Kos­mos Klee. The Collec­tion FO­KUS: Jour­nals of the Avant-Gar­de

The 20th century was the age of the avant-gardes. All over the world, movements formed with a desire for a radical redesign of the world and a rethinking of art. To spread their visions, many avant-garde movements published journals. These allowed a global exchange of artistic ideas, as happens today on the World Wide Web. The journals did not only contain manifestos, images and programmatic texts that could not be published anywhere else, but also embodied artistic visions in terms of design and typography. From the contemporary point of view these journals are not only unique art-historical sources; they also set standards in the history of design. For that reason, the exhibition casts light for the first time on journals as a central and globally deployed medium of artistic modernity, in which art and design, form and content become a single unit.

Curator: Martin Waldmeier