PREVIEW

The new elegance. The fashion illustrator Gerd Grimm

A representative selection of some 150 drawings covering the work of Gerd Grimm, the most prominent fashion illustrators of the 20th century.

Gerd Grimm (1911 – 1998), one of the most prominent fashion illustrators of the 20th century, possessed a lifelong instinct for fashion, youth culture and the spirit of the age. He designed title pages and illustrations for fashion journals such as “Die Dame“, “Die neue Linie“ and “Die Frau“, the precursor of “Brigitte“. His title designs for international fashion magazines like the American “Vogue“ made him the most successful German illustrator of the post-war era, and brought him international acclaim. From 1959 up to 1982 Grimm created the much-admired marketing campaigns for the cigarette brand Reval, establishing the iconography typical for him. After 1960 he became popular, especially in Southern Germany through the annual calendar “Grimms Mädchen“ (portraits of students). This exhibition, entitled “The New Elegance“ will be showing for the first time a representative selection of some 150 drawings covering Grimm’s work in all areas.

The versatile graphic artist Gerd Grimm produced illustrations for a variety of clients for more than half a century, always at the forefront of his profession, a career which enabled him to develop a very special feeling for change not only in fashion, but also for shifts in the perception of youth and the spirit of the age. Born in Karlsruhe, he underwent his training in Berlin – where his teachers were, among others, Karl Hubbuch, a representative of the Realists of the 1920s, and O. H. W. Hadank, the leading graphic designer of the years from the 1920s till the 1960s –, finally settling in Freiburg.

Despite being forced, as a half-Jew, to remain very unobtrusive during the Thirties, he still managed to find work, thanks to the efforts of his wife Hilde van Gülick, herself a graphic artist, and produced illustrations for “Die Dame“ or “Die neue Linie“. After the Second World War the couple decided to emigrate to the USA, but returned in 1952. The drawings for “Vogue“ were followed by numerous works for German fashion journals and title pages for paperback publishers.

In 1959 Grimm began his collaboration with the Badische Tabakmanufaktur, a maker of tobacco products, and over the extraordinary span of 23 years he designed and provided the material for the marketing campaigns for the Reval brand. Alongside this, he continued to work as a fashion illustrator, for the Bogner brand, for instance. After 1960, he created every year a calendar for the firm Faller, which produced folding boxes, with pictures of young students entitled “Grimms Mädchen“ (“Grimm’s Girls”), a play on words alluding to “Grimms Märchen” (“Grimm’s Fairy Tales”) which brought him great popularity in Southern Germany.

image: Gerd Grimm, design for an advert for the Badische Tabakwerke (Reval), c. 1970, offset print, collage, watercolours, MKG, photo: M. Thrun