Paul Renner

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Basics
Who: Paul Friedrich August RennerWhat: He was a Graphic Artist, Design teacher, Type designer, Author and Painter. He also became the principal of the Printing Trade School in Munich and the co-founder and director of the Master School for Germany Printers.
When: August 9, 1878 – April 25, 1956Where: Wernigerode, Germany

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Why: He was suspicious of abstract art and disliked many forms of modern culture, such as jazz, cinema, and dancing. But equally, he admired the functionalist strain in modernism. Renner can be seen as a bridge between the traditional (19th century) and the modern (20th century). He attempted to fuse the Gothic and the roman typefaces.How: He designed the Futura typeface, which became one of the most successful and most-used types of the 20th century. 

"The truely modern is what we hold today to be timelessly perfect" - Paul Renner


Further in depth
Paul Renner grew up and learnt a German sense of responsibility, leadership and duty through out his childhood. Renner also gained his education from a secondary school, Gymnasium. After nine years of learning to speak Latin and Greek, he decided to study arts at a number of academies. In 1926, he gained the position of the head at the Printing Trade School in Münich. Later he became the director of the Master School for Germany’s Printers. While studying, he grew interested of abstract art form and developed a hatred for some forms of modern culture including dancing, cinema and jazz.


Although, Renner was interested by the functionalist strain in modernism. It would not seem wrong to see Renner’s work as a bridge between nineteenth and twentieth century tradition. One example can be his successful attempt at merging two fundamentally different typefaces together such as Roman typeface and Gothic. He was a significant member of German Work Federation. He lent his expertise in developing a new set of guidelines for good book design. He was closely associated with another noted typographer Jan Tschichold. They both became part of the ongoing heated ideological and artistic debates. Renner took a stand against Nazi movement and made his position very clear and public through his scandalous booklet, "Kulturbolschewismus" (Cultural Bolshevism). It was published in 1932 and overtly condemned Nazi’s cultural policy.
In 1933, when Nazi rose to power they dismissed Renner from his post at the school and labeled him an intellectual subversive, a ‘Cultural Bolshevist’. He went into a period of internal exile after his arrest. Renner aspired to communicate his opinion of culture and tried to influence it through his writing, teaching and designing. He used his aesthetic skills to alter the fundamental landscape of material and spiritual form of life. As to communicate his view of high cultural standards, he invested his creative talent in applied arts designing books and typefaces.

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Art or Design? I definitely see Paul Renner's work as design. His work clearly shows subtle information which he has used in a way that it doesn't take your eye off the focal point of the image. The writing is also placed in a way that doesn't make the image look too busy or clustered. His work is strongly influential as it has messages within it. Paul Renner's art is very strong an bold. It involves a lot of structure and bold colours such as black and red. This give the impression that the work is meaningful and serious. Overall he has been a very successful designer and has influenced a lot of our design today.