(b Haag, Austria, 5 April 1900; d Santa Barbara, CA, 30 Sept 1985). American painter, designer, photographer and typographer, of Austrian birth. After serving in the Austrian army (1917-18), he studied architecture under Professor Schmidthammer in Linz in 1919 and in 1920 worked with the architect Emanuel Margold in Darmstadt. From 1921 to 1923 he attended the Bauhaus in Weimar, studying mural painting (with Vasily Kandinsky) and typography; it was at this time that he created the Universal alphabet, consisting only of lower-case letters. In 1925 he returned to the Bauhaus, then in Dessau, as a teacher of advertising, layout and typography, remaining there until 1928. For the next ten years he was based in Berlin as a commercial artist: he worked as art manager of Vogue (1929-30) and as director of the Dorland advertising agency. Shortly after his first one-man exhibitions at the Galerie Povolotski, Paris, and at the Kunstlerbund M?rz, Linz (both 1929), he created photomontages of a Surrealist nature, such as Hands Act (1932; see Cohen, p. 270).

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