So, to the Nazis, Fraktur is too Jewish, but sans-serif fonts are also too Jewish. Hell, writing itself is pretty darn Jewish. Maybe the Nazis were on a path towards banning all writing, period. Seems plausible.

I think the thrust of that article was that the crowd size reflected the band’s popularity, not Obama’s. Probably not true, but don’t make more of it than it was.

Um, the fact it’s Bauhaus is why it’s progressive—and it isn’t all-american, it’s classical European Modernist. It really is El Lissitzky/van Doesburg/Rodchenko all the way.

Trust me, the people who designed that poster know damn fine exactly who they’re quoting and what they meant, and that’s why they used those models. Obama is using European Modernism the way politicians used to use Roman Antiquity.

Apparently, some rock musicians, and some reggae!! musicians… performed.

That’s it.

I’m still a little bemused.

And yet when I looked at that poster the typeface seemed very familiar, evocative, and characteristic. I spent a year-plus in Bavaria in the mid-1950s as a little child, and I feel certain that this font or ones like it were used for the titles of many of the German children’s books I had (published in the 1930s, for the most part). Am now inspired to go dig them up. I’m almost certain that the Struwellise and Struwelpeter books had that font on the cover.

Bianca, a conservative revolution will have avant-garde. I googled “iranian revolution” and “art” and the first link has this:
http://www.nyu.edu/greyart/exhibits/iran/imageposters/index.html

But soon after things settle down, neither conservatives, nor nationalists, nor soci@1ists, nor capitalists want any agitation, they want peace and quiet, stability. So, the demand for the avant-garde drops; good bye, till the next upheaval.

But of course soon after things settle down, neither conservatives, nor nationalists, nor socialists, nor capitalists want any agitation, they want peace and quiet, stability. So, demand for the avant-garde drops; till the next upheaval.

Jared- that’s a fascinating poster. It’s advertising the Volksempfanger, an inexpensive radio set that the Nazis distributed so that everyone could listen to propaganda programs, and, being an ad for a radio (the height of modern technology) the poster is self-consciously modern. It dates to 1936 – the Nazis decided to disallow Fraktur in 1941. There can’t be many other examples of a sans-serif blackletter script, which is to my eye both beautiful and very peculiar.

Robin – without disagreeing with you at all on the modern look of the poster, I would say that it owes a lot to constructivism. The way the photo is integrated with the text through the use of color; the angled text, positioned to imply that Obama is saying the words, and the image of him from below, the way an audience views a speaker on a podium – the poster communicates urgency and immediacy, as if simply by seeing it you are already at the rally. It reminds me a little bit of the work of El Lissitsky, who made the great poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge.

The Nazi’s “Entartete Kunst” show was a big hit, setting records for attendance, and they cunningly sold off most of the works. The Tate Modern had a very nice selection on display when I last visited.