Herbert Matter

Herbert Matter was born in the Swiss mountain village of Engelberg in 1907l He is known for his contributions to visual communication, specifically in photography, photomontage, and graphic design. His innovative design work is emblematic of European modernism and post-was American expressionism and has been incorporated into common use. Born in Switzerland, Matter studied with Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant at the Académie Moderne in Paris in the late 1920s. In 1929 he was hired as a designer and photographer for Deberny and Peignot, alongside Le Corbusier. His photomontages for a series of Swiss travel posters in the early 1930s brought him early appreciation, including from Alexey Brodovich, for whom Matter later worked at “Harper’s Bazaar.” He moved to New York City in 1936 and began working for clients including the Museum of Modern Art, publisher Condé Nast, and later Knoll Furniture (1946-1966), and the Guggenheim Museum (1958–1968). In 1939, he married artist and educator Mercedes Carles, and the two became part of the emerging New York art scene. In the 1940s, the couple lived for a few years in California. Matter began teaching at Yale University in 1952 and became a tenured professor at Yale where he helped to shape the university’s photography and graphic design program until 1976. In 1960, he met fellow Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti after working on the graphics for his exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 1955. Matter began photographing Giacometti’s sculptural work and continued for several decades after the artist’s death in 1966 to create a chronicle of the art and his responses to it. Thirteen images from the series were issued as a portfolio in 1978, published by Matter’s Yale colleagues Peter Ives and Sewell Sillman and in the book “Alberto Giacometti” (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1987), published after Matter’s death with text by his wife. In 1978, the School of Art at Yale mounted a retrospective of Matter’s work and the Kunsthaus in Zurich presented an exhibition of his work from the 1930s. Matter was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship for photography in 1980. Matter became terminally ill in 1979 and died in Southampton, New York, in 1984. In 1991 the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized the exhibition “The Graphic Design of Herbert Matter.”