early 20th century - DADA, Surrealism, Futurism

In the early 20th century, artists started to rebel against society and authority with movements like DADA and Futurism. Futurists embraced destruction, war, danger, and the age of machines. Their philosophy was this is what the world is becoming. there is no way to stop it or change it, so embrace it. They wanted to destroy museums and relics of the past and all social conventions. Filippo Marinetti was the one who launched Futurism. Futurism impacted typographic design by pulling i into avant garde movements.

The DADA movement rejected logical order and sought to create non-sequiter imagery to express the chaos of the world. In their art, they "replaced logical nonsense with illogical nonsense". An example of a famous DADA artist is Marcel Duchamp. He rebelled against classic ideas of art by using found objects for his art.

The influence of Futurism and DADA created modern Graphics Design. Both of these movements were iconoclastic and closely related. Different factions of these movements arose and developed into more art forms, such as surrealism, which arose from DADA, cubism, and automatism.

Surrealism impacted graphics design with its visual expression of poetry, fantasy, and the subconscious.

Automatism was a psychic exercise that attempted to express "the foundations of thought "dictated" by the absence of all control exercised by reason."

synthetic cubism "signs" the graphic esse."nce of an object rather than appearance of the object

Artists in all of these art movements utilized concepts involved in structural linguistics (whether or not they were aware of seminology or the philosophy of Ferdinand Saussure) to create the unexpected, non-sequitors, or to rebel against authority.

Another very important influences to graphic design that emerged during this time is typographic materiality. Poets started to think about the way text looked and how it was arranged as much as the words themselves. this obviously was a major breakthrough in the development of modern typography.

Without the influences of the art movements that emerged in the early 20th century, pictorial modernism wouldn't have developed into the forms that exist today.