‘Like art vanishing into architecture’: Barbara Stauffacher Solomon’s Modernist Supergraphics

EXITS EXIST, exhibition 
Graham Foundation, Chicago

25 February, 2022 – 9 July, 2022

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I had been a dancer and could paint pictures but, in 1955, dancers and artists didn’t make money. A friend suggested I become a designer.

—Barbara Stauffacher Solomon¹

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EXITS EXIST, a 2022 site-specific work by Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, envelops its beholders—soon to become its readers—in black and vermillion letterforms painted at large scale onto the interior walls of the Madlener House, the 1902 Prairie-style mansion that houses the Graham Foundation in Chicago. The work is as much a poem as a painting—and perhaps even a domesticated series of billboards. Its disorienting scale and immersive arrangement initially estrange its status as writing, forcing the viewer to pivot around in order to behold the text that spans from the living room into the music room. Our experience of architectural space becomes a poetic experience. Guided by Solomon’s letterforms, we become alive to the phonic and graphic dimensions of the word, the phrase, and—in an architecturally conflated sense—the line (Figure 1). And the ultimate effect, we will see, is to save architecture and typography alike from their relegation, under neoliberalism, to mere commercial utility or merely feminine experience.

Solomon discovered this typographic-architectural medium in 1966 when she painted the interior walls at Sea Ranch, a Sonoma real estate venture that set a benchmark for a markedly Californian approach to modernist architecture. Popularized in Life magazine as “supergraphics,” Solomon’s letterforms and hard-edged motifs gave this experimental community’s weathered-wood wedge buildings an interior Helvetica flare that was, at this point, largely without precedent in the US (Figure 2).

56 years later, in 2022, EXITS EXIST stands as something of a formal culmination of Solomon’s supergraphic medium, not unlike the Brazilian Noigandres group’s modernist notion of a “verbivocovisual” ideogram in concrete poetry, but subsumed within an architectural approach to making meaning out of the contingent experience of beholders as they move through space.² Notably, Solomon arrives at this supergraphic medium via the highly commercial contexts of graphic design and architecture, rather than via the more market-insulated context of experimental poetics. However, the Sea Ranch supergraphics do not yet exhibit the level of formal integrity that distinguishes EXITS EXIST. It is only in Solomon’s late work that she seems to realize the full potential of supergraphics as a modernist medium. Ranging from supergraphics to artists’ books, this late work exemplifies how modernism can persist beyond its appropriation by marketing. Solomon’s incisive handling of the commercial and gendered pressures on her art exemplifies a twenty-first-century modernist commitment to the self-legislating form of the autonomous artwork, albeit premised on its own precarity in the market-saturated and predominantly postmodernist paradigms of artistic production under neoliberalism.

While modernist typography is integral to Solomon’s supergraphics, we can bring the broad contours of its aesthetic problematic into focus in architectural terms. When Le Corbusier asserts in his 1923 modernist manifesto Towards a New Architecture that a “house is a machine for living in,”³ he is arguing that modernist architects must design houses like airplanes—that is, in strictly utilitarian terms. Just as the airplane must fly, the house must shape and enable domestic life with the utmost efficiency. Architecture is a material support for life. But crucially, for Le Corbusier, modernist architecture must also go beyond this level of utilitarian purposiveness. His criterion of architectural art is a narrow band of aesthetic sensuousness that nonetheless arises out of the ordinary experience of fulfilling instrumental needs: “By the use of inert materials and starting from conditions more or less utilitarian, you have established certain relationships which have aroused my emotions. This is Architecture.”⁴ For Le Corbusier, such emotional arousal is a matter of sensuous, formal harmony:

Architecture has another meaning and other ends to pursue than showing construction and responding to needs (and by “needs” I mean utility, comfort and practical arrangement). ARCHITECTURE is the art above all others which achieves a state of platonic grandeur, mathematical order, speculation, the perception of the harmony which lies in emotional relationships. This is the AIM of architecture.⁵

Thus, against Adolf Loos’s influential 1910 polemic against architecture as art,which holds that “everything that serves some practical purpose, should be ejected from the realm of art”⁶—and in contrast to what Le Corbusier imagines to be “pure art, a concentrated thing free from all utilitarian motives”—Le Corbusier contends that assertion of aesthetic autonomy is possible in architecture, but only insofar as it transforms what we mean by use, not by rejecting usefulness.⁷ For him, the use of architectural art is to produce sensuously intelligible unity: “the harmony which lies in emotional relationships.” Architecture should not merely satisfy external needs like “utility, comfort and practical arrangement” but, more deeply, satisfy what the work needs to work on its own terms. Its aesthetic use is the more or less successfully realized intention of the architect: “the use” of “inert materials” and “conditions more or less utilitarian.” Architectural art dramatizes how aesthetic autonomy is not merely freedom from instrumentality but how a work of art freely uses its medium to fulfill an internal purpose it sets for itself.

Domestic architecture, like typography, is unavoidably instrumental. If architecture wants to facilitate social reproduction by housing you, typography wants to facilitate economic production by selling to you. We can begin to see how Solomon asserts aesthetic autonomy through the instrumentality of both domestic architecture and typography by looking, in EXITS EXIST, from the music room back into the living room—that is, from the endpoint of the work’s syntax back to one of its early moments. Notice that the living room “T” in “EXITS” is proportionally inverse to the music room “T” in “EXIST” (Figure 3).

Where the first “T” mimes the living room mantelpiece adjacent to it, the vermillion square that dominates the second “T” finds no such architectural rhyme in the music room. Instead, the second “T” of “EXITS EXIST” takes the form of a sign on a pole, suggesting that once its beholder-reader exits the gallery through the literal exit immediately to the right, imposing letterforms are more likely to be found in more instrumental roles—like on billboards, street signs, or protest posters. Further, Solomon’s two “T” letterforms embody the difference between the “t” in “exits” (a glottal stop, an unvoiced instant) and the “t” in “exist” (a sharply defined termination of a consonant blend). Accordingly, the living room “T” appears as an empty plinth with nothing on it, and the music room “T” fills the former’s emptiness with its arresting vermillion square. Likewise, in the “ST,” Solomon uses a phonically-keyed difference in the typographical weighting of the “S” to imply its ligature with the “T.” In EXITS EXIST, phonic forms find visual analogues that acknowledge the architectural logic of their supergraphics medium.

Similarly, at the “X” of “EXITS,” Solomon evokes the work’s architectural “outside” only to typographically subsume it within the logic of her supergraphic (Figure 4).

This “X” is bisected by the southeast corner of the music room so that its evocation of linear perspective—as it were, “exiting” the music room into pictorial depth—finds an architectural rhyme in the literal depth of this room’s corner. At the same time, a horizontal edge extending from the center of the “X” suggests a horizon—perhaps the horizon obscured by the wall and the several blocks of high rises between the Graham Foundation and Lake Michigan. Yet this edge also asserts the flatness of a typographical picture plane against the literal depth of the corner, pulling us off the wall but into rather than out of the exhibition space. We might say that here, “X” marks the spot where “outside” and “inside” enter a dialectic that they ultimately “exit,” but only insofar as, within the unity of the work’s aesthetic existence, apparent ways out of the work are relativized as ways into its self-legislating form. Solomon, in a recent artist’s book, reflects on her oeuvre in resonant terms: “Like Art vanishing into architecture, lines, colors, and shapes, called Art only because they are enclosed inside their rectangle frames, or the other side of the wall, vanishing out into the land.”⁸ Solomon identifies the problem of art’s heteronomy—grasped here as “Art vanishing into architecture” and into its literal components and contexts (thus,  even vanishing “out into the land”)—with the problem of innovating procedures of enclosure that integrate a work’s material support—be it frame, wall, land, letter, sound, whatever—with its artistic purpose. EXITS EXIST asserts aesthetic autonomy by opening onto itself—that is, by opening onto the medium-specific terms it innovates and sets for itself as a supergraphic.

Material supports are frequently foregrounded in Solomon’s work, whether the invisible gridlines that make possible the precise formatting of type or the physical support of a chair that makes possible the leisurely experience of reading. In Figure 3 above, we can see how at the same syntactical and architectural moment that EXITS EXIST culminates with “ST,” its “S” opens a retrospective sight line onto “SIT”—as on a mantelpiece or a pedestal. With an immediate implication of stasis and immanence, and therefore of an alternative to literally exiting the gallery, “SIT” is legible as an interpretive invitation: a demand to sit with the work’s encompassing formal logic. And this demand is itself literalized once EXITS EXIST reaches its final form. In October of 2022, the Graham Foundation consolidated its presentation of Solomon’s work to make room for a new exhibition in its second-floor gallery. Under Solomon’s direction, a series of lacquer-painted wood cubes that had sat on the floor of the upstairs gallery—functioning there as seats and pedestals for Solomon’s artist’s books—were moved downstairs and incorporated into the site-specific logic of her supergraphic (Figure 5).

These pedestal-seats invite Solomon’s audience to sit and read her artist’s books—in particular, her 2012 autobiography Why? Why Not?, in which she first published her original typographical drawing of the phrase “EXITS EXIST.” Thus, these cubes point to the context of the EXITS EXIST supergraphic in two ways. On the one hand, these cubes invite Solomon’s audience to shift from the logic of architectural “reading” imposed by the supergraphic to a more conventional form of reading—from reading walls to pages. On the other hand, these cubes, like Solomon’s artist books, are not site-specific—they are made to be literally moved as a product. Indeed, these cubes are an almost caricatural art commodity. Condensing Solomon’s Swiss design palette into a high-finish, interpretively low-stakes, and highly versatile interior-design object, these chair-pedestals’ bluntly iterative logic counterpoints the formal intricacy of Solomon’s supergraphic in a way that dramatizes the commercial context of Solomon’s artistic practice.

The art/commerce counterpoint that these cubes introduce into EXITS EXIST finds a unifying contextual ground in Solomon’s autobiography. The first chapter, titled “EXITS EXIST,” is illustrated by Solomon’s original typographical drawing of this phrase and narrates how, at the age of 26, Solomon’s life was upended:

My husband Frank Stauffacher has just died. We’d been married for six years. Frank had been thirty-nine. I was twenty-six. Chloe was three. In 1955, there was no role of single parent, no crisis lines, no grief clinics, no government programs for children with special needs (Chloe was one of those, but I hadn’t yet realized this), and shrinks were for the rich. Frank left no money or property or insurance and his family vaporized. Friends just stared at “the poor little widow” with a screaming child, and I hated it. I had been a dancer and could paint pictures but, in 1955, dancers and artists didn’t make money. A friend suggested I become a designer. The best design schools in the world were in Switzerland.⁹

While the architectural “exits” that Solomon takes up in the Graham Foundation supergraphic give rise to abstract manipulations of senses of “inside” and “outside,” autonomy and heteronomy, the “exits” that Solomon senses before her as a 26-year-old widow with little money and a special needs child are utterly concrete: immiseration or a career as a designer.

Solomon manages to take the latter “Exit.” With her husband’s art-world connections, she moves to Switzerland in 1955 to study typography with Armin Hoffman at the Basel School of Design. There, Helvetica is everything, and designed entirely by hand. Solomon recalls:

Our design tools were minimal: white boards, pencils, black and white paint, brushes, T-squares, a straight-edge, scissors, our hands and eyes. We used a straight edge ruler, but no compass, no French curves. Curved lines were drawn by eye… After a few months, I could sense each millimeter of paint. A millimeter of black was whited out. Add a hairline of white to change the intensity of a white space. The weight of each black line was sacred. The shape of each white space, the white space between each letter, sacrosanct.¹⁰

In the 1960s, Solomon takes this Swiss typography to California, where she is one of the first designers to work in Helvetica. And since the 1980s, Solomon has developed a collage medium that, while central to drafting processes for much of her work, has only recently emerged as a discrete aspect of her oeuvre in itself—and at a scale very different than her supergraphics.            

In five artist’s books published between 2012 and 2022, Solomon structures 8 1/2” by 11” sheets of paper with variations on a Swiss typographical grid within which she arranges typographical drawings, some of which are counterpointed with columns of prose that have been manually cut and pasted onto the page. Since these 8 1/2” by 11” collages are digitally scanned before their assembly into a book, the works that result are photographic. Page to page, they consist of facsimiles of Solomon’s collage in its textural, handmade complexity (Figure 6).

“The game,” Solomon writes in one of these artist’s books, “is making the invisible visible.”¹¹ Immediately, that which Solomon makes “visible” is Helvetica itself. For the light blue pencil of many of Solomon’s grids is a midcentury Swiss design standard meant to remain invisible in the photographs that designers used to extract deliverable typographical work out of the accumulated paint of their manually shaped letterforms.¹² But by integrating high-resolution scanning into her collage medium, Solomon ensures that these blue grids remain visible, along with the textural and gestural complexity of her hand-drawn letterforms and the more expressively arrayed red pencil lines of what she calls her “California grids” (Figure 7).

Here, Solomon is “Doing the forbidden, mixing the 2 Grids at the same time.” With this photographic grid collage as her starting point, Solomon invents a medium through which the Helvetica typeface that seems invisible in its utterly generic, digitally-mediated ubiquity today emerges anew through expressive manipulation of the analog design process that originated it over half a century ago.

This artistic labor, Solomon tells us, also supported the reproductive labor of caring for her house and family. In a recent interview, Solomon describes how she lined up the 8 1/2” x11” pieces of paper in a grid on the walls of her office, which also became “a way to maintain order in the family home: it kept the family’s “700 sq.ft. duplex in San Francisco from being dirty when living, working, cooking dinners for [her second] husband and raising two daughters.” Behind Solomon’s imposing supergraphics is the scaled-down, intricate practice of an artist whose modernist commitment to asserting aesthetic autonomy through formal innovation is inextricable from the historically feminine domestic sphere of social reproduction and the commercially instrumental context of graphic design (Figure 8).

Here, we return to EXITS EXIST. Along a sight line running from the living room into the music room, “SEX” appears in quick succession with an ideographic condensation of “SEE” (Figure 9).

 “Sex” is the linking sound between “exits” and “exist,” and in the original typographical drawing from which this supergraphic emerges, Solomon uses brackets to notate “SEX” as the initial phonic and graphic core of the work’s form (Figure 10).

Aware that both the commercial and the domestic sphere are sexed, we can immediately see how “SEX,” taken literally, refers to the thematic core of EXITS EXIST. Yet we can also see how “SEX,” embedded within the work’s titular phrase, more fundamentally signals the unity of form and content that organizes the work as a whole. “SEX” is what Solomon wants us to “SEE” in EXITS EXIST: aesthetic autonomy as a bridge between escape and existence. For EXITS EXIST is not merely a branding exercise for the uplifting content of Solomon’s autobiography, embellishing the title of its first chapter to produce an immersive logo for the autonomy of women artists within modernist institutions, thus tying Solomon’s art to feminine, social-reproductive “existence.” Nor is the work simply an escapist experiment in typographical form, using abstract elements of sound, shape, and color to assert autonomy from the world, thus “exiting” it. EXITS EXIST integrates these thematic and formal elements within a larger, self-legislating whole. Solomon’s twenty-first century modernism lies in the specifically aesthetic way her work’s unity of form and content makes escape and existence thinkable together.

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1. Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, WHY? WHY NOT? (San Francisco: Fun Fog Press, 2012), 1.
2. The term “verbivocovisual” was invented by Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake and taken up by the Noigandres group in the 1950s. See Augusto de Campos, Decio Pignatari, and Haroldo de Campos, “Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry,” in Concrete Poetry: A World View (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958), 71–72.
3. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (Courier, 1986), 95.
4. Le Corbusier, 203.
5. Le Corbusier, 110-111. References here to the “platonic” and “mathematical” are more polemical than rigorously worked out. While the former emphasizes non-instrumentality, the latter follows from Le Corbusier’s fascination with Taylorism.
6. Adolf Loos, On Architecture (Ariadne Press, 2002), 83.
7. Le Corbusier, 142. See Todd Cronan’s suggestive gloss on these issues in “Why Architecture Matters as Art as Never Before: Le Corbusier, Tony Smith and the Problem of Use,” nonsite, no. 21 (July 17, 2017), https://nonsite.org/why-architecture-matters-as-art-as-never-before/.
8. Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, Making the Invisible Visible, (Owl Cave Books, 2019), 3.
9. Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, WHY? WHY NOT? (San Francisco: Fun Fog Press, 2012), 1.
10. Solomon, WHY? WHY NOT?, 5.
11. Solomon, Making the Invisible Visible, 1.
12. Note that in figure 7 Solomon uses both blue and red pencil. This recto-verso spread combines a conventional Swiss grid (in blue) with a more expressive, “Californian” grid of Solomon’s own creation (in red).

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  Christopher Gortmaker

  Chris Gortmaker is Teaching Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He specializes in Anglo-American modernist fiction and its intersections with African American literature, the contemporary novel, and critical theory. His work has been published in nonsite.org and JMMLA and is forthcoming in Modernism/modernity and Mediations. His current book project, The Market Architecture of Modernist Fiction, argues that a distinct strain of Anglo-American modernist fiction spans the twentieth century and persists today by making the market an aspect of its medium.