George Lois’s Esquire covers produced from 1962 to 1971 are icons of graphic art, publishing, and American history. Many collaborations with photographer Carl Fischer took an average of three days to produce and are considered among the most memorable propaganda imagery in any medium. Harnessing the technique of photo manipulation, Lois and Fischer’s covers equal the acerbity and acuity of pioneer German photomontagist John Heartfield. The trenchant coverlines were written by Hayes and Lois together. “Half the sentence would be said by one, and then the other would interrupt and finish it,” recalled Antupit.
But Antupit did not sit on the sidelines. His first act was to reformat Esquire. He standardized all the column widths and made room for illustration. His goal was to let a reader open the magazine anywhere and know that it was Esquire. The type was understated by today’s standards, but playful. He consistently used many new illustrators (including one student per issue) because, he said, “the same few old hands were used to excess by most national magazines, thus creating a visual sameness.” But there was a fine line between the Esquire look and that of other magazines. One of Antupit’s proudest accomplishments was a story on the building of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge (linking Brooklyn to Staten Island) with dramatic photographs by Bruce Davidson. The photo essay was so strong that Gay Talese was assigned to write an accompanying text. Despite their power, Antupit said, “It started out being twelve pages, but that was too much. To have all photography without text was no longer Esquire. It was Life or Look.”
During the late 1960s Esquire covered the social and political revolutions of the era. While many of its covers announced stories about political folly and changing mores, its sardonic parodies, Dubious Achievement Awards, campus supplements, and other features underscored a commitment to a generation of “New Left” constituents. For a while, under Harold Hayes, Esquire even seemed to shed its male focus for a more ecumenical stance. But contrary to appearances Hayes was no radical. As Antupit said, “Harold would get a lot of his ideas from Time magazine. Here we’re all going to openings and talking with writers and getting cut by the leading edge, and Harold’s reading Time… . He was never a flaming activist.” But he had an “absolute genius” for putting the wrong writer with the right idea. “Sending Genet and Beckett to the Democratic Convention was brilliant. I think Harold just wanted us to keep everybody off balance,” said Antupit.
Eros and Avant Garde
HERB LUBALIN
Few graphic designers embody the aesthetics of their times as totally as Herb Lubalin (1918–1981). From the late 1950s to the early 1970s he was American typography. He built a bridge between modernism and eclecticism, joining rational and emotional methodologies in the service of commerce. His conceptual typography made letters speak and words emote. He was a pioneer of photo-typography and promoted the practice of smashing and overlapping letters. He liberated white space from the orthodox moderns by refusing to follow the edict that “less is more.” He experimented in the marketplace, not the academy, and once his radical approaches to type and page design surfaced in design annuals and shows they were thoroughly accepted and ultimately turned into fashion.
“We’ve been conditioned to read the way Gutenberg set his type, and for five hundred years people have been reading widely-spaced words on horizontal lines Gutenberg spaced far apart… . We read words, not characters, and pushing letters closer or tightening space between lines doesn’t destroy legibility; it merely changes reading habits,” Lubalin once wrote. He based his own approach upon the ideas of earlier twentieth century type/image-makers, such as Kurt Schwitters and Lazar El Lissitzky, and then further married type and image into a single composition. Lubalin’s work was very much of his time, and his understanding of the impact of the new technologies on contemporary perception was visionary. In 1959 he argued before an assembly of typographers that television had begun to have an influence on the way that type was read, and likened this kinetic quality to the speed with which type shoots by on advertising on the sides of buses. He reasoned that in this environment smashing letter forms together and including images in a rebus-like manner made type easier to decipher.
Lubalin had a tremendous impact on the practice of American and European graphic design for a generation. His hothouses were Eros and Avant Garde, which he art directed and designed. The former was America’s first unexpurgated celebration of erotica, the quintessence of magazine pacing and composition at the time (despite its high design merits, its publisher, Ralph Ginzburg, was convicted and imprisoned for pandering through the U.S. Mail). The latter was a slightly more acceptable expression of the social and cultural flux within American society as influenced by the antiwar movement, civil rights, and the alternative New Left and youth cultures. A hybrid that crossed a magazine with a literary journal, Avant Garde lived up to its name. It was square (the size of a record album) in shape not in content, and featured illustration and photographs that busted the verities of 1950s sentimental and romantic commercial art. Both publications were alternatives to mainstream design conventions, but not in the raucous and anarchic sense, like the underground and psychedelic graphics of the same era.
Although Lubalin was soft-spoken, almost painfully shy when addressing people, he spoke loudly through design. His headlines for articles and advertisements were signs that forced the reader to halt, read, and experience. Story titles were tweaked and manipulated to give Lubalin just the right amount of words or letters to make an effective composition. The graphic strength of “No More War” (originally an advertisement for Avant Garde’s antiwar poster competition), which featured block letters forming the pattern of an American flag with a bold black exclamation point at the end, became an icon of the Vietnam war epoch. Lubalin rarely missed the opportunity to make his own variant of concrete poetry. Making words into sculptural forms was one of his typical mannerisms.
Some of the smashing and overlapping was contrived, and the conceit ultimately became self-conscious. But since Lubalin was its inventor, even the excesses must be viewed in the light of one who was testing the limits of form. For example, the Avant Garde typeface has been misused by a generation of designers who could not master Lubalin’s distinctive ligatures. Lubalin played with and modernized these historic letter forms, but releasing the family of ligatures to the public as the key characteristic of the font was a mistake. In most other hands, Avant Garde became a silly novelty face; in Lubalin’s, it was a signature.
Lubalin pushed design sometimes beyond the ken of his contemporaries. With few exceptions his experiments were conducted under marketplace conditions, which at once provided certain safeguards and made taking liberties all the more difficult. Lubalin’s was not design for design, but design for communication.
Push Pin Graphic
SEYMOUR CHWAST, MILTON GLASER, REYNOLD RUFFINS, EDWARD SOREL
In 1953 when the first Push Pin Almanack was published it would have been impossible to predict that its four principle contributors, Seymour Chwast (b. 1931), Milton Glaser (b. 1929), Reynold Ruffins (b. 1930), and Edward Sorel (b. 1929), would develop a graphic style that challenged the prevailing ethic of functionalism imported from Europe (during the Bauhaus immigration), practiced by some leading American corporate and advertising designers, and manifest in work by exponents of the Swiss International Style. Yet when that first four-inch-by-nine-inch compilation of facts, ephemera, and trivia illustrated with woodcuts and pen-and-ink drawings was mailed out as a promotion for these freelancers, other New York designers and art directors began to take serious notice. Indeed the Push Pin Almanack brought in so much work from book, advertising, and film-strip clients that the four Cooper Union classmates decided to leave their day jobs and start Push Pin Studios, the major proponent of illustrative design in America.
The Almanack, originally conceived by Chwast and Sorel as a bimonthly promotional piece, was consistent with emerging historicist design trends. Victorian, fat letter type had previously been revived for use in
advertising during the 1930s, fell out of favor in the 1940s, and was revived again in the 1950s when Otto Storch, art director of McCall’s began using Victorian woodtype and ornament for editorial layouts. Indeed a taste for things old fashioned was returning, apparently as a reaction to what was perceived as cold, humorless modernism. “It was called the Push Pin Almanack,” Chwast said in a 1990 interview, “because it was a quaint name—and quaintness was popular in those days.”
The contents were usually tidbits excerpted from books and periodicals and illustrated in styles that evoked the past. Each issue related to seasonal themes and included a few articles written especially for the Almanack on graphic design topics. Although it might be compared to Will Bradley’s early 1900s Chap Book and other printer’s keepsakes, the Push Pin Almanack was a special publication in the early 1950s, since most commercial artists who advertised their services to the trade were doing it in very straightforward, unimaginative ways. The Push Pin Almanack was a paradigm of conceptual acuity.
Six issues of the Almanack were published before the studio was started and two after. The printing of three thousand copies and the typesetting were basically done for free (or at cost) in exchange for designing and publishing the supplier’s ad in the Almanack. Other operating expenses were paid for through the sale of small ads sold after the first issue.
The narrow Almanack format was, however, creatively limiting. Wanting more freedom to explore different themes and graphic approaches, the Almanack was transformed into the Push Pin Monthly Graphic, which began as a broadside, printed in black and white on one sheet (usually newsprint). While the elegant and emblematic logo was designed by Glaser in a variant of German Fraktur, each studio member conceived at least one of his own issues, as well as combining their talents when the theme called for it. Themes were not exclusively design oriented. There were issues on railroading, dada, and War and Peace. The subjects reflected the variegated interests of their makers. Chwast remembers conceiving an issue chronicling his first trip to Italy, which included photographs and drawings, and Glaser developed an issue on Italian sculpture. In these issues the Push Pin members further developed their interest in historical styles in a contemporary context.
The response to the Graphic went beyond immediate commercial success. It was historically significant in that it exerted an extraordinary influence on individual designers, and so the entire field. To this day, designers who were beginning their careers in the late 1950s and early 1960s recall how excited they were when a new issue arrived in the mail. For Push Pin included designers with varying talents sharing a distinctive methodology—a passion for what today would be called mass popular culture—who had an ability to translate their particular vocabulary of forms into mass communication (and selling) tools. They did so through a marriage—long rejected by the modernists—of drawing and typography. The Push Pin Monthly Graphic (and the subsequent Push Pin Graphic, renamed because they could never keep to the monthly publishing schedule) proved that designer/illustrators were not simply pairs of hands doing the bidding of a client divorced from the total context, but were creatives capable of developing ideas in totality. And Push Pin’s work was not simply derivatively decorative, but originally witty.
Beginning as a newsprint tabloid, the Push Pin Graphic eventually came in a variety of sizes and shapes, evolving into discrete books and booklets on a variety of subjects, usually six times per year. The most memorable issues were on art deco automobiles (what Chwast referred to as “Roxy” style), “The Kings and Queens of Europe,” “Rhymes by Edward Lear,” “The Push Pin Book of Dreams,” “Good and Bad,” “The Kiss,” “Rock and Roll,” a collection of wooden targets (Paul Davis’s first significant work as a junior member of Push Pin), and Chwast’s tour de force, “The South,” a series of classic (and often racist) Southern stereotypes as backdrops for photographs of slain civil rights leaders. To heighten the polemic, a die-cut bullet hole pierces through the heads of the civil rights workers until in the last picture,. The bullet hole shatters the calm of an image representing the Old South, which is inset against a backdrop of the civil rights march on Washington. This poignant and caustic commentary was one of the few Push Pin Graphic’s with such an overt political message.
By the mid-1970s, the contributions made by Push Pin Studios had become part of the mainstream and the Push Pin Graphic had lost some of its innovative spark. To rejuvenate himself and expand into different realms of design, Glaser left Push Pin in 1975 and founded his own design firm. Chwast kept the Push Pin name and in 1976 decided to revamp the Graphic into a standard, nine-by-twelve-inch magazine format printed in full color. Chwast’s goal was to make it commercially viable by rigorously selling advertising and subscriptions. He printed eleven thousand copies of each issue and eventually garnered around three thousand subscribers at the rate of fifteen dollars yearly (mostly designers in the United States and abroad who were not on the complimentary mailing list). Interest was high, but as a commercial property, the Graphic was losing money at a prodigious rate. Nevertheless, as a magazine it continued for four years and twenty-two issues.
Designers who were beginning their careers in the late 1950s and early 1960s recall how excited they were when a new issue arrived in the mail.
Despite a seeming abundance of advertisements from graphic arts suppliers (mostly designed by Chwast and given in return for their services), financial pressures ultimately took their toll. “The All New Crime Favorites” issue was the last Push Pin Graphic, and perhaps not coincidentally it was the least interesting of all the issues. In all, eighty-six issues were published from 1953 to 1980, and ran the gamut from silly to profound. In its early incarnation the Push Pin Graphic had an incalculable influence on the conceptualization of graphic design and provided other firms and studios a model, and indeed a medium, to show their conceptual skills. But taken as a whole, the eighty-six issues show the evolution of a significant graphic style (and its makers) that not only eclecticized American graphic design, but also changed the style and content of American illustration.
Evergreen and Ramparts
KEN DEARDORF AND DUGALD STERMER
Few American magazines can claim to be agents of change. Most, even the once ubiquitous Life magazine, are reporters or chroniclers of their time and place. Others like Vogue, Bazaar, and even Rolling Stone have supported, cultivated, and propagated fashions, styles, and trends, but did not invent them. Most magazines are lightning rods, not lightning.
Among a generation weaned on World War II and raised on the sour milk of McCarthyism, the late 1950s and early 1960s was a period of intense cultural and political reevaluation. In the 1960s the new bohemians began to push the boundaries of propriety through sexual and cultural expression in two magazines. Ramparts on the West Coast and Evergreen on the East were the clarions of new aesthetics, politics, and morality. Ramparts was the voice of the political left and Evergreen was the voice of the cultural left. The former reintroduced muckraking to American journalism, the latter introduced banned authors’ controversial texts. The former exposed CIA involvement in American colleges and universities, the latter revealed the erotic side of the American subculture.
In terms of design these were not 1960s versions of 1920s constructivist, futurist, or dada manifestoes—the more raucous underground newspapers of the late 1960s are a more accurate visual analog. Yet in content these magazines were no less radical than the political and cultural progressive journals of the 1920s. Ramparts and Evergreen conformed to appropriate design verities, with legibility the most important. “I never wanted a magazine where the design overpowered the content,” asserted Fred Jordan, Evergreen’s managing editor from 1957 to 1971. Similarly, Dugald Stermer (b. 1936), Ramparts’s art director from 1964 to 1970, explained that a classical design format, rather than an anarchic approach, “lent more credibility to what must have seemed then like the hysterical paranoid ravings of loonies.” The significance of Ramparts and Evergreen to the history of
design is not as form givers but as conduits for various graphic forms in the service of politics and culture.
Evergreen Review was founded in 1957 as a quarterly literary magazine that published writers and poets whom its parent company, Grove Press, was already publishing in books. In 1952 Grove Press was a small, insignificant New York publishing house which was bought by Barney Rossett, a sympathizer of alternative politics and aficionado of radical literature whose tastes were influenced by progressive European writers. Grove was the first to publish Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in America. Each book challenged America’s puritanical values and intellectual standards; for in those days descriptions of the sexual act were veiled, and four-letter words were forbidden by the major publishing institutions. Rossett busted taboos and thwarted convention.
Evergreen began in a quarto format, at first publishing Grove’s authors and expanding outward. Fred Jordan administered to the unillustrated layout of the quarterly and a few years later the bimonthly. In the late 1950s he used art photographs, including pictures by Robert Frank, as the primary illustration, and eventually he introduced ribald cartoons by one of Grove’s author/artists, Tomi Ungerer, the black humorist from Alsace-Lorraine who became the golden boy of American illustration in the 1960s. In 1964, with issue #32, Rossett relaunched the magazine as a monthly, called it simply Evergreen (from a tree that grows in the grove), and filled it with stories and art designed to provoke the establishment. Evergreen was the vortex of cultural flux. “We printed subway and wall posters showing covers of the magazine with the tagline, ‘Join the Underground,’” recalled Jordan.
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