The Sens of Sight

“Graphologist and photographer”: with this nice little witty dedication, Dubuffet once qualified Massin. A droll observation in the image of a high-spirited corpus composed of writing through and through. Massin is a versatile spirit who has multiplied experiments with writing for almost sixty years. While his career spans from the 1940s to the turn of this twenty-first century, his adventure probably started around 1930, if his childhood productions are to be judged as preursors. Before the age of ten, he was making little books which he signed “Robert Massin, editor, book-seller, author, photographer, typographer, journalist [etc.].” His ensuing practices and professions would confirm: journalist, critic, layout artist, typographer, graphic designer, art director, author, researcher, editor… diarist, collector and music lover as well, but not an illustrator, nor a type designer, and even less a bibliophile.

Cultural Kaleidoscope
Massin is a graphic designer who has imposed himself over the past fifty years on the international visual communications scene as one of the major figures of French design. His contribution can seem out of the ordinary. His singularity stands out clearly, both at the beginning of his career and within its very essence. He is an autodidact who developped an activity as a graphic designer rooted in the world of books–a practice that is fundamentally linked ti literary culture and its forms of mass production. His work associates typography, publishing, literature, and writing rolled into one. The graphic side is thus broadly framed by his experience and his professions, which have covered writing in all forms: (typo) graphic, professional, journalistic, biographical, autobiographical, novelistic, etc. All the way to this fascination for the reduced letterform, rich with countless avatars, which resulted in his work Letter and Image (the fruit of over a decade of research in France and abroad).

These many facets of writin form a tentacular, versatile whole-hard to figure, resistant to widespread categorisations, constantly on the move. Indeed, Massin happily uses pseudonyms: Claude Menuet for autobiographical tales, Félix Vermot for a laugh or when he dislikes how his work has turned out, or M***, a mysterious typographic signature. Having “removed” his Christian name in 1953, he found himself christened a thousandfold: Jean, Henri, or André, among countless other false first names written on letters addressed to him or circulating in accounts of his work, along with Juste, on the lips of Simone Gallimard, after being Massinture for his fellow boarders at school. In short, several characters in one, numerous activities in one life. He belongs simultaneously to the Académie royale de Belgique and the Alliance graphique internationale and he loathes specialisations. In his welcome speech at the Brussels Academy, he declared outright that “graphic design does not exist, or to be more precise, its existence is linked to that of different disciplines that have often been artificially and wrongly separated by a number of watertight walls… graphic design … is a certain way of seeing things, a view of the world around us … graphic design is everywhere … above all, it is writing … even if it gives modernity more than a fair share, [graphic design] is a timeless notion that scoffs at time and space yet enables untold cross-overs in both.”

This conception of graphic design is bound up in an unconventional working style and an exceptional circle of acquaintances. Over the decades, Massin has crossed paths or rubbed shoulders with numerous literary, intellectual, and cultural figures from publishing and the arts, interviewing Céline, John Steinbeck, and Malcolm Lowry; corresponding with Marcel Duchamp or Roland Barthes; glimpsing Antonin Artaud, spending time with Breton, Masson, Ernst, Miro, and Man Ray for the new edition of Le Surréalisme et la peinture; meeting Pierre Albert-Birot, Tzara, Genet, Ponge, Paulhan, Michaux, Chagall, Isou, Malraux, and Sartre; workig alongside Aragon, Cendrars, Queneau, Ionesco, Tardieu, the Gallimards, or Émile Zola’s grandson, among several others. Let us point out, without meaning to lapse into hagiography, that numerous personalities have waxed lyrical about Massin. Such as Barthes, in 1970, who wrote of “the admiration I have for your work,” upon receiving Massin’s comprehensive survey, Letter and Image, then enthusing over the idea of collaborating together. [2] A few years previously, The Bald Prima Donna, another seminal piece in Massin’s work, inspired this message from Marcel Duchamp: “thank you for this fantastic Ionesco–a compositional tour de force as well–you must have enjoyed youself… all my admiration. [3] The author himself confirmed:”He multiplied all the humour I put into the Bald Prima Donna a hundredfold, from the staging to the layout. This is a Prima Donna even more Prima than the Donna.“ [4] But every rose has its thorn, and Massin also encountered less pleasant reactions, or even hostility. Such as Aragon having him replaced or a quarrel with Dubuffet over a few paintings reproduced back to front in a catalogue. [5] The climax came with the wrath of Isidore Isou, who signed a violent attack on Letter and Image, published in the journal Lettrisme in 1970. Under the title”A confusionisitic [sic] and forged plagiary of the letter and the sign,“Isou did not mince his words, laying into Massin tooth and nail:”Poor Massin, the hardy manufacturer of all kinds of imitated covers … collects frauds and idiocies … every sentence … is a conglomerate of lies and fabrications. Massin displays his ignorance and hypocrisy… Only barely good for making advertising covers.“ [6] At the very same moment, Letter and Image was the subject of an inspired and laudatory piece written by Roland Barthes, hailing this work that”forces us to review some of our prejudeces." [7]

Graphic diversity
Massin’s graphic work concerns books above all. He has explored every angle in pursuit of a more than millennial desire to magnify or metamorphose this naturally interactive medium. His interest in the physical potential and materiality of books is part of the incommensurably grand design that binds creations together, be they mediaevel, artistic, avant-gardist, etc. Massin broke with typographic greyness and the normalisation of signs to revisit the style of text, covers, double-page spreads, and the way they “unfurl”. Reflecting on a project for a collection designed along these lines, he called upon "the increasingly important role given to typographic expression: by using certain visual techniques or borrowing from the art of stage, music, the dynamic of sound and image, and even advertising, the book becomes a show animated by its own movement.

Massin’s atypical production in the field of books can vary completely, depending on the circumstances. He has designed highly original books (like Ionesco’s The Bald Prima Donna or the unpuublished mock-up for Cocteau’s La Voix humaine and is also the kingpin of some of the most standard paperback collections, starting with “Folio”–an importance summed up well in the title of the exhibition devoted to him in Strasbourg , “On a tous un Massin chez soi” (We all have a Massin at home). His activity thus runs from solo typographic experimentation to art direction (especially for Gallimard publications where ha was the “graphic designer of all the mass market collections.”) A run-through of his work displays the diversity of his contributions and resarch. Apart from “Folio”, Massin was behind the familiar graphic lines of the “Poesie”, “L’Imaginaire” (1966 and 1977) or “Tel” collections, after being one of the main players in the visual input of book clubs from the 1940s onwards. On a technical register, he asserts that in 1961, he innovated by guillotining books at Gallimard (doing away with paper-cutters in the process), a practice that became generalised shortly after. In 1958, he redesigned the “NRF” (Nouvelle revue française) logo, which has remained nchanged and omnipresent for the past half-centuy. Massin has also scattered unfinished or unpublished projects among his boxes, like a mock-up he made in 1967 or 1968 of Mallarme’s famous text Un Coup de dés n’abolira jamais le hasard (A throw of the dice never will abolish chance), written on folded paper representing a fan, which made the end of the poem run in to the beginning. In the same register–orienting the page towards the third dimension through folds or cuts–It was also Massin who gave form to Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de Poèmes (One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems), dividing the pages into thin horizontal strips corresponding to the lines of a sonnet: “a kind of poem-making machine” that “supplies reading matter for almost two hundred million years (if you read twenty-four hours a day).” [8]