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Herbert Matter.
Papers, c.1937-1984.
Acquired in part through the Kenyon Law Starling Fund.
The extensive archive of Swiss born photographer and graphic designer Herbert Matter (1907-1984) contains a combination of thousands of fine art and commercial prints and photographs, negatives (including glass plates), design process materials such as sketches, paste-up layout work, collages, exhibition materials, business letters and correspondence, and 16mm film. Matter's advanced techniques became part of the new visual vocabulary that began in the 1930s, and which has since evolved into familiar design idioms, such as over-printing where an image extends beyond the frame, and the bold use of typography. Matter studied with Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant at the Académie Moderne in Paris in the late 1920s before returning to Switzerland to design a series of Swiss travel posters that illustrate his photomontage technique. When he arrived in the United States in 1936 his first clients were the Museum of Modern Art and the publisher Condé Nast. His more notable commercial clients were Knoll Furniture (1946-1966), the New Haven Railroad (1954), and the Guggenheim Museum (1958-1968). During this time Matter became a tenured professor at Yale and helped shape the university's photography and graphic design program (1952-1976).
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