Fridolin Müller

35 x 50 in. (90 x 128 cm)

Offset lithography

Condition: This poster has a crease across the upper right corner.

A powerful homage to a Bauhaus master

Swiss graphic designer Fridolin Müller (1926–2006) produced this spectacular poster for the design museum in Zurich.

The poster promotes an exhibition on Oskar Schlemmer, who led the theater workshop at the Bauhaus (the legendary German design school) in the 1920s. Schlemmer focused his work as a visual artist, stage designer and choreographer around explorations of the human form, and his abstract renderings of the human face are highly recognizable. The profile image Müller used in this poster is taken from Schlemmer’s 1922 sculptural project Profil in Gelb (Profile in Yellow).

Oskar Schlemmer, Profil in Gelb, 1922

This elegant profile is a softer, more curvilinear version of the face shown in Schlemmer’s famous logo for the Bauhaus, also from 1922. 

Oskar Schlemmer, Bauhaus logo, 1922

Müller’s poster is an excellent example of the celebrated Swiss Style (or International Typographic Style) of graphic design.

The Swiss Style, which relied on minimalist, objective images, grid layouts and sans-serif typefaces (type without end strokes), took hold in Switzerland in the 1950s and 1960s and soon spread around the world. 

The large format of this poster gives its simple composition even greater visual power. 

This poster is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.