In writing and speech we instantiate with “the,” a proper noun, something named in the singular. We conceptualize with “a,” a common noun, something namable in the plural. In realistic image, we can mark the difference with a representation of something in its inarguable singularity, compared to icons which refer only to the criterial features of more than one thing.

Now we have a picture of a singular person, Otto Neurath, in a photo taken in 1919 by Heinrich Hoffman when Neurath was President of the Central Office of Economics in the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic. The caption in a photo booklet on the revolution printed at the time said, “Dr Neurath, Socialization Commissar.”

The photographer later joined the Nazi Party, making his way eventually into Adolf Hitler’s inner circle where he became the only photographer allowed to take the Führer’s portrait. Republished in a Nazi newspaper in 1932, this time the photo was captioned “The Jew Neurath.”¹⁰¹ The contextual narrative only serves to sharpen the singularity of the person captured in the photograph (Neurath’s embodied instantiation) and the singularity of the photograph (Neurath’s instantiation in this image).

After the failure of the Bavarian revolution, Neurath was jailed in Germany for a time. Following his release, he returned to his native Vienna. In 1924 he was appointed director of a new Museum of Society and Economy, created under the auspices of the socialist city government.

For the museum, a chart was created showing the number of children offered school meals before 1922, in 1922, then in 1931. Lined in a row like a horizontal bar graph, each outline figure of a child represents 1000 children served, and the growth in provision from zero to 18,000 children is represented by repeated profiles of the children. The concept of child (in general, in their plurality) is represented by a pictogram.¹⁰²

Otto Neurath and the visual “transformers” he employed in the museum, Marie Reidemeister and Gerd Arntz, can be credited as major figures in the development of modern visual iconography. Directly and indirectly, the fruits of their theory and practice in the visual representation of concepts are in evidence today in the proliferation of visual symbols from street and building signage, to today’s web with its ubiquitous infographics, navigational icons, emojis,^§AS1.1.1a and the ideographs in Unicode.^§MS0.2.1a

The museum was founded by the Municipality of Vienna and the Viennese Chamber of Workers and Employees.¹⁰³ The city government, true to its socialist principles, was energetically building public housing, kindergartens, playgrounds, and health centers.^§AS2.3b

Here is Neurath offering his rationale for a museum that featured social statistics: “But how, it may be asked, is it possible in any city with a democratic government to achieve so much of benefit to the masses unless the people understand what it is all about, at least in its larger outlines, and unless these enormous expenditures out of tax revenues are approved on the basis of a constant accounting to the people?”¹⁰⁴

As for the visual form, “Modern man is first of all an ocular being. Advertising, the educational billboard, cinema, illustrated newspapers and magazines are broadly responsible for the education of the masses.”¹⁰⁵ The museum is “directed in the spirit of the workers’ movement … It is not the lies that are the worst thing about schools, but the concealment. One does not learn from school … how bad the quality of housing is; one learns nothing of the fight for freedom. Now, a museum should not carry out propaganda in a vulgar sense – it must give plain facts! … Most museums have a dead effect because they appeal too little to the wants of people.”¹⁰⁶ In these ways, the focus of the museum was the presentation of revelatory social facts by visualization.

Marie Reidemeister was invited by Neurath to join the museum in 1925. Her role as a “transformer” was to turn facts and statistics into visuals for display in the museum and at public events, and later also information pamphlets and books.¹⁰⁷ Then, in 1929 they were joined by the modernist artist Gerd Arntz, who had been creating images in the style of Cubism. Working in the museum, he perfected the “pictogram,” a key feature of what came to be known as the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics. To achieve identical reproduction, Arnt devised a linocut process.¹⁰⁸

Arnt eventually created a “picture dictionary” of about 4,000 symbols. Symbols could be qualified: a green person is an agricultural worker and red is an industrial worker; and different kinds of professions could be further qualified with an icon on their chest, a wheel on the chest of a transport worker and a hammer on the chest of an industrial worker – creating the visual equivalent of noun phrases. These “stylised symbols have been designed,” Neurath explained, “to characterize social facts: men, women, cogwheels, vacuum cleaners, coffins, homes, ships, etc. … careful symbolic representation is educationally superior to … sentimental naturalism, and also to the jokes of caricature.”¹⁰⁹ Other areas of technical innovation in the museum included mapping, including a magnetic map of Vienna where pictograms could be moved, anticipating the dynamic web maps of the digital era.¹¹⁰

There was a manifest politics to Neurath’s theory of representation and the museum’s visualizations of social facts. “Statistics are a tool of the proletarian struggle,” he said, “statistics are an essential part of the socialist order; statistics are joy for the international proletariat struggling hard with the ruling classes.”¹¹¹ A system of visualization would also transcend different languages and cultures, “through its neutrality, and its independence of separate languages. … Words divide, pictures unite.”¹¹²

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¹⁰¹ Christopher Burke, Eric Kindel, and Sue Walker, eds., 2013, Isotype: Design and Contexts, 1925–1971, London, UK: Hyphen Press, pp. 20–21.

¹⁰² Ibid., pp. 40, 72.

¹⁰³ Nader Vossoughian, 2008, Otto Neurath: The Language of the Global Polis, Rotterdam, NL: NAi Publishers.

¹⁰⁴ Otto Neurath, 1973, Empiricism and Sociology, translated by P. Foulkes and M. Neurath, Dordrecht, NL: D. Reidel Publishing, pp. 215, 221; Otto Neurath, 1945 [2010], From Hieroglyphics to Isotype: A Visual Autobiography, London, UK: Hyphen Press, pp. 3–4.

¹⁰⁵ Otto Neurath, 1931 [2017], “Pictorial Statistics Following the Vienna Method,” ARTMargins 6(1):108–18, p. 115.

¹⁰⁶ Christopher Burke, Eric Kindel, and Sue Walker, eds., 2013, Isotype: Design and Contexts, 1925–1971, London, UK: Hyphen Press, p. 29.

¹⁰⁷ Otto Neurath, 1973, Empiricism and Sociology, translated by P. Foulkes and M. Neurath, Dordrecht, NL: D. Reidel Publishing, pp. 215, 221; Otto Neurath, 1945 [2010], From Hieroglyphics to Isotype: A Visual Autobiography, London, UK: Hyphen Press, pp. 3–4.

¹⁰⁸ Christopher Burke, Eric Kindel, and Sue Walker, eds., 2013, Isotype: Design and Contexts, 1925–1971, London, UK: Hyphen Press, pp. 17, 67.

¹⁰⁹ Ibid., pp. 63, 65; Otto Neurath, 1973, Empiricism and Sociology, translated by P. Foulkes and M. Neurath, Dordrecht, NL: D. Reidel Publishing, p. 222; Otto Neurath, 1931 [2017], “Pictorial Statistics Following the Vienna Method,” ARTMargins 6(1):108–18.

¹¹⁰ Christopher Burke, Eric Kindel, and Sue Walker, eds., 2013, Isotype: Design and Contexts, 1925–1971, London, UK: Hyphen Press, p. 58; Christopher Burke, Eric Kindel, and Sue Walker, eds., 2013, Isotype: Design and Contexts, 1925–1971, London, UK: Hyphen Press, p. 38; Marie Neurath and Robin Kinross, 2009, The Transformer: Principles of Making Isotype Charts, London UK: Hyphen Press, pp. 23–5.

¹¹¹ Christopher Burke, Eric Kindel, and Sue Walker, eds., 2013, Isotype: Design and Contexts, 1925–1971, London, UK: Hyphen Press, p. 84.

¹¹² Otto Neurath, 1973, Empiricism and Sociology, translated by P. Foulkes and M. Neurath, Dordrecht, NL: D. Reidel Publishing, p. 215.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 114-117. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Otto Neurath’s "Pictorial Statistics" §MS1.1.3h