In the USSR a new ship was being built, though more than one beam at a time. In 1931, the Council of People’s Commissars issued a decree that “Dr. Neurath’s method of graphic representation of statistics is to be applied in all schools, trade unions, public and cooperative organizations.”¹¹⁷ So, the All-Union Institute of Pictorial Statistics of Soviet Construction and Economy or ИЗОСТАТ (Izostat) was created. Neurath, Reidemeister, and Arntz began to spend considerable periods of time in Moscow, working with the seventy or so staff in the Institute, then regional bureaux that were created in various parts of the USSR. A book was published in Russian in 1932 written by Ivan Ivanitskii, Pictorial Statistics and the Vienna Method.

By these means, the achievements of the five-year plans were represented. “Pictorial statistics should be a powerful instrument for mass agitation and propaganda in the hands of the party and for the working class,” said Ivanitskii in the preface of the book.¹¹⁸

Neurath was fortunate to be working in Moscow, not Vienna, when in February 1934 he received a telegram from Marie Reidemeister, “Carnap is coming.” This was code to say that the fascists had taken control of key ministries in Austria. Neurath was never to return to Vienna.

Neurath, Reidemeister, and Arntz fled to the Netherlands, where on Reidemeister’s suggestion, they created a new name for their visual design group, “Isotype,” or the International System of Typographic Picture Information.¹¹⁹ And here, a new manifesto:

When will the Middle Ages be at an end? As soon as all men can participate in a common culture and the canyon between educated and uneducated people has disappeared … One solution is Isotype, a method with a special visual dictionary and a special visual grammar; that is, a new visual world, comparable to our book and word world … Visual education is related to the extension of intellectual democracy within single communities and within mankind, it is an element of international social planning and engineering.¹²⁰

With the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands, Neurath and Reidemeister fled to England in an open boat. Initially they were interned on the Isle of Man as enemy aliens. When freed, they set up Isotype in Oxford and married in 1940. Neurath died in 1945. Reidemeister, now as Marie Neurath, ran Isotype in London until her retirement in 1971. Among her later projects were children’s books and public information campaigns for illiterate populations in Africa.¹²¹

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¹¹⁷ Otto Neurath, 1973, Empiricism and Sociology, translated by P. Foulkes and M. Neurath, Dordrecht, NL: D. Reidel Publishing, p. 222.

¹¹⁸ Emma Minns, 2013. “Picturing Soviet Progress: Isostat, 1931–1934,” pp. 257–81 in Isotype: Design and Contexts, 1925–1971, edited by C. Burke, E. Kindel, and S. Walker, London, UK: Hyphen Press.

¹¹⁹ Marie Neurath and Robin Kinross, 2009, The Transformer: Principles of Making Isotype Charts, London, UK: Hyphen Press, p. 47; Otto Neurath, 1939, Modern Man in the Making, New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.

¹²⁰ Otto Neurath, 1973, Empiricism and Sociology, translated by P. Foulkes and M. Neurath, Dordrecht, NL: D. Reidel Publishing, pp. 224, 247.

¹²¹ Eric Kindel, 2011, “Reaching the People: Isotype Beyond the West,” pp. 175–93 in Image and Imaging in Philosophy, Science and the Arts, edited by R. Heinrich, E. Nemeth, W. Pichler, and D. Wagner, Frankfurt, Germany: Ontos Verlag.

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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. 118-119. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Marie Reidemeister’s "Isotype" §MS1.1.3j