CLEAN NEW WORLD: Culture, Politics, and Graphic Design.

By Maud Lavin. MIT Press. 201 pp. $27.95

GRAPHIC STYLE: From Victorian to Digital (rev. ed.).

By Steven Heller and Seymour Chwast. Abrams. 240 pp. $24.95

Lavin, who teaches art history and visual culture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is one of the most incisive thinkers about graphic design. Here she examines design as it relates to power, communication, and democracy—or, as she puts it, "who gets to say what to whom."

Her favorite period seems to be the Weimar Republic, and for good reason. The publishing house Malik Verlag, cofounded by John Heartfield, his brother Wieland Herzfelde, and George Grosz, showed how photomontage and other graphic art of ferocious originality could help create a powerful political voice on the left—a voice financed in part through sales of Grosz’s prints to bourgeois customers. Other members of the avantgarde, including Kurt Schwitters and Jan Tschichold, helped shape a modernist business culture with their equally striking photomontage images for makers of industrial equipment. And the photographers Ellen Auerbach and Grete Stern infused women’s hair-products advertisements with both feminism and humor, breaking two taboos of German advertising of the era.

The downside of today’s peace and prosperity seems to be an impoverishment of ideological zest. Only a few of Lavin’s recent examples are both memorable and widely circulated. Perhaps it is not just the new global corporate order in general but the broadcast industry in particular that has hamstrung (to use Lavin’s word) the graphic designer. To generations raised with the visual grammar of the video and the 30-second commercial, graphics of the 1920s and 1930s may be more remote than Baroque scenography. Today’s politically engaged graphics won’t be seen unless carried in a televised demonstration—and seen then only through the grace of producers and tape editors.

Graphic Style makes an excellent companion volume to Lavin’s. It is as comprehensive as hers is selective, and, because it has been edited by practitioners—Heller is art director of the New York Times Book Review; Chwast directs a New York design firm—it is also a visual feast. We are plunged into a world of relentless persuasion, a reflection of the rise of mass consumption and popular politics from the 19th century to the present.

Graphic Style reveals the Internet to be a surprisingly disappointing source of design innovation. As Heller and Chwast put it, "the paradigm one minute is an artifact the next." Perhaps the problem is that few computer monitors can display even a full letter-sized page. Toulouse-Lautrec never had to contend with a scroll bar.

—Edward Tenner