600 works of art and documents.

Technical and industrial advances and new communication needs, in addition to the emergence of new artistic trends at the start of the twentieth century, prompted what Marinetti coined the ‘typographic revolution’ in his manifesto L’immaginazione senza fili e le parole in libertà (1913). Said revolution got underway in search of industrial printing models that responded to the principles of modernity and productivity, whilst aspiring to the simplification of type and the legibility and semantic transparency of symbols. Italian Futurists and Dutch and Russian constructivists influenced the theoretical and practical evolution of the revolution, which found its greatest exponent in the German typographic industry and its designers.

Archivo Lafuente boasts a collection of materials that document this change, including the first editions of the manuals and essays that helped give rise to the transformation that graphic arts were to undergo. The collection, composed of almost 600 pieces, is arranged into two groups. In the first, the emphasis is on type foundries—companies creating and selling new typefaces for the work of typographic designers: Jan Tschichold for Lynotype, Eric Gill for Monotype and Herman Zapf for D. Stempel AG.

Whilst in the second, typographic artists such as Walter Dexel, Paul Schuitema and Piet Zwart are given particular importance due to the impact and quantity of their works—hundreds of publications and documents—found within the Archivo Lafuente collection.