A Speech Introducing Albert Einstein

For its fifth project, renowned California artist Joseph Goldyne engages with Irish playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw’s (1856-1950) introductory remarks to a speech given by Albert Einstein (1879-1955). A fundraiser for the ORT, an organization founded in 1880 to support Eastern European Jewry, Shaw and Einstein spoke at the Savoy Hotel in London, October 28, 1930—a moment that Goldyne contextualizes in his own introductory remarks as a socially and politically tumultuous moment between two World Wars. The humor and character in Shaw’s remarks about Einstein and Einstein’s response (also reprinted, translated from the German) offer a lens to better understand each of these remarkable twentieth century cultural icons, their friendship, and the complex moment in which they lived.

Goldyne, a master of the intaglio printing techniques, uses five illustrations including drypoints, etchings, and burnished aquatints to further contextualize these speeches—imagery that expands our visual perceptions and offers visual context. Goldyne’s etchings were printed by Master Printer, Robert E. Townsend, who established his print studio in 1975 and has worked with luminaries such as Arion Press, Jim Dine, Michael Mazur, Robert Motherwell, Alex Katz, and Robert Mapplethorpe.

Michael Russem, based in Somerville, Massachusetts, designed the book, selecting Bembo (1928-1929) and Gill Sans (1928) types created contemporaneous to the speeches. The letter forms reflect the tension of the era, in historical influence and the force of modernity. Bembo is inspired by incunable printer-scholar Aldus Mantinius’s Renaissance era letterforms, while as Gill Sans offers a sans-serif form aligned inspired by the Underground Alphabet, the corporate font of the London Underground.