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Warja Lavater (1913-2007) was a Swiss graphic designer who, with her designer husband Gottfied Honegger, ran a design studio in Zurich between 1937 to 1958, specialising in designing symbols, logos and trademarks. Lavater also worked as an illustrator for the young person's magazine Jeunesse from 1944-1958. In 1958, the couple moved to New York for three years and she found work designing scientific illustrations for Dell Publishing.
It was in the USA that Lavater discovered the accordion format during her visits to Chinatown and Lavater would adopt this medium for all her artists' books for the rest of her career. With her non-representational visual vocabulary she was able to create works that could be 'read' by people across linguistic boundaries. Lavater described her books as imageries, and her use of this particular kind of visual language as a way to:
"...express certain attitudes and actions, not by illustrating, but by writing picture-poems or 'pictograms.' We react to visual signs more effectively than to anything else, and I felt able to write by using such signals as codes, as signs that communicate... each story has its own 'code', signs that are easy to understand and that do not require a particular verbal language."
Lavater described herself as a Bildstellerin, or "picture writer" and the following quote by Carol Ribi from 100 Years of Swiss Design locates her work at a fascinating intersection between a variety of representational systems: "Warja Lavater's symbol notations and artists' books are situated on the boundaries of graphic design, painting, literature, and object art, and there mark a transition of genres that has yet to be thoroughly explored in picture or art theory."
Cendrillon is a beautiful example of Lavater's use of a signs and symbols to illustrate a story, in this case a version of Cinderalla written by Charles Perrault in 1697.
Please search for other works by Lavater on this blog.
21 single-sided pages, individually 6.25" x 4" and when unfolded 7ft.
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