Gerd Arntz

Biography

Information graphics, illustration. Born 11 December 1900 in Remscheid. 1918: military service. From 1919: trained at the Düsseldorf Kunstschule: a teacher was Lothar von Kunowski . From 1922: worked in a bookshop in The Hague. 1924-8: freelance designer in Düsseldorf. 1926: political woodcuts for the journal Die proletarische Revolution. By 1929 he was in Vienna working with Otto Neurath (1882-1945) on the latter’s ‘Viennese Method’ (Isotype) of designing pictograms, i.e. illustrated statistics; from Vienna he worked on a bis z, the journal of the Cologne Progressives. From 1929: head of graphic design, Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseums, Vienna. 1933: Neurath and Arntz spent four months in Moscow training graphic designers in the method at Isostat, the economic information institute; met Tatlin and El Lissitzky . August 1934: concerned by the ominous political situation in Germany and Austria, Neurath and Arntz emigrated to The Hague (where Arntz adopted the pseudonym ‘A. Dubois’ ). Their work continued at the Mundaneum Den Haag/Stichting voor Beeldpedagogie, but upon the Nazi invasion in 1940 Neurath fled to England (where he co-founded the Isotype Institute). Arntz continued his work at the newly established Dutch Foundation for Statistics. 1943: compulsory military service in the Wehrmacht. 1944: prisoner-of-war in Paris, Chartres, Cherbourg (where he was a dockworker). 1946: returned to The Hague, and to the Foundation for Statistics. 1951-62: worked in statistical research for UNESCO. 1985: awarded the Hendrik-Nicolaas-Werkman Prize. Died 8 December 1988 in The Hague.