Michael Golec, “Champ Fleury in the Machine Age”
In 1927 New York’s Grolier Club reproduced Geoffroy Tory’s 1529 humanist masterwork Champ Fleury, with a new translation by George B. Ives. This near exact reproduction of the Renaissance original appeared incongruously at the emergence of the era of “New Typography” in the United States. In this lecture, Michael J. Golec will discuss the revival of French humanist typography in the so-called Machine Age. Interested in the concepts of survival and anachronism, his lecture will focus on the question: What might the old new typography of the sixteenth-century reveal about the new new typography of the early twentieth-century, and vice versa? The answers will have a direct bearing on contemporary issues of typographic revival in the digital age.
Michael J. Golec is Associate Professor of Art and Design History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His research has been funded by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in Fine Arts, Wolfsonian Research Fellowship, the Dartmouth College Humanities Institute, and the Getty Research Institute. He was the 2011 Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in American Studies at Princeton University. He has published articles in the Journal of Design History, Design Issues, History and Technology, Home Cultures, and numerous other academic journals. He has contributed chapters to many scholarly books and is the author of Brillo Box Archive: Aesthetics, Design, and Art (2008) and the coeditor of Relearning from Las Vegas(2009). He is Associate Editor of Design and Culture.