Table of Contents: Design
Illustrations from Draw 50 Airplanes, Aircraft, and Spacecraft, by Lee J Ames, published by Doubleday in 1977. If I remember correctly, besides following the steps accurately, a successful drawing required that you loudly mimic the sounds of the craft as you drew it.
The stills above are taken from Jean-Luc Godard’s Made in USA. Made in 1966, it was an unauthorized adaptation of Donald Westlake’s the Jugger, featuring the adventures of Parker, a hard-boiled thief – the same character played by Lee Marvin in John Boorman’s 1967 classic Point Blank. (Parker was also recently adapted by Darwyn Cooke in an amazing graphic novel, the Hunter)
The movie is a squirrelly one. On the one hand, visually, it’s perfectly captivating. It is composed like a comic book, all bright colors shot rigidly against stark backgrounds.The stills speak for themselves – Scene after scene, the movie is farrago of pop art, mod fashion, and commercial signage. The dialog could be in Tasmanian and it wouldn’t matter a smidgen – it’s still a flat out sock knocker.
Which it might as well be, because the movie scarcely makes any sense at all. It’s confusing, deadpan, stiff, meandering, and plot-wise, essentially indecipherable. A decoder ring is provided on the Criterion Edition DVD in the form of a short interview with two Godard scholars. According to them, the flick is simultaneously a passionate love letter to, and a fierce rejection of, American films and culture, as well as a record of the disintegration of one of two concurrent love affairs. It is also, obviously, French. Enjoy it any way you see fit.
Visual art was part and parcel of William S. Burroughs‘ entire creative project. While the writing and the biography dominated people’s perception, his creative efforts encompassed art, graphics, calligraphy, type, photography, film, assemblage, poetry, spoken word, and music.
Culture itself was his medium. For most artists this claim would be, on its face, pretentious or megalomaniacal (it feels pretentious just writing that sentence.) Burroughs was deeply sincere about it, and he pursued it with a single minded, deadpan sincerity. The cut-up was, broadly speaking, the method that he employed wherever he turned his attention. In the visual arts, that resulted in work that anticipated or was sympathetic with many fundamental currents in post-war modern art and design.
His art evolved in a fluid series of phases. The earliest work is essentially calligraphic and typographic. Words degrade into gestures and gestures gather up into words – the notion being that there is less distance between these two states that we think. Legibility and meaning are powerful, yet fragile forces – easily dissipated, scattered, and reconstituted. This notion runs through everything Burroughs does.
Grid systems feature prominently in his work. Most striking is his adoption of newspaper layout blue-lines as a background on which he composes gonzo gazettes. Late in his life, after his retirement to Lawrence, Kansas to live among his thoughts and his cat army, he wanders into Robert Rauschenberg territory, shotgun in hand.
The results, his shotgun paintings, are my personal favorites – fine pop art stuff, paint splatters, comics, etc… The shotgun as a brush is both completely adolescent and yet congruent with his serious desire to blow up meaning and structure and read the resulting tea leaves. Also during this period he does a “spooky stencil” thing that I get, but falls a bit flat aesthetically (but does anticipate the original opening credits for the X-files.)
The work was collected in a great monograph called Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts, out of print but available, here. Also, highly recommended is the biography Literary Outlaw by Ted Morgan. It includes the following exchange: Person to Burroughs “You look like a walking corpse…” Burroughs: “Yes… but not all corpses can walk” Heh.
Mink Mutiny (recto) 1987
with Brion Gysin, Untitled (Rub Out the Word) 1965
Dust jacket illustrations for Naked Lunch, 1959 and Soft Machine, 1966
with Brion Gysin, Untitled (Addiction Plan) 1965
Envy, Gluttony, from the Seven Deadly Sins, 1992
Rub Out the Word, 1989
The early 70’s edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was a three stage rocket of concentrated knowledge. The base stage was the sturdy brown and gilt edifice we all know, and remember fondly as it fades into its new role reinforcing the foundations of used bookstores the world over. The second stage was the crimson leather bound Junior edition, the starch and fibre of a million middle school book reports. The final stage was the now nearly forgotten toddler edition – “The First Adventure in Learning Program” (See a vintage ad of the whole set here.)
They where co-produced with the Golden Press folk, which goes a long way to explain their graphic excellence. At first blush, what impresses is the serial design – amazing palette, spare but strong unifying compositions and type. And a totally killer logo – the thick-lined little birdie wearing a mortarboard. But they really blow your noggin when you grok the distinct styles and nuances of the illustrations. No surprise – the volumes were illustrated by a veritable who’s who of classic kid art – Joe Kaufman, Trina Schart, JP Miller, Dagmar Wilson, June Goldsborough, Caraway, and Art Seiden. (Another post will cover the inside art of the volumes, which is just as good)
The series grouped knowledge around experiential themes like math, comprehension, metrics, etc… one, though, was much more profound – “The Magic of Everyday Things.” Basically it was a kid manifesto for the idea you can discern art, beauty, and coolness in just about anything, provided you’re receptive, enthusiastic and imaginative enough to try. An insight for a lifetime, and when I think about how long I marinated in these books as a squeaker, I figure I owe them a mighty debt. Take a bow little mortarboard birdie!
I sincerely hope that author Maurice L Hartung of the University of Chicago was as impressed as I was with the cover designs to his slide rule manuals. (Also, belated congratulations to Dr. Hartung on the promotion he seems to have received between the publication of the guides.)
Another recent discovery at the Isabella Gardner Museum was the work of Leon Bakst. Bakst began his career as an illustrator, but quickly gained a reputation as a formidable painter and designer. He is best known, however, for his work in the theatre. He began a collaboration with Serge Diaghilev, the Russian art critic and founder of the Ballets Russes designing costumes and sets. By the time he became the artistic director of the Ballets Russes he was internationally famous.
That I saw his work at all at the Gardner is a blogament to their graphic power. Two small costume sketches leapt out from the top row of a dense grid of perhaps 50 small sketches and engravings that spanned from floor to ceiling. A potent mix of Slavic motifs, exuberant patterns, and fluid gestural drawing, their presence belied their tiny scale. Bakst’s versatility is tremendous – vivid and impressionistic set paintings, exquisitely sensitive drawings, and moody, stylish paintings and illustrations. The most comprehensive survey of his work, Leon Bakst: Set and Costume Designs, Book Illustrations, Paintings and Graphic Works by Irina Pruzhan is out of print, but available.
This swatch of an old ad is a poem for the eye. The different inflections of voice in each typeface and the elegant cascade from one line to the next give it a wonderfully nuanced read. I love the way the human touch of the girl is offset by the right angles of her gesture. It’s composed perfectly, like an expert round of Jenga – completely stable but full of tensions and cross balances. Good show, little layout, good show!
These covers were painted by Robert McGinnis, the dean of American paperback illustration. McGinnis’ reputation rests on the more 1000 pulps that literally define the genre, as well as the iconic movie posters he did for Barbarella, James Bond, and the Odd Couple. So, off the bat, they are sexy, torrid – simply killer – illustrations.
What’s more interesting is that they are the result of a fascinating development in paperback book illustration. In the early 70’s photography supplanted illustration as pulp’s preferred mode. Pressed out of the genre that made their careers, and in some cases fortunes, some illustrators retired to fine art, some to advertising. Others, in the case of McGinnis and Robert Maguire – two of the absolute best – migrated to romance covers.
What distinguished their efforts are the the noirish touches that they brought over from the pulps. Their penchant for eggshell hues, alabaster skin tones, muted colors and gestural brushstrokes gave the paintings a real allure. Also, they conjured powerful atmospherics – an epic historical sweep, a genuine sexiness, more than a touch of danger, and a sense of swashbuckling adventure.
Oh, and design-wise, these are seriously great. The typesetting is perfect in its own way and the compositions unusually dynamic and well ordered. As a exercise in serial design this Johanna Lindsay series in particular is a knockout – issuing forth in double barrelled salvos of modes – color blocked, on-white, and full lurid bleeds.
Together the design and the painting lift the covers from from usual ham handed, frosted glop to the status of real melodramatic art – which requires, along with an overheated imagination, more than a fair share of skill and technique.
Illustration from Bruno Munari’s Le Macchine di Munari, which also includes diagrams and helpful descriptions of a lizard-driven engine for tired tortoises, a mechanism for sniffing artificial flowers, a humiliator for mosquitoes, a machine for playing the pipe even when you are not home, a machine for seeing the dawn before anyone else, and a tail wagger for dogs.
Bruno Munari’s work was described by one critic as as “a playful revolution” – perfectly put. It is a rabbit hole to a realm where the tweaking of adult conventions and the stimulation of children’s imaginations meet, mingle, draw, type, play, and get wonderfully, absurdly, heartwarmingly weird. (A collection of his work can be viewed here, click on the “+” to reveal images.) Munari himself summed up his approach perfectly: lucidity, leanness, exactitude and humor. Compass points worth following, surely.
I’ve had a yen for melodramatic Douglas Sirk-y entertainments of late, so accordingly I just happily burned through Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Scored a nice, cracked, loose, hardbound reading copy – burgandy cloth, yellowed pages – pleasure to hold, pleasure to read. Gloomy, doomy, weepy, overwrought, etc, etc.. the tops. So last night I’m putting it away on the bookshelf when I notice double paperback versions of Madam Bovary… hurm? Turns out to be a his n’ hers set – bought separately before my wife and I married and nicely reflective of our aesthetic predilections. Also, just cool seeing Emma Bovary rendered in the prevailing sultry graphic modes of the day.
from How Things Work, An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Technology,
Simon and Schuster, 1967
Original German edition, Wie Funktioniert Das?, Institut AG, 1963
Walking in our neighboorhood, daughter lingers over a box of books left out for free, picks this out and declares she’s taking it home. Good eye, squeaker, good eye.
Herewith, a new short series, featuring art from old illustration guides. They have such a distinctive character that they form, I think, something of a lost genre. What defines them, and what I find so appealing, is their distinctive balance of looseness and rigor – suspended as they are between sketches and finished works.
The selections above are by Howard Forsberg. Forsberg was a commercial illustrator in the 50’s and 60’s whose clients included Coca Cola and Budweiser as well as magazines like Colliers and Woman’s Day. He also taught painting at the mecca of classic illustration techniques – the Famous Artists School in Connecticut (a subject of posts to come.)
More selections in the days ahead.
Score! Boundless delights here – from the great spy, bossa nova soundtrack (with a killer Shirley Bassey vocal, check the opening credits here), to the cover collage itself (by pulp, buy vicodin in the uk movie poster and advertising art titan Bob Peak.) The movie itself, a second rate In Like Flint like spy spoof, so far has proved elusive….
The clue to what distinguishes Uppercase Magazine lies in its motto “A magazine for the creative and curious” It’s the “curious” – It accounts for the joyful, inclusive sense of collaboration and sharing that pervades the whole shebang. The magazine reads like a conversation between like-minded folk riffing on the impossibly cool thing they’ve drawn, thought, photographed, collected, discovered, etc. No lofty curatorial snobbishness or hipster veneration of the mindlessly shocking or willfully ugly for these cats – just a democratic spirit and a celebration of beautiful things.
Another thing – the magazine, as a project and physical object, is the very embodiment of what it celebrates. It works on a collaborative publishing model, and is designed and produced with great care and craft. Feels great in the hand. The three covers so far are stunning in their graphic impact. Folks seem keen on it too. The first two issues are sold out and subscriptions now begin with the third. The whole Uppercase venture, gallery, books, blog etc… seem of all of a piece. Well worth it. Explore here.
(Oh, and – given my affinity for the venture, I’m proud to say they’ve found room for my own contribution to it. For issue three I wrote an article exploring the radio documentaries of the classical pianist Glenn Gould, not only in terms of his own career but as a manifesto for the insatiable cultural omnivore. As you can see from the preview above, they were kind enough to include an accompanying illustration, which was a great excuse to paint one of Gould’s pop cultural obsessions, the fetching Petula Clark.)
The graphic design of the various phases of the Modern Library edition is well, well trawled territory, yes, but this is a particular favorite. Every time I search through the clipping file I pull out this dust jacket and I’m flummoxed weather to frame it, paint on it, or emulate it… but I always pause to reflect on it’s graphic power. The compass rose is its aesthetic heart – its design belonging to the ages, its rendering and coloring thoroughly mid-century modern. Then there is the decorative contrast between the, again, utterly contemporary color blocking of the title, and the period flair of the authors name. Overall, these details are under-girded by two powerful compositional forces – the balance between the aged and modern background and the binding compositional echo across the spine. As for the book itself, as much as I respect it from a distance, I’d get out of its way if it were walking toward me, and on the whole I’d rather hang with Lucky Jim… [larger image]
Master illustrator Frank Frazetta’s stationary design for addlepatted sun children Bo and John Derek’s movie production company, Svengali. I was going to leave the commentary at that, but I was riding my bike this afternoon, and the Walkman offered up Sheena, by Trader Horne, a long forgotten British psych-folk outfit. Hardly a stanza had passed when I realized the song was a tone poem to the idea of Bo Derek. I share it here, below, for your pleasure:
Sheena, Trader Horn:
