COMMERCIAL DESIGN OF DUŠAN JANKOVIĆ DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION

Abstract

The Great Depression, which broke out in 1929, was devastating also for all artistic professions. However, while looking for ways to reach as wide a circle of consumers as possible, commercial design was booming. This trend influenced Dušan Janković (1894–1950), a decorative painter living in Paris (1916–1935), to intensify his work on shaping advertising messages. At the beginning of his career he collaborated with the Riven agency (Publicité Riven) performing blueprints for newspaper advertisements and posters. During the great crisis, the assortment of goods that Janković worked on increased. His achievements were shown in London in 1931 at the exhibition of the agency of which he was an associate at the time. He had less success in public competitions. In 1932, Janković got the opportunity to design and equip a villa in Saint-Cloud, and dealing with commercial design has become, for the most part, a thing of the past. By respecting the requirements of this creative discipline, he achieved an authentic expression based on the synthesis of generally accepted visual language and a delicately modernized folklore tradition of the environment from which he came.