Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group by Michael Duncan and Scott A. Shields (ed.)

Marvin Visions, Mathieu Triay’s revival of Marvin, expands Michael Chave’s original 1969 design into a range of weights and optical sizes. And yet the majority of applications uses the Bold weight only. This book is an exception.

Designers Lorraine Wild and Tommy Huang of Green Dragon Office started with the Bold, too, but made it less weighty by outlining the letterforms. The title is rendered with hyper-extended EndcapS (compare to a similar treatment for Starliners, 1980). For the subtitle, captions, page numbers, bibliographical dates and more, they pulled up a much lighter weight. This airy end of the design space has distinct qualities, which are a good match for the transcendental theme. The text typeface appears to be LL Catalogue.

The Transcendental Painting Group was founded in Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico, in 1938. This “first book on a radical, astonishingly prescient episode in American modernism” was published by the Crocker Art Museum together with DelMonico Books. It accompanied an exhibition that opened at the Albuquerque Museum in June 2021, and subsequently traveled to the Philbrook Museum of Art; Artis—Naples, The Baker Museum; and the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento. The show concluded at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in April 2023.