
Frontispiece from Taos Quartet in Three Movements
1950 · Letterpress from an illustrated book with five letterpress illustrations
sheet: 10 11/16 × 8 1/16" (27.1 × 20.4 cm)
Museum of Modern Art

Merle Armitage was an American designer and impresario who shaped modernist visual culture in Los Angeles through innovative exhibition design, typography, and publication. Active from the 1920s onward, he championed avant-garde music and experimental theater, establishing the city as a modernist center when it remained peripheral to East Coast institutions. His typographic work and curatorial intelligence bridged graphic design, performance, and art criticism in a practice that treated each discipline as an extension of a coherent formal vision.
Source: Moma Bulk 2026 05 04 · Trust score: 92% · Updated 1mo ago