see also:

Art Deco

7 American Art Deco and the Second World War

 

During the 1920s, the professions of graphic designer and art director gradually increased their visibility in the United
States. Someone with the title "art director," often a graphic designer, had general responsibility for the design and
typography of a given publication, although they might not always do the actual work themselves. In the 1920s, a number of organizations were founded in the United States that provided lectures, exhibitions, and conferences that helped support and define the field. In 1920, the Art Directors' Club of New York was established, and 1927 saw the creation of the Society of Typographic Artists in Chicago. While the American Institute of Graphic Arts had been founded in 1914 with a focus on fine art printing it gradually shifted its activities into the commercial design fields. Through a diffuse process, there was also increasing recognition that individuals proficient in the manipulation of text and image were central to all types of printed media.
Advertising agencies and publishers, especially in the mass media, became more cognizant in the 1920s of the unique set of skills possessed by art directors. There was a concomitant expansion of the advertising industry in the United States during this period that created new opportunities for graphic designers. Between 1914 and 1929, the annual dollar volume of advertising rose from $600,000 to nearly 3 billion dollars. New advertising agencies appeared almost monthly, while older operations doubled and trebled their staffs. Newspapers alone carried 2.25 million dollars' worth of advertisements in the year 1927. The advertising "game" acquired a new sense ofprofessional-ism as it became gradually more economically important to the country.

The American Magazine

While the 1920s in Europe were marked by the development of modern, abstract styles, in the United States the decade saw the continued dominance of conventional design and typography. While there were isolated instances of experimental modern graphics reaching mainstream publications, conservative American advertisers favored traditional illustration and rather unadventurous photography over more progressive styles.

However, as early as 1925, the year of the influential "Exposition Internationale des Arts Decorattfs et Industriels Modernes" in Paris, a gradual trickle of European and European-inspired designs made its first appearance on the American scene. The United States had earlier rejected sponsoring a pavilion at the exposition because of a disdain for the modern styles to be exhib­ited there. However, in 1925, exhibits from that summer's exposition were featured at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art's annual "Industrial art" exhibit, signaling very strongly for the first time a mainstream interest in the Art Deco style. Department stores in a number of major American cities across the country soon followed the museum's lead, and 1926 witnessed a further expansion of interest in Art Deco, at least among sophisticated urban consumers.

It is important to be able to identify the two separate streams that made up modern European design during this era; the first, discussed in Chapter 4, consisted of designers such as Edward McKnight Kauffer and Cassandre who used formal devices derived from modern art movements, including Cubism, Futurism, Orphism, and Purism, in order to create striking graph­ics. This first stream culminated in the An Deco style, and is sometimes referred to by scholars as "commercial modern." The second stream of European design, discussed mainly in Chapters 5 and 6, consisted of Dada as well as the various "functionalist" oriented groups, including De Stijl, Russian Constructivism, International Constructivism, Bauhaus, and the New Typography. This second stream can be differentiated from the first by the member artists' deep commitment to political change. More importantly, the second, Constructivist stream emphasized graphic design and typography over fine art, so that its work directly speaks to the graphic design profession. Of course, there is substantial overlap between the Art Deco and Constructivist projects, and a movement such as Futurism, for example, inspired artists in both camps. However, it is useful to be able to recognize the different historical roots in the work of a designer who employs functionalist typography versus a designer who draws in a Cubist-inspired decorative idiom.

During the 1930s, the vast majority of modern design works in America and Europe proudly displayed the Art Deco, or commercial modern, style. Promoters of the austere Constructivism of the Bauhaus and the like were rare, small voices crying in the wilderness.

In order to give some sense of the development of American graphic design during the 1930s, it is helpful to undertake a selective survey of the contents of two mainstream magazines from February 1930, Fortune and Vanity hair. While the overwhelming majority of advertisements published in these magazines, as well as the design of the publications themselves, feature conventional graphics and typography, much of the most exciting work during the 1930s was published in publications such as these. Periodicals would evolve more quickly than other media and present one of the best sources of commissions for expatriate European designers as well as Americans with a contemporary sensibility.

Fortune

The first issue of Fortune magazine appeared in February 1930. A product of the large media corporation Time, the new periodical was aimed at the affluent urban businessman. Published and edited by Henry Luce (1898-1967), Fortune contained critical analyses and feature articles on major American industries. For example, the inaugural issue presented commentary on the financial markets as well as articles on a variety of business-related subjects, from the use of color in consumer goods to a profile of the Rothschild banking family in England. It also promised that March's issue would cover subjects including aluminum, railroads, and jewels.
 
     Fortunes first art director was T.M. Cleland (1880-1964), who chose a characteristically conservative design, the most prominent element of which was the bold, three-dimensional ser-iffed lettering used as the masthead. For the most part, the text and images were set apart as discrete units, with headings placed symmetrically at the top of the page (Jig. 7.2). The only daring dement in the magazine's early stages was the employment of photographer Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971). Bourke-White had initially established herself as a photographer of industrial landscapes in Cleveland, Ohio, where she ran a small independent photography studio. Discovered by Henry Luce in  1929, she set to work that autumn on a series of photographs of Swift and Co.'s Chicago hog processing plant, which illustrated the first issue of Fortune. While her editor at Fortune, Parker Lloyd-Smith, had to quit the scene when he was overcome by the stench of the slaughter, Bourke-White persevered through the assignment, reportedly abandoning all her photographic equip­ment to be burned when she was finished. Her photo series included the strikingly modernist image shown here of a moun­tain containing 1,500 tons of "pig-dust," ground remains that would be turned into animal feed (fig. 7.3). The abstract geometry of the piles provides a perfect counterpoint to the organic shape of the lone worker shoveling remains. The cropping of this macabre image makes it more unsettling, as the piles of remains and the figure are not securely anchored to the ground line. While Bourke-White's photos were often composed with sophisticated Constructivist elements, their layout in Fortune was quite conven­tional. The frame around the image separates it from the page, for example, while the centered caption detracts from the asymmetry of the photo.

   The first fifty-two pages of Fortune's inaugural issue were made up of advertisements that ranged widely in design. However, the majority of the ads featured quite conventional typography matched with realistic illustration or photography. A fine example of a typical American advertisement from this period appeared on page 33 (fig. 7.4). It is useful to analyze this advertisement so as to establish a baseline of typical advertising fare from the beginning of the decade. Promoting the "Wurlitzer Reproducing Organ," a self-playing device, the most striking part of the ad's typography is the letter "E" in the word "Entertaining." Serving as a kind of dropped capital, this letter is monstrously proportioned and clashes with the rest of the tag line, which is printed in a seriffed italic. This boxy, plaid "E" is just one part of an overall chaotic exercise in typography, as throughout the ad a number of inelegant faces compete for the reader's attention. This typography lacks both the stylized grace and elegance of Art Deco and the functional clarity of Constructivism.

   There are two illustrations in the advertisement, the most prominent of which is centered at the top. Here, a pedestrian representational style has been used to showcase a wealthy family listening to the organ in their elegant salon. The image and text are aligned symmetrically, but there is little else connecting them. It is obvious from advertisements such as this that the copywriter was the most prominent part of any advertising team as the 1930s began. The Wurlitzer organ is described in three columns of text that exalt "the pleasure it gives your guests and your family, the cultural development it affords your children, the distinction it adds to your home." Indeed, this ad is actually relatively concise by the standards of the day, at a time when companies expected their publicity materials to set out fully in writing the basis for the product.

     In the staid pages of Fortune, the vast majority of the illustrations, such as those in the Wurlitzer ad, were devoid of modern tendencies. American corporations had a fundamentally conserva­tive outlook, and more than anything else they sought out art directors who would avoid offending middle-class taste. The few instances of more progressive design techniques tended to occur when the advertised company itself was European or featured a product directly related to Europe. For example, the combined White Star, Red Star, and Atlantic Transport Lines, owned by the International Mercantile Marine Company (IMM), paid for an ad trumpeting their passenger and freight services. IMM was in fact an American company, part of J.P. Morgan's financial empire, but it had maintained a European flavor in acquiring a number of British shipping interests in 1910. The illustration for this ad makes for a dramatic contrast with the representational style of the Wurlitzer designer; the bow and side of a ship shown here are pure Art Deco: simplified forms, a powerful diagonal axis, cropping, and extreme foreshortening (fig. 7.5). As in the ad for the organ, there is a great deal of text, and the image is seemingly a secondary concern. Both ads feature a prosaic design that places headline text in large scale sandwiched between an image above and body text below. The typography is a mix of sans serif head­ings and seriffed text, arranged in an asymmetrical block that is rather daring for the pages of Fortune. Presumably, someone preparing a business trip to Europe would be familiar with modernism and more open to this sort of stylish rendering.

      In the advertisements published in Fortune, illustration and photography seem almost interchangeable. Like the image used for the Wurlitzer ad, the majority of the photos are completely nondescript in both style and subject matter. One advertisement from the air-conditioner company Carrier in the February issue, however, stood out for its striking modernist photographic com­position (fig. 7.6). The ad, featuring the tag line "Are these tallest office buildings already obsolete?" is, like so many others, heavily dependent on expository text. Promoting the new technology of "manufactured weather," or air conditioning, the copywriter has explained in great detail the advantages of this "healthful com­fort." The roman type makes a number of seemingly eclectic shifts between italic and bold, although some attempt is made to indicate emphasis, as in the words "already obsolete." While many elements of the typography appear to us reserved and conventional, this photograph of New York skyscrapers is so startlingly modern in appearance that it could almost have been shot by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. The three buildings are shown from a radically oblique angle, hovering over the viewer. An essentially abstract composition, three gray geometric masses appear to float in the air, as the photo is cropped so that none of the buildings appears anchored to the ground. The ambient light has created a range of tones that emphasize the blocky shapes of the structures.

     Carrier's advertisement for the March issue of Fortune displayed a similar concept, combining conventional design with stunningly modern photography, in this case a photomontage that could have been taken from the work of Berlin Dada (fig. 7.7). Presenting a dynamic overview of a modern city, the image combines skyscrapers, monumental neon signs, and even the US Capitol. Despite the photo's striking style, it is still part of a conventional layout that separates the image from the text with framing devices. It is essential to remember that the use of photography in the Carrier ads was extremely anomalous in 1930, as the overwhelming majority of advertisements avoided progressive design techniques at all costs.

     In 1937, Fortune featured one of the most famous An Deco designs of all time when the cover revealed a work by the Austrian expatriate artist Joseph Binder (1898-1972). Binder, who had studied in Vienna under Alfred Roller (see Chapter 2), moved to the United States in 1934. His cover for Fortune, published in December 1937, uses the basic shape of a Christmas tree to structure a tower of skyscrapers, a major symbol of American corporate power (fig. 7.1). The buildings display the stepped-pyramid form that is typical of Art Deco architecture forced to conform to zoning laws regulating the amount of shadow produced by a building on city streets. Binder successfully contested the strong symmetry of the triangular frame with a high contrast deployment of black and white blocks that form the sides of the skyscrapers. A comparison of this image with Lyonel Feininger's Cathedral (see fig. 6.7) shows how Art Deco artists successfully assimilated Expressionist devices such as the crystalline forms and starry sky shown here in order to convey the magnificence of an urban, capitalist Utopia. Overall, Fortune remained quite reserved in its design until 1945, when the German designer Will Burtin (1909-1972), who had fled Nazi Germany because his wife was Jewish, took over as art director and introduced a new modern style.

7.1 Joseph Binder, Skyscraper Christmas Tree, Fortune Magazine,
Dec 1937. Magazine cover.

Mehemed Agha and Vanity Fair

One would expect that the editors of Vanity Fair magazine, the fashionable periodical devoted to the arts and culture edited by Frank Crowninshield (1872-1947) and published by Conde Nast (1873-1942), would be more open to progressive design than the editors of Fortune. Vanity Fair was the premier periodical of this era to focus on modern art, often publishing reproductions of Cubist, Futurist, and Expressionist works. Nast's stable of publications included a number of European editions of his magazines, Vogue being the most prominent example.

In 1929, Nast had hired the art director of the German edition of Vogue magazine, Mehemed Agha (1896-1978), to take over the design of his flagship publications, first the American Vogue, and immediately thereafter Vanity Fair and House and Garden. At Vanity Fair, Agha worked quickly to install a new style that used elements drawn from both the Art Deco and Constructivist streams of European modernism. Art Deco had in fact already been highly visible in the pages of Vanity Fair, especially its cover an. The February 1930 issue is typical of this trend; the cover was drawn by Georges Lepape (1887-1971), a famed An Deco illustrator (fig. 7.8). Lepape was French, and this cover shows his usual whimsical assonment of characters drawn from folklore and the Commedia dell'Arte, which was a type of popular, improvisational theater that utilized stock characters. The stylized simplification of forms and strong geometric elements reminiscent of Cubism demonstrate how Lepape, like Cassandre and others, transformed modernist painting into a sleek, glamorous form of commercial illustration.

The more dramatic initial change that Agha instituted at Vanity Fair concerned the magazine's typography. A devotee of sans serif letters, Agha redesigned the contents page using Paul Renner's Futura type as well as the bold rules and positive use of negative space typical of Constructivist aesthetics (fig. 7.9). However, Agha's design does not display the austere functionalism typical of European Constructivist designs. Rather, the atten­uated proponions and wide spacing between the letters that spell out " Vanity Fair" and "in this number" are replete with the decorative elegance of the Art Deco style. In this way Agha has successfully synthesized a new layout and typography from the two main trends of European design, combining the clarity of Constructivism with the sinuous grace of An Deco. International Constructivism and the New Typography had made very few inroads into American design culture at this point.

As early as 1930, Agha, who had already been the first art director to use double-paged photo spreads and color cover photography, became the first designer to make use of the "full bleed," allowing photographs to expand to all four margins and completely cover the page. This allowed for dramatic contrasts of form and texture that created more sophisticated relationships between text and image. In an example from Vanity Fair for May 1934, an exceptional photograph by Bourke-White of a radio transmission tower taken from an extremely oblique perspective has completely suffused the right page (fig. 7.10). In contrast to the use of Bourke-White's photographs in Fortune, here there is no rule or frame to separate the image from the page itself. This "full bleed" allows the asymmetrical, geometric complexity of the tower's composition to play off the solid blocks of text to the left. The title "Trapping the magical waves of sound" serves to connect text and image in the way it replicates a horizontal element in the photograph. Note also how the heading is located asymmetrically two-thirds of the way down the page, again in contrast to the conventional, symmetrical layout in Fortune.

     In 1931, Conde Nast acknowleged Agha's importance to his magazine empire when he included the art director's name on the masthead of the contents page of Vanity Fair, alongside those of the editor, Frank Crowninshield, and Nast himself. Agha's significance to American magazine design was further recognized in the mainstream press as early as 1939, when a brief article in Time made note of his accomplishments. Significantly, this unattributed piece appeared in the "Art" section of Time, which was an accomplishment in itself. While heralding the art director as a pioneer in the use of typography and photography, the article still man­ages to be snide when it comes to modern design, suggesting that Agha's use of blank spaces leaves "room for your laundry list" while noting that the photography he uses features "cock-eyed" perspectives. Agha is quoted to the effect that his success has already started to dilute the effectiveness of his designs because they are so widely copied.
 

see also
collection:

Georges

Lepape

7.8 Georges Lepape, Vanity Fair, Feb 1930. Magazine cover.
Original artwork by Georges Lepape.

see also collection: Georges Lepape
 

Conde Nast, Vogue, and Fashion Photography

Although the magazines that Conde Nast oversaw until bis death in 1942 included such notable publications as Vanity Fair, House and Garden, and Glamour, it was his original effort, Vogue, which secured his place in fashion history. Nast bought Vogue in 1909 and took what was then a small niche publication aimed at New York society and transformed it into a fashion publication with a powerful American and European following; by 1920, Nast had established British and French editions.

As one of the leading fashion magazines in the United States (along with its rival Harper's Bazaarj, Vogue was positioned to have an enormous influence on the industry. More than any other publication, Vogue engineered the rise of fashion photography in the 1920s and 1930s. Nast' s first major coup was to sign Edward Steichen (1879-1973) in 1923 as principal photographer. Steichen quickly established a reputation as a stylish innovator with artificial lighting. His commercial style was a variant of the "straight photography" that he had pioneered in the 1910s with Alfred Stieglitz, whereby the model was shot with a view towards eliminating obvious artifice, such as soft focus, and any overwhelming sentiment. Steichen also established the precedent that fashion photography had to be technically perfect and display the highest possible production values.

In the 1930s Vogue and Steichen were joined by luminaries including Baron George Hoyningen-Huene, Cecil Beaton, Horst P. Horst, and Andre Durst. Their photographic work was furthered by talented models such as Lisa Fonssagrives, who would appear on hundreds of Vogue covers.

Fashion photographers faced an uneasy reputation during their heyday. With its unseemly ties to commerce, fashion photography        was deemed beneath consideration as an art form (even among its practitioners and patrons). Many fashion photographers displayed a non-commercial "art" portfolio to potential clients to convince them of their artistic pedigree.

However, photography's artistic reputation shifted dramatically after the Second World War, when Steichen became the Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art. In this position that he held for fifteen years, Steichen helped to secure photography's place in the canon of modern art. Yet, to this day fashion photography remains on the outside looking in, never having quite achieved the status of an art  form.

Cipe Pineles

Agha enhanced his influence on American graphic design through the significant number of young proteges he groomed at Conde Nast. This group included Alex Liberman and Cipe Pineles (1910-1991), both of whom enjoyed considerable success long after Agha left Conde Nast in 1943. Pineles, a woman of Austrian ancestry who had emigrated to New York in 1923, was hired by Agha in 1933 to work at Vanity Fair and Vogue (the former was absorbed into Vogue in 1936). A fine example of Pineles's work at Conde Nast is the April 1,1939 cover of Vogue (fig. 7.11), which features a full color image of two women's faces by renowned photographer Horst P. Horst (1906-1999). The dramatically cropped photo is off center to the right and tilted clockwise about 20 degrees so that the upper left corner points at the magazine's name. The text and image in this manner form a diagonal compositional line that cuts across the page. The letters that spell out "Vogue," in addition, are written in a decorous script, an example of how Agha never established a fixed set of principles for the cover, but rather allowed artists such as Pineles the freedom to design entire covers from scratch.

     Pineles eventually moved on in 1942, to become the art director of Glamour magazine, where she would introduce many of the modern design techniques she had learned while working for Agha. Pineles was a pioneer in that she was the first woman art director of a mass-market periodical, and her success at Glamour led to subsequent positions as art director at Seventeen, Charm, and Mademoiselle. Her work at Seventeen in the late 1940s truly established her independent reputation as a talented modern designer. In contrast to Vogue, where the cover logo changed con­stantly to fit that issue's image, at Seventeen Pineles employed a standardized type, lower-case Bodoni in its bold, condensed italic form. The cover photo generally featured a young woman, natu­rally posed, as can be seen in the July 1949 cover (fig. 7.12). On this cover, photographs by one of Pineles's own favorites, Francesco Scavullo (1921-2004), have been montaged so that at first glance the viewer perceives a reflected image. Only when one studies how the hand in the top image appears almost to grasp the umbrella in the lower photo docs the true nature of the cover become clear. The red, white, and blue palette connects the cover to the 4th of July holiday. In the 1950s, outside the purview of this chapter, Pineles became famous for her innovative strategy of employing established artists such as Ben Shahn (1898-1969) as magazine illustrators. In 1948, she became the first woman granted membership in the prestigious New York Art Directors' Club, a heretofore all-male bastion of design professionals.

7.11 Cipe Pineles, Vogue Cover, April 1, 1939.

7.12 Cipe Pineles, Seventeen Cover, July 1949.

Alexey Brodovitch

Alexey Brodovitch (1898-1971), another European immigrant who became an influential art director in America during the 1930s, was hired by Carmel Snow (1887-1961), the editor of Harper's Bazaar, in 1934. Brodovitch worked on a parallel track to that of Agha, introducing modern design elements over a period of years. While working in Paris during the 1920s, Brodovitch had become acquainted with the work of Art Deco illustrators such as Cassandre, whom he hired in 1938 to create a series of dramatic covers for Harper's Bazaar. The cover from October 1938 features an illustration by Cassandre of a disembodied eye and pair of lips (fig. 7.13). The rich red color and sinuous shape of the lips as well as the obvious care with which the eyelashes have been shaped suggests that these are parts of a glamorous woman's face. The shape of both the iris and pupil of the eye is perfectly round and suggestive of Cassandre's early adoption of a style influenced by Purism . However, the use of frag­ments of a woman's body is evidence of the fact that Cassandre had absorbed some of the principles of the French Surrealist movement. Surrealist artists of the 1920s and 1930s such as Joan Miro (1893-1983)and Salvador Dali (1904-1989) often painted images that contained disembodied pieces of human anatomy; these fragmented bodies were a vehicle that allowed artists to convey their dreams and fantasies. A great deal of Surrealist work dealt with sexual fantasies, and the eye and lips shown in Cassandre's cover design are emblematic of male desire.

Brodovitch also oversaw the design of some of the most com­pelling double-page spreads of photography and text ever seen. Like Agha, he employed a series of prominent photographers, including Horst P. Horst, Cecil Beaton (1904-1980), and George Hoyningen-Huene (1900-1968), to create startling photographs that served as the basis for the overall design of the spread. Hoyningen-Huene shot the photo shown here, repeating the stylish curve of the model's left hip with a shadow that drapes across the right side of her form (fig.7.14). Brodovitch bled this photo across the gutter, where he formed a column of type into another smooth curve that echoed the contour in the photograph. The use of bold lettering to start each line of text further emphasizes the sweeping line that structures the entire spread. Brodovitch used the eminently functional modern seriffed typeface called Bodoni for most of the text in Harper's Bazaar, showing that sans serif type was not essential to the creation of a harmonious modern design.

7.13 A.M. Cassandre, Harper's Bazaar Cover, Oct 1938

7.14  Alexey Brodovitch, Harper's Bazaar Spread, March 15, 1938

PM Magazine

While mainstream magazines such as Harper's Bazaar and Vanity hair brought new modern styles to the attention of the mainstream, smaller trade publications that served design professionals had an important role in educating a generation of young American art directors. Among the most prominent examples of this type of periodical was called PM Magazine, the initials stand­ing for "production manager," which first appeared in 1934 as a mouthpiece of the typography firm called The Composing Room, This firm had been founded in 1927 by Sol Cantor (P-1965) and Dr Robert L. Leslie (1885-1987), who sought to join in the print advertising boom of the 1920s. The early issues of PM Magazine, edited by Percy Seitlin, focused mainly on practical issues related to the printing and typesetting businesses. However, Leslie's interest in European design soon came to the fore as the monthly magazine focused more and more on bringing European styles to the attention of American art directors.

     In 1936 the magazine began publishing overviews of individual European artists such as Lucian Bernhard, whose Sachplakflt style was the major topic of the March edition. Bernhard had immigrated to the United States in 1923 and had established a successful freelance design firm there. He kept up with innovations in graphic design and typography, and in 1929 he designed Bernhard Gothic (fig. 7.15) for the American Type Foundry, a "functionalist" sans serif type intended to rival Paul Renner's ubiquitous Futura. Bernhard served as the guest art director for the March issue of PM Magazine, so he was able to design the layout of articles celebrating himself. The double page spread shown here juxtaposes the almost mythical Priester poster with a laudatory overview of Bernhard's work written by Seitlin (fig. 7.16). Bernhard adopted many of the principles of Constructivism in his new job, using asymmetry as well as a red geometric block in this composition.

The November 1937 issue devoted similar attention to an American artist, Lester Beall (1903-1969), suggesting that the influx of European emigres was having an impact on homegrown graphic designers. Beall created the cover image for the issue, which wittily mocks the decorative excesses of conventional typography by juxtaposing an elaborate Victorian "P" with a slab seriffed "M" composed in a bold geometric fashion (fig. 7.17). Two red rules seem to reach out and pull the asymmetrical letter "M" into the future, away from the ornamental past symbolized by the "P." The dramatic use of negative white space also indicated Beall's knowl­edge of the Constructivist style. The article on Beall's work was written by the advertising executive Charles Coiner (1898-1989), one of the only non-artists involved in the industry to recognize the potential for modern design at an early date.

Leslie and Seitlin were, of course, committed to Bauhaus ideals of the integration of the design arts and architecture, and numerous articles covered this subject over the magazine's eight year run, including Gropius's "Essentials for Architectural Education" in the February/March 1938 issue. For the June/July 1938 edition, Beall oversaw the design of an issue devoted to "The Bauhaus Tradition and the New Typography." The cover page for that article, shown here, floats two lines of text so that they offer the sparest indication of the underlying orthogonal grid (fig. 7.18). Aside from the Bauhaus, subsequent issues dealt with other modern manifestations, such as the 1939 issue that declared the 1930s to be "Agha's American Decade."

The magazine's focus on graphic design was finally indicated by a title change in June of 1940, when PM Magazine became AD, An Intimate Journal for Production Managers, Art Directors, and their Associates, further highlighting the artistic interests of the editors. During this period, Leslie also operated a small exhibition space devoted to progressive graphic design in the offices of his firm. Called the 'AD Gallery," it became an important meeting place for like-minded young designers. The inaugural show at the gallery featured the work of the then unknown Swiss emigre Herbert Matter (1907-1984), who had recently arrived in New York and was working as a photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair. Matter soon established a stellar career as a designer of corporate identity as well as an educator at Yale University's influential design program.

7.15 Lucian Bemhard, Bemhard Gothic Typeface, 1929.

7.16 Lucian Bernhard, PM Magazine, 1936. Archives & Special Collections, RIT Library,
Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York.

7.17 Lester Beall, PM Magazine, Nov 1937, Archives & Special Collections, RIT Library,
Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York.

7.18 Lester Beall, PM Magazine. June/July 1938. Archives & Special Collections, RIT Library,
Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York.

Government Patrons
 

The Great Depression

Amid all the glamour and affluence portrayed in magazines such as Vanity Fair during the 1930s, it easy to lose sight of the fact that most of the decade was spent in the grip of the Great Depression. This severe economic downturn began in October 1929, when "Black Monday" initiated a stunning pullback in the American equities markets. The decline in prices was exacerbated by the fact that many Americans had bought stock using loans, or margin, and were unable to pay off their newly acquired debts. The stock market crash alone did not cause the Great Depression, but it set off a chain of financial calamities that resonated throughout the United States and Europe.

By 1933, unemployment in the United States surpassed 30 per cent. Because of the continuing effects of the Great Depression, some graphic designers were forced to turn to the government for work as the commercial segment of the market contracted. The new administration elected in 1932 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945) sought to alleviate the crisis by hugely increasing the federal workforce. Roosevelt established the Works Project Administration (WPA), whose most visible work involved the construction of hundreds of public proj­ects, mainly roads, dams, and government buildings. However, one branch of the WPA, called the Federal Art Project (FAP), was given the responsibility of providing government work for artists in a variety of fields. Much of the work sponsored by the FAP consisted of fine an, especially murals to decorate the hundreds of new public buildings, but a small subset was devoted to poster design. During an eight-year period, the FAP commissioned over 35,000 unique designs, resulting in 2 million published posters.
 

FAP Posters

The FAP viewed the poster as a democratic art form, one that could reach out to people from all walks of life, especially those not of the elite, who were for the most part excluded from the study and appreciation of fine art. Stylistically speaking, this government patronage had the opposite effect from what one might expect, as it led to a more open environment in which the introduction of sophisticated Art Deco styles became widespread tor the first time. Under the FAP, American artists were free to pursue the modernist styles that corporate advertisers in the United States had largely shunned.

     As many as one third of the FAP posters were produced in New York City. Richard Floethe (1901-1988), the German-born director of the New York poster division of the FAP from 1936 until 1939, had trained as a student at the Bauhaus in the 1920s. As a poster designer in the United States, he favored Art Deco over more austere Constructivist styles, although the influence of

the Bauhaus is also visible in his frequent use of Josef Albers's Stencil lettering. Floethe's 1936 poster publicizing an FAP art exhibition displays the rounded curves and elegant, idiosyncratic sans serif lettering typical of An Deco (fig. 7.19). Like the majority of the graphic works produced by the FAP, this poster is a small (14 by 22 inches) silkscreen that uses a restricted palette. The silkscrcen process, whereby ink is pushed through a taut screen of fabric, was first introduced in the New York division by Anthony Velonis (1911-1997), who adapted it from his knowledge of com­mercial printing techniques. Silkscreen ing, which was most often used for graphic ephemera, was much less expensive than lithog­raphy, and after an eight-color process was developed it allowed for almost as much range of color. After the FAP artists shifted to silkscreening, their output increased tremendously. For example, the New York shop often printed over 500 posters in a single day.

      The FAP posters were viewed by a dramatically larger audi­ence than the educated elite who read Fortune, Vogue, or Vanity Fair. Despite their banal subject matter and obviously inexpensive production values, these posters functioned to awaken the broader American public to the beauty of Art Deco abstraction in a way that no magazine would have been able to. Like the posters of Edward McKnight Kauffer designed for the London Underground, images such as Foreign Trade Zone No. 1, by Martin Weitzman, appeared normative and non-threatening (fig. 7.21). Weitzman's poster uses a style based on Cassandre's Purist work (see fig. 4.39), which reduces the bow of the ship to a flat plane that runs off of the frame on three sides. The vertically proportioned lettering complements the towering height of the ship's prow. This striking style had a real potential to offend conservative American viewers; but this potential was nullified by the official, government-sanctioned nature of the message, complete with the name of the Mayor of New York. How could a poster that is signed by the Commissioner of the Department of Docks seem too radical?

     One of the most visually strong posters to come out of the FAP was printed under the aegis of the Chicago division. This silkscreen by an artist named Carken suggests familiarity with the Sachplakat style, as the illustration of the powerful panther has been joined with simple, declarative text (fig. 7.20). The flatly rendered panther crouches in the ambiguous space created by the words "Brookside" and "Zoo," tying text and image together with its tail. This connection is reinforced by the way in which the animal's tongue picks up the orange color of the lettering. The wide block of letters spelling out "Brookside" complements the panther's torso and tail just as the compact mass of the letters in the word "Zoo" echoes the coiled muscles of his chest and head. In 1942, after the United States had entered the Second World War, the FAP poster division was transferred to the Defense Department Graphic Section, through which graphic designers continued to serve the government.

7.19 Richard Floethe, Oils and Watercolors Exhibition. 1938,
Works Progress Administration.
Poster. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

7.20 Carken, Brookside Zoo, 1936. Color silkscreen.
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

7.21 Martin Weitzman. Foreign Trade Zone No.1, 1937.
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Lester Beall

Lester Beall, born in Missouri, moved in 1935 to New York City, where he opened a freelance graphic design business. During the 1930s, Beall was one of the most important homegrown American designers to adopt sophisticated European styles. Among his important early works are a series of posters designed for the Rural Electrification Administration, a government body that promoted the use of electricity in the countryside. A 1937 poster trumpeting the relatively new technology of radio (which was made possible by electricity) uses a simple abstract scheme to convey its message (fig. 7.22). The three white arrows are obliquely positioned so that they create a modicum of space in what is an otherwise completely flat plane, the single word "radio" attached to the surface confirming its two-dimensionality. The white arrows are balanced by the red contour line that runs from the middle to the lower right corner of the page. What so distinguishes Beall's work from that of his contemporaries is the manner in which he eschews most of the decorative excesses of Art Deco in favor of a more radically simplified Constructivist style. The lack of "styling" in the arrows or the lettering is evidence of his penchant for clear, functional design solutions.

     Beall's 1937 work for the Department of Agriculture effectively integrates black and white photography with an abstract geometric background (fig. 7.23). The horizontal bars of the fence echo the red and white striped background, while the grinning children convey an upbeat message that is reinforced by the patri­otic use of color. In a nice touch, the stenciled lettering appears to be printed on the fence itself, although the shadow on the diago­nal crosspiece reduces the legibility of some of the letters. The stenciling in Beall's poster represents not a sophisticated "univer­sal" alphabet, but rather the prosaic look of everyday official writing on crates. Finally, the slightly off-kilter angle of the photograph vis a vis the background creates a shallow space while also breaking the photograph out of the strict orthogonal grid. In 1937, Beall received a huge honor when his work was featured in a solo exhibition of graphic design at New York's Museum of Modern Art. As discussed below, Beall's embrace of Constructivism perfectly complemented the interests of the museum's curators, who sought to promulgate the more severe Constructivist style in the face of an overwhelming attachment to the stylish Art Deco preferred in the United States.

The Museum of Modern Art
 

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which was established in New York City in 1929, soon became an important champion of modern design in the United States. On November 8, 1929, the MoMA opened officially to the public. In The Nation, Lloyd Goodrich observed, "The foundation of the new museum marks the final apotheosis of modernism and its acceptance into respectable society." While Goodrich was, of course, mainly refer­ring to painting and sculpture, from an early point the MoMA also devoted resources to the display of architecture and other related design materials. The founding trustees of the museum included many prominent industrialists such as A. Conger Goodyear (1877-1964), but Frank Crowninshield, the editor of Vanity Fair, also made the list. Throughout the 1930s, the Rockefeller family and other wealthy philanthropists provided considerable financial support and status to the museum, securing for it a significant role in American cultural life. This section surveys four exhibitions held at the MoMA during the 1930s that had a considerable impact on the way in which Americans perceived modern graphic design.
 

The International Style

At the MoMA, there was a decided emphasis on Constructivist functionalism, which was considered to be a much more signifi­cant development than the "modernistic" Art Deco. The first show at the MoMA that advocated a Constructivist aesthetic was focused exclusively on architecture. "Modern Architecture: International Exhibition," curated by Philip Johnson (1906-2005) and Henry-Russell Hitchcock (1903-1987), opened in 1931 (fig. 7.24), providing a survey of modern architecture that the organizers grouped under a new term, the "International Style." A book that was authored by the curators, called The International Style: Architecture since 1922, was published in 1932 as an accompaniment to the exhibition. In this book, Johnson and Hitchcock celebrated the abstract geometric architecture of great architects such as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and the De Stijl architect J. J. P. Oud as exemplary of the rising new trend in building.

The authors identified three main aesthetic principles that define the International Style in architecture. While they did not originally intend to prescribe the rules for architecture, but rather to describe them, the book became enormously influential for modern architects. Additionally, these principles of the International Style would prove to be equally important to the subsequent development of graphic design in the United States. The first principle submitted by Hitchcock and Johnson stated that modern architecture emphasized volume—the enclosure of space by planar elements—over mass. While difficult to translate into two-dimensional media, this rule resonates with the flat, geometric planes of a lot of Constructivist graphic design. For Hitchcock and Johnson, the three-dimensional orthogonal skele­tons of steel beams that form the basic structure of a building are essential to determining its form. Similarly, the grid is the underlying element in Constructivist graphic designs.

     Their second principle called for "regularity as opposed to symmetry," a rule whose application in graphic design was a major tenet of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Jan Tschichold's New Typography. The "regularity" invoked here refers to the same type of machine standardization that is a prominent part of Constructivism. The third element of the International Style was its dependence on proportion, not applied ornament, as the basis for its aesthetic achievement. This is, of course, a central tenet of graphic design of the 1920s.

     The promulgation of the International Style in architecture by the MoMA was based solely on aesthetic principles. Hitchcock and Johnson deliberately ignored what they called the "sociological aspects" of modern architecture in their exhibition and book. In this manner, the design principles of Russian Constructivism, De Stijl, and the Bauhaus were introduced to an American audience completely devoid of political context. This gradual depoliticization of Constructivism was already traced in the con­text of the Bauhaus. It is striking how quickly modern design, whose post-war roots were so closely tied to polit­ical events in Russia and Germany, became completely detached from its political history.

     In regard to lettering on the sides of buildings, which Hitchcock and Johnson considered to be suitably functional as opposed to ornamental, they wrote, "Clear unseriffed letter forms are most legible at a good scale and conform most harmoniously to the geometrical character of contemporary design." Invoking the principle of regularity, they called for lettering to respect the underlying geometric composition of the building. A good example of this type of lettering existed at the Bauhaus, where the name of the institution was incorporated into the structure using Herbert Bayer's all-lower-case Universal. Like most Constructivists, Hitchcock and Johnson were under the misappre­hension that sans serif lettering was more legible and functionalist than traditional seriffed forms, while in reality the serifs on letters serve to increase their legibility and especially their readability (the body text of The International Style was set in roman). In this case as in many others, sans serif lettering is preferred for its perceived, rather than empirically deduced, functional qualities in typography.

     While this theme will be developed in greater depth in Chapter 8, it is crucial to note how Constructivist graphic design was aided by its perceived aesthetic closeness to International Style architecture. This alliance, which has its roots mainly in the Gesamtkunstwerk pursued at the Bauhaus, would become very important in establishing the intellectual and stylistic credibility of functionalist graphics. Anecdotally speaking, this analogy was expressed best by the art director Charles Coiner when he called the designer "the architect of the printed page." This is not to say that graphic designers sought to connect their work to architec­ture for the cynical purpose of gaining professional status, since the stylistic parallels between the two arts had naturally developed as pan of the modern movement.

     During the period covered by the exhibition at MoMA, the radical simplification of form espoused by modern architects such as Corbusier and Gropius was almost completely absent from the American scene. Corporations in the United States were only just beginning to accept the "modernistic" Art Deco style, which often featured elaborate ornament that violated one of the core tenets of the International Style. For example, the same year of Hitchcock and Russell's exhibition, New York City residents witnessed the completion of the Art Deco Chrysler building (fig. 7.25), by William Van Alen (1883-1954). Designed as the tallest manmade structure in the world, the Chrysler building soared 1,046 feet from Lexington Avenue to the top of its stainless steel spire. The summit of the building is composed of an eccentric series of seven parabolic curves clad in stainless steel, punctuated by triangular windows that radiate upward. In addition, Van Alen placed steel gargoyles at the corners of the major setback, a medieval device that, like the wheel-shaped carvings near them, indicated the building's ties to the automobile industry. An iconic example of the opulent use of geometric ornament characteristic of Art Deco, the flamboyant decorative scheme is completely at odds with the austere functional ism of the International Style. The Chrysler building celebrates mass, symmetry, and applied ornament, and is indicative of how completely marginalized the Constructivist style was in the United States at this time.

7.24 Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock (curators),
"Modern Architecture; international Exhibition,"
Museum of Modem Art, New York, 1931.

7.25 William van Alen, Chrysler Building, New York, 1928-30.

The "Machine Art" Exhibition

In March 1934, MoMA opened  its "Machine Art" exhibition, the second to assert the primacy of the machine aesthetic in modern life. This unique exhibition focused on objects that were tradi­tionally excluded from the museum realm, such as industrial products, mass-produced furniture, and even scientific instru­ments. The conceptual basis of the "Machine Art" show was set out in the introduction to the catalog, which opened with an excerpt from the writings of Plato. "By beauty of shapes ... I mean straight lines and circles, and shapes, plane or solid, made from them by lathe, ruler, and square. These are not, like other things, beautiful relatively, but always and absolutely." The Neoplatonist basis for the beauty of geometric abstraction had, of course, been asserted for years by the artists of De Stijl, Purism, ind the Bauhaus. The catalog further draws a series of parallels between the "pure shapes" of machine-made objects and Plato's Classical aesthetic, celebrating the objects' kinetic rhythms, simplified surfaces, visual complexity, and functional beauty.

The catalog that accompanied the exhibition was notable for its striking cover, designed by Josef Albers (fig. 7.26). One of the many former Bauhaus professors who had emigrated from Germany some time after the Bauhaus was closed by the Nazis in 1933, Albers had a significant impact on American graphic design. The cover is starkly simplistic, combining a photograph of one of the objects in the show, SKF Industries' "Self-Aligning Ball Bearing," with all-capital sans serif letters. There is a strong contrast created between the extreme close-up image of the circular ball bearing and the architectonic structure of the typography.

    In his essay in the "Machine Art" catalog, Philip Johnson, the director of the MoMA's Department of Architecture and Industrial An, sketched the last eighty years of industrial design in terms of the reconciliation of handcrafted quality with mechan­ical reproducibility. Using architecture as an analogy, he asserted that design had developed separately but toward the same end— showing sturdy simplicity and the elimination of superfluous ornament. The exhibition at the MoMA was based on Bauhaus principles of Constructivist functionalism, and the curators rejected the opulent ornament of An Deco. Citing an American need to resist the "'modernistic' French machine-age aesthetic," Johnson reminded his readers diat in America the machine tradition is "purer and stronger." He also took a swipe at "styling" firms, which Johnson felt were responsible for the overzealous use of streamlining as ornament. This use of a machine element as a decorative device was abhorrent to functionalist artists because it subverted the underlying principles of machine art.

    At the time of the "Machine Art" exhibition, the American market for luxury goods was saturated with Art Deco objects. American Art Deco often stressed the streamlined look whereby ornamental geometric lines determined the form of the composi­tion. A good example of this type of work can be seen in the Zephyr Clock from 1933 (fig. 7.27) by Karl Emanuel Weber (Kem) (1889-1963). Manufactured by Lawson Time Inc. in a combina­tion of brass and copper with celluloid numerals, the clock features two rounded curves, one on the vertical axis and one on the horizontal. Born in Berlin, Weber had been working in San Francisco on behalf of the German government in 1915, when he was stranded by the First World War. He set up shop in the United States, and established a thriving design practice in Los Angeles. The Desk Clock is exemplary of the sort of object that Philip Johnson disliked because it uses streamlining "dishonestly," its form being essentially decorative as opposed to functional.

    An Deco designers shared the same love of decorative ele­gance as their counterparts in Art Nouveau. A stunning stylistic comparison can be made between Hector Guimard's Paris Metro trom (see fig. 1.15) and an Art Deco interior space designed by John Eberson (1875-1964) for the Colony Theater in 1930 (fig. 7.28). The sinuous curves of Art Nouveau have been replaced by the planar geometric abstraction of Art Deco. Of course, the work of the Art Nouveau designer Henry van de Vclde seemed to anticipate the geometric stylization of Art Deco in many ways. It is also important to recognize how the MoMA's embrace of strict machine functionalism was not widespread in the 1930s, when Art Deco took precedence :n American industrial and graphic design.

7.26 Josef Albers, Machine Art, Exhibition Catalog,
Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1934.

The "Cubism and Abstract Art" Exhibition

The influential exhibition "Cubism and Abstract Art," curated by MoMA director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr (1902-1981), opened in April 1936. This show represented the first historical survey in the United States of abstract art, mainly painting, dating from 1890 to 1935. While "Cubism and Abstract An" focused primarily on painting, a variety of related manifestations in industrial design, the theater, and even abstract film were also included. Although only brief mention was made of graphic design and typography, the accompanying catalog, written by Barr, made clear that these were important parts of the Russian Constructivist and De Stijl movements.

In a startlingly innovative employment of graphic design outside its usual context, the jacket of the Cubism and Abstract Art catalog displayed the history of modern painting in diagrammatic fashion (fig. 7.29). This illustration, designed by Barr himself, applied the emerging discipline of "information design" to the history of art. Like Harry Beck's map of the London Underground, also designed in the 1930s (see fig. 4.15), this diagram was intended to render complex information and interrelationships schematically, in a clear and logical manner. Using the simple red and black color scheme favored by Constructivists and championed at the MoMA, Barr attempted to show that modern an had formed two streams—a geometric one encompassing Art Deco and Constructivism, and a non-geometric, Expressionist one. Barr's diagram became more contro­versial than most examples of information design, because later an historians felt that the reductive nature of the exercise tended to oversimplify a vast and often contradictory subject.

As was typical of modern art exhibitions at the MoMA, "Cubism and Abstract Art" emphasized stylistic development over a consideration of subject matter; the political ramifications of Constructivism, in particular, were largely glossed over. However, the rise of Nazism in Germany and the Nazis' hostility to abstract art was the subject of an introductory paragraph in the catalog. In this statement, titled "Contrast—and Condescension," Barr called attention to the transformation that was occurring in German versus American aesthetic taste. Illustrated with two posters advertising the "Koln Pressa," a printing exhibition held in Cologne in 1928 (fig. 7.30), Barr sought to make the point that abstraction was being suppressed in Germany just as it was gaining a foothold in the United States. The poster on the left, by H. Nockiir, was illustrated to serve as a foil to the one on the right, because for Barr the former, aimed at English-speakers, represented "the fairly realistic poster style common to mediocre travel posters the world over." Of course, Barr and other MoMA curators' hostility toward Art Deco was well established at this point. Further on, Barr praises the highly abstract Constructivist style of the other poster, by Fritz Ehmcke (1878-1965). While condemning the Nazis, Barr also used this comparison in order to make a backhanded criticism of the philistine taste of most American commercial artists and their patrons.

7.29 Alfred H. Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, Exhibition Catalog,
Museum of Modem Art, New York, 1936

7.30 (a) H. Nockur, Pressa, Koin 1928, 1928. Poster, (b) Fritz Ehmcke, Koln, Pressa 1928,
1928. Poster. Museum fur Gesltatung, Zurich. Poster Collection.

The "Bauhaus 1919-1928" Exhibition

The MoMA made a further commitment to the machine aesthetic and Constructivism when it brought the art of the Bauhaus to the public in 1938, the year that the exhibition "Bauhaus 1919-1928" opened. Over the previous two years, numerous faculty members from the Bauhaus, including Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Josef Albers, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer, had all immigrated to the United States. This is not to give the impression that the entire faculty fled Germany the moment that the Nazis came to power; on the contrary, Bayer pursued a private practice in Berlin for several years, accepting numerous government-sponsored commissions, including some that made clear references to the Nazis' perverse ideological con­cerns. MoMA's show featured a unique installation designed by Bayer that highlighted the leadership of Gropius in formulating the new school's aesthetic principles. The accompanying catalog, edited by Bayer as well as Gropius and his wife, Ise, served as a sourcebook of primary materials related to the Bauhaus. Bayer designed the typography and layout of the accompanying catalog, using a sans serif characteristic of the New Typography through­out the text. In order to illustrate the post-1925 introduction of all lower-case lettering at the Bauhaus, Bayer eliminated capitalization from the concluding sections of the catalog (fig. 7.31). He also structured the text and images with regularity, not symmetry, while making use of Constructivist devices such as the bold arrow in the lower left margin. As was the case with the "International Style" and "Machine An" exhibitions before it, here again the MoMA asserts the significance of Constructivism over the ornamental decadence of the Art Deco.

7.31 Herbert Bayer, Bauhaus Catalog, 1938

Pulp Magazines
 

In striking contrast to the elite styles both of Art Deco and Constructivism, which advanced in the United States during the 1930s, are the thousands of covers made for pulp magazines. In many ways a response to the misery of the Great Depression, pulp fiction flourished in the United States during this period, offering people an escape through stories of mystery, adventure, and sexu­ality. Millions of "pulp" magazines—so-called because the paper used to print them was of the lowest possible quality—formed a thriving popular culture industry that provided work for thousands of artists.

    The vast majority of pulp magazine covers were created by artists trained in the traditional skills of representation, making their work appear quite retrograde by the standards of Agha or Beall. In fact, pulp covers served those artists as a foil, exemplary of everything that modern design rejected, including realism and Expressionist displays of emotion. Most pulp covers were originated as oil paintings that measured roughly 20 by 30 inches, with the artist often having only a vague notion of the text that served as the images' complement.

    Designed to catch a passerby's attention from the shelves of a newsstand, pulp covers usually featured brilliant colors and bold design elements. One popular pulp genre during the 1930s was the science fiction magazine, which focused on adventures in outer space. One of the foremost designers of pulp science fiction covers was Frank R. Paul (1884-1963), an Austrian immigrant who had a background in architecture. Starting in 1926, Paul created a plethora of covers for the Hugo Gernsback science fiction empire, which included Amazing Stories, Science Wonder, and Wonder Stories. Paul's most famous works consist of architectural fantasies that run the gamut of his imagination. The back cover of one of the Amazing Stories called Quartz City on Mercury, for example, shows otherworldly creatures inhabiting a tower made up of hexagons (fig. 7.32). The jewel-like brilliance of the predominantly red and green palette calls attention to itself, as do the crystalline shapes of the structures.

Most pulp magazines trod very close to the edge of contemporary decency codes, and some featured explicit themes of sexual violence diat were taboo for the respectable mainstream. The most overtly obscene pulp publishing house was formed by Harry Donenfeld (1926-1965) and Frank Armer in 1934. Their company, named Culture Productions presumably out of a sense of irony, commissioned covers that displayed explicit scenes of sex and violence. For example, the 1936 cover for Spicy Mystery Stories, by HJ. Ward (1909-1945), is a paean to voyeurism (fig. 7.33). The beautiful young assistant of a humpback archer has been brutally bound to a target; her eyes well with tears as she tries to ignore the leering menace beside her. While her pink clothes suggest innocence, her bare torso and jutting breasts are provocatively posed. In typical pulp fashion, the evildoer holds a phallic arrow close to her pelvic region. The misogyny in images such as this one is as palpable as the bold color. Despite their myriad faults, the visceral energy of this type of representational drawing wits its heavy chiaroscuro and bright palette appears more vital in some holistic way than contemporary abstract designs. Ward was also responsible for the cover that eventually put Culture Productions out of business. In 1942, the mayor of New York, Fiorello Laguardia, walked by a newsstand and a copy of Spicy Mysteries caught his eye, exactly as it was intended to. Laguardia started an assault on the Spicy empire, which was soon forced to close.

7.32  Frank R. Paul, Amazing Stories, 1941.


Frank R. Paul, Computer as Envisaged in 1927,
Illustration to the Thought Machine by Ammianus Marcellinus

7.33 H.J. Ward, Spicy Mystery Stories, 1936. Magazine covet.