In the balance
In the 1970s and 1980s Heinz Edelmann designed many posters for the West German public broadcasting station Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR).

In the 1970s and 1980s Heinz Edelmann designed many posters for the West German public broadcasting station Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR).
Heinz Edelmann worked extensively with the Klett-Cotta press over the course of his career: we’ve collected some of his best jackets.
We looked at some of Edelmann’s political posters for the West German radio station WDR back in June. But there was also a lighter side to his collaboration with the broadcaster.
While preparing for a class visit a couple of weeks ago, I rediscovered these gorgeous posters Heinz Edelmann did for Theater der Welt (Theater of the World) in 1981.
For large patches of his later career Heinz Edelmann focused on quickly producing posters for arts events and series productions: these typically made use of a fairly regularized typographic template for information, and wild, allusive but enigmatic illustrations. For one season in the mid-1980s, he worked with the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus theater, playing off the plays’ angsty plotlines with evocatively deformed bodies.
Enjoy a few of the acclaimed posters he produced for Germany’s Westdeutscher Rundfunk radio station after the jump. And click here for a characteristically witty and illuminating interview with Edelmann in Graphis.
Heinz Edelmann’s book covers for Klett-Cotta.
Direct from Stuttgart, we’ve received 151 posters and 9 books from the truly delightful Heinz Edelmann. Edelmann is best known as the influential art director of The Beatles’ film, Yellow Submarine. He’s worked in Germany, England and the Netherlands since the late 1950s, doing design, illustration, advertising and animation.
Heinz Edelmann, like his contemporary Milton Glaser, had an incredible range of graphic styles, both in his mode of illustration and layout. This 1982 poster for the Westdeutscher Rundfunk broadcaster’s series Reden muß man miteinander (roughly—correct me if I’m wrong—“We need to talk”) enlists an exceptional array of devices recalling the work of Seymour Chwast: there are similarities in the pattern, abstracted period stylization, and a floating quality to the shapes and forms, though imbued here with Edelmann’s more spastic bursts of emphasis. For comparison, see this Chwastian cat or this notable cover of Pushpin Graphic. Click through for the full poster.
You were the cute bearded guy on the F train this morning. I was the somewhat pallid but classically beautiful girl. I thought we were a good match but it was as though we were pulled apart by powerful ropes. Want to have coffee sometime?