, broadsides, and ultimately,
112a
Review from Fine Print
Harold Berliner's Typcfoundry
m Main Street
Nevada City, California 95959
Memo to the Mountain Lion. 1984. Designed by Wolfgang Lederer.
Printed by Harold Berliner. 47 x 55 cm. Lutetia types on Curtis
Ragston paper. 750 copies, $30.
A political message is
presented by Wallace Stegner, the
Pulitzer-prize-winning author who has lent his name to many
environmental causes in the San Francisco Bay Area. Memo
to the Mountain Lion is a beautifully written essay addressed
to that animal, an apology for human action against it and a
plea for sane behavior toward it. This is a long piece,
five
para
graphs of text, difficult to place on a single sheet so that it still
entices and, up closer, reads well. Wolfgang Lederer, the de
signer, has chosen a traditional rendering of the work: title
at the top, name printed following the text, colophon in one
line at the tail of the sheet.
The piece is
lovely, in perfect balance with itself and with
the sheet of paper it rests on. At the top, Lederer has drawn
the mountain lion, evidently stalking unseen prey along a
green vine; the initial letter of the first
paragraph is
par
tially superimposed over the image. There is a distinctly
medieval approach to the illustration in both use and scale.
This is made fresh and contemporary by its
juxtaposition with
the title of the essay, which is set in two lines in capitals
and
lower case rather than in the all
capitals one might expect. As
befits the idea of a memo, the text is set
ragged right (a little
too ragged in some instances). A more formal touch is added
by beginning each of the four succeeding paragraphs with a
capital
letter printed in a second color (the russet used for the
initial letter of the text). This color is also used to emphasize
the central message of the text: "If we cannot live in harmony
with other forms of life, if we cannot control our hostility
toward the earth and its creatures, how shall we ever learn to
control our hostility toward each other?"
Stegner's name is added at the bottom in the green of the
vine at the top of the sheet; this and his residence are printed
in small caps. The printing, while it doesn't sparkle, is certain
ly competent and beautifully registered; the edition is
quite
large,
numbered for some reason but unsigned, printed on
Ragston paper and not made to be more than it is. The work,
analyzed by its
component parts, seems at first to be contra
dictoryformality mixed with informality, medieval image
and contemporary titling, stylized type and mostly casual
style of writing. Yet taken as a whole it is
compelling, strongly
designed and meant to be read, a credit to the talents of
designer and writer. K.W.
Nathan:
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also, books like one that is in production now that is devoted
to some fifteenth century songs, which I have illustrated with
fifty illustrations, all in color, a very enjoyable and
ambitious project.
Yes, it is. Now, I'm assuming that we will come back to your
interest in book production.
Lederer: Oh, yes, book production as such. I only wanted to indicate
this work as something by which I maintained some kind of a
balance to the type of work and various activities in
connection mostly with the wine industry.
Nathan: Either here or when we start again, I did want to ask you a
little about your choice of lettering and your choice of
paper- -whether this is part of what you did, let's say, in the
brochure design.
Lederer: Yes, it certainly enters there, although it entered with
considerably more possibilities later on when I got back into
book design; then the choice of paper could become very
important, although it is primarily a responsibility of the
production department in the publishing house.
In the work connected with trade publications, the
choices were often restricted by economic considerations.
Choice of form or style of lettering, like that of
illustration, is of course part of the design. As far as
typefaces are concerned, the choices were frequently limited
by what the print shops had on hand. The vast array of
typefaces that has become available now as part of computer-
driven equipment even for very economic production, was not
available at that time.
Travels and Graphic Design (1955)
Lederer: What I also wanted to mention is that after the war we started
traveling, and I enriched my life and my observations
considerably by traveling in various parts of Europe. I saw
what was going on in graphic design in the various countries
we visited- -Germany, Italy, France, England- -and also visited
some of the art schools. I remember, that was in 1955, so
that was only ten years after the war, I got into West Berlin,
where I visited with my father and my brother. I went to a
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school that was roughly the equivalent of the Oakland college
here, and I was quite overcome by the spaciousness, the
orderliness, the equipment- -how that all was kept. It was ten
years since this city had been battered to rubble. It gave me
an idea of the recuperating force at work there that later, of
course ,
led to the tremendous economic development that one
has seen in Germany.
Nathan: I wondered whether you were mentally comparing the work that
students were doing in West Berlin with that done here?
Lederer: No, what I saw was not sufficiently revealing there, because
my visit there was during vacation time. I was shown through
the place, and I saw the facilities, but no work.
But I remember, unforgettably, that I visited once in
Zurich the very famous Arts and Crafts School there. I
entered this very spacious, beautiful building with vast
corridors, elevators for faculty only, and walked through
corridors with doors hermetically closed. Then I came to an
open space where two faculty members in white smocks, the way
doctors here wear them, were putting up an exhibit of
students' artwork, placing some package design into display
cases. They would put a piece up and then step back, evaluate
its placement, and then an underling who was standing nearby
with a feather -duster came forward and dusted each piece when
it was placed.
Thinking of the confusion, turmoil, participation, and
activities that went on when we put up exhibits, I thought it
could not be more of an illustration of a different world than
seeing these white-clad gentlemen, who looked like medical
doctors, and their helpers with the feather -duster, arranging
that exhibit of students' work with no student present,
[laughter] This little scene revealed an entirely different
world to me. The Swiss are leaders in design education, and
they are doing something to look up to. With its rigidness,
it would not fit into the American scene, as the little scene
I observed made quite evident.
Apart from that, I traveled in Europe to get to know
things that I had not known before. Except for visiting my
family, we avoided Germany most of the time because of the
unpleasant feelings lingering in our minds. Mostly, we veered
towards Italy, where we felt very much at home. I did an
abundance of drawings in streets, and parks and museums,
wherever I saw things that fascinated me because even in a
small sketch, I experienced impressions much more intensively
than by mere observation. Every one of those many hundreds of
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drawings brings a. full recall of the scene and its
environment .
This sketching led later on to a very nice assignment.
Everywhere I had drawn with great enjoyment old hand-made toys
from all over the world, which I love. The richest experience
I had was in ten days of almost uninterrupted drawing in the
Girard collection of the enchanting Folk Art Museum in Santa
Fe, New Mexico. The owner of a new toy store, Heffalump, in
San Francisco, saw these drawings and asked me to become the
illustrator of a newsletter that he is producing. But these
travels had really no practical aim beyond enriching myself by
looking and drawing. The collections of these drawings are
simply in a number of portfolios and only quite occasionally
have I shown them in exhibitions at the college or elsewhere.
Nathan: I wonder whether you had ever gone to Mexico?
Lederer: Yes, I have twice been in Mexico, and the same thing happened
there. There, too, the experience of what one sees in the
streets as well as in the unbelievable museums, and the
monumental pre-Columbian sites, is something that has had a
tremendous meaning, opening a new world for me. I think of
the anthropological museum in Mexico City as probably the most
beautiful museum in the world. I call it a place of worship,
rather than a museum, in the way that one experiences great
art there. What I feel about all great art is that it
confirms a sense that life is not a paltry thing. Watching
the reverence of the Mexican peasants contemplating with awe
the wonders of their past deepens that experience.
I always felt that the greatest arts have always been
connected with life and people wanting to communicate
something. They used a place, or an object, or a situation in
life to which the thing they were creating was a contribution,
a way of enhancing their daily or religious life. Of course,
in Mexico you find that so very strongly not only in the
objects in the museum of the past with all their ritualistic
meanings, but you find it also in the incorporation of the
startling contemporary murals wherever you turn.
Volunteering in Graphic Design
Lederer: In a way, that corroborated very strongly my feeling about our
role as designers, contributing to the life of the people
among whom we live. I had reduced my workload when I retired
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from the college and decided to contribute in a more, how
should I say, direct way by involving myself in volunteer work
as a graphic designer, trying to help organizations with
whatever skills and abilities I have. I wanted to help them
put out their communications in a better form. This proved
sometimes quite difficult because one is accustomed to working
with people who deal with you as a professional and are
themselves professionals; you can establish a rapport on that
basis.
You know what they are talking about, and I know what I
am talking about. In dealing with lay people, this can become
very difficult. I found them sometimes very, very nice, and
very unusual as human experiences, but also at times
enervating and in a way that stymied me. In many instances,
my chances to make a contribution were limited by amateurish
reactions and an inability to listen to experienced advice.
Nathan: Did you work with Geoff Link?
Lederer: I wanted to talk about that. The group is called San
Francisco Study Center. The center is a nonprofit
organization that is set up to help community groups to get
their stories out in a professionally presented, inexpensively
produced manner. In this case, they put out a good number of
printed materials which benefit from well-organized, well-
thought-through presentation. Since I was taken on their
advisory board, I took my role in this case with less shyness
about hurting feelings and hurting very personal involvement
of individuals to preconceived ideas. I could have some
influence with advice and with the individual pieces.
In the meanwhile, this organization has expanded its
activities with a section called Community Graphics, and they
have some very good persons working there. I maintain contact
with them and participate in meetings of the Board of
Directors.
Fascination with Magazines
Nathan :
Lederer:
To ask you another question would you deal with the journals
that you designed for Alfred Heller, Cry California, and
World's Fair?
That actually belongs to the whole area of journals,
always had an intuitive interest in publications and
I have
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magazines. As a boy of twelve, I put out publications of all
kinds of regularly issued material. The world of magazines
with its variety of material --taking the word "magazine"
literallyhas a great fascination for me, and also the manner
in which it is presented and how with all that variety, each
time a definite image is projected.
So that when you think of a publication, you do not think
of one appearance only, but you think of it as you would think
of the appearance of a person. whatever dress that person
puts on, it is still always the same person. That goes for a
publication which remains the same, although it is very
important that each issue presents itself as a new one to the
eye, which is different from the strictly individual
appearance of a book, unless it's part of a series.
I have always welcomed opportunities to design journals
and magazines, and one of the very enjoyable ones in that
respect was Cry California. It had a very noble subject
matter, to work on ecological issues and influence outcomes.
It was handled by a man who had, by avocation, always involved
himself in important issues that engaged more than a
commercial interest on his part. He is Alfred Heller from an
old San Francisco family.
He approached me at one time with the task of redesigning
the cover of Cry California. I did this, and this was the
beginning of a long, fruitful, and enjoyable association.
Later on, he asked me to redesign the interior of Cry
California and design individual covers, which went on for
several years until the publication changed hands and totally
changed its appearance.
Alfred Heller started a new publication, and that
publication is the outgrowth of his personal, lifelong
fascination with world's fairs, which he considers a source of
endless enrichment and stimulation, and has followed and seen
for many years. When he started that publication, he had
already worked with one or two other designers trying to get
from them an image for his new publication, but wasn't
satisfied.
He sat down with me, and that is a good example of
somebody talking about what he envisioned. In this case, his
talk was enriched by his interest in and acquaintance with
typography, which he had studied with Jack Stauffacher, the
well-known San Francisco typographer. That gave, of course, a
very rich and welcome background, particularly also his
references to eighteenth and early nineteenth century British
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Nathan:
Lederer :
publications. I designed that publication and received a very
nice letter: "My search has come to an end."
Since that time- -we are in the eighth year already- -this
quarterly publication involves me in the design of each issue.
Essentially, what I had laid out at the time was a basic
format and grid to cover all kinds of situations, but as it
turned out, the kind of material at our disposal is so varied
and rich that to really bring it to life still asks for
individual answers. That's what I am trying to contribute
there. There is wonderful historical and new material, and
it's a very satisfying task to work on that.
It's beautiful. Would you say that this publication has the
refined, European look?
It's meant to have that, yes. Heller started out wanting it
to a greater extent to be purely literary, and was very strong
in his intention that pictorial material should be very much
underplayed. My dummies, what I presented to him, were
certainly based on that idea. As it turned out, actually to
show the beauty and the variety of what these world's fairs
offer, particularly the reference to historical subjects,
definitely invited the idea of using illustration more
extensively, and I pushed that it would help this journal
considerably.
Designing Representations
Lederer: Talking about these journals, I remember as one of my really
interesting experiences my work on yet another one. Maybe I
mix up things too much that way if I talk now about another
publication that I worked on much later on?
Nathan: Please go ahead.
Lederer: A few years ago, I was approached by a group of professors at
U.C. Berkeley who wanted their new publication to be designed
from scratch. I met with them, all of them from various
disciplines. They discussed with me the title of the
publication, Representations, and that the nature of the
articles would be a cross-fertilization between departments.
It was a publication deliberately intended not to just stay
within the boundaries of a certain department, which obviously
was a new concept.
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We talked about format and about all kinds of practical
matters: the length of the articles; the nature of the
articles; the kind of illustrations; the expected audience;
and so on. With everyone participating, it was not easy to
listen to and get the gist of what they were discussing. I
had done other publications for the University of California
Press, and I knew that this was an academic publication, and 1
know that these publications are not meant to be sold on
newsstands. They are not heavily advertised and are certainly
not meant to give a feeling of anything that is sensational or
unusual. The design had to stay within the scope of what you
may call a scholarly presentation.
After I had made the interior design, which involved
imagining various kinds of articles, planning for different
kinds of titles and all that goes with the design of the
pages, I presented it to the group with a written outline of
my ideas. The group went wholeheartedly for it, except for
what I thought was the best part of it all: the cover. I had
made a really very elegant design for the cover, but no, that
was not it. It was not it because they felt very strongly
that they were doing something rather unusual in academic
procedure in emphasizing this cross-fertilization of
disciplines, and they wanted the cover to project something
that was quite unusual. I was dealing with a group of highly
intelligent persons who continuously reiterated, "Of course,
we don't know anything about design, but..." in all kinds of
ways voicing their feeling about that publication.
I was very disappointed, but listening to them and
looking at their faces, I realized that I had misjudged my
clients. There were mostly young scholars, anxious that the
publication should make visible that they were mavericks. It
still had to be dignified, it had to belong in the academic
world, but it also had to reflect their kind of attitude among
other publications on the magazine racks in bookstores.
I had to make a U-turn designwise, in my thinking, which
was not easy, because I had occupied myself with the other
formulations. I had come up with something that I felt was
very nice, very elegant, but it was obvious to me now that
this was not it. In the process, I came up with a design,
after a lengthy struggle, that the group fell for one hundred
percent, and which has been- -as they have assured me --an
important contributing factor in what has become a great
success story in academic journalistic publications.
Dealing with people of such intellectual caliber, I found
extremely stimulating, even if the first reaction was
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disheartening. This journal is now already in its fifth year.
It's growing very strongly, and it is getting bigger each time
I see it.
Nathan: That is remarkable.
Lederer: Yes. It's a real success story as far as journals are
concerned. In the meanwhile, I have designed a computer
publication, certainly a new subject for me, and designed
others like Nineteenth Century Literature, the Film Quarterly,
and the Journal of Musicology--al\ for the University of
California Press.
Nathan: You were saying that your recent experiences with the media
tend to make readers want pictorial presentations, rather than
long, long typographical passages only?
Lederer: I'm observing that right now, particularly also in The New
Yorker, whose publication I am extremely fond of. I do not
know whether it will be able to maintain what has been its way
of sticking to long, long articles which are to be read very
carefully, often with sequels in the next issues. I would
love to be proven wrong, but I am concerned whether it will
work that way.
Vitality of American Graphic Design
Lederer: My interest in publication, and I talked about that at another
time, and particularly also what is being done in America with
publications, is something that I was acquainted with already
in Europe, where I knew The New Yorker and Esquire Magazine.
When we went to a coffee shop and saw Esquire Magazine, at
that time in its huge size and with unbelievable lavishness of
illustrations and wonderful paper on which they were produced,
that really gave us an idea of what America could do in
publications. In one way or another that also has remained
extremely alive, the design of magazines. I have observed
that and how their designs have changed, and the way they
continuously change is to me still a source of endless
fascination. In many instances, the design of magazines has
gone the way of endless imitation of American models, as the
perusal of French, German, Italian magazines on an
international display stand clearly shows.
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That is the other side of the medal. The leaders, the
best magazines, have maintained a freshness and a willingness
to each time go another step and try something new. That I
find is totally stimulating and very wonderful.
Nathan: Which magazine do you find currently especially interesting?
Lederer: Well, there is one publication that is only known in our
profession, called Upper and Lower Case, and that is produced
exclusively for the promotion of an establishment in New York
that produces new typefaces for the new computer -driven
machinery. In order to interest designers all over the world
in their new typefaces, of which they have an abundance, they
show them in interesting articles and designs, and enlivened
by provocative and startling illustrations and offering
thereby a wealth of information.
There are other graphic design-oriented publications like
Graphic Print and CA magazine, all of which feature the work
of the best designers and illustrators. Certainly, all these
publications have a very distinct profile. You open them and
know you are in that particular publication. All that, of
course, is the work of first-rate designers.
Nathan: Yes. I was thinking for the moment of Sunset magazine.
Lederer: Well, Sunset magazine has also a character, which in this case
is very conservative and deliberately low key. In other
words, the publishers obviously want to emphasize that
everything presented is down-to-earth, and nothing is
fanciful. They don't want to dress up this publication as
something that it really isn't, just in order to titillate you
for that moment. What they want to present is thorough, and
down-to-earth and practical. As a deliberately low-key
publication that has at the same time a great deal of
character, I would rather mention The Smithsonian, which had
the great Bradbury Thompson as its designer.
As a designer, apart from being just particularly
interested in publications, to observe what has happened in
America in the field of design in these years since I came
here is a very exhilarating and fantastic story with many
great and varied personalities. I think of --now we start
talking names- -McKnight-Kauffer, Ben Shahn, Leonard Baskin,
Leo Leonni, Saul Bass, Charles Eames ,
Milton Glaser, Paul
Rand. I name just a few of the multitude of names that have,
each time, brought out another new aspect, a new direction of
thinking, and have created in the process the most varied,
imaginative, beautiful, exhilarating kind of world of images
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Nathan:
Lederer :
that makes me sometimes wonder whether if the remains of this
world will be dug out 5,000 years from now, whether they may
not, maybe even more than a great deal of what is produced by
the painters and sculptors really represent the creative peak
of what America gave to the world.
This is not a prophetic pronouncement by any means, and
it may still be what Jackson Pollock and other great artists
in our time have created will be the remaining thing. But
looking at the variety and the richness, the ability, and the
inventiveness poured out in design and illustration, it
certainly makes a startlingly wonderful image, and one that
carried the message of America's vitality into the world.
Whereas a great deal of what is going on in the fine arts
today, and what I sometimes observe and read about it, leaves
a certain amount of suspicion, and maybe a justification for
my assumption that promotion and skillful marketing have more
to do with some of its overwhelming success in the art markets
of the world rather than its real value.
Again, I hear myself saying things (and I'm talking to
you who know me and know me as not a person inclined to
overestimate whatever comes from me, and for that reason, I
certainly would not want this to appear in some way as a
pompous, overstated kind of pronouncement). I would rather
have said it in order to indicate my impression of what some
of these graphic designers and illustrators working in their
unpretentious ways have created.
Seen as an expression of this country's culture, it's
pretty overwhelming. Having come from the old world of Europe
where subtle differences within an overriding maintenance of
high standards of quality was the beautiful thing, the
youthful exuberance of creation and at the same time the
enterprising variety in doing things, as I observed it in
America, is very, very wonderful.
I talked at one time about our admiration in Europe for
American children's book illustrations. At that time, America
still, as far as graphic design is concerned, relied to a
great extent on the European image, but that changed with that
unfettered outburst of creative energies after World War II.
You find that it is continuing? Is it interesting?
It's still very much continuing; only that with that kind of
initiative by American designers and with the easy
dissemination of ideas in books and publications, there has
been much cross fertilization throughout the world. In Japan,
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some quite startling and beautiful things are now done, as is
true in Europe .
Books and Illustration
[Interview 5: July 26, 1988]
Lederer: I have really looked forward to this session because we
finally come back to where I had wanted to be all along.
Nathan: And that is--?
Lederer: That is to talk about my desire for doing work in connection
with books. Even that is not quite right, because as I think
back to when I started drawing in somewhat more than in just a
babylike manner, I had first the idea, since I obviously had
some talents and my parents made too much ado about it, that I
would become the greatest painter and set the world aflame.
Then that changed, in connection with my interest in
literature, to the idea of becoming an illustrator. That,
again, was the great thing, and I modeled myself after the
most wonderful German illustrator, the Impressionist painter,
Slevogt, who is not very well known in this country, like all
the German Impressionists. But he was one of a triumvirate
there (Liebermann, Slevogt, Corinth). All three were
excellent also as illustrators of books, but Slevogt had the
most genuine gifts as an illustrator, particularly with pen
and ink drawings and with etchings.
He was my idol, and the person whom, as a teenager, I
endlessly imitated without having any background in it. So
that was the field of illustration. Then when I started in
Prague, in Vienna, later also in New York, the field changed
for me, essentially, to using these skills on book jackets
because there was not much doing in book illustration.
In early years, and in study years, I had illustrated
Dickens and Flaubert and Dostoevksy, and whatever came my
reading way. When I came to New York, still with that thought
in the back of my mind, I did illustrations for Showboat by
Edna Ferber, in order to have something of an American subject
matter to show, and got involved with the Hawthorne stories
which I loved, The Scarlet Letter and House of Seven Gables,
for which I did full sets of illustrations. They have been
shown in exhibition but not published.
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The idea to become an illustrator was always connected in
my mind with the idea that my illustrations should have a
place in a book.
Nathan: Somewhere in this discussion, can you say more about what it
is that an illustrator brings to a book through these
pictures?
Lederer: Well, what he brings to the book is that when he reads it, and
reads it sympathetically, he can with his illustrations go
beyond what the writer has actually put down in words . The
writer, in order not to overburden the story with whatever may
be of a descriptive nature, will often leave things suggested.
That's where the illustrator can take off. That's why the
illustrator's task really intrigued me; its expansion of and
immediate outgrowth of the literature.
This idea is what some great artists have done who have
been inspired by a piece of literature to create a new
imagery. In the most monumental way, you might say the
Sistine Chapel is an example. In our contemporary scene,
there are the wonderful, unbelievable illustration scenes that
Bonnard, Picasso, Matisse, Dufy, and Dunoyer de Segonzac
created for some of the great works of literature. These
works I almost would not call illustrations, but independent
works of art that happen to be inspired by a piece of
literature in the same way as a landscape might have inspired
Cezanne .
What I try to describe is the illustration that really
belongs in a book and is in its appearance integrated and, I
might even say, subordinated to the total appearance of the
book. Certainly, by the intimacy of its relation to the
literature, it should for the reader never be an intrusion but
an expansion of reading enjoyment. That is a question that is
often raised; people will say, "I like to read a book rather
with my own imagination going." I could only answer that the
illustration is not meant to be an interference with that, but
it is simply setting another person's reaction, a visual
reaction, next to your own. The give-and-take between
literature and illustration could be compared to the relations
between words of the poet and their musical setting in, as an
example, the Earlking by Schubert. You can experience the
drama in reading the poem, and you can absorb the power of the
music that is fused with the words.
There is no argument if somebody says, "Illustrations in
a book bother me, and I would rather read a book without
them." That person should not have an illustrated book.
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Meaningful illustrations, if they are fully integrated with
the typography, actually offer an enriched experience. But as
I sadly experienced, a negative attitude has become rather
prevalent. In addition, economic factors are reasons why
there are hardly any illustrated books around anymore.
Nathan: Except children's books?
Lederer: Well, children's books are a totally different story. It's
good that you mentioned that. I told you how overwhelmed I
had been at an early stage by what is being done here in
America, elsewhere, too, but in America in particular, in
wonderful children's book illustrations. It so happens that
it has not come my way.
Nathan: The "Heffalump" drawings suggest that you do have this playful
quality.
Lederer: Yes, playful is all right. Well, if I had found a publisher
who would have wanted his children's story in the spirit of
those drawings, I certainly could have done it. But as a
matter of fact, I had a children's story written for me and
did illustrations for it. The stories were nice, but we could
not entice book publishers to do the book.
Yes, you are quite right. Sometimes it is simply a lack
of opportunity that leads you not to develop parts of your
abilities. The illustrations I did for my children and, more
recently, for my grandchildren, certainly show that I could do
it. But my original bent was for illustrating great
literature, and that bent has remained to this day. Although
a few years ago it happened- -and that is also one of those
things that occur in a person's life- -Harold Berliner wanted
me to do illustrations for Bartleby the Scrivener, to my mind
one of the greatest stories ever written. I struggled with it
for two months but then gave up. It's a very rare thing that
has happened to me that I really said, "I can make that
drawing, but it was never Bartleby the Scrivener as I sensed
it." So I told Harold, "Let's forget that."
Outlets for Illustrations
Lederer: Well, since I am telling now the story of my illustrations and
have been relating all kinds of things that did not happen,
what happened was that I found first outlets to do
illustrations in magazines for which I worked, in greeting
126
cards, in Christmas cards, special announcements and several
cookbooks --but what I did in fully illustrated books for
Harold Berliner is something I will want to talk about later
on.
What emerged were actually two styles of illustrations
which I used for different tasks. One was of a strongly
decorative, slightly archaic kind, which I could employ in
illustrative initials, or for illustrations with a strong
connect with type or with lettering, as I have done in books
like When We Belonged to Spain, or the broadsides that I did
later on.
Nathan: Would you just say what a broadside is?
Lederer: A broadside is a sheet printed on one side and consists of a
complete statement of some kind or a poem that people want to
live with, the same way that they would want to live with a
picture, something which they like to come back to very often.
Some people call it a poster, but that is a misnomer. A
poster is an announcement of some kind, whereas a broadside
conveys a personal idea and has a sense of intimacy about it.
The other style was developed from what had been my
inclination way back, a loose, sketchy, impressionistic style,
carried out in pen and ink, that I gradually simplified for
easier reproduction, most successfully, I think, in two books
with stories by Dickens, or in a cookbook which was called The
Blue Danube Cookbook, a collection of Max Knight's mother's
recipes. That book lent itself ideally to my style and gave
me a chance to use my recollections of Vienna.
Attitudes Toward Book Design
Lederer: Now, if that broadly covers one side of work that I got into
later on, the other side was an outgrowth of preoccupation
with the place in which the illustration should appear in
books. Books as objects should have their own style and
should by their attractiveness add to the response of the
reader.
I had known of and met some of the famous people in past
California book design history and of the present: the
Grabhorns and the wonderful Adrian Wilson, and Jack
Stauffacher, Andrew Hoyem, and others active in this field.
There is, however, something that very definitely set me
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Nathan:
Lederer :
somewhat apart from them: they all had started with a
fascination with type and printing as a craft, something I
never had. It was lovely and admirable, but I could not share
this fascination, much as I cherished the appearance of
letterforms and typefaces and knew how to use them and all one
can do with them.
A man like Adrian Wilson came to this field simply by
discovering type in a printing shop and finding out what could
be done with it. He fell in love with the craft of setting
type and printing and remained wrapped up with it for the rest
of his life. All the marvelous work he has done had started
for him with the smell of ink, the feel of a piece of type in
his hand, and with the sense of excitement in getting the type
impressed on a sheet of paper. 1 had spent some time in a
printshop during a summer in my study years, in order to
acquire knowledge of practical matters, but I did not get the
romance of it.
You were already in love with something else?
Yes, all the time I was very definitely in love with
illustration and with the total appearance of books.
I came to book designing- -
So when
Workine with Book Publishers
Nathan: How did that start?
Lederer: It started by getting assignments for book designs from the
University of California Press. I had not shown them the book
designs I had done in Europe way back, but the graphic work
that I showed to them gave them the idea that I understand
typography, have taste, and that I can do illustration. They
wanted to try me out and gave me one book to design and one
book jacket with illustration to do.
I did a lot of homework, steeped myself in whatever
available literature I could get hold of in order to find out
practical technical matters of what is strictly to be
understood as book design as practiced in America. I had
designed books in Europe. The specifications for the book
design there consisted essentially of giving the format, the
binding design, the basic page, the title page, and the
choices of the typeface. All the rest was done in the
128
tradition indicated to a well -trained craftsperson in the
print shop.
All the minutiae and particulars of specifications for
all parts of a book that are required here were something that
I had to try to learn now. My first design was successful.
The Press liked what I did and gave me more and more books to
design, and that continues to this day.
Now that I had these books to show, I went to other
publishers, and the ball started rolling, and, gradually, with
all kinds of opportunities from different publishers, I became
a full-fledged book designer. By that time I was getting
close to sixty, and I was really starting virtually a new kind
of work, if I consider that although I had much experience in
typography, I had very little in the production of books.
Nathan: I might ask with whom you worked when you started with the
University of California Press. Was there one person you
worked with in particular?
Lederer: Yes, Bill Snyder was in charge of the book design department,
which at that time maintained a regular staff of four or five
designers. The freelance people, like me, got only what the
regular designers on the staff could not handle themselves, or
if something special was wanted. Bill McClung, executive
editor, was one who was at an early stage aware of what I
could contribute at the Press and instrumental in having me
design some books that I seemed particularly well suited to
do. The setup at the University Press was later changed.
There is now one designer, the art director, Steve Renick,
working with free-lancers and a production department under a
new production manager of superior qualifications, Chet Grycz.
Nathan: So you were saying, then, after the reorganization, that there
were not people on staff in the same way.
Lederer: That's right, because now most of the work was done by
outsiders, including the technical work and the mechanicals.
New is also a gradual transformation to using more often
standardized designs, and particularly also new opportunities
for shortcuts and simplification of the new methods of type
image production of the computer age, none of which have,
however, altered what makes a well -designed book, and the need
for a new design for most books.
128a
BOOKBUILDERS WEST CATALOG 1981
WOLFGANG LEDERER
I remember a statement by Goethe that criticism should come from
"affectionate partiality, joy, sympathy" rather than from pretense of
expertise. With such a view in mind, I
approached the task of eva
luating the entries to the Bookbuilders West Book Show with some
uneasiness. It would have been easy to judge the books on the basis of
my spontaneous and passionate reactions. But I found the books
extremely difficult to evaluate fairly when considering the great va
riety of problems with which designers and manufacturers were con
fronted. Some of these problems are evident, some can be guessed,
but not all are known. In the end, and with some relief, I discovered
how frequently my evaluations coincided with those of the other
judges. That publishers, designers, and manufacturers want to ex
pose themselves to such evaluations speaks for the seriousness of
their concern for the qualify of their work.
"While doing u great variety of work in the graphic arts, myfavorite
tasks have alwavs been those that were connected with books and
publications, l-'or the past twelve yean I have worked almost exclu
sively oh the design and illustration of books.
"
Wolfgang Lederer,
Professor Ementus at the California College ofArts & Crafts in
Oakland, studied at the Academyfor Graphic Design and Book Arts
in Leipzig, Germany, the Academic Scandinave, Pans, and Officina
Pragensis, Prague. He freelanced in Vienna and New York for five
years, thereafter working in the Bay Area. From 1942-1956 Wolf
gang was A rt Director. Wine Publications; from 1957 to the present
he has freelanced for such companies as University of California
Press, Chronicle Books. Berliner &McGinms, Sierra Club Books,
Presidio Press, Lancaster Miller, and Amencan Artists Group.
Wolfgang has been associated with the California College ofArts &
Crafts since 1942. He was Chairman, Department of Graphic Design,
from /<W-/V55, and from 1956-1977 was Director, Division of
Design. In 1981 Wolfgang was named Professor Ementus. He
has won numerous distinguished awards, including those from the
Amencan Institute of Graphic Arts, Bookbuilders West, and
Rounce and Coffin Club.
The ingredients that make a good book, one in which all pans har
monize and support reading, perusal, or use as study sources, are
well-known. They can be found in those books that were selected for
awards a satisfying large number, incidentally. It is impossible to
present a detailed critical analysis, but several comments regarding
problems I encountered with some frequency are appropriate. The
use of too many typefaces within one book, particularly when their
choice did not enliven a page or clarify a presentation, bothered me,
as did the occasional selection of a typeface whose character was ob
viously not in harmony with the character of the design for the
whole book.
I was often disturbed by attempts to enliven quiet-looking books by
overly heavy chapter heads or by too elaborate, colorful, or eccentric
pan tides (sometimes also covers) that made the text pages look dull
by contrast. There was also a frequent tendency to overdesign, to
make the appearance of various levels of heads and subheads very
noticeable. Lastly, I observed at times thai the change of color in the
reproduction of typefaces gave each face a different weight from one
page (or signature) to another.
It is not necessary here to point out that many (if not most) of my
comments refer to details that hardly influence the success of a book
in the marketplace. But those who-contribute to the creation of beau
tiful books and all books should be beautiful know that their work
requires efforts and attention to many details that go essentially
unnoticed; certainly by the general public. All the more must an
idealistic attitude persevere. Concern for the bottom line cannot be
come an excuse for mediocrity in the creation of books. There are
enough examples of well-produced and successful books to bear out
thai such an attitude does nol reflect a disregard for practical matters
It takes the courage and the fortitude of all concerned to ensure
that books will be designed and made with regard for high quality, n<
because they sell better that way, but because beautiful books make
for a better quality of life
129
Nathan: I might ask you one other thing. You were saying that in
Europe you could rely on very highly trained technical
craftspeople. In this country, is it somewhat different?
Lederer: It is. I think this is something that I mentioned earlier:
the training of a craftsperson in Europe in the field, let's
say, of typesetting, very definitely included a very rigorous
training in design. Once, when I was in Zurich, in a crafts
school, I saw samples of assignments as part of training for
typesetters. They included the setting of a title page in six
different ways. Now a typesetter here certainly could do that
technically, but he is not expected to have ideas of how to
create such images. He is trained to do typesetting
technically as well as possible but always following very
detailed specifications given by the designer.
Altogether, my contact with the University Press has
brought me in contact with many wonderful people, all deeply
devoted to the work, whether they are editors or production
people. The concern for the printed word must be a bond that
makes these people- -interesting and different from each other
as they are as individuals- -appear as a quite special group.
Another publisher I worked for was Chronicle Books, where
the tasks were highly varied: photographic books, cookbooks,
books dealing with California history- -an interesting variety
of subject matter. Another was Presidio Press, a publishing
house entirely devoted to military literature- -a subject that
is quite foreign to my nature. But my personal relation with
the publisher, a retired army major with an enthusiasm for
fine books, remained excellent to the end, when he left the
company .
There is Sierra Club Books, who call me if they have a
text that seems to fall within the area considered my
province, that is, a "University Press type book," as it is
now often called. I do not know whether that is really valid,
but, in any case, in categorizing different designers, it
helps the publishers to put persons into different cubbyholes
for various assignments.
I actually feel comfortable designing all kinds of books
as long as their appearance is to appeal to readers for whom
books are an important part of their lives, something that
they cannot live without and whose appearance they therefore
treasure. The difference between a well-designed book and an
indifferently presented or badly done book is often minute,
and the number of people who are consciously aware of what
makes the difference is very small. It is often a surprise to
130
me to find that even very educated people are not even aware
that books are designed.
I consider the book designer's task in most cases a quite
humble one: to create an inviting setting for the text, one
that possibly in a subtle way sets its appearance apart from
other books that a prospective buyer may thumb through in a
bookstore or keep in his library at home. The basic structure
of a book, as we know it today, was established five hundred
years ago as a practical way to keep printed texts together
and allow convenient reading. These traditions of the book as
a physical object and the established forms of letters in the
Western world 2,000 years old- -set definite limitations within
which a designer works and which he can transgress only at the
risk of interfering with the enjoyment of absorbing what a
good book presents: a worthwhile text to be read without
distraction and with pleasure.
Choice of Typeface
Lederer: I do not consider the choice of a typeface per se as of such
tremendous importance. There are some typefaces that are
inappropriate for some books, either too heavy or too stylish
in one way or another, but a historical appropriateness for a
text can only very rarely be a criterion for the choice of a
typeface.
As a young man, I got acquainted with world literature,
regardless of whether it was Dickens or Dostoevsky or
Flaubert, mostly in very beautiful German editions by the
famous Insel publishers who presented the classics in standard
volumes. Binding, format, and typeface in these books were
all the same. As a matter of fact, they were all set in
Fraktur, which certainly is a typeface of very pronounced
historical appearance that has no relation to these texts.
As a designer, I approach book design as a reader. Now I
contradicted myself, I said, "as a designer." Let's call it--
I approach book design as a reading designer. I still
consider the reading as paramount. Anything that interferes
with the reading is obnoxious to me. Obvious design can
become irritating, not excluding the possibility that there
are occasions where books can gain a separate place for
themselves as objects of art that happen to have the shape or
appearance of books .
131
I present literature. I expect the reader to approach
literature and not the design. I think about our task as book
designers, as designing something that should be sensed but
not seen. Maybe that sums up ray basic attitude, including
also that I feel very much in sympathy with the great
architectural genius, Mies van der Rohe ,
who at one time said,
"I don't want to be interesting, I want to be good."
I feel that expressed one hundred percent what I am
yearning for. Underlying the designing of books there is the
desire to create order. I know the other side of the medal,
as far as design is concerned, which is boredom, making things
appear in a very orderly but terribly boring way. If I am in
a very self-questioning frame of mind, I look at some of my
lesser achievements, saying, "Well, some are merely decently
done, but uninteresting to look at." In case of doubt, on my
own drawing desk, I rather decide for the less startling
solution to the design of a book page rather than for a wild
one that could disturb a reader. However, I have respect for
people who have the daring to do something outrageous ,
who get
away with it, and in the process may create something very
stimulating. Maybe that sums up where I stand in the world of
book design.
Working with Authors
Lederer: The other aspect that interests me tremendously about book
design is the chance of working with people. In all fields in
which I worked, I felt that was a stimulating asset; and when
I work on books, I find myself more often in contact with
people with whom, by the nature of my particular background
and leanings, I feel also an emotional relationship. These
are people who cherish beautiful things. I think of the
design of a book as a cooperative effort together with the
editors and production people.
The author, regardless of whether I meet him/her or not,
is of course the person who has created the thing for which I
am to shape the garment. Although I do not often meet the
authors in person, I meet them through their writing. In
reading the manuscript, usually only selected parts of it, an
image emerges in my mind that gives a direction to what I am
going to do. I find that very necessary and desirable, and
definitely preferable to working from a brief synopsis.
132
Nathan: Would you care to say anything about the book Literary
Architecture?
Lederer: I have three examples I would very much like to use to
elucidate my thinking about book design.
Some Practical Factors
Nathan: Good, but before we go on to that, could I revert back to one
question in design? I could only say, "Amen," when you spoke
of the clarity and simplicity of the page as being of service
to the reader. Would you have anything to say about the use
of white space in readability?
Lederer: That's part of it. The amount of white space is partly, of
course, a matter of economics because if you use a lot of
white space, you get less on the page and have to print more
pages. It can also be a question of driving up the bulk of
the book too high. I notice that when I look at other books
by the same publisher, mine are often distinguishable by being
rather bulky because I like generous margins. If I get away
with it, if my proposals are not rejected, it can bring up the
bulk of a book considerably. On the other hand, a heavy
appearance can also make a book appear less desirable to a
prospective reader.
These practical factors are part of the game. You have
to work within practical possibilities towards the most
desirable result. Sometimes the aim is an inexpensive
production; or a long manuscript should appear as not too
heavy a volume ;
or a short one should make a book that does
not look skimpy. In addition to amount of margin space,
leading-space between lines, size of typeface, can have an
influence on such decisions, as does ultimately the choice of
a high-or-low bulk paper stock.
Choice of typeface and selection of format and margins
are made at the start. Other factors are determined by the
nature of divisions. How are the titles: short, long,
varying? How are the subtitles? How many subdivisions in
subtitles or levels of subtitles are there? All of this
influences the patterns and choices that you can make in the
use of space, sizes of type, and kinds of contrasts, until
from many decisions made, together with the idea I have of
that book, a definite image for the appearance of a text page
emerges. I read in Adrian Wilson's lovely book, The Design of
132a
Hermann Zapf D-G100 Darrn< .(_:.: sweg 35 -Telefon: (0 6151 176025
September 24, 1991
Dear Harold:
We spent a nice time together in Parma. Nevertheless our stay
was much too short. I would have liked so much to hear more
about your typefoundry. After my return the first thing I did
was to study your bouk A Christmas Carol. This is an edition
of special beauty, - above all due to the illustrations by Wolf
gang Lederer. Thank you so much for it - also on behalf of
Gudrun .
In Parma I forgot to ask you if you are an possession of my
Manuale Typographicum 1968. Your brief note would be very much
appreciated .
All my best wishes and many thanks for your invitation to Nevada
City which I hopefully will be able to accept one day.
Kind regards - also from Gudrun,
yours sincerel y ,
/ / ?\~ r\-\ /V.L.,
Mr. Harold Berliner
224 Main Street
Nevada City/Ca. 95959
SA
133
Books, that he starts out his book design with the title page
to set the tone for the rest of the book.
I do the title page at the end as my reward after I have
designed the whole book. I try first to resolve all the
practical questions and not get hung up on some idea that
then, considering what the practical demands are, creates
problems that are in my way. Then, at the end, there comes
the real goody, the title page. That, for the designer, is
really the place where he or she can show on one page in more
space and with a limited amount of copy, more imagination and
control than anywhere else inside a book.
Incidentally, title pages in this country are handled
with more weight and emphasis than they generally are in
Europe. I occasionally had the repercussion that a title page
had not enough "presence" when first working in book design in
this country. A title page in Europe has what you would call
presence only in a very restrained way.
Hermann Zapf and the Development of Type Faces
Lederer: I think I should at this point mention a person that had the
greatest influence on me after Steiner-Prag. The great idol
for me in the last thirty years in this area of work connected
with typography, lettering, and book design is Hermann Zapf,
whom I consider a genius of a wonderful kind. He embodies
everything that I am yearning for. His imagination and
inventiveness are boundless ;
his taste and relationship to the
printed page is admirable, and so are his understanding of
letter forms, his calligraphy, his sense of space and color.
You can only be in awe of all that.
I don't want to sound like an adolescent, but I know that
I am somewhat inclined to that in the presence of somebody who
has accomplished as much as Hermann Zapf, and has contributed
so much and still does. His is at the moment a very important
voice in the total changeover in typesetting technology and
type design production. Going wholeheartedly along with the
idea that the world changes, he is aware that a new technology
brings in new things, and new things are not necessarily bad.
With his great sense of tradition, he maintains that the
mistake in what type designers could do for the new technology
would be to imitate the old typefaces rather than to create
new typefaces in terms of a technology.
134
Nathan: You are thinking now of computerized and photo -typesetting?
Lederer: Computerized typesetting; photo- typesetting was new thirty to
forty years ago. New typefaces are being designed for it
continuously. Some of them imitate certain characteristics
that were in the nature of type that was to be cast and cut in
metal, which cannot be done in the digital systems. Zapf's
understanding and guidance are so important there and so
influential in the new world of typography today, in which he
has become a wise and open-minded counseling voice.
Nathan: You're seeing a continuum of development?
Lederer: Yes, a continuum of development. However, in the last decades
we have seen the appearance of some typefaces that I can only
call atrocious. I do not think that somebody who represents
in a painting all human beings as bowlegged creates a
meaningful new form of art, because you would see these
figures only as bowlegged human beings. In the same way I
dislike bowlegged letters. I know all this sounds somewhat- -
what is the pejorative term?
Nathan: Conservative?
Lederer: Well, overly conservative and overly teacherly, pedantic, as
if coming from somebody who wants to write on systems. I do
maintain that anything of the most fantastic sort and
imaginativeness can be done with letters, if it is meant to be
just something of a fantastic imaginative sort. I have seen
letters used in wonderful ways that were explosive and
fantastic in their deviation from the established norm. But
when I read a book, I do not want to struggle against things
of that kind. The same goes also for the use of too small
typefaces that seem to ask for a magnifying glass with which
to read.
Literary Architecture and Its Awards
Lederer: A while ago, I was given by the University Press a very
unusual manuscript by a young writer, Ellen Frank, who had
written it as her Ph.D. thesis at the University of
California. The editors thought it was an extraordinary
manuscript, in which the author is trying to explore
interrelations between literature and architecture and
discussing the work of some writers who had used architectural
134a
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Literary Architecture
Ellen Eve frank
328 pages; 5x8
Designed by Wolfgang Lederer
Composed in Fototronic Garamond by
Dharma Press. Printed offset by Carey Col-
orgraphics on 70 Ib. Warren Lustro Offset
Enamel Dull. Bound by Roswell Book Bind
ers in Holliston Crown Linen. Jacket printed
offset in one color.
COMMENT: This little book feels good in
the hand, looks good to the eye, and re
freshes the spirit. It is a book meant for
reading, contemplating, and inspiration and
has been a
delight to those readers who have
cared to comment on its
design and manu
facture and there have been many such.
We find it a book we are proud of.
Literary
A rchitecture
Essays Toward a Tradition
WALTER PATER
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
MARCEI. PROUST
HENRY JAMES
Ellen Eve Frank
L
1
NIVFSI1T 01 rALIFI
KEIKFJCr . I m ASf.il
RETROSPECTIV
135
descriptions as part of their writings. It is a text of a
highly personal nature .
I met the author, a very sensitive, attractive woman, who
was terribly anxious how her book would look and concerned
about every detail of it. Her watchful, concerned attitude,
together with editor McClung's special interest in it, set the
scene. Ellen Frank had for her book gotten in Europe --she had
done research at the Courtauld Institute in London- -copies of
some of the most wonderful photographs of architecture in the
nineteenth century. They were mainly churches in England and
France, just beautiful prints.
So there was the question of what to do with this book,
and I felt that here was a text of great personal intimacy
which should be presented in a very inviting way. That meant
a small format, easy to hold in one's hand. The author felt
considerable concern about the small format: "How about my
wonderful photographs?" One could just as well have used them
to make a gorgeous, big picture book, a coffee table book if
you want, and let the text be the customary accompaniment as a
pretext for showing the pictures. I couldn't see it that way.
I wanted these photographs to be an accompaniment. That led
to a good deal of soul-searching on the author's part, and
since I was very sympathetic with her attitude, not simply
saying, "Well, I know that this is the way it should be done,"
we had a good many conversations about this basic question. I
was able to convince her that a small book would be the best
way to go .
In addition to that, I had the support- -and now comes
what I like so much as cooperative work- -of various people
participating. The new production manager, Chet Grycz, at the
University of California Press, was able to solicit from
various printers examples of how to get the best reproductions
of these photographs by printing them as duotone (printing
with two inks) in the size in which they might be used.
Seeing these proofs, that finally made the idea of a small
format really convincing. So I designed the book and I
designed it as a very conspicuously inconspicuous book: a
very, very restrained title page without dramatic presence and
everything most carefully spaced; all captions broken up the
way I wanted them to be broken up for best reading; epigraphs
the same way; centered lines throughout, but really
deliberately very unobviously designed.
136
Fortunately, the design was accepted on that basis. The
typeface is Garamond. The reproductions are most carefully
carried out. I had made the reproductions, even on these
comparatively small pages, very small with a lot of margin
around them.
So this really was a process to create an elegant, simple
book, not one that would draw attention to itself. The really
wonderful thing that happened was that this is the book that
has earned more design awards than anything that I have ever
done , beginning with a recognition from The Rounce and Coffin
Club in Los Angeles. The American Institute of Graphic Arts
in New York selected it as one of the fifty best designed
books of the year. Bookbuilders West created a special award
category "Best of Show" for this book in their annual show,
something they had never done before and have not done since.
It got recognition for design in reviews and accolades
everywhere .
The author was enchanted. It was a great success and a
wonderful way of affirmation that something that is created in
such an inconspicuous way can actually get that much
recognition. The book then was also produced in paperback,
repeating the design. Well, I have since found that two books
were designed consciously based on that book and both look
essentially like it. In both cases, the two different
designers told me about it, they thought it was so good that
they just copied it. "Imitation is the greatest flattery."
[laughter]
There is one more story about that book Literary
Architecture, which is really such an oddity. A new
publishing house in California, Northpoint Press, set out a
number of years back to produce books that would be really
well made, using acid- free paper anc quality typesetting.
They are guided by an excellent designer, David Bullen. They
pursued the goal to produce books whose standards in quality
and manufacture would reflect their respect for literature,
for authors, and for the reading public. I learned from
someone who was present that the publisher at the beginning of
their publishing venture, which is by now very successful,
showed the group of people who were to work with him that
little volume of Literary Architecture, and said, "That's the
way I want our books to look."
Nathan: Wonderful.
136a
Imprints ,
Newsletter of
Associates of the UC Press
Fall 1987
Wolfgang Lederer
Book Designer of numerous UC Press titles, including
Giovanni and Lusanna by Gene Brucker (UC Press, 1985),
winner of the 1986 Bookbuilders West Trade Design Award
Berkeley
I like at this time of my life to read primarily biogra
phies of creative people. Currently I am moved and stirred
by the beautifully written life of Chekov by Henri Troyat.
Among my UC Press books there are a few that relate
to special experiences I had in designing them. One of my
favorites is
Literary Architecture by Ellen Frank, which I
associate with an unusually stimulating working relation
ship with the author, who is also a painter. As an outcome
of this exchange we have become close friends.
There never is
enough time to read even a part of all I
would like to read, but I will gladly forego entertainments
offered in movies or on television to save time for books in
the evening. Only friends and music take precedence;
136b
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137
Lederer: Oh, incidentally, I have to add to all the accolades that at
the fiftieth anniversary show of the Association of American
University Presses, each university press in the country was
asked to select the one book that they considered
representative of the highest standards of design and
production they had achieved in the past fifty years. The
University of California Press selected Literary Architecture
for this honor .
At a recent talk to the Association of Western University
Presses, I told the audience something about my attitude
towards book design, that I don't want to draw attention to my
design, but I surely couldn't help adding that if my
professional colleagues notice, it is very, very nice.
[ laughter ]
This book has also led to a continuing friendship with
the author, who now lives as a painter in the East.
Collection: Cry California Articles
Lederer: By contrast, I could mention now a book of a totally different
nature, a book Alfred Heller, the publisher of Cry California,
the environmental and ecology-minded journal, had asked me to
design. It was to be a collection of the best articles that
had appeared in Cry California.
Nathan: Are we talking about the collection now?
Lederer: That's right. That book consisted of articles by many
authors, illustrated in the greatest variety of ways with
drawings, cartoons, charts, photographs- -you name it- -as they
had appeared in the issues of the journal over so many years.
Nathan: What was the name of the book itself?
Lederer: The New California Tomorrow Book. In this case, the task
obviously was to create order out of a jumble. That gave the
direction. Now this is not Literary Architecture in
appearance, but it is a book that I think invites reading and
certainly does not present a jumble. Careful selection of
spacing and order by a hierarchy of emphasis and other means
of design were employed to accomplish this. The book was
successful in resolving an inherent problem, which was to
create a sense of continuity, a flow with material that was
quite unsuitable to achieve that end.
138
Giovanni and Lusanna
Lederer: There is another book I like to mention, just to give an
example of a book designed with a suggestion of historical
style. It is a book featuring a Renaissance text from
Florentine archives, telling the story of a broken love affair
that led to a trial about broken promises. The story reflects
very interestingly on the mores of those times, since it is
based on the court papers recorded in that little book.
James Clark, the director of the University Press, and
sponsoring editor of that book, wanted it to be designed as an
inviting, pleasant -looking book. There were some contemporary
woodcut illustrations, chosen by the author, and I went to
quite some trouble trying to find some additional ones, which
I felt would be desirable to add some atmosphere. I found
them in various libraries after a good deal of searching. I
employed ornamental details and lettering for the title, which
I did in a manuscript style of the period.
This book was accepted for the show of the American
University Presses of 1987, for which the selections were made
by Hermann Zapf. That meant a good deal to me. His
commentary in the catalog was, "It looks like a book done with
love , appropriate for a book about love .
"
Nathan: This is Giovanni and Lusanna?
Lederer: Right. And that comment by Zapf certainly warmed my heart.
University Press Style
Lederer: In their appearance, books for the University Press have
sometimes been called books in a university press style.
University press book productions do have by nature something
that sets them apart. They originally started merely as a
vehicle for professors to publish books within their
departments, and had no trade book outlook. But this has
changed considerably. The university presses are very much in
the market today and yet, by the nature of the titles of their
books and by how thoroughly they are researched and annotated,
they maintain a distinct character that emanates from the
university as an institution devoted to learning and research.
That sets them apart from other trade books.
138a
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Giovanni and Lusanna: Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence
Gene Brucker
150 pages: 5 x 8'/4 ; 2,000 copies
Designed by Wolfgang Lederer
Production coordination by Fran Mitchell
Edited by Marilyn Schwartz
Unit manufacturing cost $4.38, retail
price
$12.95. Text composed in 11/13 Bembo,
Linotron 202, with Bembo display by Wil-
sted and Taylor. Printed offset on 50 Ib.
Antique Cream by Vail-Ballou Press. Bound
in Rex Linen 21405 with Ecological Fibers
Rainbow endsheets by Vail-Ballou Press.
Jacket printed four-color offset on 80 Ib.
enamel by New England Book Components.
DESIGNER'S COMMENTS: The designer
was guided by the style of the author who
is not only a writer, but an artist who pos
sesses a highly personal style. The text and
the subject suggested an intimate format
resulting in the small trim with classical
typographic and image layout. The concept
was to produce an honest and unassuming
book with beautiful illustrations positioned
on single pages with generous spacing sur
rounding them.
ZAPF'S COMMENTS: An atmosphere of
the Renaissance is
presented by the design
elements of this book, with pleasing ar
rangement of ornaments and woodcasts.
The whole design is done with knowledge
of handling type, especially the title
page
that uses calligraphic lettering. The binding
and gold stamping are well done. It looks as
though the book was done with love, as is
appropriate to the love described inside.
TYPOGRAPHIC BOOKS
139
This is a great help to me in a situation where today's
book publishing industry veers considerably towards the big
market place, selling in chain stores, a blockbuster kind of
marketing that has moved book publishing out of its former,
more sheltered position. I find these attitudes very foreign
to my way of thinking and cannot design books that are
produced with that attitude. For that reason, I am grateful
that the university presses, in spite of a greater interest in
the marketplace, have upheld their standards of quality and
restraint in book production.
I think you asked at one time whether I also do logotypes
for publishers. Of course, I have done a great many for
publishers and organizations. A series of books, like those
for the Biblioteca Italiana for the University of California
Press, is held together largely by a characteristic logo that
conspicuously appears in the same place on all volumes.
Incidentally, some of the fun of designing logos or
trademarks can be to see them reappear on all kinds of mundane
objects like drinking cups, T-shirts, balloons, et cetera, and
be carried out in different ways. The one for the 100-year
anniversary of Saint Mary's College, which I discovered when
driving through Golden Gate Park, was carried out as a floral
design with hundreds of plants on a large flowerbed in front
of the conservatory. Another one I designed is used as a
watermark in a special paper made for the publisher Harold
Berliner.
Nathan: Oh, the HB?
Lederer: It's HB, yes. It's a little like a western branding mark.
Nathan: Just for fun, I tried to write it. It's very subtle. I
couldn't do it.
Lederer: That's because it is not calligraphy. It is designed by
building up the letters.
Harold Berliner. Letterpress and Fine Editions
Lederer: As a matter of fact, I did a few marks for Harold Berliner
because he published under various names, including a greeting
card line called Black Oak Press.
140
Nathan:
Lederer :
After describing the trade book and journal publishers,
and the university presses, mention of Harold Berliner brings
me to the third kind of publisher I work for. That is the
special fine edition publisher, Harold Berliner, whom I
mentioned before, with his printshop in Nevada City.
When Harold Berliner went into the production of books,
he offered me an outlet for the design and illustration of
books that would be exquisitely done, carefully set by hand or
by very fine monotype, and printed by letterpress on the best
paper available. These books were produced under the very
best conditions, with sufficient time for alterations until
everything would be absolutely right. They came out in
numbered small editions, primarily with the idea to show what
level of quality can be achieved in making beautiful books.
They are meant for collectors of fine books and printing, as
are also the large broadsides I did for him with quotes and
poetry by Shelley, Wallace Stegner, Dickens, Goethe, and
others.
When we produced A Christmas Carol by Dickens, we assumed
that almost anybody had read that book before but would like
the idea of an edition distinguished by its presentation and
illustrations. It is being debated quite often in Fine Print,
a journal that deals with such matters, whether the publishers
of such book productions should not select texts that are a
bit more special. With that in mind, Berliner then chose such
texts as, for instance, the book When We Belonged to Spain, a
record of tales a woman told of her childhood experiences in
early California.
Do you participate in choosing the manuscripts?
Yes, sometimes. In a particular instance I got the editor-
author together with Harold Berliner.
Most recently, I was able to get to Harold Berliner a
very unusual text. A book was published by the University of
Chicago Press some years ago on traveling French balladeers of
the Renaissance. Maybe fifty of these songs appeared in the
book in a translation by Max Knight, a great translator. I
had come to know him as an editor at the University of
California Press. Harold Berliner was enthusiastic to produce
a special edition of the songs only with my illustrations in
color, under the title Knights and Valentines. This is an
ambitious and expensive undertaking. The edition is limited
to 425 copies, of which 25 will be handbound in leather.
141
Another very interesting book that I designed for Harold
Berliner is a collection of poems by a late nineteenth century
French poet, Tristan Corbiere, poems that are in kind related
to Baudelaire's symbolism. I have designed the book and did a
frontispiece illustration, using for heads a quite unorthodox
old typeface and an unusual greenish paperstock. Berliner
proposed to me to do illustrations for these poems, too, but I
felt that would be totally inappropriate. At one time, you
asked me that good question about the role of illustration in
a book. In this case, I felt the illustrations would be an
infringement on the very evocative , very visual imagery of the
poetry, and for that reason told him that these poems should
not be illustrated.
Harold and I have over the years maintained a very
harmonious work relationship. He obviously also found that
doing a good deal of work with me did not mean a monotony in
appearance. He must have felt that although I have been
involved with so many of his productions, there is enough
variety.
Finding the Appropriate Style
Lederer: In one of your letters, you raised the questions of whether I
am aiming at a Lederer style or at a publisher's style. No, I
never did. I tried always to find the style that is
appropriate for a specific book. That means different
approaches. However, if you put all the books together that I
have done, and all the illustrations, I think there is
something that ties them all together. In other words, they
are all done by me, and even if sometimes when I have a
yearning to do something quite new, something really wild for
my temperament and I look at it after a while, I have to say,
"It still looks like what I do, and I cannot get out of my
skin." [laughter]
So that is really the answer. Now some publishers in
Germany had all their work done by one designer. Steiner-Prag
did most of the books of Propylaen, Walter Tiemann for Insel,
and thereby certain features came through that imparted the
style of that designer on these publishing houses. On the
other hand, here even Knopf --who was such a highly
discriminating publisher and so very much interested in what
the designer contributed and the choice of the typeface and
with elaborate colophons at the end of his books where he
described the nature and history of the typeface employed--
142
even he did not have the wish that by that he wanted his books
recognized as having a Knopf style.
Concern for Quality
Lederer: With my work on books, I am now very much where I want to be
and where at one time I had set my goal to be. In spite of my
meandering through a great variety of work that I have done,
from small trade advertisements to fully illustrated books, an
underlying principle has stayed with me, really an outgrowth
of my upbringing, my education generally and my education in
the arts. It is a concern for quality.
When a very famous designer recently saw my illustrations
for the toystore, Heffalump, he commented, "They are
wonderful; they look so terribly uncommercial." [laughter]
Today I worked on a small newspaper advertisement for this
store. The type had been set; I used Zapf's Palatine, very
elegant, and there was the signature, the store's name. In
the process of the mechanical setting, some letters seemed a
fraction too close together. Two letters seemed a bit too far
apart. Mind you, when this little advertisement appears in an
edition of a newspaper supplement, seen by some 700,000
people, not one of them would notice that difference of
spacing, but I would. I spent a good half hour, carefully
cutting these small letters apart, shifting them a fraction
here, a fraction there, trying to keep them in line on these
little pieces of paper until they were better spaced. It
mattered, and that is what the whole thing is all about.
This is really what one lives for. I certainly cannot
charge the client for that extra time. I certainly could not
prove to the client that it makes a bean of difference to
anybody, and it certainly will not sell one toy more or less,
but it matters. This attitude has remained with me. In the
long run, while if one describes it, it might almost sound
slightly foolish, it still, like all things that one believes
in, is something that gives life meaning.
If I were to sum up what I tried to convey in my many
years of teaching, it is this idea that quality matters. I
know that this must have sounded to some students either
exaggerated or foolish or not really meaningful. To those who
understood, this conviction must have conveyed something that
is meaningful. It certainly has meant that if one spent that
kind of attention also on a page in a trade publication that
142a
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143
was to go to farm equipment people who would not know one
typeface from another typeface, it still was the thing that
matters. It's not something that one can prove, but the thing
that one simply does.
Nathan: That's admirable.
Lederer: Maybe this is also a nice way of summing up: Three years ago,
the prestigious Book Club of California asked me to put on a
show. While their quarters are very limited in space, I still
made it a small retrospective of fifty years of work, which
was, of course, book and periodical design, and I selected
from these fifty years just a few examples. I felt very self-
conscious at having my work seen in surroundings where the
great masters in that field had shown their work, but the warm
reaction, especially welcome from many colleagues, was very,
very satisfying.
So, if life permits, I intend to go on in that vein for a
while longer, as long as they let me.
Nathan: Yes indeed.
Thank you so much for this fine account of your life and
work. We hope for much more to come.
Transcriber: Chris Fenner
Final Typist: Noreen Yamada
144
APPENDICES --Wolfgang Lederer
A. Wolfgang Lederer- -Biographical Data Sheet 145
B. Wolfgang Lederer- -Items Deposited in The Bancroft Library 146
C. Interview with Wolfgang Lederer from Snappy Patter. AIGA San 151
Francisco Newsletter, Volume I Number 4 1990
D. Interview with Wolfgang Lederer from California College of . 154
Arts and Crafts Review. Winter 1971
145
Appendix A
Wolfgang Lederer- -Biographical Data Sheet
Born in Mannheim (Germany) January 16, 1912. Moved to Saarbrucken
(Germany) 1922
Education: Graduation (Arbiturium) from Gymnasium in 1931
Art Education:
1931-1933 Akademie for Graphic Arts and Book Design/Leipzig
1933-1934 Paris, Academic Scandinave
1934-1936 Officina Pragensis under Hugo Steiner-Prag, Prague
Czechoslovakia
Assistant to director, many student awards
Professional activities:
1936-1938 Vienna, Austria, freelance designer, mostly for
book publishers (Bastei, Fischer, etc.)
one-man show, Heck Gallery
1938-1939 Prague, teacher at Officina Pragensis and freelance
designer
1939-1941 New York, freelance designer, mostly for book
publishers (Macmillan, Columbia University Press,
Simon and Schuster, etc.)
1941-1980 Instructor, California College of Arts and Crafts,
Oakland, California. Later professor
1946-1975 Director of Design Division and Chairman, Design
Department
1980 Professor emeritus
1941 to present: freelance design, mostly in the wine industry
1943-1957 art director, Wine Publications
1957-1965 art director, Farm Publications
1955 to present: work for publishers as book and publication
designer and illustrator (Harold Berliner, University of
California Press, Sierra Club Books, Chronicle Books,
Northpoint Press, and others)
Numerous awards. Work represented in many annuals.
Participant in many shows. One-man shows: Elder Gallery 1941,
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 1944, Book Club of
California 1984.
146
Appendix B
Wolfgang Lederer- -Items Deposited in The Bancroft Library
Folder titled "Logos" 4 items
Booklet The Two Islands by Irving H. Marcus, Illustrated by Wolfgang
Lederer, dated 1947
Folder, treatment of Academy of Master Wine Growers design, 17 items
Folder, Christmas Card Development, 1989. Card for Harold Berliner, work
on 7 sheets. Final version mounted on cardboard for reducing to 64%
Card "Merry Christmas" scene in park (two versions)
Folder titled "Corbiere poems"
18 pages of correspondence: Wolfgang Lederer with Harold Berliner and
members of his staff primarily concerning decisions on book design
and production.
1 page on placement and dimensions of type
2 proof pages
Christmas card in color for American Artists Group
original
print
Folder titled "The Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, Designs
for a logo" 1986
cover letter
10 sheets
Folder, The Private Press of Harold Berliner. Books and Broadsides: 1988
catalog designed by Wolfgang Lederer
publications designed by Lederer are checked in pencil
Newsprint page, "Visitez Prague" ad designed by Lederer, 1935
Folder titled "Production"
printed card, "Christmas Greetings"
inside, color separations and illustration
147
Folder titled "Logotypes"
3 pages showing logotypes for Negev Biblical Excavations, the Jewish
Welfare Federation, Chronicle Books, Wine Publications, Asia House
Publications, Institute of East Asian Studies, and Gateway Pacific
Construction Company
Folder titled "Christmas Cards" with items dated and identified by client
American Artists Group, 1940
Personal, 1943
American Artists Group (award-winning wartime design), 1943
Personal, 1945
American Artists Group, 1946
Personal ,
1947
Berliner & McGinnis, 1948
American Artists Group, 1949
American Artists, 1950
Harold Berliner, 1952
Bechtle Verlag, Germany, 1952
Harold Berliner, 1954
Joy Designs, San Francisco, 1956
Designers & Illustrators, 1957
American Artists Group, 1958
Designers & Illustrators, 1959
American Artists Group, 1960
Designers & Illustrators, 1961
Designers & Illustrators, 1963 (star)
Designers & Illustrators, 1963 (billboard)
Berliner & McGinnis, 1964
Mariedi Anders/Concert Management, 1966; 1968 Christmas Card (2 parts)
Harold Berliner, 1969
Mariedi Anders Concert Management, 1976
Christmas Greeting Broadside/Anders Concert Agency, 1978
Harold Berliner, 1979
Harold Berliner, 1982
Harold Berliner, 1983
Harold Berliner, 1985
Harold Berliner, 1986
Examples of books, journals, and other publications
Cry California Fall 1969; cover by Wolfgang Lederer
Nineteenth Century Literature quarterly, December 1987; cover and
interior design by Wolfgang Lederer 1979
Literary Architecture book by Ellen Eve Frank 1979; designed by Wolfgang
Lederer
Representations quarterly, Summer 1987; cover and interior design by
Wolfgang Lederer 1982
The Journal of Musicology quarterly, Spring 1989; cover and interior
design by Wolfgang Lederer, 1985
148
Columbia Foundation: a Five-Year Report: cover and interior design by
Wolfgang Lederer, 1988
Computing Systems (Usenix) quarterly, Spring 1988; cover and interior
design by Wolfgang Lederer, 1988
Film Quarterly Fall 1989; cover and interior design by Wolfgang Lederer
1989
Arts and Crafts Review quarterly; cover illustration, initial letter by
Wolfgang Lederer; lead article about Lederer, September 1952
Folder titled "Illustrations and Layouts: Books and Journals"
Interior folder, Illustrations for Wine Publications, San Francisco, 6
sheets
Edna Ferber/Show Boat/Print Magazine, 1939
extract from ...Bardell against Pickwick. 8 pages, Lederer design and
illustrations, 1983
extract from A Christmas Carol, various pages of type and illustration,
design and illustrations by Wolfgang Lederer, 1976. Includes one
large, animated Christmas street scene with personal clues: "HB" over
entrance-way, and the letters "...liner & Co." refer to the
publisher, Harold Berliner; a shop sign reads "Tom's Toys"; another
"Andy Grocer"; an ornamental "H" appears above an archway, referring
to sons Thomas and Andrew, and Wolfgang's wife Hanni, respectively.
Folder titled, "Covers, Books & Journals, Book Jackets"
journal covers: 1946, 1983, 1987, 1989
book jackets:
volume by Dr. Th. Wolff, 1936
Julacke dnv. 1937
Kein Krieg in Troia. 1937
Friihling in Dalmatien. 1937
Menschen der Sudsee. 1938
Schwarzes Unheil. 1938
Half That Glory. 1939
A Spanish Tudor. 1941
Theodor Boveri. 1967
Leonardo's Legacy. 1968
Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty. 1969
The California Tomorrow Plan Revised Edition. 1972
Metadrama in Shakespeare's Henriad. 1974
Samuel Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose. 1977
An Islamic Response to Imperialism. 1980
Mallarme Igitur. 1982
Russian Drama from Its Beginnings to the Age of Pushkin. 1985
Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance. 1987
Performance Dynamics and the Amsterdam Werkteater. 1988
Orlando Innamorato . 1988
149
World Fair's quarterly cover and interior design by Wolfgang Lederer 1980
Volume IV Number 3 Summer 1984
Volume VI Number 3 Summer 1986
Volume VI Number 4 Fall 1986
Volume VII Number 1 Winter 1987
Volume VIII Number 3 Summer 1988
Volume IX Number 4 October-November-December 1989
News From HEFFALUMP advertising brochure, illustrations by Wolfgang Lederer
Volume 1 Number 1 December 1986
Volume 2 Number 1 September 1987
Volume 2 Number 2 November 1987 with page 8 article, "Our Illustrator"
folder titled "Title pages, Broadsides"
Broadside for The Artists Portfolio 1987
"Sonnet on Chillon" no date
"Harold Berliner" Book Club of California no date
"Tristan Corbiere Poems" 1988
"When We Belonged to Spain" 1983
"The Power Within Us" 1975
Twin Prints reproductions 1943
"Joy" 1989
"Music" 1984
"Memo to the Mountain Lion" 1984
"Lord. . ." 1989
"Wide and beautiful is the world..." 1984
"We need another and a wiser..." 1977
folder titled "Label, Layout, Cover and Jacket Dummies"
Group: Jacket, Label Comprehensive Sketches
Paul Masson Brandy no date
"Giovanni and Lusanna" first treatment no date
"Giovanni and Lusanna" second treatment no date
"The Poetry of Ezra Pound" no date
page, "Pickwick Papers" no date text and illustration
"Italian Music Incunabula" first treatment no date
"Italian Music Incunabula" second treatment no date
Helgerson Case no date
Helgerson/Jacket Sketch 1 no date
"Darkness Visible" no date
"The Italian Baroque Stage" no date
Foreword "We shape our buildings..." no date
"The Tudor Play of Mind" no date
"Puritans and Libertines" no date
"Orlando Innamorato" no date
"The Journal of Musicology" 1987 five treatments
"Film Quarterly" Summer 1960; Summer 1989
150
Various items
Large sheet "Litho Studies" Wolfgang Lederer 1934
Xerox copy, catalog, "Books, Broadsides & Maps: A Catalog of Letterpress
Publications" Harold Berliner Items designed by Wolfgang Lederer
"Harold Berliner's Typefoundry" information booklet
also price list February 1988
cards and announcements :
Society of Graphic Arts announces that Wolfgang Lederer will talk
informally on the life and work of Hugo Steiner-Prag February 26 (no
year) (postcard)
SGA Meeting March 18 (no year) to view Steiner-Prag exhibition and
again hear Wolfgang Lederer (postcard) . Both cards kindness of Albert
Sperison.
Book Club of California invitation to an exhibition: Wolfgang Lederer
Selections from 50 years of work in Prague, Vienna, New York, and
the Bay Area July through August 30, 1984. Postcard invitation
kindness of Ruth Teiser.
Small page, typography and illustration, from Hamlet, beginning "Some
say that ever 'gainst that season comes..."
folder titled "Comments on work and teaching, Awards, etc., Letters" 16
items
September 2, 1942 Grace L. McCann Morley, San Francisco Museum of Art
August 13, 1954 Spencer Macky, California College of Arts and Crafts
June 2, 1970 Betsy Adler, student
June 5, 1975 Hans A. Halbey, Klingspor Museum, Offenbach, Germany
January 30, 1980 Louise George Clubb, Department of Italian, University
of California, Berkeley
July 14, 1980 Charles Neider, author, University of California, Santa
Cruz
September 25, 1984 County of Marin, resolution of commendation
1984 Judges' commentaries, Bookbuilders West Show
August 21, 1985 Nicolas J. Perella, Department of Italian, University
of California, Berkeley
February 12, 1987 Marian Green, Journal of Musicology Louisville,
Kentucky
October 26, 1987 Ogden Dunbar, author, Department of Dramatic Art,
University of California, Berkeley
March 15, 1990 Maria Epes re: Representations
May 15, 1990 Susan C. Silk, Columbia Foundation
August 16, 1990 Michael Cronan, AIGA
August 28, 1990 Geoff Link, San Francisco Study Center
no date Steve Reoutt, Book Club of California
also additional items
151
Appendix C
Q. Wolfgang, how many years since you began working?
A. SS years. I mm afraid, (chuckle*)
Q. And did you work originally in Europe?
A. 1 started in Vienna, then Prague and then I came in '39
to New York. It started in 1936 in Vienna and continued
in Prague then resumed in New York.
Q. Did you finish your education in Prague or in Vienna?
A. I finished my education in Prague. My graphic design edu
cation I had exclusively in Prague.
Q. What can you say about the best time and worst time in
your career to date?
A. Well, the worst time I'd rather forget! (chuckles) The
best time is always the last one. I think the last 15
years. There is something special about the last 15 years
because I concentrated core on the work on my desk rather
than to split nyself between 2 days teaching and the work
on siy desk and, in addition to that I returned after long
detours to oy first love which is books. So I have
cherished this time.
Actually, I'd like to say something about the worst times.
The worst times are always when I get a piece of work
back that I have produced and I find it's lousy. I have
to live with it because it is there. It's printed and I
cannot change anything anymore.
Q. It's lousy not because of anybody else's failure but your
own?
A. U'ell, sometimes it's somebody else's failure but then I
cannot blame myself for it. But if I find after half a
year of not seeing it and then see something that really
bothers me- or I think it is a bore or whatever I consider
is bad, then I really agonize. So, These are my worst
times.
Q. What, if anything, frightens you about being a designer?
A. Frightens me? Well, what frightens me truly is how good
the others are. I always feel they are so much better.
That frightens ae.
Q. And is that something you have always felt?
A. Always been. I was always a great adiirer of others. And
I think it is quite justified.
Q. Could you comment on the advent of the computer as a
design tool? What do you think it can't and maybe won't
ever do?
A. Well, I think the computer is here and we should whole
heartedly accept it. I cannot see doomdayers who say that
because things change, they change for that reason- for
something less good. When people talk about that I an re
minded about the beginnings of Gutenberg whose invention
was a blow to the fine book because the fine book was the
handwritten book and he even, by casting many letters in
lous forms, had to almost hide the fact that a book was
:. So, certain things get lost, certain things
nge. But to my wind, the computer is here and designers
will make the most of it. I'm afraid I'm not the kind of
person to do this. For me the computer has remained a big
ogre that I don't truly grasp. But that's me at the age of
almost 80. But while I feel strongly that a computer can
aid in graphic design work and can facilitate all kinds of
things immensely, it can never invent and it cannot make
decisions.
Q. What is the designer's responsibility with respect to the
environment?
A. Well, I know the general question that is Implied here.
That is the question about what todajr is being talked
about aa environment. I have spent my life considering
the environment. What I see daily and since I live in the
cities I am considerably more concerned as designer
about what is happening in our cities' environments and
I have always felt that since what the graphic designer
does is seen much more and more frequently and more ob
viously than what you see in the museums and is presented as
art. There is a tremendous responsibility for the designer
to try to contribute to what is seen daily in photos,
billboards, signage, newspapers and magazines to make a
better visual environment there. As a matter of fact, it
was one of the bases of my whole teaching idea- to instill
in young people a sense of responsibility there. To merely
say that this is what goes as best design at the present
time is not enough. Graphic design of course was formerly
not clearly separated from advertising design, and I know
that I always had to defend myself against accusations of
not presenting "the real world", as it is called. But you
don't have to do everything as the real world wants it.
Either as human beings defending our morality or as
'
designers defending quality, or let's not even say quality,
but just, basic decent standards in design.
Q. What inspires you?
A. Wow! Well, I would say that I have learned one cannot
live on inspiration. Because inspiration is something
that happens and it happens to the geniuses all the time.
It has happened to me a few times I would say. My inspira
tion is working with other people, talking to them,
getting from them a feel how they are and what they react
to. Get a feel of the problem. Work with the copy as a
material that has to be organized, grouped, presented.
Work with the illustrations and bow they contribute, and
out of all this, images emerge from which I will then make
either by way of sketches or trying to visualize it in
other ways what the end result ultimately should be. I
think the inspiration comes from the nature of the prob
lems, from the nature of the conditions and most of all
from the endless limitations that are given. What can be
done, what sizes, what papers, what budgets are available
and what the demands of the message are.
Q. So you do see limitations as an inspiration?
A. Absolutely! Yes, that puts It in a nutshell. Yes! Right!
Q. Where do your ideas come from?
A. I don't know how to answer that question really. I look
around endlessly as far as design is concerned. Of course
I study the design of others and there are certain people
who appeal to me and who undoubtedly influence me. As a
matter of fact, I can pinpoint that even. Certain people
like Herman Zapf, for whom I have an endless admiration,
and who have very much influenced me. In Europe it was the
type designer E.R. Weiss who designed beautiful typefaces
and was a fabulous designer and also illustrator. These
people were very much my idols. What was the question?
What are my ideas or my Inspirations?
Q. Where do your ideas come from?
A. Well, I'm afraid they don't all come from me. I would be
the last one not to admit my dependence on others.
152
Q. When jrou were student, were there other specific indivi
duals who vere strong influences on you?
A. Well, there were the grest German illustrators and book
designers. There was Ehoke. There was Weiss. There was also
one of >y teachers. Steiner-Prag, who was a leading Ban in
the European design field. There was Hadank. Naae them and
they all had an influence on me. Then I had the good for
tune when I was seventeen. 1 saw an exhibition of French
poster designs. That was an unforgetable eye-opener
because suddenly I was confronted with Cassandres, Carlus
and a whole world openend to me. I should add something
here about the environment. We talked about that a moment Q.
ago. I remember in Paris when I studied there in '33-'34. A.
There was a large empty wall on the side of a building,
without windows. On that was painted a gigantic poster
by Cassandre. And instead of being a horror which any kind
of billboard here usually is. it was a breathtaking piece
of beauty. It was a poster for cameabert cheese of all
things. Unforgetable! 'That is to my Bind also an answer
to the question about the environment. What these people
could contribute to their environment- and at the same
tine create fabulous communications. Because that was
camembert that you wanted to eat right then and there.
Q. What forces you to change your perspective?
A. The clients. The nature of the problem. The nature of
the technology. The nature of what can be done. I think Q.
that changes all the time. I have very little in Be to A.
change for change's sake. That's why I have remained a Q.
traditionalist. What I have once loved I don't abandon very
easily. So for that reason, ay work has very little changed
over the years. I think it has intensified. It has become A.
richer, all kinds of things, but essentially the Bain
direction has remained.
Q. Of course that's one of the reasons you work in the field
of books because that's so tradition bound?
A. Yes, but of course even there one can be adventurous and
I don't think that is very much in my nature. Fortunately
there are areas where this kind of attitude is welcome and
has its place.
Q. What magazines do you subscribe to?
A. Well, I do subscribe to the one magazine that I do not Q.
not find in the libraries where I regularly go where I
see Craphis and Print, that is Fine Print, which is un- A.
fortuantely on the way out or undergoing a great deal of
change. But of course I love Graphis, Print and CA magazines
and I wouldn't want to be without them. But I don't subscribe
because I have a house full of books and I don't want Q.
to clutter it any more. A.
Q. Who has been a major influence oq you? (Not necessarily
a designer)
A. Well, the greatest influence in my life was undoubtedly
Steiner-Prag whose intimate friend I became. -Who was my
aentor and who was an unusually imaginative, intellectual
ly rich person with a wonderful way of formulating in
words what he is talking about, thereby enriching me in
more than one way. Not only in my comprehension of what
graphic design or book design or typography is all about,
but also in human comprehension. He has remained a great
influence on me and it is quite interesting to me that re
cently somebody came from New Jersey for 3 days to inter
view me about him because that person is writing a
biography on Steiner-Prag. That brought this whole area
to life again and in pulling out these books I became
ware- the books that he had Illustrated and designed.
I became aware of what influence he'd had on me. The
School of Fine Arts and the De Young Museum had, I think in
'47, one-van shows of his paintings, drawings, graphic and
illustration work. At that time I lectured rather widely
about him and his work. People were always very much inte
rested. Nowadays his name has, in this country, no particular
ring, although he actually died working in this country,
but only a few years.
"
What is the best book you ever read?
Well, (chuckles). I tell you something. The book that
spontaneously comes to Bind is Moby Dick. I don't think
that Moby Dick is as wonderful a book as many others I
have read like the Brothers Karamazov or the books by
Thomas Mann or such but, it is to me the embodiment of
what literature as an art represents. I am totally dis
interested in ships. In seafaring. In hunting. In fish.
The whole world of exclusively Ben has no appeal to me. So
that, as far as subject Batter is concerned, is as remote
to me as anything could be. But then I read the first sen
tence of Moby Dick, I'm caught and I read the whole big
book over again and I have done it twice. That to me is a
miracle of what great literature really is.
What is the best book you've ever seen?
I do not know what that... does that refer to book design?"
Well at least two avenues spring to mind. One is the book
designed and also the best book that has been turned into
a motion picture.
I think I have to bypass that question. There are so many
beautifully designed books that I love and cherish, to
say one i* the best I would not know. And the relation to
movies is even more foreign to me because I find that a
movie should be created as a movie and a book should be
created as a book. And I usually find the translation of
a book into a movie as a sham. I have seen a few that
independently are also good as movies. But essentially,
the two are totally independent forms of invention and
creation and they should remain that.
Now that we've talked about movies, what is your favorite
movie?
My favorites were the ones by Bergman. Without exception,
virtually. They bowled me over and of course Dreams of
a Summer Night did not bowl me over, but enchanted me
endlessly.
What was the biggest loophole in your education?
That I grew up in a family in which to talk about money
was despised and to this day I do not understand the
workings of money. Pure and simple. Fortunately I have a
clever wife who handles these matters for me, but basical
ly, it has remained a Bystery to me. It has also limited
my design output because I never knew how to exploit any
kind of good situation for myself. I think in this day
and age it shouldn't be that way. It's ridiculous that
one should go through life and not understand one of the
essential elements that we work with. 1 know that if I
153
spend money it is not there anymore, but that is as far as
my econoaic understanding foes.
Q. Especially for you, Wolfgang, how have clients changed in
the past oO years?
A. They change all the tine. Every one is entirely different
and of course in Europe the character of the client was
somewhat different because they considered themselves edu
cated people who had opinions about how the designs should
be formulated. They could talk a great deal about that
with you. Here _ find people are much more down-to-earth
and say what they are after in terns of the end result and
most '
ill the clients in America are ouch easier to
deal with because they nre more easy going, accessible,
less forbidding if they are in high position. I found
that extremely agreeable when I cane to this country. But
how they have changed in 60 years, it's a very flattering
question. I must say (chuckles) I would be hard put to say
chat in general terns. I was always interested in my
clients and I always found them as different from each
other as can be. I think I said at the beginning that the
character of the client is at the initiation point of the
design, always very much in evidence for me. The client
means also in the case of book design not only the editor,
but first and foremost the author. What he says and how
that influences the attitude of what you are doing.
Q. What wisdom would you like to inpart to your not-so-
experienced colleagues?
A. Oh My Cod! If I would have to impart wisdom I would have
to be a wise nan, which I do not consider myself to be.
So. well, after 60 years, 1 would like to encourage any
body to never give up. Be optioistic. If you look at
things as they are being done. I speak now exclusively
about the design world, you can -easily say that for every
step forward you find 3 steps backwards and you can do a
lot of finger pointing in that direction. But I find a
tremendous sense for optimism in what an ever changing
scene wonderful people have continuously created. When I
came here there was a 21 year old man by the name of
Paul Rand. And you opened the newspaper and there were
the Oroach advertisements and you were goggle eyed. What
wonderful things you can do in a newspaper. Then came
Lustig, Leonni, Claser. Now, I don't want to flatter
some people by naming naraes, but in any case, it has al
ways gone on. and for me this has been a source of endless
optimism in spite of the fact that I'm very often des
perate about tne mess that we are surrounded with. So
my wisdom is don't give up believing that efforts ulti-
aately will move things in a better direction or a
changing direction. It's all part of life.
Is that wisdom?
On behalf
of the AICA
membership,
a special
thank you
to Wolfgang
Lederer and
Steve Reoutt
for this
poign .ant
and inspiring
gift.
154
Appendix D
Interview with Wolfgang Lederef in
California College of Arts and Crafts
Review, Winter 1971 .
TO DESIGN
IS TO ORDER
Wolfgang Lederer Steers
One of CCAC's Most
Dynamic Programs
By MARILYN HAGBERG
To design is
to plan and organize,
to order, to relate
and to control
In short it embraces
all means opposing
disorder and accident
Therefore it signifies
a human need
and qualifies man's
thinking and doing
Consequently
a school of design
is not first an opportunity
to express oneself
It is an educational area
to teach systematically
and to learn step by step
through practical work
and thus through experience-
observation and
articulation.
Josef Albers
The quotation at the left, part of a longer statement by
Albers, could well have been written by the man who
introduced it to me: by Wolfgang Lederer, Director of
CCAC's Division of Design. For it expresses perfectly the
philosophy by which Professor Lederer creates and teaches
and steers a program which, thanks to his strong but sensitive
leadership, has developed into one of the College's best.
According to Wolfgang Lederer and he's far from alone-
the entire principle of design is order, and the designer's
i.isk, like the artist's, is to create order out of chaos. "Art is
c't because it is not life, but to be creative is not just a
matter of having fun. Children can have fun," he says.
A frail-looking, highly articulate man with a grey goatee.
Professor Lederer runs a tight ship for a division head at an
American art school. Since many art schools have a tendency
these days to become self-indulgent centers for freewheeling
experimentation and "anything goes" standards which too
often means no standards at all it's rather refreshing to find
people in this case an entire department still dedicated to
the idea of quality and to the search for order which has
always defined the course of art and which always will if art,
and with it the human spirit, is to survive at all.
It's just now, in fact, when those of us who are aware and
sensitive are demanding a better environment and an im
proved quality of life, that designers, real designers, may be
155
more important than anybody else. They're the ones who'll
have to plan the new cities, the new environments, the new
systems, the new life styles, and who'll have to talk
businessmen, developers, politicians and private citizens into
buying their proposals. If they can indeed bring about
something significant, they'll have people like Wolfgang
Lederer to thank.
"Designers," he says, "are practical idealists, but ideas are
no good without know-how. Quality is of the utmost
importance, and there can be no quality without skill and
discipline in short, without craftsmanship."
CCAC's design courses are outlined idealistic and colored
practical. As Mr. Lederer points out, "The College is not a
trade school and we in the Design Division don't see our
program as one of job-training. Our teaching is vitally
concerned with what's going on in the various design fields
right now, of course, but we also project toward the future
by thinking in terms of leaders in the profession. We know,
though, that the graduate will not be able to help his
profession unless he can latch onto conditions as he'll find
them when he leaves school. He'll need a job first of all."
Wolfgang Lederer's approach to teaching design is to use
the individual student's core of interest in his chosen area as
a point of departure for the widening of his total horizon.
"The important thing is to offer him an education," he says.
"Yet, unless he can step into a professional position after he
has his degree, his education will not go on. He must learn,
therefore, both what should be done and what can be done.
We hope he can improve the profession, but that improve
ment must come from within; it cannot be achieved in the
wilderness, or in the ivory tower."
Himself a professional graphic designer with a specialty in
book design, and an enthusiastic draftsman and watercolorist
as well, Professor Lederer has brought CCAC's design program
up from a quite limited status to a major position
as a highly
respected and acclaimed academic division. When the gentle
German-born designer began his teaching career at the
College in 1941, there was no design department, only one
basic design class, one advertising design class, and four
students taking advanced graphic design. Today the Design
Division has sixteen full- and part-time people teaching about
300 second, third and fourth year design majors and graduate
students in the disciplines and practical applications of
graphic, environmental and industrial design.
The men and women who comprise the Division's three
departments all are successful practicing professional design
ers as well as teachers, either freelancers or partners or
consultants with their own firms. Mr. Lederer has been
influential in attracting some of the finest people in the field
to CCAC.
156
In the graphic design department there's artist-designer
Emma Eisner, illustrator Helen Bregner, calligrapher Byron
Macdonald, and designers Steve Reoutt and Joe Cleary in
addition to Professor Lederer. The industrial designers are
Morris Barnett, Dean Snyder and Robert Onodera. The fairly
new (1968) environmental design department, which grew
out of the earlier interior design program, is infested with
initials: environmental and interior designers Andy Addkison
and Wallace Jonason, A.I.D. Accredited, Willis Kauffman,
N.S.I. D., and Emil Barnich, A.I.D.; and architect Robert
Overstreet, A.I.A. The Division's part-time instructors in
clude the College's graphics design manager Louis Shawl;
Building and Grounds supervisor Richard Corey, who this
spring is launching a shop-training program; and drawing
teacher Kenneth Rignall, whose regular beat is the Fine Arts
Division.
Over the years, Wolfgang Lederer and His faculty and
students have won numerous design awards, far too many for
enumeration here. Worth mentioning, though, is the fact that
the College has three times received the gold medal in the St.
Regis Paper Company's National Packaging Design Contest-a
record equaled only by Los Angeles' Art Center School,
where design is the program, not part of the program.
Professor Lederer is very proud of that. He's also proud of
his many former students who've made top marks in their
profession among them Don Fujimoto, art director for
Addison-Wesley, textbook publishers; William Adamo, design
director for Southern California Carton Co.; Hisashi Naka-
muto, art group supervisor for Hoefer Dieterich& Brown; Ken
Lavey, vice president in charge of design for W.L. Frohlich
and Company of New York, Montreal, London, Frankfurt
and Tokyo; Lowell Herrero, nationally known designer and
illustrator; Tomie de Paola, an illustrator of numerous
children's books; and Ed Sturgeon, art director for Container
Corporation of America.
"I'm proud, too, that I've had some excellent students in
my design classes who've made names for themselves as
painters or printmakers-like Robert Bechtle, Charles Gill,
Ralph Borge and Nathan Oliviera. What they have told me
about the meaning of their design classes as part of their
training attests to the value of a broad education for the
artist," he says.
What originally attracted Wolfgang Lederer to CCAC 30
years ago, he says, was "the chance to have a tightly knit
program of design in close relationship with other depart
ments. This relationship is hard to maintain now that the
College is larger, but I still believe strongly in the interdepen
dence of the arts. Just as design cannot be a thing apart from
art or from life, the strength of a school comes from the
working together of its components."
Mr. Lederer chose to enter the field of design himself
because he "wanted to find an art activity that would be
useful in an immediate way to create things that would
bring repercussions." It was obvious from the beginning that
he'd make his career in some art endeavor, however, for as he
says, he "grew up with art in all its forms."
He was born in Mannheim, Germany, into a family "that
talked about everything except money." His father was a
symphony and opera conductor and his mother came from a
family deeply involved with art and literature. Wolfgang and
his two brothers were constantly surrounded by art, litera
ture and music, all of which have continued to be important
to Professor Lederer. Whenever he can break away from his
many duties at CCAC, he listens to music, reads, sketches
and paints.
Once he had chosen his course, he studied at the Academy
of Graphic Arts in Leipzig, the Academie Scandinave in Paris,
and the Officina Pragensis in Prague. In Paris his teacher was
the Fauvist Othon Friesz, and in Prague his mentor was Hugo
Steiner-Prag, one of Europe's leading book designers and
Detail of a program design for the North Shore Friends of Opera's fourth season 11964/65).
m
157
design educators. The tatter's friendship and guidance ex
erted a profound influence on the young Lederer, who
eventually became Steiner-Prag's assistant and taught off and
on for two years at the Pragensis, interrupting his association
there to work as a book designer in Vienna from 1936 to
1938. When Adolph Hitler moved into Austria, he returned
to Prague.
"But Hitler soon followed me there," says Mr. Lederer,
"so in 1939 I went to New York City and worked for two
years as a freelance designer, mainly for book publishers."
He came to San Francisco in 1941 to visit an Austrian girl
named Hanni whom he'd known in Vienna. By coincidence,
he met Dr. Frederick Meyer, who invited him to teach at
CCAC. "I liked the school and decided to stay," he says.
Two years later he and Hanni were married. The Lederers
now live in Marin County's charming Mill Valley, whose
environs they enjoy exploring on foot, and have two grown
sons. One recently returned from a three-year stint as an
English teacher with the Peace Corps in Somalia, East Africa,
and is now principal of a two-room school in Hollister; the
other is an engineer currently in India with the Peace Corps.
All the while he has taught graphic design at CCAC and
headed the design programs, Professor Lederer has continued
his career as a designer. Besides designing book jackets,
covers and layouts for several publishing houses, among them
the University of California Press, the University of Nevada
Press, Harold Berliner, and Chronicle Books, he has done
advertising and promotional design in all its forms and has
designed labels, letterheads, trademarks, posters and greeting
cards for various clients.
From 1942 until 1964, when he resumed freelancing and
returned to his first love, book designing, Mr. Lederer was art
director of Wine Publications and Western Farm Publications
in San Francisco. This long association grew out of the label
and package designs he did for a number of Napa Valley
wineries (Paul Masson, Charles Krug, Christian Brothers, and
others) when he first settled in the Bay Area.
He always comes back to books. In designing for
publishers, his concern is "to form a companionship between
literature and design." As with all his commissions, his
designs are suggested by the material and style of a subject;
never does he impose a preconceived idea on a book or other
product. As a result, his work is tremendously versatile,
running from sketchy and illustrative to elegantly stylized,
from serious to whimsical. In each design, though, there is a
graceful simplicity created by his excellent design and
draftsmanship and crisp lettering and the craftsmanship of a
master.
Mr. Lederer also has exhibited his drawings and water-
colors from time to time. His first one-man show was in
Vienna, and he has since had solo exhibits in San Francisco One or Professor Lederer's many figure studies.
158
and Oakland and has been represented in faculty shows at
CCAC. Last spring, while he was enjoying his first sabbatical
leave from the College, he spent four weeks sketching people,
places and landscapes in Northern Italy "for stimulation and
discipline," he says.
He also visited friends and renewed old haunts in
Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin and Zurich and combined some
business with pleasure by visiting the State Academy for
Graphic Design, Advertising and Printing in West Berlin and
the School of Arts and Crafts in Zurich.
At both schools Professor Lederer was struck by the
formality of the programs and the high quality of work
emerging from them. "My observations were brief and casual
and may not be totally accurate," he says, "but the standards
at both institutions seem uniform, with the emphasis on the
perfection of craftsmanship." Dedicated as he is himself to
excellence, however, he feels that the pursuit of perfection
can lead to a boring monotony and rigidity. 'The looser
system in American art schools produces some sloppy work,
but it also encourages diversity and imaginative freedom," he
says. "The ideal, of course, would be to combine the German
and Swiss love of perfection with American vitality, freedom
and love of variety and novelty."
In talking of that goal, Wolfgang Lederer recalls the
Matisse exhibition which he saw in Paris last spring. "It
included some beautiful statements by Matisse on the artist's
need for discipline and control, the sources of ultimate
freedom. Matisse himself embodied this idea in a wonderful
way," he says. "He grew from his own discipline to
tremendous freedom. "CD
159
INDEX- -Wolfgang Lederer
Abel, Art, 90
Academic Scandinave ,
17
and Paris, 17-18
American Artists Group, 50, 112
American University Presses,
Association of, 137-138
American Wine Merchant, 100-101,
107
Annual of the Wine Industry, 101
Art Center School, Los Angeles,
76-77
Arts and Crafts movement, 55-56,
59, 63-64
Arts and Crafts School, Zurich,
144. See also California
College of Arts and Crafts.
Bauhaus ,
influence of, 72-73
Bayer, Herbert, 72
Berliner, Harold, 112-113, 125,
139-141
Biblioteca Italiana, 139
Blue Danube Cookbook, 126
Bodanzky, Arthur, 1, 46-47
Book Club of California, 143
Borge, Ralph, 58
22
2-3
90
136
Bouda, Cyril,
Buddenbrooks ,
Bull, Michael,
Bullen, David,
CA Magazine, 121
California College of Arts and
Crafts, 55-98
Basic Studies Program, 73-74
course offerings, 58
design, teaching of, 56, 63-
64, 66, 74, 94-97
faculty members, 66-68, 74-75
student population, 61-66, 83-
85
teaching, philosophy of, 56-
57, 68-83, 85-90, 97
Carlu, 8
Cassandre, 8
Christian Brothers Winery, 100-
101, 107
Chronicle Books, 111, 129
Clark, James, 138
Colin, 8
Columbia University Press, 44
Container Corporation of America,
advertisements of, 8
Cooper Union, 13
Cry California. See Heller,
Alfred.
de Paola, Tomie, 90
Disney films, 49-50
drawing and sketching, 6-7, 52-
53, 114-115
Dvorak, Anton, 2
Eichenberg, Fritz, 51
Elder Gallery, show at, 99
Epes, Maria, 90
Esquire Magazine, 120
Farm Publications, 109
Film Quarterly, 120
Fine Print, 140
Frank, Ellen. See Literary
Architecture .
Frankenstein, Alfred, 99
Friesz, Othon, 17
Fromm, Alfred, 100, 108-109
Furtwangler, Wilhelm, 25-26
Furukawa, Mel, 90
160
Gill, Charles, 58
Giovanni and Lusanna, 138
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 3
Grape Grower, 101
graphic arts and design
and advertising and
communications, 56, 81-82,
93, 100-107, 115
and books, 20-22, 49, 111-
113, 123-143. See also
individual titles,
and illustration, 9, 20-
22, 51, 96-97, 122-127
and jackets, 41-45, 82-83
and Christmas cards, 112. _
See also American Artists
Group .
and magazines and journals,
116-120. See also
individual titles,
and posters, 7-8, 112
and teaching of. See
California College of Arts
and Crafts, design,
teaching of; and teaching,
philosophy of.
and type and typefaces, 113,
121, 130, 133-134
Graphic Print, 121
Gropius, Walter, 72
Grycz, Chet, 128, 135
Heffalump, 115, 142
Heller, Alfred, and Cry
California, and New California
Tomorrow Book, and World's
Fair, 116-118, 137
Herrero, Lowell, 90
How to Win Friends and Influence
People, 36-37
Hirschberg, Hanni. See Lederer
family, wife.
Hitler, Adolph, and the Nazis,
4-5, 14-16, 19, 25-26, 29-32,
47
Hoyem, Andrew, 126
Journal of Musicology, 120
Judaism, and the Hitler era, 2,
14-16, 29-30, 47
Kandinsky, Wassily, 95
Knight, Max, 126, 140
Knights and Valentines, 140
Knopf, Alfred, 42-43, 141-142
Koch, Rudolf, 51
Kotzebue, August von, 3
Kredel, Fritz, 51
Krug, Charles, winery, 101
Lambert, James, 90
Lavey, Ken, 89-90
Lederer, Wolfgang
art, music, theater, early
experiences of, 1-3, 6-9
education, early; elementary,
3-4; Gymnasium, 4, 7
education, higher. See
Academic Scandinave , Leipzig
Akademie, Officina
Pragensis .
family
brothers, Felix and
Johannes, 4-5, 26, 113
parents, 1-6, 15, 25-26,
113
sons, Tom and Andrew, 5,
45, 101, 111
wife, Hanni Hirschberg, 28,
45, 54, 60-61, 100
one -man- shows ,
99. See also
Book Club of California.
Leipzig Akademie, [Staatliche
Akademie Fur Graphische Kunste
und Buchgewerbe- -State Academy
for Graphic Arts and Book
Trade], 10-14, 21-24
Life Magazine, 39-40
Limited Editions Club, 49, 51
Link, Geoff, and the San
Francisco Study Center, 116
Literary Architecture, 132, 134-
137
Mac Agy, Douglas, 99
McClung, Bill, 128, 135
161
Macmillan, 41
Mahler, Gustav, 2
Makowski, 39
Marcus, Irving, 102
Masson, Paul, winery, 101, 107
Matisse, Henri, 95
Meyer, Frederick, 55, 59-61, 65
Meyer, Otto, 100
Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo, 72
Mottl, Felix, 2
Northpoint Press, 136
Officina Pragensis, 21-25, 29-31
Oliveira, Nathan, 58
Presidio Press, 111, 129
Purdy, Carol, 61
Rabbi Rapoport of Prague, 15-16
Renick, Steve, 128
Reoutt, Steve, 90, 98
.Representations, 118-120
St. Regis Paper Company contest,
82
Salter, George, 43-51
Samuels, Albert, 54, 60
San Francisco Art Association,
show, 99
San Francisco Study Center. See
Link, Geoff.
San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, show, 99
Siegriest, Lundy, 58
Sierra Club Books, 111, 129
Simon and Schuster, 43-44
Sinel, Jo, 92-93, 106-107
Slevogt, 123
Smith, Thomas, 31-33, 35, 37-39
Snyder, Bill, 128
Songs We Sing in Vienna, 33
Stauffacher, Jack, 117, 126
Steiner-Prag, Hugo, 10-15, 20-
25, 30-31, 40, 51, 70-71, 141
Stockholm, school in, 30-31
Sunset magazine, 121
Svolinsky, Karel, 22
The Smithsonian magazine, 121
Thompson, Bradbury, 121
travels, 113-115
University of California Press,
111, 120, 127-129, 134-140
Upper and Lower Case, 121
van Loon, Hendrik, 33
van der Rohe, Mies, 131
Vanderbyl, Michael, 90
Walter, Bruno, 13, 16
Weber, Tom, 102
Wienand, E.B. , 100-102, 109,
111
Weiss, E.R. ,
8
Wildenhain, Marguerite, 84
Wilson, Adrian, 84, 126-127,
132-133
wine labels, 105-107
Wine Museum, 108-109
Wine Publications, 74, 100-102,
109
Wines and Vines, 100-101, 107
World's Fair. See Heller,
Alfred.
WPA murals, 51-52
Zapf, Hermann, 133-134, 138
Zweybruck, Emmy, 29, 32
Harriet Siegel Nathan
University of California at Berkeley alumna with
two Journalism degrees: A.B. in 1941 and M. J. in
1965. Wrote for the on- campus paper, The Daily
Californian ("Monarch of the College Dailies") as
reporter, columnist, assistant women's editor, and
managing editor. Prepared President Sproul's
biennial report to the Legislature, 1942-44;
wrote advertising copy; edited house journals;
served on local and state boards of the League of
Women Voters primarily in local and regional
government and publications. As a graduate
student, wrote for the University's Centennial
Record. Worked as an interviewer/editor at the
Regional Oral History Office part-time from the
mid-sixties; concurrently served the Institute of
Governmental Studies as Principal Editor doing
editing, writing, research, production, and
promotion of Institute publications. Wrote
journal articles; and a book, Critical Choices in
Interviews: Conduct. Use, and Research Role (1986)
that included oral history interviews in the
analysis. Also with Nancy Kreinberg co-authored
the book, Teachers' Voices. Teachers' Wisdom:
Seven Adventurous Teachers Think Aloud (1991) ,
based on extended interviews with the teachers.
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BERKELEY LIBRARIES