Newly found old artifacts of graphic design history are many—and Michael Russem, proprietor of the Katherine Small Gallery in Boston, is a dedicated forager of them. The collections he’s pulled from obscurity include this cache of items by Uli Huber.
Huber had tremendous skills as a letterer, calligrapher and illustrator, and with those skills he made delightful cards and notes for friends and family. He had no loyalty to a personal style in the work that is now on display at the Katherine Small Gallery. Rather, according to Russem, “Uli Huber seemed loyal only to doing things well.”
Who is or was Uli Huber?
There’s no reason you should know who Uli Huber is–or was. He’s dead. He was born on Aug. 3, 1902. He died in 1981. Before that, he spent his entire career as a graphic designer in Germany, working on posters, packaging, advertisements and logos. So, normal graphic design stuff. None of the companies he worked for had much of an international presence, so his work never really made it to the States. The handful of articles about him are in German. His one book, Werbung + Graphik (Advertising + Graphics), written with Eugen Johannes Maecker, is also in German. A tribute book was published in 1969 when he retired from teaching at the State Teaching Institute for Graphics, Printing and Advertising in Berlin. Google translated it for us but we didn’t learn much–except that he’d been a student of F. H. Ernst Schneidler, one of the 20th century’s great teachers of lettering and typography, and that “[h]e was tolerant even towards things that he rejected for himself because he saw the good in them.”
Where did you discover his work?
There’s a whole world of tips and leads and suggestions hidden in books. Or, well, not hidden. They’re right there, listed at the back in the bibliography or the notes or on a dust jacket with lists of other related books from the same publisher. As with all of my favorite discoveries that were really right in front of me, I was looking up one thing and found something else.
Where does this work fit into graphic design history?
In the past I worked for a publisher of art books. Every essay that introduced the artist would declare that artist to be the greatest artist under 30 or the greatest artist working with collage or the greatest artist in the Southwest between 1949 and 1952. Uli Huber was not the greatest. He was really very good, though. He had taste and skill and he clearly did things with consideration and care. I think he’s just an example of a good Midcentury German graphic designer. Because I was able to put together a collection of 120 or so pieces of his work spanning the better part of his adult life, a story can be pieced together.
How did you obtain his work?
That’s my job! It’s what I do when I should be doing other things. I hunt for work I don’t know about and hope it will be of interest to others.
What do you hope this discovery will mean in the canon of design history?
I’m not sure this will alter the canon, but what’s on display is work largely made by hand. Things made by hand are not magic or necessarily better than those made with the tools we use today. But they can be a reminder that “cutting” and “pasting” once meant cutting and pasting. The history of graphic design is actually real stuff, not JPEGs we see on Instagram and forget two seconds later.
This exhibition consists of cards Huber made for family and friends. These were mostly made by hand, during and after World War II. There are many references in his notes to going without, and I think he was giving these cards because they were what he had to give. These delightful little things showed he cared—and they didn’t cost him anything more than a scrap of paper and the ink from his pen. Those are tools we still have today.
What else should we know about him?
When I was young I heard Deputy Sheriff Barney Fife (Don Knotts) say “Nip it in the bud” on “The Andy Griffith Show.” I had no idea what that expression meant, but it made an impression. Not long after, I heard Alex P. Keaton (Michael J. Fox) utter the same expression on “Family Ties.” And then I started noticing “nip it in the bud” when and where I least expected it. I hope the same will be true for Uli Huber—and for other designers not named Milton, Alvin or Paul. If we know more names, we can know (or make up) more stories.
The post The Daily Heller: Have You Ever Heard the Name Uli Huber? appeared first on PRINT Magazine.