arts and design

Before emojis: the utopian graphic language of Marie and Otto Neurath

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Just before he died at his Oxford home in December 1945, Otto Neurath said something lovely to his third wife, Marie. The philosopher had been reading an article on the subject of happiness, when he turned to her and said: “I can tell you what I mean by happiness. If godfather would come to me and say: ‘Dear Otto, I make you an offer as you are living now with your books and your work and your wife. You can live for ever and ever but you will never be more prosperous than you are now. Will you accept?’ ‘Yes, dear godfather. I gladly accept.’”

Marie and Otto were Viennese refugees from Nazism, he a Jew denounced as a communist, she an Aryan whose maiden name was Reidemeister. They fled fascism in 1934, first to the Netherlands and later to the UK where they were interned during the war for a while as enemy aliens.

The Neuraths were creative revolutionaries who shared a utopian vision, one in which contentment could be achieved through a simplified visual language.

Graphic pioneer … Marie Neurath in 1945



Graphic pioneer … Marie Neurath in 1945 Photograph: with permission of Otto and Marie Neurath Isotype Collection at University of Reading

It’s geological, stupid … from Marie Neurath’s Spread of the Volcano.



It’s geological, stupid … from Marie Neurath’s Spread of the Volcano. Photograph: Design and Print Studio/Otto and Marie Neurath Isotype Collection at University of Reading

In 1935, Marie came up with the acronym Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education) to refer to the pictographic language they were developing that would educate children through visual icons and visible chains of reasoning. They had been inspired by the English philosopher Charles Kay Ogden, who proposed that English could be boiled down to 850 words. The language, called Basic, could be learned in days and, he hoped, would pave the way to peace by reversing the curse of Babel. Their Isotype Institute, founded in Vienna, had the slogan: “Words divide, pictures unite.” In hindsight, they were communication pioneers in that their new visual language pre-empted emojis.

But while Otto has long been celebrated as a philosopher and social reformer, the work of Marie has been relatively neglected – until now. London’s House of Illustration has a beguiling little show called Marie Neurath: Picturing Science, celebrating her work at the Isotype Institute until her own death in London in 1986. From her husband’s death until the 1970s, she led a team of illustrators who produced more than 80 children’s books, half of them devoted to science education.

The beautiful books on show at the exhibition – among them Too Small to See, Inside the Atom and Railways under London – were modelled on Otto’s conviction that data pictorially organised could say more than words. In a 1944 typescript explaining the value of Isotype books exhibited in the show, he wrote: “There are many fine books, giving information to adults and children, but usually they are ‘learned’. These Isotype books try to avoid that … It is not so much the question of how to transfer in the most direct and simple way some knowledge, but how to satisfy the possible questions of a child, his love of action, his identifying himself with a person on the page.”

As a child, Otto had been fascinated by Egyptian hieroglyphics, not just their forms but how they communicated a story. While the narrative of human progress usually has hieroglyphics as way station to sophisticated written and verbal communication (the British Library’s current superb show on writing suggests as much), Otto held on to the value of simple rule-based combinations of symbols and colours, particularly to graphically show complex data in easily graspable ways. After the first world war, he was inspired in developing this visual language by Soviet constructivism and the German Bauhaus, and sharing their minimalist aesthetics and utopian, modernist spirit.

At the time, Otto was working as director of the Museum of City Planning in what was known as Red Vienna, the post-first world war era from 1918 to 1934 when the city became a crucible for socialist living. The museum’s purpose was to educate the Viennese public about postwar social housing and at exhibitions he would showcase a symbol-based language as an alternative to written language. It was there that he met Marie, a physicist, mathematician and art-school graduate who became what they called a “transformer” – an intermediary between data collectors (historians, statisticians and economists) and graphic artists. Today, she would have been called a graphic designer. Indeed, without the Neuraths, graphic design as we know it might not have existed.

As the project grew, Otto hired artists including Erwin Bernath and Gerd Arntz, for what would become known as the Isotype Institute. Along with Marie, they pioneered the professional design of a visual language for the public communication of historical and statistical information.

At the same time as working in the museum and developing the Isotype Institute, Otto was becoming an eminent philosopher, a leading member of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists and tilting at the Marxist Jews of the Frankfurt School, whose scorn for scientific progress and Enlightenment values he loathed. Indeed, the Isotype Institute was a self-conscious continuation of the Enlightenment’s most resonant project: 18th-century French philosophers’ attempt to promote the advancement of science and secular thought through an illustrated encyclopaedia.

Once exiled from Austria, the Neuraths became even more ambitious. They created the International Foundation for Visual Education in The Hague, and spearheaded the international Unity of Science movement that launched a project called the Encyclopedia of Unified Science, aimed at using pictorial languages to proselytise for international scientific and social cooperation – a beautiful idea, if one effectively eliminated by the increasing darkness of the times.

Clarity and insight … Marie Neurath’s children’s book jackets.



Clarity and insight … Marie Neurath’s children’s book jackets. Photograph: Otto and Marie Neurath Isotype Collection at University of Reading

But while Red Vienna remains architecturally renowned for such imposing blocks as the Karl Marx Hof and the Rabenhof, featuring communal facilities such as bathhouses, laundries, kindergartens, libraries and even kitchens, Otto Neurath backed a different solution for a housing revolution. In 1934, he and Marie oversaw the opening of a workers’ association housing complex (Werkbundsliedung), an estate of 70 houses in south-west Vienna that offered working-class families the opportunity to purchase or rent homes designed by a diverse group of 31 international architects, including Adolf Loos.

A decade later, the Neuraths were invited to work in Bilston in the Black Country. Like Vienna after the first world war, Bilston after the second world war – a town of 31,000 – desperately needed new housing. After hearing Otto lecture on Vienna in Wolverhampton, Bilston’s town clerk invited the socialist philosopher to help. Williams was impressed by his humane vision: “He made one believe in the dignity of human beings.”

As Neurath wrote: “On estates, mix up individuals: married and unmarried, old and young. Do not create ghettos of, for example, old people who, if they are stuck altogether in flats, will feel isolated, lonely and unwanted. If you put them in with young people, they can do things like babysitting and feel useful and wanted.” Again, a beautiful dream, too rarely realised.

But, just as the rise of Austrian fascism scotched the Neuraths’ dreams of a Viennese socialist paradise, so Otto’s early death thwarted the couple’s plan to make Bilston happy. While the estate still exists, it’s scarcely the socialist paradise they hoped to create.

A spread from Marie Neurath’s book I Show You How It Happens.



Spring up all over … a spread from Marie Neurath’s book I Show You How It Happens. Photograph: Laura Bennetto/Otto and Marie Neurath Isotype Collection at University of Reading

More happily, Marie carried on the work of the Isotype Institute, focusing on rendering complex scientific ideas in visual form. Many of the results can be seen in this exhibition and they’re unexpectedly beautiful as well as instructive. Though the books on display were created for children, I found them unbelievably helpful. In fact, epiphany followed epiphany as I stood for long minutes realising for the first time how bread is made, how insects pollinate plants and how volcanoes work. Later, I spent even happier minutes elbowing small children aside at the activity table where I was tasked with numbering in the right order the pictures showing what happens in a bird’s egg, based on four frames from a children’s book that shows Marie at her best – explaining complex concepts in easily understood ways.

Co-curator Katie Nairne argues that Marie Neurath’s “groundbreaking approach has had a huge impact on contemporary design and infographics and deserves much greater acclaim than it currently receives”. Now, 33 years after her death, she is finally getting it.

Marie Neurath: Picturing Science is at House of Illustration, London, until 3 November.

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