Chapter 33 Pop Art

During  the1960s period, a powerful reaction against the established norms of the society was developing throughout the glob which was later dobbed  "the counterculture of the 1960s".  The prolonged TV coverage of the U.S. military intervention in Vietnam, which for the first time could be observed in the living rooms along with the broadcasting of other social tensions including, colonial exploitations, struggles for democracy and liberation,  race relations,  women's rights, sexual mores and so on created a defiant attitude among the young university students and intellectuals that demanded a total reassessment of old values. In the cultural chaos that ensued many of the aesthetic values were lost, and while some new directions for art and artistic endeavors were discovered, the destruction of artistic criteria gave rise to the emergence of a new class of untalented charlatans that tried to get the maximum financial advantage from the prevailing turmoil.  Unfortunately,  institutions like the Tate gallery of London, in their blind competition to be  more modern than the MOMA in New York, and therefore to attract  more tourists, exacerbated this trend. 

Andy Warhol - Campbell's Soup (1962)

Artist's shit - Piero Manzoni (1961)

The impact of the Pop Art era on graphic design, and the role played by artists like Andy Warhol, and Roy Liechtenstein is one of the least understood areas in the art and culture of the mid-twentieth century. These artists discovered a new and bold chromatic aesthetic, expressed mostly in spatial relationships of figurative art. Unfortunately,  pop art was also the predecessor to "conceptual art" of the 1990s  that  was responsible for a flood of uncreative garbage, produced by charlatans that found the art market of the time gullible enough for accepting their products as art. This monstrosity has been interpreted by some as the reflection of the popular  counterculture of the 1960s on artists. Some have tried to attribute the aesthetic of the pop to the mind-altering influence of drugs. Whatever were the causes, the fact remains that it had a devastating  impact on the visual art scene. In the words of Barbara  Kay:

Conceptual faddishness soon colonized art schools, where pranks and performance theatre replaced serious skills-building. The Royal University of Fine Arts in Stockholm no longer teaches traditional drawing and painting techniques. But last January, as a (tax-funded) academic project, an art student in Stockholm was encouraged by her teacher to fake a suicidal tableau on a bridge, then dramatically fight, kick and bite her police rescuers and psychiatric examiners, all in aid of �questioning the accepted definitions of sanity.�

Instead of technically proficient craftspeople with respect for art�s traditions, these art schools are graduating preening fifth columnists. Decades ago, most art schools became, and remain, militantly politicized along politically correct lines. At the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, staff who defended two professors awarded figurative art and sculpture appointments were characterized by their colleagues as Nazi sympathizers.

Canadian schools are no better. A long-time male art teacher who stubbornly champions courses offering technical skills and figurative art at the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) told me, �My students can�t draw and paint.� He added, �If you have talent with your hands and eyes, you�re out of luck at OCAD.  Barbara Kay: The artist has no clothes,  February 03, 2010.

 

White Painting (Three Panels), 1951, Robert Rauschenberg, In SFMoma

Roy Liechtenstein (1923-1997)

Roy Fox Lichtenstein was born in New York. His father, Milton Lichtenstein was a real-estate broker, and his mother was a gifted piano player. He had an uneventful childhood. He started to draw and paint as a hobby in his high school years. In those early days, he was fascinated by jazz players, and he tried to imitate Picasso's style of Blue and Rose Period paintings. In 1939, he entered the summer art classes of the Art Students' League under Reginald Marsh. He then enrolled in the School of Fine Arts at Ohio State University, but was drafted in 1943 into the army and served in Britain and continental Europe. After the war he returned to Ohio State University and finished his Bachelor of Fine Art in 1946. He then accepted an instructor position at the graduate program, and in 1949 gained his Master of Fine Art and exhibited his first solo-exhibition at the Ten Thirty Gallery in Cleveland.





In 1951 Lichtenstein exhibited his found-objects show in New York, and during the 1957-60 period he experimented with a number of styles, including Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism and Dadaism. His sophisticated compositions of surfaces were enriched by bold colors, letters and other symbols, such as maps and other esoterica l signs. In 1960 he was appointed Assistant Professor at Douglas College at Rutgers University of New Jersey. His proximity to the New York's art scene provided him with the opportunity to be in contact with a number of influential artists and critics. He became interested in the Pop Art movement, and in 1961 he produced a number of paintings that were based on comic-strip frames. By using Ben-Day dots, lettering and speech balloons, he added a new dimension to his paintings. Leo Castelli Gallery offered him a show which would feature his comic-based works in 1962. He participated at the Venice Biennale In 1966, and Guggenheim Museum exhibited a retrospective of his works in 1969.

Lichtenstein pulled the comics into a new paradigm, changing them from a humdrum existence with limited audience into a thought provoking art form where panels juxtaposed print, advertising and more to create a conceptual work for a more sophisticated audiences. His work showed that comics have stylistic characteristics that inescapably follow an aesthetic code. He worked on a number of subtle parodying of various styles including Cubism, Futurism and Surrealism.

All my art is in some way about other art, even if the other art is cartoons" -Roy Lichtenstein ( J. Hendrickson, Roy Lichtenstein, Cologne 2000, frontispiece

 Lichtenstein's work is characterized by an inexhaustible ebullience and energy, manifested in his resolute appreciation of pop-culture. His images are dominated by the vivid primary colors, masterfully outlined with black lines. His nonchalant blunt conceits with perplexing, and often playful renditions of tawdry images are appended by  thought balloons - which renders an enigmatic and visual sentiment. Similar qualities can be found in his three-dimensional graphic imitations of German Expressionist woodcuts in the early 1980s, and in his later works of painted or sculpted brushstrokes - which meticulously created an impression of modernist impulsiveness.

Lichtenstein was wholesome, freethinking and almost always a down-to-earth explorer. Perhaps he invariably conceived of the concepts of 'here' and 'now' as  an  amazing occasion and he was quite confident of how to deal with the uncertainties of this moment. More than anything else he was not a charlatan who would hide his lack of talent behind a discourse in philosophical nonsense -- a practice all too common these days.  As Roberta Smith of New York Times has written:

The perfection of his paintings was achieved through extensive and beautiful preparatory studies, as indicated by his drawing retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1987. It is not too soon to be reminded of this again, in a delicious survey of nearly 60 works. (NY Times January 12, 2007)

In the late 80s Lichtenstein created a series of "Perfect" and "imperfect" paintings, in which he explored the reduction of form in the spirit of 'neo-geo' painting. They were deliberate gaudy composition of triangles, spheres and other geometric shapes, which according to him

Parody nameless or generic abstraction you might find in the background of a sitcom - the abstraction hanging over the couch. (Deborah Solomon, 'The Art Behind the Dots', in The New York Times, 8 March 1987)

His "perfect" paintings were compositions made by a number of triangles that were constrained by the boundaries of a rectangular canvas. Lichtenstein explored the color tensions of these geometric surfaces with some humor. His ''Imperfect'' paintings, which according to him were supposed to be "humorous" were in some sense an evolution of his perfect paintings that some sides of those triangles extruded beyond the square frames of the canvases. According to the artist ''Art becomes this game of whether I hit the edges.'' These awe-inspiring and artistic work were scoffing at the philosophical tenet of the early modernists who criticized the  pictorial illusionism of the three-dimensional spatiality in painting . His experimentation with shaped canvas and geometric imagery represented the formidable level of his inventiveness and  sustained creative curiosity. Lichtenstein's rebellious challenging of  the philosophical underpinnings of modern styles led to a straight forward resolution of aesthetic dilemma of the modern art. 

    "Imperfect"  and perfect Paintings

Andy Warhol (1929?- 1987)

Andy Warhol's pop art was a byproduct of the technological revolution of the 20th century. As the critic Robert Hughes wrote in 1971.

Painting a soup can is not in itself a radical act, but what was radical in Warhol was that he adapted the means of production of soup cans to the way he produced paintings, turning them out en masse - consumer art mimicking the the process as well as the look of consumer culture... To look at an image like Campbell's Soup Can, 1965, is not to see it through Warhol's eyes�he has eliminated all idiosyncrasies. There is no contagion of personality. What remains is the flat, mute face of an actuality presented as meaning nothing beyond itself. (Art: Man for the Machin, Time, May, 17, 1971)

What Hughes failed to mention is that Warhol's work, particularly silk-screen prints he made of political and Hollywood celebrities, including Mao, Liza Minelli, Jimmy Carter and Jacqueline Kennedy, were not only aesthetically pleasing in terms of their composition, color, and artistic sensitivity, but also were a new interpretation of portraiture � they amounted to a radically new conceptual paradigm. Warhol genuinely believed in the endless reproducibility of  art. 


It is not clear where or when Andy Warhol was born. It has been suggested that he might have been born around 1929, somewhere in Pennsylvania. The son of a coal miner, his family immigrated to the US from Czechoslovakia. Andy graduated with a degree in pictorial design from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University), in 1949. Immediately after graduation he relocated to New York and changed his name to Warhol. He became a successful commercial artist and graphic designer for Tiffany's, Bonwit Teller's, Vogue, Glamour, The New York Times and other magazines and department stores. In 1960 he started a series of illustrations based on comic strips, such as Superman and Dick Tracy, and on Coca-Cola bottles.

He tried to exhibit with Leo Castelli, an art dealer who was best known for representing the artists Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg. Castelli declined to exhibit his work, since his gallery artist Roy Lichtenstein, was already painting from comic strips. However, Warhol's first exhibition of the Campbell's soup cans at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1962, followed by his next exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York finally convinced Castelli to represent him in 1964, and he remained his art dealer until his death.

In Warhol's Pop Art, consumer culture came face-to-face with itself reflectively , and that encounter was at once boastful and apprehensive -- apprehensive because the very fact of reflectiveness challenges self-absorbed consumption even as its temptation is acquiesced halfheartedly or placated fully. His art is not quaint or whimsical, because as David Dalton of the New York Times writes:

You can have him with or without irony, and it all still works. And because he was a master of the double-take, everything about him remains ambivalent. Once you choose one aspect of Warhol over another, you miss the point. Like Jean Cocteau�s definition of himself, Warhol is �the lie that tells the truth.� His paintings have the paradoxical quality of being both sexy and icily mechanical, and this ambivalence is at the core of his art. Even the affectionate nickname he was given at the Factory � Drella � is double-edged, a fusion of two disturbingly irreconcilable images: the waif-like Cinderella and the sinister, manipulative Dracula

Over the six years period, between 1962 to 1968 when he was shot, Warhol created some of his most powerful images that were inspired by a profound reflection on the state of the consumer society, in which mass media have appropriated the role of man's brain, and dictated his choice through bombarding him with banal and senseless images that would sear in his mind his required course of actions through an endless repetition of commercial messages. Warhol created the banal art for the banal man. You no longer need to be a thinking and reflective entity. You are only expected to be a conformist robot, you should buy the over-the-counter drugs that would relieve your headaches and your heart burns, purchase a host of hygienic products that would make your hairs shine, and your skin look young and so on. Warhol's work meditated over a prevalent American mindset that extolled fame and celebrity status. He created the modern icons of this culture, using silk screen of not only stars such as Liz Taylor, Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe,and Marlon Brando, but also those rich and famous people who commissioned him to silk screen their images in the new style-- people like the Shah of Iran, his wife Farah Diba, his sister Ashraf Pahlavi, and Conrad Black a Canadian millionaire, and he obliged. Like any good businessman, he opted to maximize profit so when it didn't matter, he did not bother to clean up the imperfections of his silk screen prints; caused by slips of the screen, uneven inkings of the roller, and other defects. He was imitating a mass production process without any quality control. But he made sure that the image of the Shah would look exactly like one of his commemorating stamps, and the image of Ashraf would prominently display her diamonds.; Nevertheless, the imperfections, together with his enchantment with the American celebrity culture became the hallmarks of Warhol's work.

Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia , in 1930. However, due to the marriage breakup of his parents, he was raised in Allendale, South Carolina by his paternal grandparents. It  was in Allendale in his  early childhood that he showed an intense interest in art. He has said;   �In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn�t know what that meant ... I think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation different from the one that I was in.�  Later on, he entered a high school  in Sumter, South Carolina to be with his mother, He entered the University of South Carolina to study art, but he dropped out in the middle of his second year to enter the art scene at New York. However, he had to return to South Carolina, when the US Army sent him a summons in 1951. He served in the army until 1953, and a  yrear after returned to New York, where he met a number of other artists including the composer John Cage, the choreographer Merce Cunningham, and another Pop artist Robert Rauschenberg.

 The Dutch Wives (1975). 

Johns became very interested in Marcel Duchamp�s work,  after  visiting his  Philadelphia exhibition of �readymades� � created with  a series of found objects. Inspired by Duchamp�s philosophy of looking at things differently Johns created  �Walkaround Time", a performance with Merce Cunningham. In 1958,  Leo Castelli's gallery discovered John's work at Rauschenberg's art studio and offered him a one-man exhibition, where four of his artworks  was purchased by Alfred Barr, founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  In his  early work Johns reflected  on the meaning of an everyday, almost absurd, subject matter. He found such a meaning in the painting process itself. His flag paintings was part of this process. The banality,  absurdity and the enigmatic nature of the subject matter provoked  viewer's curiosity for discovering a deeper meaning. Johns' own  ambiguous and enigmatic explanation appeared to suggest that there is a deeper ontological meaning at work; �There may or may not be an idea, and the meaning may just be that the painting exists.� It is claimed that the writings of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had a  great influences on Johns' work. Although, John's works still show a high degree of artistic accomplishment,  his was the start of a trend  in which art appears to have morphed into a philosophical discipline, without any regards for aesthetically trained talent and artistic skill in the later modern art.  In this prevailing trend in the visual art, the compositional component of the artwork is to be supported by an accompanying written explanation in order to grasp what the artist was getting at. The actual art work merely illustrates the concept. Apparently, in Wittgenstein�s work Johns recognized both a concern for logic, and a desire to investigate the times when logic breaks down! It was through painting that Johns found his own process for trying to understand logic!

 

Three Flags (1954-1955)

Nevertheless, Johns� printmaking experimentation and innovations in screen printing, lithography, and etching have been valuable artistic endeavor, notwithstanding, of course,  his explanation that: �My experience of life is that it�s very fragmented; certain kinds of things happen, and in another place, a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences.�
In the 1960s, while continuing  producing works with flags, numbers, targets, and maps, he began to introduce other objects such as paint brushes, beer cans, and light bulbs, into his later works. Johns has also illustrated the poet Frank O�Hara's book, In Memory of My Feelings; and  Samuel Beckett's, Fizzles.

 Target, 1974

By the early 1970s Pop Art became internationally prominent.  Pink Floyd worked extensively with London based designers, Hypnosis, to create graphics to support the concepts in their album soundtrack from the film More. Yellow Submarine which was was a milestone in graphic design, was inspired by the Pop art. Heinz Edelman was hired by TVC as the art director for this film. Despite the critical acclaim of his design work for the film, Edelman never worked on another animated feature. In 1967 The Beatles company "Nems" contracted Richard Avedon to create four posters depicting John, Paul, George, and Ringo.  In the US  they were published in "LOOK" magazine, and in England in the Daily Express Newspaper.

Unfortunately, a misguided belief soon took hold of the art scene. The belief was that the bold and strong color contrasts in the Pop Art works are created by the effect of mind altering drugs. According to Mati Klarwein a Pop Art painter;

I'll tell you about a funny episode. Jean Houston and Robert Masters put together a book called Psychedelic Art in the sixties, and they came to me. They did an interview with me, like we're doing now, to include me in their book. And they asked me, "What kind of psychedelics do you take when you're painting?" And I said, "I don't take anything when I'm painting. When I take psychedelics I get very horny, and I start going out to nightclubs and cruising." (laughter) So they said, "Well, we can't put you in the book." I freaked out, because I wasn't in any book yet (laughter), and I said, "But I get my ideas when I'm high." And they said, "Alright, we'll put you in the book." Next they asked me for the names of other psychedelic painters, and I gave them a whole list, including Fuchs. I called them all up right away, and I told them, "Tell them that you're taking psychedelics!" And they all got in the book.' (laughter)

This attitude gave rise to Psychedelic artificiality that relied on drugs and abandoned all the artistic aspects of the pop art, such as balanced composition, aesthetics, and authenticity. As the bars for achievement of excellence were persistently lowered, more and more of the publicity seekers around the world tried their luck by creating low quality, but highly controversial art-ificial  objects. The criteria for acceptance became the shock value for the piece and how much controversy they generate. But there are signs that this tendency has began to subsided by the end of the 20th century, although some remnants of that era still lingers on in places that bureaucrats are still in control.  In the words jdy Singer:

�The whole business: collectors, dealers, museums, universities, art magazines have nothing to do with what it takes to make a great work of art. Curators are not the trailblazers that they portray themselves to be, but rather, they are sheep, merely following trends. I challenge them to step out of the mainstream and show art that is great. To do this, they would have to know what it really is.�  Judy Singer: Is art dead? February 19, 2010,

Tadanori Yokoo 

 

Tadanori Yokoo was born in Nishiwaki, Japan in 1936.  He was interested in art at very young, and  started his art career with  reproduction of paintings. Soon after he was designing store wrapping paper, and drawing posters for the Chamber of Commerce. In his early posters he was influenced  by the works of Seymour Chwast.  In 1965 he participated in the Persona group's  joint exhibition, in which his name appeared at the top of a dark, lyrical, and enigmatic poster,  depicting  a hanged man against a blue sky with red rays emanating from a rising sun.  At  the bottom corners some childhood photographs together with  a stunning statement, completed the composition. The statement read; "having reached a climax at the age of 29, I was dead."  With this poster "Yokoo style" in  Japanese pop art was born in which  rising sun is a recurring  motif. 

"having reached a climax at the age of 29, I was dead.", 1965

Yokoo has  worked  on virtually every aspects of visual communication including  book designs, animation, prints, posters, album covers, Swatch watches, illustration,  paintings and so on. In all his works he incorporates an eclectic artistic taste informed by a wide range of styles including Surrealism, Dada, Russian Constructivism, American Pop Art, contemporary Japanese popular culture and traditional Japanese art forms, especially the woodblock prints. His art is imbued with  the postwar energy, of Tokyo with its cultural contradictions, human tragedies, and social challenges.  In Yokoo's own words; �When I walk through the streets of Tokyo, it is not unusual for me to weave back and forth as if I were recovering from an illness.�

He became fearful of death ans stopped work after an injury in a traffic accident and the hara-kiri suicide of his close friend Yukio Mlshiman in the 1970s.  He began a spiritual quest for a philosophical meaning and become interested  in  Hindu religion , Buddhism, UFOs, and extraterrestrial civilizations.  He returned to art and began to create collages using images of the universe and various religious symbols. His work was noticed by various musicians such as the Beatles, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Carlos Santana, and Cat Stevens who offered him projects to design their posters and album covers. Yokoo became especially close to John Lennon and Carlos Santana. In 1974, his cover for Santana's triple album "Lotus" was awarded the special jury prize at the sixth Brno Biennial .

According to the art critic Yasushi Kurabayashi ; �Yokoo�s posters are not designed around conventional poster-like ideas. Rather his posters have been executed from his own desire for creative expression, with little regard for cognitive clarity or message.�  Yokoo himself has said that he learned in the late 1960s "to escape from compromise when designing by linking my creations directly to my lifestyle."  He is immersed in deep subjectivity, and his themes are about his personal  desires, visions, fears and spirituality.

 

"Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC)," 1988

Shigeo Fukuda

Shigeo Fukuda was born  in Tokyo to a family of toy manufacturers,  in 1932. As a boy he enjoyed making origami, the Japanese art of paperfolding, which  began in China in the first or second century and then spread to Japan during the sixth century.  He was still a teenager, when he  became intensely influenced by the philosophy the International Style, or the Swiss Style; which was a reflection of the modernist and constructivist ideals. Fukuda was interested in  styles' authentic pursuit of simplicity, and the idea that  the beauty is inherent in the foundation of a purpose, and it cannot be the purpose of art was appealing to him. In practical terms, he followed the International Style's keen attention to detail, precision, craft skills, and supported a system of graphic design education and technical training that would aim at a high standard of craftsmanship and art in design and printing as well as a clear refined and inventive lettering and typoraphy.

He graduated from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1956.  In 1966, Fokuda's work gained prominence at a Czechoslovakian graphic design competition, and in the subsequent year his posters for Montreal's Expo '67 brought him the fame. His reputation began to snowball when Paul Rand noticing his work in an issue of Japanese Graphic Design Magazine  helped him to exhibit his stunning,  wooden puzzle-like sculptures at New York City's IBM Gallery. The structures were based on the design of toys which he originally created  for his young daughter.  In 1999, the Japan Foundation in Toronto presented the show �Visual Prankster: Shigeo Fukuda.�

 

Fukuda's  talent in visual communication design,  using minimal graphic dimensions was at the foundation of his fame. He admired the clean and powerful design of   Japanese woodblock traditions, and tried to link  them to the modern global communication exigencies. Fokuda was an idealist, whose main body of work was created for social and cultural concerns. His 1980,  poster for Amnesty International, which features a  clenched fist interwoven with barbed wire,  his 1982 Happy Earth Day  posters; one with an upside-down axe, with a sprouting  wooden handle, and another with the image of the earth in the shape of an opening seed awash in a pristine sea-blue background, and his most celebrated poster, Victory 1945 , with a cannon barrel that its shell firing, backwards, destroying the cannon forever, are examples of Fukuda's dark sense of humor, pointing to a childlike innocence that wishes  for a better world. His Victory 1945 won the grand prize at the 1975 Warsaw Poster, and he devoted all the proceeds from the competition to the Peace Fund Movement.

Fokuda's boyish playfulness and enthusiasm for various pranks were a reflection of his philosophical outlook towards the world that were represented in his 1960s  visual illusion  of �Ryu Mita Ka?� (�Have You Seen the Dragon?�) in the Asahi newspaper, and Idea Magazine 's "Visual Circus." He had said;

"I believe that in design, 30% dignity, 20% beauty and 50% absurdity are necessary. Rather than catering to the design sensitivity of the general public, there is advancement in design if people are left to feel satisfied with their own superiority, by entrapping them with visual illusion."

According to Seymour Chwast  in his introduction to �Masterworks� (Firefly Books, 2005), a monograph about  Fukuda;

�Fukuda is not a communicator who conforms to the principles of accessibility. With few exceptions, his purpose is to mystify.�

Shigeo Fukuda died in Tokyo on Jan. 11, 2009.  


Go to the next chapter; Chapter 34- Graphic Designers in the Fashion Industry

References

• Masters, Robert E.L. and Houston, Jean Psychedelic Art New York: 1968 A Balance House book�printed by Grove Press, Inc.
• Robert R. Hieronimus and Laura Cortner, ''Inside the Yellow Submarine; The Making of the Beatles' Animated Classic'', kp books, February 01, 2002, ISBN 9780873493604
• Lobel, Michael. Image Duplicator: Roy Lichtenstein and the Emergence of Pop, Yale University Press, 2002, ISBN-10: 0300087624
• Michelson Annette,Andy Warhol (October Files, The MIT Press, 2001, ISBN-10: 026263242X
• Bader, Graham. Roy Lichtenstein (October Files,The MIT Press, 2001, ISBN-10: 0262512319
• Hendrickson, Janis. Lichtenstein: 1923-1997 (Basic Art),Taschen, 1994, ISBN-10: 3822896330
• Waldman, Diane. Roy Lichtenstein, Guggenheim Museum Pubns, 1994, ISBN-10: 0810968754
• Shafrazi, Tony. Andy Warhol Portraits, Phaidon Press, ISBN-10: 0714849669
• Hickey, Dave et al. Andy Warhol ''Giant'' Size, Large Format, Phaidon Press, 2009, ISBN-10: 0714849804

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Chapter 32 - Pioneers of Advertisement Posters and Newspaper Layout

After the invention of printing press and lithographic techniques advertising by posters for circus, cabaret shows, alcoholic beverages, tobacco products and some manufactured consumer goods, like bicycles, became very common by the late 19th century.

The great artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec, Eugene Grasset, Paul Berthon, Jules Cheret, Theophile Alexandre Steinlen, Pierre Bonnard, Georges Ripart, and others created artistic posters that solidified the foundations for contemporary graphic artists. The American graphic artists, such as Louis Rheade, William Schumacher, Frank Hazenplug, George Wharton Edwards, and a host of others, were also publishing their works in various periodicals and books, such as "The Century Magazine" and the "Lothrop Publishing Company." The positive impact of the colourful and eye-catching posters which represented various products and created demand encouraged corporations to invest heavily in advertisement. They spared no expense competing against each other and increase their market share through their advertising posters.





With the development of a consumer society and mass production, the role of advertisement exploded in the 20th century - particularly in the United States. The impact of the advertisement was so immense and significant that in the 1920s Albert Lasker, an ad agency executive claimed that �We are making a homogeneous� people out of a nation of immigrants .

The technological developments in printing created new possibilities for layout; defined as the art or process of arranging printed or graphic matter on a page. The organization of content is probably one of the most important and influential aspects of any good magazine, poster, and web design. A clean and efficient layout would help the message of the advertisement to be conveyed more effectively and more forcefully.

Different approaches to page layout for advertising radio (first row of images) and television sets (second row)  in the early 20th century

However, marketing�s emphasis has been on targeting their consumers - so much so that advertisements started to show segmentation. For instance, compare the above ads for radio and television sets with the following for various food products. It is clear that the marketing strategy tries to fit a particular product to a specific group and its needs. The historian Robert Wiebe has even suggested that the divisions in advertisement �by economic, social, cultural and even psychological characteristics�now mark the United States as a �segmented society.�

Food advertising in the mid 1920s

Doyle Dane Bernbach was an ad agency started in 1949 by Ned Doyle, Mac Dane, and Bill Bernbach. Starting with only 13 employees this small agency became an advertising powerhouse in the 1950s, and is now known as DDB Worldwide and continues to be a key player in the global realm of advertising. In the 1950s, the automobile industry was a stronghold of companies that mass produced large and luxurious cars. They relied on �show-off� and " keep up with the Joneses" marketing. Volkswagen, a brand that Adolf Hitler had touted during the 1930s as the �people�s car," was small and austere.

The DDB decided to represent the modest Volkswagen with advertisements that emphasized their economical practicality. Perhaps counter-intuitively. the agency boasted that their clients' cars were ugly, small and had barely changed in years. The campaign targeted devotee followers who, in the eyes of marketers, shunned ostentation and took pride in their modesty. One famous ad invited buyers to �Live Below Your Means,� presenting a car for people who could afford to spend more but chose restraint. With this in mind the layout of the Volkswagon ads was represented by minimalist and monochrome images. Pictured below the stark contrast between the Volkswagon and the typical automobile advertisements is obvious. It's interesting to note that the typical automobile ads usually contain a prosperous family in a colourful setting.

1950's DDB Volkswagon advertisements

American 1950's Automobile Ads

Modern artistic car posters

Modern Layouts, and Alexey Brodovitch

 Alexey Brodovitch is known today for his work as the art director of Harper�s Bazaar. He was born in Ogolitchi, Russia in 1898 in an aristocratic family. He was only nineteen  years old when  the Bolshevik revolution flared up, forcing him to defer his goal of attending the Imperial Art Academy in order to fight in the Czarist army. When Bolsheviks won , he fled Russia with his family and future wife and, in 1920, settled in Paris. Like many other  Russian emigr�s of his status, he had to face both poverty and unemployment.

Fortunately Diaghilev's Ballets Russes offered him a job to paint the stage sets. Diaghilev's philosophy of the lack of boundaries between different arts influenced him, and soon  he entered a poster competition which searched for the most innovatory design to announce an upcoming ball. He won the first prize, beating Picasso who was also in the competition. This was the start his career as a graphic designer.

Brodovitch also won medals for fabric, jewelry and display design at the International �Art Deco� Exhibition of Decorative Arts. Soon he was in great demand, designing restaurant d�cor, posters and department store advertisements. His designs was becoming noted because of their bold and refreshing sense of adventure. For instance when he was asked by Maximilien Vox, an ad agency, to design for Martini Vermouth, he did not hesitate to employ an avant-garde idea, inspired by constructivist style of El Lissitsky, using  geometric forms and basic colors. He migrated to the US in 1930 to instruct design classes at Philadelphia College of Art, where he trained students in the fundamentals of European design, while working as a freelance illustrator in Philadelphia and New York. When Carmel Snow,  who had been recently appointed as the editor of Harper�s Bazaar, saw his graphic design portfolio in 1934, he immediately offered him the post of Harper's art director. Brodovitch accepted the offer and by acting as the ambassador of European modernist ideas he revolutionized magazine design.

Corporations in the US,  particularly after the economic crisis  of  1929, were reluctant to experiment with radically new ideas.   In spite of their reluctance Brodovitch experimented with a radically simplified, European �modern� graphic design.  Understanding the value of visual communications, he gave photography the central role in the magazine layout. His approach to layouts was characterized by emphasizing  on large areas of white space, in conjunction with  elegant compositions of type and imagery, while creating an overall sense of rhythmic dynamism. Brodovitch believed that type and photographs are equal in their power. A single letter magnified to the size of a page is just as provocative and inspiring as a photo of a model wearing the latest fashions.

He cropped his photograhps, often off-center, brought them to the edge of the page, integrated them in the whole. He used his images as a frozen moment in time and often worked with succeeding pages to create a nice flow trough the entire magazine. This brought a new dynamism in fashion layouts.This was something  very new and created an artistic flair to the published media. Brodovitch redefined the role of art director in a publication. Not only he supervised and designed the layout of photographs, illustrations and type on the page; but also actively  searched for new talents, suggested various artistic concepts,  and commissioned all forms of graphic designs. Among his proteges in New York were Irving Penn, Leslie Gill, Richard Avedon and Hiro.

In 1949 Brodovitch became director of Portfolio. He used only type on the cover, which was unusual for American magazines at that time. He wanted to create a magazine unlike any other. The first issue of the magazine was filled with a range of design influences that formed Brodovitch's creative vision. But as the high cost magazine with a small advertising revenue Portfolio ended up folding after just three issues.

   

Brodovitch�s personal life was an unhappy one. Because of his  heavy drinking and frequent absents Harper's fired him in 1958. His wife Nina died in the same period. A series of house fires in the 1950s destroyed not only his country retreat but also his paintings, archives and library.  He died in 1971 in a small village in southern France where he had spent the last three years of his life. Brodovitch�s innovative style was continued by art directors including Henry Wolf (at Esquire and Harper�s Bazaar) and Otto Storch (at McCall�s) .

Dr. Mehemed Fehmy Agha

Mehemed Fehmy Agha Agha (1896- 1978) was born in Russia into a  Turkish family. He studied arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kiev, and then entered the Emperor Peter the Great Polytechnic Institute in Czarist Russia and graduated in economics. He left  Russia after the October Revolution and enrolled in  the National School of Modern Oriental Languages in Paris, and received a special degree in 1923. He was a truly Renaissance man, was fluent in Russian, Turkish, German, French, Greek and English, had a strong technical and scientific aptitude, was an accomplished artist, photographer, and typographer.

In the mid- 1920s, Agha found a job as the  studio chief  of the Vogue headquarters at Paris, and soon was sent to Berlin as the designer of the German Vogue. Early in 1929, Conde Nast, the publisher of Vogue, whose art director  Heyworth Campbell had resigned, was searching for a  replacement.  Casting out his net wide open into  London, Paris and Berlin, eventually he interviewed Agha in Berlin. Nast was impressed by the "order, taste and invention" of what he had seen in Agha's work. According to Nast, he had  numerous discussions with his staff and others in which he analyzed scores of back issues of Vogue, rival publications and foreign periodicals, in order to expound his theories, convictions and prejudices in the matter of makeup; "And I had invariably in such s�ances�and perhaps with too great an assurance�assumed the role of teacher." However,  facing Agha in the interview Nast could not assume the role of a teacher anymore; "since (Agha) had at our extended interview, assumed that role himself�after relegating me politely to the dunce's corner where apparently, he thought, I really belonged." Agha migrated to the US to assume the art direction at Vogue, and it did not take long for him to  distinguish himself as an extraordinary art director, and he became known  as Dr. Agha.

Agha radically redefined the role of the art director at every level. He fully  integrated the layout process  of the Vogue with the editorial process, in which  design was  playing a key and fundamental role. He drastically reformed the concepts of page layout, photography and illustration, with the help of many talented and influential  artists such as Edward Steichen, Cecil Beaton, Hoyningen-Huene, Horst, Carl Van Vechten, and Charles Sheeler.  Furthermore, he allowed artists like Willaumez, Pages and  Carl Ericsonto to experiment with their wildest imagination and creativity. He reformed typographic style and introduced the sans serif type styles of Europe, and  designed  and conducted complicated engineering experiments to improve the color printing techniques.  He brought the full force of European avant garde experimentation to the pages of Vogue, Vanity Fair, and House & Garden, the Cond� Nast publishing company's flagship magazines in the United States. He is described as  a man of penetrating insight, unequaled wit, and at times, like the brilliant chess player he is, of dazzling intellectual wizardry.

Agha  left  Conde Nast in 1943 and became  an active graphic and directorial consultant for numerous corporations, department stores and large publishing companies. He was deeply affected by the death of his wife in 1950. He became president of both the Art Directors Club (1935) and AIGA (1953-55). In a tribute published by PM Magazine in August 1939, William Golden wrote :

"Agha's demands seem so simple. Make something legible, present it logically and make it look somehow luxurious... in a way that he will like. So they devise not merely one version of how they think a page should look, but ten, or twenty, or forty... And for sheer productivity this method is unequalled. As for those bales of rejected layouts that have never seen the light of day; I don't think they are completely wasted. Some day, a less jaded scholar of the Graphic Arts will unearth them and discover again the amazing amount of original and exciting work that was stimulated by the man who knew too much to like anything."

A 1936 Vanity Fair double-page spread layout by Agha with photographs by Edward Steichen. This was a whole new way to use photography and layout.

Henry Wolf 

Henry Wolf  (1925- 2005) was born  into a Jewish family in Vienna . He and his family fled the advancing Nazis in 1938, traveled to Paris where he began to study art. However, they had to leave for the United States in 1941.  He entered at New York City's School of Industrial Arts, while also working in type and printing shops. After serving with an intelligence unit of the Army over the 1943-46 period  he studied design and photography, with the legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch, when he he also working in a commercial art studio.

In 1951, Wolf became an art director for the State Department, designing publications and posters for overseas use, and a year later,  accepted an offer from Esquire to became its art director.  Using his artistic talent as a graphic  designer  he radically changed the image of the magazine and introduce a sense of elegance and  sophistication that lasted even after his departure.  He introduced thought-provoking photographic covers, combined with aesthetically pleasing typography; and a stable of modern artists, including Ben Shahn and Richard Lindner. After Harper's firing of  Alexey Brodovitch as the art director in 1958, his job was offered to Wolf .   After three years at Harper's Bazaar, and working with Richard Avedon, Man Ray and Melvin Sokolsky Wolf departed  to start  Show for A&P Heir Huntington Hartford.

He joined the leading global marketing communications company of  McCann Erickson in 1965 , where he directed ad projects like Alka Seltzer, Buick, Gillette and Coca-Cola. Soon after he and  ad executive Jane Trahey  founded Trahey/Wolf, where  Wolf assumed the role of the vice president and creative director directing ad campaigns for companies such as Xerox, IBM, Revlon, De Beers, Blackgama Mink, Charles of the Ritz, Elizabeth Arden, and Union Carbide. Finally, he launched Henry Wolf Productions, in 1971. He devoted himself to photography, film and design, for the next three decades.  Wolf worked as both a photographer and a designer, creating numerous television commercials for companies like RCA, Revlon, Borghese, Olivetti and so on. He also  taught graphic design at Parsons School of Designmarker in New York, as well as the School of Visual Arts and Cooper Unionmarker.  He was an influential graphic designer and art director who believed; "A magazine should not only reflect a trend; it should help start it."

Henry Wolf Collection, Spread from Harper�s Bazaar, featuring photographs by Richard Avedon, undated

   

Otto Storch 

Otto Storch (1913 -1999) was born in Brooklyn. He studied at New York University, the Art Students League and the New School for Social Research and graduated from Pratt Institute. He started working as a photo editor for Dell Publishing, and eventually became its art director, designing book covers, magazines and comics. He took night courses with Alexy Brodovich,  who challenged Storch to quit his job at Dell and look for more challenging work. Storch began a seven year period of freelancing as a designer and photographer.  Finally,  in 1952. he was offered the post of  assistant art director to Better Living, a magazine published by the McCall Corporation.  Three years later, discovering the wide range of his artistic talents, McCall appointed him as the art director for its main publication;  McCall's magazine.

In the days before computers editing, he invented a variety of photographic techniques to distort type and produce various special effects. For instance, to create the impression of words in the eye of an illiterate person, he placed type under a pair of glasses and photographed it to appear warped and bent. He also experimented with various typefaces including the 19th-century Victorian wood typefaces, which had been abandoned for decades.  Under Storch, McCall�s transformed into a vibrant fashion pictorials designed for younger and perhaps more stylish women. Often the pictorials were photographed outdoors for a modern, more realistic look.  In an interview that was reprinted in William Owen�s 1991 book Modern Magazine Design, he identified two �moments� in the preparation of a magazine which he considered �of supreme importance� to an art director: The first, Storch said, is the editorial conference that outlines the material to be presented and �the thinking behind it.� The second is the designer�s instructions to the photographer, illustrator and layout artists. �They want, just as I want, to have a clear visualization of what they are going to accomplish before they start.�

Unfortunately, his insistence on innovation, experiment  and new artistic approach  gave rise to the conservative McCall�s discomfort and eventually led to Storch's  resignation from McCall�s in 1967 after nearly 15 years. He returned to a successful freelance career focusing on editorial and advertising photography which included the design of an impressive booklet for the Cinerama premiere of Stanley Kubrick�s 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968.

Quentin Fiore and The Medium is the Ma/essage

Quentin Fiore was born in 1920. He is a graphic designer, who has studied at the "New Bauhaus" in Chicago. Fiore has been bold and highly creative in his art. He coauthored two books with Marshall McLuhan; the most insightful and provocative book of the 1960s; The Medium is the Massage and War and Peace in the Global Village. Fiore's typography, layout and accompanying images were superbly executed to convey McLuhan's ideas. Particularly, in the first book Fiore's images show that the characteristics of a medium in fact renders it non-neutral, and the technological means through which the information is conveyed has an effect on the human perception independent of the information content.?? The word 'Massage' in the title of the book was actually a typo by the print-setter, but when McLuhan and Fiore saw the typo they liked it since it conveyed the exact message of the book. The medium is massaging the message, and produce something which is different from its content -- perhaps very much like the way statisticians are said to massage their data to produce the results they want to show. McLuhan asserts that the media are an extension of the physical and psychic faculties of man, and outlines the effect that each medium �in itself� has on the senses. From the beginning of the book, Fiore adopted an innovative pattern for the time in which an image demonstrating a media effect was presented with a textual synopsis on the facing page. The reader experiences a repeated shifting of analytic registers�from "reading" typographic print to "scanning" photographic facsimiles�reinforcing McLuhan's overarching argument that each medium produces a different "massage" or "effect" on the human sensorium. McLuhan writes;

�How much do you make? Have you ever contemplated suicide? Are you now or have you ever been�? I have here before me�Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community�s need to know. The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions�the patterns of mechanistic technologies�are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval by the electrically computerized dossier bank�that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early �mistakes.� We have already reached a point where remedial control, born out of knowledge of media and their total effects on all of us, must be exerted. How shall the new environment be programmed now that we have become so involved with each other, now that all of us have become the unwitting work force for social change? What�s that buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzing?�

Modern Newspaper Layout

In today's world it appears that paper-based journalism is in crisis. Daily newspapers are going out of business at an unprecedented rate. Over the 2006-09 period, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and The San Francisco Chronicle have trimmed their staffs. The number of American correspondents reporting from abroad fell by 25 percent from 2002 to 2006, and only a handful of American newspapers now operate foreign bureaus. Thousands of reporters and editors have lost their jobs.

 

New York Times Op-Ed,  Pafko at the Wall, 1992,  Mirko Ilic

New York Times Op-Ed,  Russia Comes Apart, 1992,  Mirko Ilic

 

It may be true that the new generation would like to take their news from the internet and their iPods, and this may be the very cause of the plight of the paper-based media. According to Pew, only 27% of those born after 1976 read newspapers, as opposed to 55% of those born prior to 1946.  Nevertheless, it appears to me that there is a limit to this free downfall, and after certain point this trend would be arrested and  would stabilize at some level, simply because newspapers have certain characteristics and certain feel about them  that cannot be reproduced by the electronic media.  Furthermore as Thomas Jefferson wrote in January 1787;  �The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right, and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.�

 Politiken, Copenhagen, Denmark

El Economista , Madrid, Spain

El Economista , Madrid, Spain

Newspaper design is more than just design it is visual communication. Newspaper designers must make the paper visually appealing to the eye, but also tell and show the importance of the story through their designs. Stories and photographs are not the only elements that convey the news to readers; good design tells a story too. The layout of a newspaper ad has also a large effect on how a viewer reads the newspaper.  Normal ads can have different looks about them. The can occupy just one narrow vertical column, many columns, or they can spread over an  entire page.  A layout designer must balance the overall composition of the page taking into consideration the effects of various ads. Of course. the amount of space available will dictate the designer's ability to lay out text.  Using a bold design, areas of contrast, and appropriate typeface, the composition should lead the reader eyes towards various parts of the page, in  a harmonious and unintuitive journey. In any layout, the negative space, that is  the space without any content, plays a key role in this journey.  The designer style should include an appropriate amount of negative space that would support the text arrangement in the text. In summary, whether the design is simple or complex, the way the story, photos, typeface, and negative space are composed is a part of the communication  package as a whole. If a page is designed poorly, the reader may miss the whole or the major part of content.

Expresso, Portugal

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Frankfurt, Germany

   

�Emarat Al Youm� newspaper, Dubai

Go to the next chapter, Chapter 33 Pop Art


References

•  "The Man Who Knew Too Much," by William Golden. PM Magazine. Vol. 5, no. 2 (Aug./Sept. 1939).
• Kerry William Purcell, Alexey Brodovitch, Phaidon Press (2002). 
• Gabriel Bauret, Alexey Brodo-Vitch, Assouline (2005).
• Alexey Brodovitch, Portfolio #2: A Magazine for the Graphic Arts, Zebra Press (1950).
• Roger Remington and Barbara Hodik, Nine Pioneers in American Graphic Design, The MIT Press (1992).
• Andy Grundberg , Brodovitch (Masters of American Design), Harry N Abrams (1989).
• Brodovitch: Bazaar and Beyond

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