Jean Widmer, a French-Swiss graphic artist whose simple, streamlined designs affixed the images of France’s major buildings and monuments, through logos and road signs, in the minds of generations of his compatriots, died on Feb. 2 in Paris. He was 96.
His death was announced by the Pompidou Center, the Paris museum of modern arts, which noted in a statement that Mr. Widmer had “made a lasting mark on the history of design by his sense of minimalism” and “his typographical rigor.”
Those elements were combined in his most famous design, the Pompidou Center’s logo: five thick, black horizontal lines cut across by two wavy parallel diagonals. The logo is a representation of the building, with its exterior escalators, radically simplified — “pure reduction,” the museum called it in a 2020 interview with Mr. Widmer.
In 1977, he sketched his concept on the corner of a paper tablecloth at a cafe across from the Pompidou, which was then under construction at the edge of the Marais, the oldest part of the city.
“It was the fastest logo I ever created,” he said. “It was already in my head.”
Mr. Widmer also developed the museum’s unusual system of signage to guide visitors inside, creating vertical signs that echo the towering interior. He went on to design the instantly recognizable logo for the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the stylized Arabic-script symbol for the Arab World Institute, among other cultural landmarks.
By then, Mr. Widmer’s style was already familiar to every French motorist, even if his name was not.
French officials, fearful in the early 1970s that their highways would be invaded by American-style billboards, turned to Mr. Widmer. He was already a successful magazine art director and poster designer for exhibits at the state Center for Industrial Creation — just the man, officials thought, to ward off the horrors of advertising by directing drivers instead to the cultural riches of France that were situated along the highway.
Mr. Widmer got to work and created, with his firm, Visuel Design, the images for more than 500 chestnut-colored roadside panels beckoning French motorists to the delights that lay ahead.
Using photographs, he reduced French churches, castles and houses to their simplest, most stylized outlines — transformed, but still recognizable at 65 miles an hour. He was influenced, he said later, by pictographs he had seen in Mexico designed to aid the illiterate.
The hieroglyphic-like signposts didn’t just direct drivers to historic landmarks. The outline of an apple signified an open-air fruit market; a shrimp meant a seafood market.
His most radical idea was to play a simple game with the motorist — to keep the person behind the wheel awake, he said. First came the picture and then, just ahead, another panel identifying the image.
“The signs had to be very simple,” Mr. Widmer told Eye magazine in 1999. “I separated the elements. The picture asked a question.”
A thousand feet later, he added, “The text gave the reply.”
In this project and others, Mr. Widmer was faithful to his early training in modernism with Johannes Itten, the leading exponent of the Bauhaus school in Switzerland.
“To exclude the anecdotal aspect of the image, this is what I try to do in the graphic arts,” Mr. Widmer wrote in a text quoted by Le Monde for a 1995 profile. “What seems pertinent to me is to transmit information, to go to what is essential, to express it clearly, to render it intelligible and obvious for everybody who sees it.”
In that goal, he succeeded as few did, graphic designers on both sides of the Atlantic said in interviews.
“He was about the outline; he wasn’t about decoration,” said Philippe Apeloig, who worked with Mr. Widmer at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and designed the catalog for a 2003 exhibition of Mr. Widmer’s work at the Cooper Union in New York. “With very little, he says a lot.”
Paula Scher, of the Pentagram design studio in New York, said Mr. Widmer was known for his restraint: “He wouldn’t give too much. He was never over the top.”
Jean Widmer was born Hans Ulrich Widmer on March 31, 1929, in Frauenfeld, Switzerland, to Emil Widmer, a master mechanic in a factory, and Anna (Rageth) Widmer. His father, he once told an interviewer, worried about his penchant for drawing.
In 1950, he graduated from the Kunstgewerbeschule Zurich, the school of applied arts where he studied under Mr. Itten. Within a few years, he was in Paris designing packaging for luxury products in a workshop on the Île Saint-Louis. In 1959, Mr. Widmer became the artistic director at Galeries Lafayette, designing advertising for one of the grandest Parisian department stores.
He left in 1961 to become the artistic director of the fashion magazine Le Jardin des Modes, signing big names in photography like Helmut Newton and designing the magazine’s covers. In 1969, he was hired to do a series of 20 posters for exhibits at the Center for Industrial Creation, a commission that, along with his stripped-down designs, solidified his reputation as an up-and-coming modernist.
Like many other designers of Swiss origin, Mr. Widmer was adept at simple, minimalist, sans-serif typography that, as he once explained to an interviewer, “had no nationalist overtones.”
In 1970, with his then-wife Nicole Sauvage, he founded his graphic design studio. Among the firm’s important commissions was designing the signage for the Paris buses in 1989 and the Paris airports in 1994.
Mr. Widmer is survived by four sons: Thomas, Ivan and Alexandre, from his first marriage, to Nicole Maïer; and Julien, from his second marriage, to Ms. Sauvage. Both marriages ended in divorce. He is also survived by a sister, Margrit, and five grandchildren.
In interviews, he described how he gradually turned away from simple reproduction — the world he knew in advertising and magazines — and back to the pure Bauhaus world he had known as a student.
“I stopped thinking photographically and turned toward design, basic forms, visual identity,” he told Eye. “I refused simply to reproduce an object or the details of an object. I wanted it to be about the essence of design.”
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans and is now a writer on the Obituaries desk.
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