National Gallery of Art, Washington
160 pages | 101 images
This book, featuring twenty paintings by early American Modernists, called for a clean and modern design with finely crafted typography. Frutiger, a graceful and legible sans serif typeface, lacked oldstyle figures and small caps in electronic form until recently. I identified a new version of Frutiger that includes these features when looking for the right type for this project. In the index, the bold and regular weights of the text make the information particularly accessible and, at the same time, create a beautiful texture. The cover detail of Marsden Hartley’s Pre-War Pageant puts stripes and a star, of sorts, on the spine of this very American catalogue.
