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From World War I, a New Visual Language and Many Dialects 

The exhibition "Graphic Modernism From the Baltic to the Balkans, 1910-1935" at the New York Public Library. Above, a display containing designs from journals and literary magazines. . . .

The curators, S. A. Mansbach and Wojciech Jan Siemaszkiewicz, have pulled rare books, journals and ephemera from the library's Slavic and Baltic division. Tattered, date-stamped and marked with the names of immigrant readers, these materials show new and reconstituted countries embracing the aesthetics of Modern art and design (though not always the radical politics.) . . .

Then as now, advertisers cashed in on the counterculture. The cigarette rolling-paper company Modiano established relationships with Hungarian artists, publishing a multivolume survey of its favorites. On the cover of Volume 4, created by Janos Tabor, the letter O has been enlarged to accommodate the figure of a smoking man. As a suavely commercial use of Modernist design, it stands out in this literary context.

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