Pioneering graphic designer, scientist and writer Marie Neurath (née Reidemeister) was born in 1898 in Braunschweig, Germany. In 1934 she fled Vienna with her Jewish husband Otto Neurath, immigrating to England in 1940. A year later they founded the Isotype Institute in Oxford which, during the 1940s, became influential in the fields of propaganda, adult education, town planning, film and information design. Between the late 1940s and early 1970s Neurath directed a team of writers and illustrators, producing more than eighty children’s books which transformed complex natural phenomena into easily understood infographics and diagrams.
Pioneering graphic designer, scientist and writer Marie Neurath (née Reidemeister) was born in Braunschweig, Germany on 27 May 1898. Between 1917 and 1924 she studied mathematics and physics at the Universities of Braunschweig, Berlin, Munich and Göttingen, as well as briefly attending art school. In 1925, she moved to Vienna in Austria and joined the staff of the Gesellschafts und Wirtschaftsmuseum (Museum for Social and Economic Affairs), where, together with her future husband, museum Director Otto Neurath, and an ever-changing team of designers, bookbinders, and sociologists, she developed a simplified pictorial language designed to communicate social information, as well as clarify scientific relationships for non-specialists, named the Vienna Method. As the museum's resident designer, or 'transformer', her job was to convert complex science into striking infographics and diagrams to be easily understood by a broad audience.
Upon the outbreak of the Austrian Civil War in 1934, she fled with Otto (who was Jewish) to The Hague in Holland. Having left the Vienna Method's original context behind, Neurath rebranded their work the following year, using the acronym Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education). Otto collected the information while German artist, Gerd Arntz developed the pictograms and graphics which Neurath converted into visually comprehensible presentations. Working from The Hague, Neurath and the team continued to grow Isotype, focusing on publications and education. Adjusting was difficult, but a few commissions from America eased their economic difficulties, including a book for Knopf called Modern Man in the Making, which was published in Britain and the USA in 1939. In 1940, following the Nazi invasion of Holland, Neurath and Otto escaped to England. Soon after their arrival, however, she was taken to Holloway Prison before being interned as an 'enemy alien' on the Isle of Man. In 1941, ten months later, she and Otto, who had also been interned, were released after a range of advocates, including Albert Einstein petitioned for their freedom. The couple married and moved to Oxford, where in 1942 they founded the Isotype Institute. Although missing their previous staff, the Neuraths made a quick start and began working on plans for post-war rebuilding and propaganda films for the Ministry of Information. The couple also designed animated diagrams for documentary films and worked with renowned British filmmaker, historian and critic Paul Rotha. After their success with Knopf, they began to consider publishing as a critical future outlet for Isotype’s ideas and made an agreement with the London-based book packaging company Adprint, run by fellow Viennese émigré Wolfgang Foges, to produce a series of picture-based educational books for children: If You Could See Inside was published in 1948 and used simple cross-section illustrations to reveal the inner workings of a mixture of everyday and unexpected things, such as a house, an egg and a volcano. The use of cut-through illustrations to show, rather than tell, how things work became a method used regularly by Neurath on the Isotype children’s books over the next two decades.
After Otto's death in 1945, Neurath carried on Isotype's work with a small group of English assistants, moving to London in 1948. She directed a team of writers and illustrators who produced more than 80 children’s books between the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1970s, half of which were dedicated to science, translating marvellous and complex natural phenomena into easily understood infographics and diagrams, with titles including How the First Men Lived (1952) and Visual History of Mankind (1962). The books were distinct from other children’s books of the time with their graphic covers, double-page spreads, and logical use of colour that added meaning to the content, rather than just visual appeal. Neurath used visual techniques, such as magnification, sequencing and cross-sections in her designs in order to communicate with both children and adults clearly and effectively. She described her role as transforming 'data given in words and figures', finding 'a way ... to extract the essential facts and put them into picture form', as well as deciding 'how to make it understandable, how to link it with general knowledge or with information already given in other charts. In this sense, the transformer is the trustee of the public' (Marie Neurath, Isotype, Instructional Science, 3, 1974, p136). After her retirement in 1971, she donated the working material of the Isotype Institute to the University of Reading, where it is housed in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication as the Otto and Marie Neurath Isotype Collection. Thereafter she devoted much energy to preserving and documenting the history of Isotype. Marie Neurath died in London in 1986. In 2019 the House of Illustration in London held an exhibition of her work entitled Marie Neurath: Picturing Science in order to highlight her life's work and achievements, in particular, the revolutionary children’s books produced by the Isotype Institute between the 1940s and the 1970s.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Marie Neurath]
Publications related to [Marie Neurath] in the Ben Uri Library