Now make your way to the second tower. Here, in the chapter entitled Revolution of seeing, three smiling faces await you, engaging you directly with their gaze. The incorporation of photography was another key innovation in the visual language of avant-garde graphic design.

The posters on the tower demonstrate how advertising posters in particular benefited from photography. It allowed the advertised product to be depicted in detail and with great fidelity, while human faces conveyed emotion. At the same time, these posters bear witness to the social transformations of their era, showing how the role of women was being renegotiated.

While Hans Neuburg’s poster for Super Bouillon presents a woman as a housewife wearing an apron while cooking, Francis Bernard’s poster for an AEG typewriter depicts a woman engaged in paid employment.

Women were not only represented in posters; they also increasingly emerged as their designers. The advertising poster for Astra was created by the graphic designer Maja Allenbach, who is regarded as a pioneer of the photographic poster in Switzerland. Through its collage featuring a small child floating in the air behind the young man depicted, the poster acquires a humorous quality and remains memorable for its viewers.

On the shelves to your right, you will see further posters that employ the innovative technique of photomontage as a means of visual expression. It was particularly popular in political posters. Avant-garde designers created new realities and envisioned the ideas of a new society.

To your left, in the side-gallery chapter Experiments, Construction, and Poetry you can discover how photography and film also established themselves as independent artistic disciplines in other media—disciplines that not only depict a supposedly objective reality but also call for a radically new way of seeing.

(AI-generated translation)

Short guided tour through the exhibition