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Chapter 49: Graphic design in Latin America, Part II; Cuba, Argentina, Brazil & Chile

2011-12-26T19:03:00.000-08:00

Table of Contents:

Cuba
Argentina
Brazil
Chile

Cuba

Cuba is endowed with a rich visual design history, informed by its tumultuous and colorful history, both prior and after its revolution. The country's visual communications during the 1920-30 era was heavily influenced by the American culture, stemming from Cuba's economical and financial ties to the US economy. The Cuban sugar and tobacco plantations were virtually owned by the American conglomerates, and Havana was a tourist destination for the rich Americans. The desire to promote tourism tried to appeal to the Hollywood stereotype criteria of superficiality. Nevertheless, the graphic design of this period, highly influenced by Art Nouveau, is dubbed by some as the “Golden Age” of Cuban design.

Guajiro with Fighting Cock, circa 1930s

"So near..so fast" Havana Fashion, Travel Poster, circa 1930s

"Amazing Black Rumbera"Salsa, 1936

"Fruit vendors in Havana" Circa 1930s

However with its cultural and political transformation after the revolution Cuban graphic designers developed a unique sense of identity, and with her later gradual shifts in the 1990s towards a market oriented economy Cuban graphic design gradually moved to the forefront of a highly sophisticated and modern aesthetics, expanding and deepening the potentiality of the universal communications design.

The Castro regime employed visual communications designers to promote a new sense of cultural identity and gave the artists a free rein to create avant-garde posters in the state supported studios.Cuba’s far-reaching cultural exchanges with the world produced a unique style of silkscreen poster used to publicize widely varying activities such as health and education campaigns, historic commemoration, concerts, performances, exhibitions, rallies, and of course, movie posters (that is the subject of chapter 36 in this history).

Brigade Venceremos - Antonio Reboiro, 1969
The Brigade Venceremos - "young Americans sharing the life and work of revolutionary Cuba" - was part of the Cuban effort to find sources of labour. Applying a pop-art hippie style Reboiro succeeded in communicating with young Americans. The poster was produced in very small numbers to be distributed in the US. Venceremos means "we will be victorious".

Better not to be, than not to be revolutionary. - Rene Mederos 1968
This powerful and stunning poster uses only a black and white geometric composition using only typography.

Solidarity with Zimbabwe - Jesus Forjans 1973
Arming a traditional african statue with an AK47, Forjans' plea for revolutionary freedom, set against the OSPAAAL logo. The minimalist approach of Cuban poster art uses some of the simplest ideas to create some of the most striking designs.

The vast majority of posters produced in Cuba have been under the auspices of three agencies: Editora Politica, OSPAAAL (the Organization in Solidarity with the People of Africa, Asia and Latin America), and ICAIC (the Cuban Film Institute). Editora Politica (EP) is the official publishing department of the Cuban Communist Party, and is responsible for a wide range of (mostly) domestic public information propaganda in the form of books, brochures, billboards, and posters. At the height of Cuban poster design in the late 1960s design icons including Nico, Alfredo Rostgaard, Rene Mederos, Raul Mart nez, Elena Serrano, Felix Beltran, and others became internationally celebrated artists. With their limited resources due to crushing poverty, thanks in no small part to the US blockade, these artists created the stunningly striking imagery that speaks to humanity's best of characters.

La Odisea Del Gral Jose, Nico, 1969

In addition, many other agencies utilized the resources and distribution powers of EP for their own work, including FMC (the Federation of Cuban Women), the CNT (the National Confederation of Workers), and OCLAE (the Latin American Students Association). There are, also, other venues for poster production. The Taller Artistico Experimental de Serigrafía Rene Portocarrero, founded in 1983, is a fine-art studio in Havana, always abuzz with students and teachers. Other agencies also have small shops, such as ICAP (Instituto Cubana de Amistad entre los Pueblos, or the Cuban Institute for Friendship between the People). And finally, there are small workshops that will provide services for commercial clients.

El Arte del Tabaco, Antonio Fernández Reboiro – Cuba, 1977

Felix René Mederos Pazos was born November 20, 1933 in Sagua la Grande, Cuba. A self-taught artist, he began work in a Havana printshop in 1944 and was appointed Chief Designer for Cuba's most important television station in 1959. In 1964, at the beginning of the new wave of Cuban graphic design, Mederos began creating his first posters as head of the design team at Intercommunications.In 1969 he was assigned by DOR (Department of Revolutionary Orientation) to travel to Vietnam to paint scenes of the war. After traveling along the Ho Chi Minh trail with the liberation forces, experiencing the brutal conditions of war and witnessing the courageous response of the Vietnamese people his paintings were exhibited in Hanoi, and were subsequently reproduced as a screenprinted series which has been shown throughout the world. He returned to Vietnam in 1972 to paint more. He also contributed to the solidarity posters produced by OSPAAAL (Organization in Solidarity with the People of Africa, Asia, and Latin America) which enjoyed worldwide distribution by virtue of their inclusion in the magazine Tricontinental. In 1973 Mederos created a series of "vallas" (12-sheet billboards) on the history of the Cuban revolution and also produced a screenprint series commemorating the 20th anniversary of the assault on the Moncada, the event signalling the beginning of the armed resistance to the Batista government. He continued to design vallas and posters for DOR and its succesor Editora Politica (EP) on a wide range of domestic and international issues. In 1991 Mederos visited the United States for the first time, where he designed and painted a mural at UCLA on U.S. solidarity with Vietnam. His last major project was a 14-panel portable mural series on Che Guevara. As an artist, René Mederos' style, with its bright, firmly contoured surfaces, its ebullience of patterns in nature, and an unwavering sense of political direction, established a unique standard for graphic design in Cuba which influenced a whole generation of graphic artists all over the world. Despite all his honors and achievements, he was a modest man. He was generous to others and maintained faith in the goals of the Cuban revolution - a world of equality and peace.

Anniversary of the bombing Hiroshima, René Mederos, 1968

As In Viet Nam- Tenacity, Organization, Discipline, René Mederos, 1970

Aprendiendo a morir (learning to die) - Antonio Fernández Reboiro (1964)

LA GUERRA Y LA PAZ, War and peace, NICO (Antonio Perez) ,1969.

A silk screen poster designed by Ernesto Garcia Peña 1976.

Ernesto García Peña, was born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1949. He graduated silk screen poster designed by Ernesto Garcia Peña 1976. from the School for Art Instructors in 1965, and then in the the National Art School to study Painting, and after graduation in 1970 he got a bachelor of Plastic Arts (Engraving) at the Higher Institute of Art in 1987. During 1969-1970 he thought at the San Alejandro Academy of Art, in Havana, and from 1970 to 1989 he became the head of department at the National Art School in Cubanacan. He is a member of a number of professional association including; the Experimental Workshop on Graphic of Havana, the International Association of Art of the UNESCO (IAA) and the National Union of Cuban Writers and Artists (UNEAC). He has contributed to a number of books and magazines and taken part in cultural exchange activities in Cuba, Mexico, Spain, Nicaragua, Panama, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Angola, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, France, Monaco, Ecuador, Canada and Japan.

Argentina

The history of graphic design in Argentina cannot be understood without taking into account the context, the country’s history and, more recently, its social and economic policies. Argentina is a sovereign and federal state, fully cosmopolitan, and based on two founding ethnic groups — Spain and Italy- as well as minor migration movements from countries such as Poland, Germany, Peru, England, Paraguay, Bolivia, Wales, etc. A series of de facto rulers, economic breakdowns, historically rampant inflation, have made working in Argentina difficult for everyone and particularly difficult for designers, whose work depends mostly on factors associated with a nation’s prosperity and stability. Some pioneering work was began in Argentina, thanks to the efforts and talent of a number of designers such as Castagnino, Sabat, Quino, Mordillo and Tomas Maldonadoare and a few specialized publications, but it took many years for design to be acknowledged in the Argentinian society and become part of the university curriculum.
Juan Carlos Castagnino (1908 –1972) was born in the city of Mar del Plata, he studied in the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires. Along with Antonio Berni, Spilimbergo and Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, he created a series of murals. He visited Paris in 1939, where he attended the atelier of cubist painter André Lhote, later traveling across Europe perfecting his art and in the company of Georges Braque, Fernand Léger and Pablo Picasso, among others. Castagnino returned to Argentina in 1941. He received numerous awards in subsequent years, including the Grand Prize of Honor of the Argentine National Hall (1961), the Medal of Honor at Expo '58 (Brussels, 1958), and a special mention for his drawings at the II Mexico City Biennale of 1962. His illustrations for a EUDEBA (University of Buenos Aires Press) edition of José Hernández's Martín Fierro (the national poem of Argentina), gained wide recognition. Castagnino died in Buenos Aires in 1972. Following its relocation to the landmark Villa Ortiz Basualdo, the Miunicipal Museum of Art in his native Mar del Plata, to which the artist had contributed over 130 works, was renamed in his honor in 1982.

Juan Carlos Castagnino "PONY"

Juan Carlos Castagnino, Self portrait, and the Boy with his Dog

Juan Carlos Castagnino "PAMPA - FLIGHT - URBE"

Hermenegildo Sábat (born June 23, 1933) is a renowned Uruguayan-Argentine caricaturist.Life and workEarly career in journalismHermenegildo Sábat was born in the oceanfront Pocitos section of Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1933. Named after a grandparent who had been a noted local artist in his day, Hermenegildo was known as "Menchi," from early childhood. Montevideo's leading newsdaily, El País, first published a drawing of his - a portrait of Uruguayan national football team forward Juan Schiaffino - when the young artist was but 15 years old.Sábat's first work experience in journalism began in 1955 as a graphist in Acción, returning to El País, in 1957. His career prospered in El País, and Sábat became an editor at the daily, as well as contributing work as a staff correspondent, photographer and illustrator. His byline was featured in other Uruguayan periodicals in subsequent years, such as Marcha, Lunes and Reporte, and he freelanced as a graphic designer. He married Blanca Rodríguez, in 1961, and the couple had two children. A dispute with El País' owners, however, led Sábat to emgirate to neighboring Argentina, in 1966. Following a stint at Editorial Abril, a Buenos Aires publishing house, his caricatures were soon included in Primera Plana and Crísis (then the leading Argentine newsmagazines), Clarín, and La Opinión, then an important Argentine daily, for which Sábat became the sole illustrator. La Opinión 's closure by the new dictatorship in 1977 led to Sábat's transfer to Clarín, where he would remain over the years.

Anton Chejov - Revista Teatro, Hermenegildo Sábat, 1996

Monsieur Lautrec, Hermenegildo Sábat,

Poster de Carlos Gardel - Buenos Aires, Hermenegildo Sábat, 1985

Joaquin Salvador Lavado, known as ‘Quino’, was born in the city of Mendoza, Argentina in 1932. Son of Andalusian Spanish immigrants, he was called from early childhood Quino in order to distinguish him from his commercial artist and painter uncle Joaquín Tejón. He was only 13 when he lost his mother,it was the very same year that Colonel Juan Domingo Perón rose to power, and Quino who had dissevered his love for the art at the primary school enrolled in the School of Fine Arts, in Mendoza. He dropped out of the art school in 1949, a year after his father. In his own words he was “tired of drawing vases and plaster”, and thought of the only possible profession: graphic humorist and artist. After a trip to Buenos Aires and searching for a job in every possible newspaper and magazine office in town he returned disappointedly to Mendoza three weeks later in 1951, and two years later was called to obligatory military service.

A year later, Quino settled in Buenos Aires, and continued his desperate search for job in a journal, when finally, a Buenos Aires weekly paper, “Esto Es” (‘this is’) published his first page of graphic humor. Shortly after other newspapers and magazines such as; “Vea y Lea”, “Leoplán”, “Damas y Damitas”, “TV Guía”, “Usted”, “Che”, “Panorama”, “Atlántida”, “Adan”, “Democracia” began to publish his works, and later on many published media throughout Latin America and Europe followed suit. In 1958 Quino began his graphic design career for advertisement. He exhibited his works for the first time in 1962 at a library in Buenos Aires, and a year later he published his first humor book, “Mundo Quino” (The World of Quino), a compilation of humorous graphic drawings, without text. In 1964, Mafalda his long-running and successful comic strips appeared, for the first time, in “Gregorio”, a humor extra of “Leoplán” magazine. This was his most successful cartooning venture which ran from 1964 to 1973. The comic was translated into more than 30 languages. However, it never received much of an audience in the English-speaking world, perhaps because, as Quino put it, the strip was "too Latin American." In 1976, the character Mafalda was chosen by UNICEF to be a spokesperson for the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Argentinian director Daniel Mallo translated 260 Mafalda strips into 90-second cartoons that aired in Argentina.

Mafalda, and her cast , Quino

In 1974 Quino visited the US, for the first time. This was the year that Perón died. He had returned to Argentina from his exile in 1973, when on the day of his arrival, a horrendous massacre of Peronist party, organized by the extreme right wing took place at Ezaiza airport in Buenos Aires. Nevertheless, Peronism triumphed and Arturo Ilia was elected President. After Peron's death and his wife, “Isabelita”, then vice-president, assumed control over the government, while paramilitary activity, tortures, hostage-taking, disappearances and political murders increased. In 1976, after General Videla took power in a military coup, and the Armed Forces Commanders’ Junta (composed by Videla, Massera and Agosti) ousted “Isabelita”, establishing the “National Reorganization Process”, which initiated the darkest period in the history of Argentina, Quino and his wife Alicia moved to Milan: “The fact that I’m far from my country has made my humor turn a little less vivacious but possibly somewhat more profound.”

Quino's works have been celebrated and won great many awards and accolades throughout the world. In 1982, he was chosen Cartoonist of the Year by fellow cartoonists around the world, and has won twice the Konex Platinum Prize for Visual Arts. In 1988, he was named an "Illustrious Citizen" of Mendoza. In 2000 he received the second Quevedos Prize for graphical humor. Additionally, Buenos Aires' Colegiales neighborhood named their plaza "Plaza Mafalda."
Guillermo Mordillo was born in Villa Pueyrredon, Buenos Aires in 1932. The son of Spanish parents, he exhibited an early interest in drawing. Two years after obtaining the certificate of Illustrator from the School of Journalism in 1948, Mordillo joined the animation team Burone Bruch while at the same time illustrating children's stories such as Tales of Perrault, tales of Schmid, The Musicians of Bremen and The Three Little Pigs, edited by Codex and publishing some comic strips in local magazines.In 1955, he departed for Lima, Peru, where he worked as a freelance designer for the advertising company McCann Erickson. In 1958 he illustrated Aesop's Fables and Samaniego for Editorial Iberia Lima.

After landing a commission to illustrate greeting cards for Hallmark, he traveled to the US in 1960. In 1963 he traveled to Paris, where he worked at the magazines Le Pelerin and Paris Match. shortly after his work was published in Germany's Stern. In 1980 he moved to Mallorca, Spain and was named President of the International Association of Authors of Comics and Cartoons (CFIA) based in Geneva, Switzerland. He returned to France in 1998.He is most famous for his humorous, colorful, and wordless depictions of love, animals, nature, sports, and man's ultimately futile and hopeless endeavors in a language that is hilarious, disarmingly simplistic, graphically faultless and vibrantly colorful. He currently resides in Monaco.

This piece, commissioned by Amnesty International, features a monochromatic townscape where the policemen are arresting a man who dares to paint the roof of his house in vivid, wavy pink lines. A brilliant depiction of the tragic rendered in comic language.

The formation of Diseno Shakespear as a classic graphic design studio shaped the origin of the profession in the country and rendered the word “design” a meaningful word in a place where it had no clear meaning and inspired generations of young and talented visual designers.
Ronald Shakespear, was born in Rosario, in 1941, he founded Diseno Shakespear, a design studio in Buenos Aires together with his children Lorenzo, Juan and Barbara. He taught graphic design at the University of Buenos Aires FADU UBA over the five years period from 1985 -1990. He became the president of ADG, Asociacion de Disenadores Graficos de Buenos Aires in 1984, a position that he held for two years until 1986. Shakespear worked on several mega projects in urban signage, including signage systems for the City of Buenos Aires, the City Hospital, the Buenos Aires Subway and Temaiken Zoo. When Shakespear established his studio, there was little or no information about graphic design as a professional practice. Argentina, as always, kept its eyes on Europe more than anywhere else, and he was no exception to this. According to his own recounting;

meeting Alan Fletcher, a relationship that flourished with the passing of time, in the times of Fletcher Forbes Gill, as well as seeing the work of Jock Kinneir, the German masters (Aicher, Muller Brockmann, Hoffmann et. al.), Milton Glaser, and a few more, shaped and consolidated my vision but, above all, confirmed my intuition

Hamlet, Ronald Shakespear, 1964

Señal de Diseño, Ronald Shakespear,

The logo of Argentine bicentennial, by Juan Pablo Tredicce, Hernán Berdichevsky and Gustavo Stecher. The logo synthesizes the Argentine Cockade and the Sun including each of the decades of the two hundred years to celebrate, from 1810 to 2010, in a story similar to the rings of a tree trunk to reveal his age.

Estudio Almacen

Nat Filippini

Venturis Ventis, by David Maruchniak,

Bazil

The origin of Brazilian graphic design can be traced to the works of pioneers like Ziraldo Alves Pinto, Aloisio Sergio Magalhaes and Alexandre Wollner.

Movie Poster, Ziraldo Alves Pinto,

Ziraldo Alves Pinto was born Caratinga, in the State of Minas Gerais in 1933, the eldest of a family of seven brothers. After speding his childhood in Caratinga, he enrolled in a two years course at MABE (Modern Teaching Association) in Rio de Janeiro in1949. Howecer a year later he returned to Caratinga to be drafted for military service. Later he was admitted in the Faculty of Law of Minas Gerais in the capital of Belo Horizonte, and graduated in 1957.

Rio de Janeiro, Ziraldo Alves Pinto, Graphis Annual 67/68

Ziraldo's love for drawing started at a very tender age, and when he was only six years old the newspaper A Folha de Minas publised his drawing in 1939. In 1954 he started his career in the graphic journalsm by providing drawings for A Folha de Minas' humor page. In 1957, he started publishing his works in magazine A Cigarra, and later in O Cruzeiro. In 1963 he started working with Jornal do Brasil, where he still has comics strip. He also worked at magazines Visão e Fairplay. Ziraldo has made posters for several Brazilian movies including Os Fuzis, Os Cafajestes, Selva Trágica, Os Mendigos, among others . In Rio de Janeiro Ziraldo became one of the most well known and acclaimed graphic artists . He is also a painter, poster artist, cartoonist, caricaturist, journalist, author of plays, and writer. He launched the first Brazilian comics book by a single author, using a mythical figure in the Brazilian folklore, the one-legged Saci Pererê, as his main character.

Self-portrait

In 1964, when the military came to power, his magazine was closed down as he could not tolerate the fascistic censorship of the coup leaders. Nevertheless, these characters were so typically Brazilian that they resisted the hard military years. During the Military Dictatorship period of 1964-1984 , Ziraldo participated as part of an intense resistance effort against repression. Together with other humorists he founded the most important non-conformist newspaper in the history of Brazilian press, O Pasquim. Ziraldo spent his nights assissting his activist freinds to hide without worrying for himself. Finally, he was arrested in his home, and was taken to the Forte de Copacabana, accused of being a dangerous element.

In 1968 Ziraldo's talent was acclaimed internationally with the publication of his productions in the Graphis magazine, a sort of Panthéon of the graphic arts. His works were also published in international magazines including Penthouse and Private Eye in the U.K., Plexus and Planète in France and Mad Magazine in the U.S. In 1969 he won the 32nd International Exposition of Caricatures in Brussels, and the Merghantealler Award, the highest honor granted to the free press in Latin America by the International Press Association in Caracas, Venezuela. He was invited to draw the annual UNICEF poster -- the first time a Latin artist was granted the honor

Logo Design, Aloísio Magalhães

Aloísio Barbosa Magalhães (1927- 1982) was born in Recife, Pernambuco. He graduated in law from the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), in 1950. As a student he took part in the Teatrodo Estudante de Pernambuco [Student Theater of Pernambuco] (TEP), where he assumedthe roles of stage and costume designer, in addition to being responsible for the puppettheater. After receiving a scholarship from the French government, he studied musicology in Parisfrom 1951 to 1953, while also attending the Atelier 17, a center for preserving the art ofengraving technique, where he was a pupil of the engraver Stanley William Hayter(1901-1988). Magalhães returned to Brazil in 1953, and three years later with a scholarship granted by theAmerican government, traveled to the United States, where he devoted himself to graphic artand visual programming. Together with Eugene Feldman, he published the books Doorwayto Portuguese and Doorway to Brasília, and lectured at the Philadelphia Museum School ofArt. In 1960, Magalhães returned to Brazil and opened a visual communication practice, a field inwhich he was one of the pioneers within the country, executing projects for companies andpublic institutions.

In 1963, Magalhães collaborated in establishing the Escola Superior de DesenhoIndustrial [Higher School of Industrial Design] (ESDI), where he lectured in visualcommunication. In 1964, he created the symbol of the 4th Centenary of Rio de Janeiro, thefirst of his works to have major public impact, and in the following year, designed the firstsymbol for the Bienal Foundation of São Paulo. From 1966 onwards, he developed designsfor Brazilian coins and banknotes. In 1979, he was appointed director of the NationalArtistic and Historical Heritage Institute (Iphan), and in the following year, the chairman ofthe Fundação Nacional Pró-Memória [National Memorial Foundation], when he initiated acampaign for the preservation of Brazil's historical heritage. As a tribute to him, theMetropolitan Art Gallery of Recife changed its name to the Aloísio Magalhães MetropolitanArt Gallery in 1982. In 1997, the name of the institution was changed to the AloísioMagalhães Modern Art Gallery (MAMAM). He died in Padua, Italy at ahe age 55.

Book Jacket, Aloísio Magalhães

Série preta e branca, by Aloísio Magalhãe

Índio Uaika, Amazonas, by Aloísio Magalhãe

Alexandre Wollner was born in São Paulo in 1928. He studied visual design at the Institute of Contemporary Design (IAC), created at the São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand Museum of Art (Masp), in 1950, where he studied with Lina Bo Bardi (1914-1992), Poty (1924-1998) and Sambonet (1924-1995). Interested in the Concretist movement, in 1953, he joined the Grupo Ruptura [Rupture Group], presenting his constructivist works at the 2nd São Paulo International Biennial. Also in 1953, he was chosen by Max Bill to study at the Hochschule für Gestaltung [Superior School of Form] in Ulm, Germany, where he remained from 1954 to 1958. Upon returning to Brazil, together with Geraldo de Barros (1923-1998) and others he inaugurated Form-Inform, the first design consultancy in the country.

Fachbücher selbst ist der mann, Alexandre Wollner

Alexandre Wollner & Geraldo de Barros - Cartaz para o Festival Internacional de Cinema do Brasil em 1954

Third Biennial, São Paulo Museum of Modern Art, Alexandre Wollner, 1955

Alexandre Wollner - Cartaz para a IV Bienal de São Paulo em 1957

Alexandre Wollner - Cartaz comemorativo dos 60 anos USP / 31 anos MAC-USP em 1994

In 1963, Wollner took part in the structuring and creation of the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial (ESDI) [Superior School of Industrial Design], in Rio de Janeiro, the first higher level design institution in the country. During the 1960s, he opened his own visual programming office, where he developed logotypes for major companies. He exhibited his projects at the Masp and at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro (MAM/RJ) in 1980, opting for a show that emphasized the process of creation, execution and implementation of visual identity systems. In 1999, the Centre of Communication and Arts of Senac, in São Paulo, held his second individual exhibition.In 2003, Wollner celebrated 50 years of design with his book Design Visual 50 Anos, and a photography exhibition at the Maria Antônia University Centre, in São Paulo.

Logo Design, Alexandre Wollner

... And Other Designers

Mary Vieira - Cartaz para a Panair do Brasil, década de 1950


Antonio Maluf - Cartaz para a I Bienal de São Paulo em 1951.

Leonardo Prause,

Caution // Risk of Brainstorm, by Tiago Bernardes

Batman Zavarese

Billy Bacon

Rafo Castro

Eduardo Denne

Morro de Alegria :: Spanta Neném, Eduardo Denne

Ricardo Cunha Lima

Thinking about Brazil , "Thinking about Brazil", For Correio Braziliense Newspaper , Ricardo Cunha Lima, 2001

A Guerra dos Mundos, The War of the Worlds, Ricardo Cunha Lima,

Sangue Errante (Blood's a Rover), Illustration for the cover of the book by James Ellroy,
Ricardo Cunha Lima,

Bruno Porto (1971) is a graphic designer, educator and consultant from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he graduated with a degree in Graphic Design and took a post-graduate degree in Marketing and Enterprise Management. He has also attended the New York School of Visual Arts and studied under many distinguished professionals.His graphic design and illustration work has frequently been awarded and exhibited in the Americas, Asia and Europe, and featured in over 30 international publications. He currently serves as Executive Coordinator for Brazil at Tipos Latinos Biennial of Latin American Typography, as Council Member at SIB – Society of Illustrators of Brazil, and as liaison member of the Brazilian Graphic Designers Association – ADG Brasil with Icograda. He has previously been a member of ADG Brasil’s National Board of Directors (2004 to 2007), its Rio de Janeiro Board of Coordinators (2002 to 2004) and Ethics Committee (2009 to 2011).

Discover the Brazilian Cinema, poster for an exhibition, Shanghai, Bruno Porto, 2007

The company & the challenge of global capitalism, Book covers, Bruno Port , 2004

(R)The diary of a magician, Theater poster, Irmãos Brothers, 2006
(L) World Cup Poster, Poster for an exhibition 2006

Stephen Tedjakusuma

Chile

From one of the most neglected outposts of the Spanish Empire, Chile developed into one of the most prosperous and democratic nations in Latin America. Throughout its history, however, she has depended on great external powers for economic exchange and political influence: Spain in the colonial period, Britain in the nineteenth century, and the United States in the twentieth century.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the so-called Generación del 13 used painting to highlight social concerns by depicting local customs, and prior to the 1973 coup, the country had a long tradition of an active press, which was closely tied to the Chile's competitive political parties. Santiago had ten daily newspapers spanning the ideological spectrum. However, after the coup Chile's independent press disappeared. The papers of the left were closed immediately, and the centrist La Prensa stopped publishing a few months later. Newspapers that kept publishing strongly supported the military government and submitted to its guidelines on sensitive issues; they also developed a keen sense of when to censor themselves. The remaining media fulfilled the almost liturgical role of representing to the masses the goodness of the institutions of law and order. As a result, one of the basic codes for representing reality was to depict the unrestrained and irrational common folk contrasted with the civilized elites.

Nevertheless, during the period of the dictatorship, an art market for theoretical post-modern concepts was developed in Chile. New galleries opened up and the public was invited to participate in contemporary consumers' art. However, much of the general public has difficulty relating to the quasi-complex theoretical proposals of conceptual art, and their silly codes for processing the communicative facts. As pointed out by Tomás Andreu, director of the avant-garde art space Galería Animal, some art dealers drew on the seduction of material, shock impact and the surprise element as way of attracting the public’s attention. The patrons who financed theoretically driven post modern art exhibitions, the large corporations of the private sector, looking with favor on those artists who did not overtly politicize their works. Artists who demonstrated social or political consciousness were treated harshly. The traumatic experience suffered by artist Guillermo Núñez at his exhibition at the Chilean-French Cultural Institute is a case in point. Núñez’s installation consisted of various bird cages individually filled with diverse objects such as bread, flowers and a Chilean flag. After the opening day, the artist was detained by the police, subjected to six months of imprisonment, partially blindfolded and eventually released into exile. Local artists had to develop strategies to elude censure. The social message of their work became hidden through the use of artistic metaphors and indirect language.

Although in the recent times, these trends have begun to subside and the artists and the media have begun to ally themselves with the demands of the masses in order to unmask the irrationality and corruption of the institutions, Chile’s cultural depravity has made it one of the most repressive countries in the region and one with the highest rates of interpersonal mistrust. In response, throughout the modern times the Chilean graphic artists have expressed themselves in the street art. For instance; in 1940 when during protests marches against a new government a young woman named Ramona Parra, was shot and killed, she became a symbol of struggle for liberation and the fight against tyranny. Her memory became immortalized through the underground art movement that decorates the streets of Santiago with illegal art and political slogans in favour of human rights. The art collective that calls itself the Brigada Ramona Parra travels the world making murals protesting against the global tendency towards capitalism. This incipient muralist movement of the 1940s, was influenced by the Chilean visit of Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros.

During the 1970-73 Chileans communicated with immense and magnified murals in vibrant colors that expressed their hope and desire for justice, freedom, and respect for human rights in a symbolic language of determined faces, hands that held banners, mothers that held their infants and birds that basked in the sunshine. A few poster artists were also trying to use a symbolic language, that like the secret communications of the early church, used signs and symbols to convey their defiant messages of anti-fascism. Unfortunately, Pinochet regime whitewashed all those murals and destroyed most of those posters. Today there are only a few sample of posters available, while some graphic artists have tried to recreate some of those murals.

With the onset of the economic crisis of 1983, censorship became weaker. An important group of exiled artists return, including José Balmes, who spearheaded a more politicized and testimonial art. Street mural painting appears in the shantytowns, suburbs and closed spaces. Like the early Christian art, these artists communicate with symbols on their murals, while harassed by their opponents or running from the police, The dove, hand, ear, star, are like the secret language of a new faith, which is bing whispered in the darkness of nights. In 1988, the government called for a plebiscite, and the muralist brigades became visible again in support of “No” vote to decide whether the military regime should continue in power.

Today the influence of Chilean murals can be detected in the works of artists such as Patricia Marin Spring, whose powerful and strikingly beautiful mosaic artworks graces the streets of Lo Abarca, a small village of 300 people in Cartagena, Chile. With the help of Lo Abarca's children and youth, and using local stones Patricia has given the town truly a unique character.

Chapter 48 : Graphic design in Latin America, Part I; Colombia, Peru, Venezuela & Mexico

2011-12-25T15:13:00.000-08:00

Table of Contents:

Colombia
Peru
Venezuela
Mexico

Colombia

Graphic design in Colombia has a relatively long historical tradition, evidenced by the oldest printed work in the country dating from the seventeenth century. Colombia's most important graphic designer is David Consuegra who was born in the capital of Santander, Bucaramanga, in 1939. He enrolled in Boston University for graduate studies in Fine Arts (BFA), at the age of sixteen, where he received his Cum Laude in 1961. He received his master degree in Fine Art from Yale University, where not only he graduated with top marks in 1963 but also, thanks to his talent and skills landed a teaching position. He soon began to work with Paul Rand in his studio in New York.

He returned to Colombia, to teach at the University of Los Andes, and in 1967 at the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano, He founded the first graphic design program in the country. Over the years 1966, 1977 and 1982 he was involved in restructuring of the program of Advertising Design at the National University of Colombia, where he became a Professor Emeritus in 199i. He also worked as a graphic designer for the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá over the 1964-68. He translated and edited The Book of Signs by Rudolf Koch, and also published books such as Origami, the art of duplicity, Enlightenment and type design.

Throughout his career Consuegra applied his skills in graphic design, typography, editorial, production of posters, corporate identity and graphic illustration.He exhibited his posters, logos, symbols and photographs, in solo shows and in numerous group exhibitions, both nationally and internationally, and created numerous corporate graphic identity design for businesses in his country, the United States, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Belgium and Korea. He received several awards, including Gold Medal, awarded by the Colombian Association of Designers, the first prize in the category of symbol, on two occasions, awarded by the National Corporation for Tourism in 1991, and the organizers of the Pan American Games in 1996, respectively.Consuegra was recognized nationally and internationally for the creation of dozens of marks, symbols and logos, such as Inravisión, Crafts of Colombia, Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá, Icollantas, Croydon, ISERR, Industrial University of Santander.
Consuegra was a member of International Trademark Center of Belgium and a visiting professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Barcelona.He died in Mexico City, on October 30, at the age of 64, while participating in the Eighth International Poster Biennale in Mexico in Xalapa.

Dicken Castro, architect and graphic designer was born in Medellín, Antioquia in 1922]. He graduated as an architect at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá, and did his postgraduate studies in architecture at the University of Oregon, USA, where he then become an assistant professor. He resided for several years in Seattle, and worked as a professor at the University of Washington. He also served as design architect in New York. He then decided to study urban planning in Bouwcentrum Rotterdam, the Netherlands and joined the Planning Office in The Hague. Later Castro returned to Colombia, as a professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts and the Faculty of Architecture.

He created many graphic designs, symbols and logos for various Colombian institutions. Castro studied the pre-Columbian ceramics and textiles and graphic design, experimenting with the use of rollers and seals, these studies culminated in 1976 with an exhibition at the Centro Colombo Americano. In 1980 he was invited to the International Exhibition at the School of Fine Arts in Paris, where he painted a mural, and five bus lines of the city were decorated Colombian style. Castro also experimented with photography, with special emphasis on conservation and preservation of visual memory of everything that could be reproduced mechanically. This interest led him to promote the creation of graphic arts office of the National Museum as a member of the advisory board of the Museum. In 1970 many of his designs were exhibited at the Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango, under the symbolic name, the exhibition held in 1976 pre-Columbian designs in the Centro Colombo Americano. Part of his work has been exhibited in Guatemala, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Ireland.

Catalog with color planes generating spaces, Dicken Castro, 1962

Poster for the development of the Colombian Pacific coast, Dicken Castro, 1980

Logo, Metéfora tissue with materials, colors, and geometric shapes, Dicken Castro, 1995

Born in Duitama, Colombia in 1943. Marta Granados studied at the Javeriana University and at the University of Los Andes, in Bogota; subsequently at the National Superior School of Decorative Arts, in Paris, and the Saint Martin’s School of Art in London. Presently, she works for Colcultura, Museum of Modern Art, Patrimonio Fílmico Foundation, Santillana Foundation, The National Theatre and the Economic Cultures Found.

Her work has been shown individually in the Modern Art Museum of Bogota in 1983 and 1992, in Santillana del Mar in 1985, in the Grand Palais of Paris in 1986, and in the Book Fair of Guadalajara, in 1993. She has also participated in the Poster Biennials in Warsaw, Lathi, Colorado, Helsinki, Tehran and Mexico, where she obtained the 2nd prize in the cultural poster cathegory, in 1992. Her designs have been published in Graphis Poster, Who is Who in Graphic Art, World Graphic Design Now and Comunication Arts.

Peru

The inception of graphic design in Peru may be dated with the pioneer worksClaude Dieterich, a calligrapher and hand letterer from Avignon, France, who after studying fine art and graphic design in Grenoble, France, worked as a graphic designer for a variety of magazines and design studios in Paris. After avisit to South America in 1961, he resided in Lima, Peru, where he opened by own graphic design studio. For the next 25 years, Dieterich designed logotypes, corporate identities, and publications, many of which won various awards for excellence. He also taught graphic design at the Catholic University in Lima, and during his seven year tenure, he became the dean of the school of Graphic Design. One of Dieterich's most influential calligraphy teachers was Hermann Zapf, with whom he studied in Rochester, New York. Shortly after this period of study in the mid-1980s, he then moved to the United States where he lived in New York and in Miami before settling in the US west coast. Since 2002, he has spent his summer vacations teaching calligraphy in Lima.

Fabian Delaflor a Peruvian graphic designer working in Miami, Florida, attended Miami Dade College for graphic design, and began working as a graphic/web designer for the Miami Herald, and soon finished a BFA from the Miami International University of Art and Design. Fabian cites the eccentric art of Ralph Steadman and Robert Crumb as inspiration to his emotionally charged, sometimes dark, and whimsical interpretations of everyday people.

Jesús Ruiz Durand, Cuatro afiches de difusión de la Reforma Agraria (Four propaganda posters for the Agrarian Reform), 1969-1972, Courtesy: Museo de Arte de Lima Collection, Contemporary Art Acquisitions Committee 2007.

Under General Juan Velasco’s military government, Jesús Ruiz Durand designed a propaganda strategy to publicise the regime’s Agrarian and Industrial reform, which aimed to return land to peasant communities and change Peru’s social structure. Unlike other reform processes in Latin America, the implementation of the reform in Peru did not emerge in response to mass actions. Rather, it was the official line promoted by the technical and military leadership, forcing the Government to generate mass diffusion strategies. The posters produced by Durand in collaboration with SINAMOS (a public institution created to channel independent social organisations without links to the government) were heavily distributed among Andean and peasant communities. The artist subverted and resignified North American pop art in order to produce a vernacular, Andean 'pop' with reminiscences of myth.

Alfredo Márquez, Chinachola, 2006 (1988-89), Courtesy: Museo de Arte de Lima, Collection Contemporary Art Acquisitions Committee 2007. In 1989, Taller NN (a name taken from the initials used to label the corpses of unidentified persons) was invited to the 3rd Art and Architecture Biennial of Havana, where the group produced a screen print showing the face of Mao Zedong superimposed with a photograph of prisoners of the subversive group the Shining path caught by the army, and with the slogan: “Viva el Maoismo” (Long live to Maoism!). In 1994, one of the Taller NN artists, who had authored this print (Alfredo Márquez), was kidnapped, arrested and tried by faceless judges during the dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori. Accused of ‘defence of terrorism’, virtually the whole series of the edition was destroyed.

Taller E.P.S. Huayco, Cojudos (Assholes), 1980. Courtesy: Museo de Arte de Lima Collection. In 1980, Taller E.P.S. Huayco reused the image of leftist poet César Vallejo to produce a series of screen prints and stickers. The phrase placed over the poet’s head – “COJUDOS” (“Assholes”) – seems to attempt to reactivate the political aspect of his writing, in contrast with the official image that had involuntarily transformed him into the paradigm of the 'melancholic poet'.

Venezuela

The origin of graphic design in in Venezuela can be traced back to the first newspaper that was published in 1808. Gerd Leufert (1914-1998), born in Klaipeda, Lithuania, is considered the father Venezuelan graphic design. He was also a printmaker, draftsman, photographer, painter, art teacher, and museum curator. His strong interest in printmaking and draftsmanship led to the founding of the Department of Modern Prints and Drawings at the Caracas Museum of Fine Arts and the establishment of the Art Graphic Workshop, also in Caracas, two initiatives that played an important role in the constitution of modern graphic art in Venezuela. He studied at the High School of Design in Hannover, at the School of Arts and Crafts in Mainz and at the kademie der Bildenden Künste München. He moved to Venezuela in 1951. In 1957 he was art director of the magazine El Farol, and in the following year he taught composition in the Faculty of Architecture and Cit. y Planning in the Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas, and graphic design in the Escuela de Artes Plsticas Cristbal Rojas, of Caracas, becoming director of its graphic arts department. He also taught graphic design in the USA at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, and at the Pratt Institute, New York. On his return to Caracas in 1959, he became a curator at the Museo de Bellas Artes and artistic director of its magazine Visual. With M. F. Nedo, Leufert did much to revive the graphic arts in Venezuela, producing a series of prints in collaboration with Nedo and Alvaro Sotillo as a symbol of this revival. Leufert's best-known work includes Marks, a fusion of writing and graphic design, and Funeral Songs, monochrome works of heroic proportions in which sculpture, painting and graphic design are blended.

Drypoint, plate, Gerd Leufert, 1960

Logo Instituto de Diseño Neumann, Gerd Leufert, 1968

la planificación, Ink, Gerd Leufert,

Nuevas Nanias exhibition, 1985 Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas

Poster for Teatro Estable de Markay, Gerd Leufert, 1967

Nedo, M.F. (Mion Ferrario) was born in Milan, Italy in 1926. He is considered a pioneer of graphic design in Venezuela. He was a prolific designer, skilled watercolorist and illustrator. Much of his life was dedicated to the design and teaching. He designed sixty typefaces for use on posters, brochures and logos, some of them within the family called Impossible. His passion for impossible shapes and making geometric optical illusions are the main characteristics of his work. Much of his training came fromfrom his father, Emilio Mion Vianello, who was a carver, a lineage profession in Italy. Emilio was educated at the Brera Academy in Milan. Nedo, M. F. studied in the Commercial and Technical Institute of Milan between 1936 and 1940 and the Academy of Fine Arts in the same city.Encouraged by Venezuelan immigration policy, he migrated and arrived in Caracas in 1950. One of his first commissions in Venezuela was a series of illustrations for “La Esfera” the supplement to "El País", a newspaper. As well he designed many emblems, logos, magazines, catalogs, posters and advertising campaigns for various Venezuelan and foreign brands.In 1959 he assumed the artistic direction of the la revista el Farol, a publication for which he had previously done some work. Together with Gerd Leufert and Carlos Cruz Diez They established the applied arts section of the School of Visual Arts Cristobal Rojas, where afterwards, he founded department of Design, where he became a professor for 27 years.

Magazine: El Farol 243, cover, Nedo M.F.

Impresión serigráfica, Nedo M.F., 1966.

Emblem: Postal Telegráfico Institute, Nedo M.F., 1979

Emblem: Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas, 1974

Jorge Montero, a graphic designer, illustrator, visual artist and educator has studied for Master of Art and Master in Fine Art at the University of Iowa, majored in Graphic Design and Drawing. Montero has worked as a free-lance graphic designer and illustrator in Venezuela and the USA for advertising agencies, publishers and corporations. He also has worked as an editorial cartoonist in Venezuela and the USA. He has taught at Savannah College of Art & Design (USA)and as a guest lecturer in Germany, South Africa, Czech Republic, Venezuela, Cuba, El Salvador, PuertoRico and the USA.

Our Economy is growing, Jorge Montero, Poster

Genaro DeSia Coppola was born in Venezuela and then moved to work in Barcelona, Spain. He is a hailed as a superb vector art and Flash artist. Taking inspiration from pop art symbols, cult icons and heroes, Genaro’s colorful and tasetful artworks are appealing in the vulgarity dominated cyberspace.

Under Cover, Genaro Desia Coppola, Digital Art

Punk iT, Genaro Desia Coppola, Digital Art

Tiburón Club, Genaro Desia Coppola

Mexico

Nearly two hundred years before the famous Gutenberg Bible was printed in Argentina, the Mexico City archbishop, Juan de Zumarraga had a printing press brought from Europe in 1539. The press was set up in the “Casa de las Campanas” (House of the Bells) by the Seville-based publisher Juan Cromberger with Italian printer Juan Pablos who worked for living expenses for ten years. They began printing viceregal- and Church-related documents. One of these documents was a catechism entitled “The Brief and Most Concise Christian Doctrine in the Mexican Language” written by the archbishop himself.In 1816 during the Mexican revolution for independence, José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi wrote El Periquillo Sarniento or The Mangy Parrot, a novel concerned with custom and everydaylife, in a genre of writing called costumbrismo, dealing with virtue and vice; a commitment to utility or usefulness as measured by a constant preoccupation withbeing productive, finding a trade, and not ending up a burden to society by becomingyet another letrado (lawyer); and the admonition that people be judged by their acts anddeeds, that is to say, by their internal qualities rather than by external signs or trappingssuch as clothes or manners, their social status or position. El Periquillo became so popular that was reprinted many times from the 1820s, to the 1840s, incorporating at first engravings, and later the lithograph. Cuostumbrismo was one of the most important genres for integrating textand image,for reinforcing visually the romanticism, nationalism, and morality in which lithograph artists graphically interpreted the action and event of the novel, especially those critical moments in the book having to do with fights between men and the fainting of women, along with the duels, dinners, and dangers.

A form of visual national imagining that came to prominence in the first half of thenineteenth century, lithography developed in the 1840s, reaching its most compelling expression in El Museo Mexicano, a literary magazine published by Ignacio Cumplido and directed by Manuel Payno and Guillermo Prieto. Artists illustrated tradespeople, servants, street vendors, and other figures that had been elaborated in various artistic forms during the colonial period, or were the subject of travelers’ accounts, or both. This led to the publication, in installments beginning in 1854, of Los mexicanos pintados por sí mismos, an illustrated and textual portrait of many different characters like “El Aguador,” (“The Watercarrier”) a fixture of life in Mexico City at that time, and also featuring “La China,” a female figure whose manner of dress would evolve into the symbol of Mexico itself.

La chiera, a Mexican seller of "agua de chia" , by H. Iriarte, from Los Mexicanos pintados por si mismos, por varios autores. Originally issued in parts 1854-1855,


Frontispiece, Anonymous. Lithograph. Vicente Riva Palacio, ed., México a través de los siglos…, vol. 1 (Barcelona, 1888–1889).


Atlas title page, Genaro Lopéz. Lithograph. Alfredo Chavero, Antigüedades mexicanas (Mexico City, 1892).


Fruits of Labor, 1932, Diego Rivera (1886–1957), Lithograph

Diego Rivera (1886-1957), Mexico's most famous painter, rebelled against the traditional school of painting and developed his own style, a combination of historical, social, and critical ideas depicting the cultural evolution of Mexico in a graphic design style. Diego Rivera was born in Guanajuato, Guanajuato State, on December 8, 1886. He studied painting at the National School of Fine Arts, Mexico City, under Andrés Ríos (1897), Félix Para, Santiago Rebull, and José María Velasco (1899-1901). In 1907 Rivera received a grant to study in Europe and lived there until 1921. He first worked in the studio of Eduardo Chicharro in Madrid and in 1909 settled in Paris. He was influenced by the impressionists, particularly Pierre Auguste Renoir. Rivera then worked in a postimpressionist style, inspired by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Henri Matisse, Raoul Dufy, and Amedeo Modigliani. The series of works Rivera produced between 1913 and 1917 are in the cubist idiom, for example, Jacques Lipchitz (Portrait of a Young Man; 1914). Some of them have Mexican themes, such as the Guerrillero (1915). By 1918 he was producing pencil sketches of the highest quality, exemplified in his self-portrait. Before returning to Mexico he traveled through Italy. Rivera's first mural, the Creation (1922), in the Bolívar Amphitheater at the University of Mexico, painted in encaustic, was the first important mural of the century. From the beginning he sought for, and achieved, a free and modern expression which would be at the same time understandable. He had an enormous talent for structuring his works and a great hand for color, but his two most pronounced characteristics were intellectual inventiveness and refined sensuality. His first mural was an allegory in a philosophical sense. In his later works he developed various historical, social, and critical themes in which the history and the life of the Mexican people appear as an epic and as a specific example of universal ideas. Rivera next executed frescoes in the Ministry of Education Building, Mexico City (1923-1926). The frescoes in the Auditorium of the National School of Agriculture, Chapingo (1927), are considered his masterpiece.

Vendedora de Flores, 1949, Oil on masonite, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain

Las Ilusiones, 1944, Oil on canvas, Museu de Arte São Paulo. Sãoo Paulo. Brazil

An internationally recognized artist and a central figure in the Mexican mural movement, Rivera created a highly personal style by blending Renaissance and modernist techniques with his interest in indigenous Mexican art forms and commitment to Marxist ideology. While his legacy undoubtedly rests on his monumental projects, his sizeable body of easel paintings and prints reached a far broader audience.

This poignant evocation of the toils and rewards of agricultural life was produced when the Mexican agrarian reform was unfolding with full force in the 1920s and '30s. The iconic composition focuses attention on the dignity of the workers and their children with a quiet, mystical grandeur of expression.

Profile of an Indian Woman with Lilacs, 1938, Charcoal and pastel., Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin

Agrarian Leader Zapata, 1931, Fresco, The Museum of Modern Art, New York City

Flower Festival: Feast of Santa Anita, 1931, Encaustic on canvas, The Museum of Modern Art, New York City

Jos Guadalupe Posada was born in Aguascalientes, in 1852. The son of an illiterate baker, he received early training in drawing and as a teenager apprenticed to lithographer Jose Trinidad Pedroza. In Pedroza’s print shop he did commercial work and made lithographic caricatures of local political figures. He moved to Leon in 1872 where he taught lithography in high school and produced illustrations for books and periodicals. In the meantime he gained greater recognition as an illustrator. Around 1888 he moved to Mexico City to capitalize on his growing reputation.

El pequeño adivinadorcito, 67 adivinanzas No. 5 (the little fortune-teller, 67 riddles) by José Guadalupe Posada. Chapbook cover shows five boys standing in a circle, one has bare feet and is wearing a top hat and tails. The chapbook contains 67 riddles with the answers on the last page. Natural ground wood paper, relief cut, with text in letterpress, editor Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, Mexico, D.F., between 1890 and 1913.

Posada's era was a time before the appearance of radio and television, when there were only a few costly books and newspapers available, and the populous were mostly illiterate. The broadside was street literature which first emerged in Europe in the sixteenth century following the development of the printing press in the West. Printed handbills on any topic of current interest, often accompanied by illustrations, were produced and sold for a penny or two. They came in various formats and sizes but all were printed on one side of an unfolded paper, a broadside, or on both sides, a broadsheet.
Once in Mexico City Pedroza’s methods and style changed. He began to produce relief prints, engraving and etchings, and his famous broadsides. Relief prints come in a variety of forms but the basic idea is to create a picture on some media (wood, linoleum, metal) and cut away the part which is not to be printed. The relief, standing out, is coated with ink and paper is pressed on it. In an engraving or etching the picture is scratched or etched with acid in the block, ink is spread on the surface and into the lines cut into the surface of the block, and when the ink is wiped off of the block it stays in the engraved lines. Then the printing process takes place.

A los padres y madres de famila, Jos Guadalupe Posada. In 1921 the young French artist Jean Charlot, then working as a muralist in Mexico City, encountered the broadsides of Posada. Posada had been dead since 1913, and though his prints and broadsides were familiar to many Mexicans, Posada as a person was largely forgotten. Charlot's pioneering article on Posada published in 1925 in Revista de Revistas brought Posada to the attention of the art world. Charlot's enthusiasm for Posada remained with him during the course of a long and productive life, and resulted in the assembly of an extensive personal collection of Posada's art.

Jose Clemente Orozco (1883-1949) was born in Jalisco, Mexico, and studied art at the San Carlos Academy for Fine Arts in Mexico City. He lost his right hand and partial sight in one of his eyes during an school experiment. He was politically active throughout the Mexican revolution and witnessed its horrors first hand. He turned a political cartoonist, publishing most of his work in local newspaper, and was greatly influenced by Jose Posada. Orozco could be considered the most complex of the Mexican muralists. He was dedicated to depictinMarxg the truth and had a greater sense of realism that Diego Rivera. This is illustrated by his violent displays of conflict and chaos and misery. He realized the enormous gap between social ideals and social realities. He focused on showing personal suffering in a pessimistic, skeptical, yet sympathetic way. Prometheus was painted at Pomona College in California. This was his first mural in the United States. It illustrates Orozco's belief that all the events of history are in a never ending circular sequence. One of the most influential Mexican muralists of his time, Orozco was also a remarkable draftsman, making hundreds of drawings for his mural projects and printed works.

Rear Guard, José Clemente Orozco (1883–1949), Lithograph 1929. Although Orozco executed only about fifty lithographs and etchings in total, they are a powerful evidence of his unique aesthetic sensibility. His expressive compositions, like this one inspired by a vignette from his 1926 mural at the National Preparatory School in Mexico City, are characterized by their sharp lines, oblique angles, and expressive play of light and dark tones.

Zapatistas, Jose Clemente Orozco, 1931

Zapata, David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1975), Lithograph
Along with Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, Siqueiros was one of the most important artists in the Mexican mural movement and one of Mexico's key political figures. With its bold tonal contrasts, this print offers a posthumous representation of Emiliano Zapata (1879–1919), the revolutionary leader of Indian ancestry and champion of agrarian reform who fought in the Mexican revolution from 1911 to 1917.

Leopoldo Méndez (1902-1969) was a printmaker, painter muralist. Like Posada, he is known primarily for his politically charged prints depicting the horrors of war, struggles of laborers & parodies of capitalist greed fascism. He helped found the long-lived Tallerde Gráfica Popular (TGP) in 1937.

A portrait of Posada in his shop, by Leopoldo Méndez

Paremos la Agresion a la Clase Obrera. Ayude Usted. A los Huelguistas de Palau, Nueva Rosita y Cloete. (Let us Stop the Aggression toward the Working Class. Help the Strikers of Palau, Nueva Rosita, and Cloete), Leopoldo Méndez, 1950. Méndez created the print in 1950 as a street poster calling for solidarity with mine workers in their strike against the U.S. owned company, Mexican Zinc Co.

W. Randolph Hearst (1947-1974),by Leopoldo Méndez, Woodcut on paper,

William Randolph Hearst, the world's largest newspaper and magazine conglomerate at one time, was a controversial figure, who is depicted here with a chess board and several pawns. Two figures on either side of Hearst are seen whispering into his ear. The unmistakable United States dollar signs leave little doubt that Hearst is being advised on a financial matter. At the end of the Mexican Revolution, Hearst went to Mexico City to meet with Alvaro Obregón, the president of Mexico. It was rumored in the New York Times that Hearst would start a Mexican newspaper if he could retain the titles to land he owned in that country. Méndez's depiction relates more to the controversy surrounding Hearst and his supply of arms to Mexican counterrevolutionaries. The Bureau of Investigation investigated these acts but found no concrete evidence. The chess pawns Hearst pushes away resemble Emiliano Zapata and a Mexican peasant, as indicated by the hat in the small man's hands as if begging for alms. The figure he props up with his left hand is probably General Victoriano Huerta, a supporter of Porfirio Díaz; the very dictator the Mexican Revolution sought to defeat.

In The Name Of Christ: They Have Assassinated More Than 200 Teachers (En Nombre De Cristo: Han Asesinado Más De 200 Maestros), Leopoldo Méndez, Lithograph,1939.

In the counter-revolutionary “Cristero War” of 1926-1929, the fundamentalist Cristeros (“fighters for Christ”) launched an armed rebellion against the Mexican government because of the anti-clerical Mexican Constitution of 1917. In 1939 the administration of Presidente Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940), commissioned Méndez to create a portfolio of seven lithographic prints on the subject of educators who had been murdered by Catholic fundamentalists during the Cristero uprising. The resulting lithographs commemorated seven different teachers who had been brutally slain by religious zealots, depicting the teachers under threat, in the throes of death, or after they had been assassinated. In the lithograph shown above, Méndez portrayed the gruesome killing of Professor Ramón Orta del Río in Nayarit, one of Mexico’s 31 states. The killers doused the body of their victim in gas and set him on fire.

The strike of 50,000 Honduran workers exploited for more than 50 years by the monopoly of the United Fruit Co., is a just cause." - Alberto Beltrán. Linoleum block print. 1955.

Beltrán’s original linoleum-block print was reproduced as a poster expressing solidarity with striking workers in Honduras. Since the early 1900s U.S. companies totally controlled Honduran agricultural production and exports, largely based upon the cultivation of bananas, making Honduras the original “Banana Republic.” The Standard Fruit Company and the United Fruit Company – both U.S. businesses – virtually ran the country. It was the president of United Fruit, Sam Zemurray, who infamously said of Honduran officials; “A mule costs more than a deputy.” From 1903 to 1925, the U.S. Marines intervened in Honduras no less than seven times. After decades of ferocious exploitation by U.S. commercial interests, Honduran banana workers staged a historic strike for better working conditions and higher pay that began on May 1, 1954.

Picador, Julio Ruelas, Color paper and silk cutout. c1900

Julio Ruelas (1870-1907) was a painter of cadavers, hanged satyrs, bewitching maidens, sudden epiphanies and lovers' suicides. He was (and remains) the foremost Mexican Symbolist, close to Odilon Redon or Gustave Moreau in his appetite for hallucinatory scenarios. For Jose Clemente Orozco, as for many others, Ruelas was the touchstone influence, and he was an important participant in the burgeoning arts of his day: he was the principal illustrator for the Revista Moderna, a magazine not dissimilar to the Yellow Book that published excellent Spanish translations of Novalis, Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire, as well as the poetry of Ruben Dario. Based on the centenary exhibition of the same name at the National Art Museum in Mexico City, The Lugubrious Traveler restores Ruelas to his rightful prominence. Detailed and authoritative texts by three of Mexico's most respected critics--Teresa del Conde, Carlos Monsivais and Antonio Saborit--explore the many facets of this curious artist, from his fauns, wraiths and succubae to his deeper and still disquieting trawling of the fin-de-siecle subconscious.

Sókrates, Julio Ruelas, 1902

Alejandro Magallanes Gonzalez was born in Mexico City in 1971. He studied at the National School of Plastic Arts (UNAM). Magallanes has created the visual design for the Human Rights Commission of Mexico City and cultural publications of the Universidad Panamericana. His work has been published in various international journals of graphic design, in countries such as France, Iran and Spain. His posters have been exhibited in Poland, Japan, Argentina, China, Netherlands, Czech Republic, France and Russia, among others. Magallanes has received numerous awards, which include Jozef Mozrack Medal, the Golden Bee, the bronze medal at the 4th biennial Icograda Block and medal at the International Poster Biennale in Mexico. A member of Alliance Graphique International (AGI) and the collective El Cartel de Medellín. Over the recent years Magallanes has created posters for philosophical Book Fair, organized by the UNAM Institute of Philosophical Research, and has ensured a certain continuity within its perspective. In this case there are two series: the first deals with gods and mythological characters and the second with philosophers. The posters are printed by combining metallic inks and spot colors.

Minotauro, Alejandro Magallanes Gonzalez, Poster for the Second philosophical Book Fair, organized by the UNAM Institute of Philosophical Research, n.d.

Hércules, Alejandro Magallanes Gonzalez, Poster for the Third philosophical Book Fair, organized by the UNAM Institute of Philosophical Research, 2006

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Alejandro Magallanes Gonzalez, Poster for the Fifth philosophical Book Fair, organized by the UNAM Institute of Philosophical Research, 2008

Karl Marx, Alejandro Magallanes Gonzalez, Poster for the Sixth philosophical Book Fair, organized by the UNAM Institute of Philosophical Research, 2011

Lourdes Zolezzi was born in 1972 in Mexico City. She enrolled in Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, in Mexico City in 1993, and was grauated as a Bachelor of Arts in Graphic Communication Design, in 1997 . She attended a number of seminars such as: "One Color Poster", presented by Mieczyslaw Wasilewski of Poland, "Poster Design", and "The Typographical Poster" both presented by Gianni Bortolotti, in his Studio in Bologna, Italy, 1999. she has exhibited in many countries and has won a number of prestigious awards.

Cinco caminos a la danza / Five paths to the dance, Season of dance and popular concerts, Lourdes Zolezzi, 1999

Solistas y bien acompanados / Soloists and well accompanied, Season of dance and popular concerts, Lourdes Zolezzi, 1999

Dia internacional de la danza / International day of dance, National Center for the Arts (CENART), Mexico City, Lourdes Zolezzi, 2001.

Eduardo Barrera Arambarri was born in Mexico City in 1974, where he currently lives and works. He studied graphic design at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He attended workshops by Uwe Loesch, Takashi Akiyama, Marna Bunnell, Peter Pocs and Manuel Marin, among others. Barrera has created designs for several cultural projects including Trama Visual AC; Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes; and Conaculta and Instituto de Cultura de Yucután, Mexico F.D. In advertising, he has worked with Leo Burnett in México, Magic Moments in Austria and Eveun Boutique Criativa. Working as a freelance designer since 2001, Barrera has developed corporate and institutional images, typographic fonts, posters, editorial designs, packages, web pages, motion graphics and multimedia presentations. His poster work has represented Mexico in official selections for contests, biennales and collective exhibitions in eighteen countries. He has received awards at the Bienal Internacional del Cartel, Mexico (2000) and the 4th Block Triennial of Eco-Posters, in Kharkov, Ukraine (2006). His publication Ergo Sum, developed with artist Erick Beltrán for the Fundação Tápies in Barcelona, won the first prize at the Bro Biennale of Graphic Design in 2008, in the Czech Republic.

Racism, Eduardo Barrera Arambarri, 2011

Chernobyl, Eduardo Barrera Arambarri, 2008

Corre Conejo!! (rabbit run!!), Eduardo Barrera Arambarri, n.d.

tristis book tours

2011-09-25T21:21:00.001-07:00

tristis book tours

Chapter 47: Artists and Creators of American Movie Posters

2011-09-24T18:25:00.000-07:00

Table of Contents:

Introduction
Bob Peak,
Howard Terpning,
Bill Gold,
Tom Jung,
Ted CoConis,
Steven Chorney,
Drew Struzan,
Steve Frankfurt,
Rudy Obrero,
Robert McGinnis,
Richard Amsel,
Reynold Brown,
John Alvin ,
Jack Davis,
Bob McCall,
Frank McCarthy,
Frank Frazetta,
Andrea Alvin .

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Introduction:

The American movie studio system of poster design has been rather peculiar in the 20th century. The movie studios had usually their own art departments, run by their art directors who subcontracted various elements of a poster to various artists including illustrators, typographers and photographers. Some artists themselves had founded commercial graphic studios, and applied the same mass producing industrial structure. While, this system was responsible for the poor quality of so many of the American movie posters, it created occasionally authentic masterpieces, when a group of talented artists, like the instrument players of an orchestra, gather under the direction a of great art director, who directs like a maestro. Of course, some art directors have been exceptionally talented graphic designers themselves, and had created genuine pieces of art works. However, in the final analysis, it is now very difficult to attribute the artistic credit of a poster to the art director alone when an illustrator's work dominates the design. The process is rather similar to, let's say, performing the Brahms violin concerto by a virtuoso player under the direction of a maestro. In fact, when the art director Bill Gold, published a 450-page limited-edition book, entitled Bill Gold: PosterWorks, Reel Art Press, it raised some eyebrows since many of the posters in that book were considered the works of artists such as Bob Peak, Steve Frankfurt, Philip Castle, and so on, and thus in reviewing the book, in the Spectator, on 23rd April 2011, Bevis Hillier wrote ;

When I first riffled through this book, I found, amid the many luxurious illustrations, one of the famous poster for A Clockwork Orange by the English artist Philip Castle, that brilliant master of the air-brush. I was mystified as to what Gold’s role was in that. The answer to that conundrum comes at the end of Christopher Frayling’s introduction:

The initial idea for this book came about when Bill and [his wife] Susan ... were having lunch at an Italian restaurant in Bridgeport, and saw a French poster for Camelot on the wall. When they explained to the proprietor that it was Bill who had designed the original poster, the proprietor replied, ‘No, he couldn’t have, Bob Peak designed it.’ Bob Peak was the illustrator. The designer of the poster was in fact Bill Gold, even though the artwork was signed by Peak. This convinced Bob and Susan that the record ought to be set straight.

Of course, the art director, was not the final decision maker about the poster, as most often the views of the director and producer carried the main weight. For instance, for the Empire Strike Back poster, George Lucas insisted that he wanted an image like Gone With the Wind that would capture the spirit of an epic romance. Art director Sid Ganis, contacted artist Roger Kastel, and a number of other illustrators to depict the romance of Han and Lila, in the same posture as Rhett and Scarlett.

Some of the earliest graphic designs for the Empire Strike Back was created by Tom Jung. These were clearly inspired by his poster for the re-release of Gone With the Wind, which was solicited by Sid Ganis. Jung incorporated a half-sheet kind with an image of Luke and Leia before Vader and another with Luke in the bizarre gear of Hoth beside a half naked Leia side-saddling on tauntaun. After these romantic designs were rejected by Lucas and Ganis, Jung finally came with an authentic design of the film's darker theme, represented by Vader's imposing prominence in the composition, outstretching his hand. The poster became the signature feature of the film.

By the end of the previous century, with the intrusion of digital techniques, the art of poster design went through a drastic change. Many major studios closed their publicity departments. Although still in the current practice a single poster design is the product of many different hands - those of an art director, a graphic designer, a photographer, a typographer and a computer programmer, and so on, the human touch has been replaced by computer's slick and soulless attitude. Digitally mass produced movie posters have became almost identical in their various genre, and completely pathetic in their communication missions, in the final analysis they are now worthy of being exhibited in Tate modern of London!

Bob Peak

Robert "Bob" M. Peak (1927-1992) was born in Denver, Colorado and grew up in Kansas. From an early age Peak knew that he wants to be a "commercial illustrator". He majored in geology from Wichita State University and got a part time job in the art department of McCormick-Armstrong. After serving the military during the Korean War, Peak transferred to the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, California, graduating in 1951. He was perhaps the greatest graphic designer active in the U.S. after World War II. An accomplished artist, and a superb draftsman, his striking command of figurative compositions and expressive portraiture, were masterful, elegant, and aesthetically authentic.

In 1953, Peak moved to New York City, landed an Old Hickory Whiskey advertising campaign. His work went on to appear in major advertising and national magazines. United Artists studio hired Peak in 1961 to design the poster images for the film West Side Story. Peak's innovative approach to movie advertising from basic collages of film stills or head shots to flamboyant artistic illustrations was revolutionary. His bold composition of a single montage-became the first of over 100 such posters, among them “My Fair Lady,” “Camelot.” In the mid-1970s Peak's style would become familiar to fans of science fiction films when he created the poster art for the futuristic film Rollerball (1975), followed by the first six Star Trek films, Superman (1978), Excalibur (1981), In Like Flint, and Apocalypse Now (1979). Peak was not short on editorial assignments with 45 covers of Time Magazine featuring his illustrations-most notably the portrait of Mother Teresa. Sports Illustrated, and TV Guide were regular showcases for Peak's work in the 1970s and 1980s.

Bob Peak has been hailed as the “father of the modern Hollywood movie poster.” his extensive list of accolades include being named Artist of the Year by the Artists Guild of New York in 1961 & 1977, elected into the New York Society of illustrators Hall of Fame. A Key Art Lifetime Achievement Award granted by The Hollywood Reporter and elected, along with Norman Rockwell and NC Wyeth, into the prestigious Illustrators Hall of Fame. Peak received a commission from the U.S. Postal Service to design 30 stamps for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia.

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Howard Terpning

Howard Terpning was born on November 5, 1927 in Oak Park, Illinois. He was raised by his mother, an interior designer, and father, who worked for the Northwestern Railroad. He grew up in the Midwest living in Iowa, Missouri and Texas as well as Illinois. As a boy he liked to draw and knew by the age of seven that he wanted to be an artist. At age 15, he became fascinated with the West and Native Americans when he spent the summer camping and fishing with a cousin near Durango, Colorado. When he turned 17, he enlisted in the Marine Corps and served from 1945 through 1946. He was stationed in China for nine months. After leaving the Marines he enrolled at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts in their two-year commercial art program using the G.I. Bill to pay his tuition. To further his study he attended the American Academy of Art in Chicago for six months where he honed his life drawing and painting skills.

After art school a family friend introduced Terpning to Haddon Sundblom, a successful and highly regarded illustrator of that time. Based on the recommendation and the strength of Terpning's drawings Sundblom hired Terpning to work at his Chicago studio as an apprentice for $35 per week. Initially, Terpning ran errands, cut mats, built crates and cleaned brushes. After about a year and a half he began to work on his own commissions. In 1955, he moved to a Milwaukee studio where he stayed for three years before relocating to New York where he was hired by a major Chicago studio. By 1962, he was working as a freelance artist using an agent to facilitate the business side of his craft. As a result Terpning was able to work from his home studio eliminating the long commute into NYC. During his 25 years as an illustrator he created magazine covers, story illustrations and advertising art for publications such as Reader's Digest, Time, Newsweek, Good Housekeeping, Field & Stream, McCall's, Redbook, and Ladies' Home Journal.

In addition to illustrating for magazines Terpning completed over 80 movie posters starting with The Guns of Navarone in 1961. Other examples include Cleopatra, Doctor Zhivago, The Sound of Music, The Sand Pebbles, and the 1967 re-release of Gone with the Wind. Today, Howard Terpning is celebrated as one of the most talented and prolific artists in his field. His visually stunning artistic ability has garnered Terpning numerous esteemed awards and recognitions throughout his illustrious career, including the prestigious 2005 Masters of the American West Thomas Moran Memorial Award and a lifetime achievement award from the Autry National Center, as well as an award from the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians & Western Art for excellence.

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Bill Gold

Bill Gold was born in Brooklyn in 1921. From his early childhood he was interested in art, and soon he was making copies from Norman Rockwell’s works. Gold went to elementary school in Brooklyn where he took several art courses, and later after graduating from Tilden High School, he enrolled at the Pratt Institute to study advertising art, including lettering, layout & design and illustration. Son of an insurance broker, he was fascinated by movies, and thus after Pratt, he went to show his portfolio to Joe Tisman, the art director of Warner Brothers’ advertising department in New York City. As part of his interview process, Tisman asked him to go and design three posters for "The Adventures of Robin Hood", "Winter Meeting" and "Escape Me Never". He did and got the job. The art department employed seven graphic designers, with three artists solely devoted to lettering, with backgrounds in sign painting. As a result their typography was clear, bold and sharp.
According to Gold:

MGM was known for its spectaculars and musicals -- they had more stars than in heaven -- and Manhattan had Broadway and Tin Pan Alley. Warner's was all about gangsters and gritty realism and having a social conscience -- three things easily found in Brooklyn.

Yankee Doodle Dandy, and Casablanca, both directed by Michael Curtiz, were Gold's first two assignments. However, in 1942, Gold was drafted into the army, and after eight weeks of training he was transferred to the Air Force Photography Unit, where he made instructional films about aircraft maintenance. He rejoined Warner’s in 1948, two years after being discharged from the army. He succeeded Joe Tisman as the art director, and in 1959, after Warner Bros closed its in-house advertising department in New York, Gold moved to Los Angeles to set up Bill Gold Advertising, and continued to accept contract work from Warner’s.

Yankee Doodle Dandy, 1942, Michael Curtiz. A patriotic poster, with the American flag stars that are like the shimmering sparks of fireworks. The poster projects bright, spangled, and lively entertainment.

Casablanca, 1942, Michael Curtiz. With Bogart in the forefront and the rest of the cast in relief, shadowed behind a blood red color, the viewer gets the sense of intrigue, romance and drama.. In the words of Michael Bierut; "On the Casablanca poster ... you see everything you need to know about the movie, about the era, about that point in time of studio filmmaking.” A rare patriotic film noir, Casablanca was a success in its initial run during World War Two, and it is now included almost every year in the best film lists.

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Tom Jung

Print is very important. Selling of films through posters makes a difference between success and failure...The goal of poster art is to crystallize a film into a simple image - to catch a moment. Tom Jung

Tom Jung was born in Boston, in the 1940s. His parents were in show business, and he exhibited his artistic talent from his early school days, when he was sketching various scenes of life on paper. He was very interested in movies and he watched them at the Boston Art Museum, three times a week. After his graduation from school he found a job in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. But after two years he was drafted in the Army. He worked as a freelance illustrator and art director with a number of major advertising agencies in New York, after his discharge from the Force.

Jung's first break came in 1958, when he was assigned by an acquaintance to redesign the ad-campaigns for Federico Fellini's 1954 La Strada and Roger Vadim's 1956 And God Created Woman. Jung's redesign of these posters helped the films to appeal to the American taste, and contributed to the introduction of these important directors to the American audiences. Soon, Continental, the largest distributor of foreign films at that time, contracted Jung for ad-campaigns of such classics as; Jack Clayton's 1959 Room at the Top and Sidney Lumet's 1962 A View From the Bridge.

Illustration by Howard Terpning, Poster design by Tom Jung

Ice Station Zebra, 1968, John Sturges. The top half of the poster down to the bottom of the submarine was drawn by Robert McCall. The actors were drawn by Howard Terpning. The poster design and layout itself were done by Tom Jung.

The artwork, poster design, and layout by Tom Jung

Jung became a freelance art director at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1962, when the Director of Marketing at Continental, left the company to go to MGM and he took Jung with him. Included among the posters Jung designed for MGM were; "Dr. Zhivago," "Ice Station Zebra," "Shoes of the Fisherman" and the re-release of the "Gone With the Wind." In 1968, Jung was contracted by Cinema Center Films to handle the art direction for their entire release schedule of nearly 30 films. Despite the fact that Jung had worked as an art director and designer his own artwork was not yet accepted to be included in the posters. However, in 1973, the director, Franklin Schaffner, and the producer, Ted Richmond, of "Papillon" accepted Jung's artwork for a poster that was also designed by him. This was the first major break for Jung's artwork, in which he depicted the inner personalities of the film's main two characters, a stubborn and defiant Henri 'Papillon' Charriere, who is wrongly convicted of murder in the 1930s and sentenced to life imprisonment in a French penal colony on Devil's Island in French Guiana, and his cagey and crafty fellow convict Louis Dega, who is helping Charriere in his many escape attempts.

Artwork by Howard Rogers, Poster design by Tom Jung

Artwork by Howard Terpning, Poster design by Tom Jung

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Ted CoConis

Ted CoConis was born in Chicago, in 1927. He was a child prodigy, and in 1939, at the age just twelve years old and still in grade school, he was awarded a scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago. Three years later, in 1942, he abandoned his formal education, added a few years to his age and trained as a pilot with the US Air Force. However, he was honorably discharged after the Air Force realized that he was underage. CoConis did not give up, and soon joined the Merchant Marines, serving as an ordinary seaman. on the way to Russian-occupied Romania.

After returning to Chicago, in 1945, he decided to return to art, and headed to Las Vegas, then moved to Los Angeles, and finally ended up in San Francisco, where he landed his first freelance commission as an illustrator. It wasn’t long before a major art studio in New York recognized his talent. He moved East and his signature technique graced the pages and covers of such magazines as Cosmopolitan, Playboy, Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping. He was commissioned to create book covers for novels like Ada and The Devil Tree, and his posters for Academy Award winning films like Man Of LaMancha, Fiddler On A Roof, Hair, and Labyrinth quickly established him as one of the U S's preeminent illustrators, gaining worldwide recognition for the outstanding movie posters, book covers and story illustrations he created in collaboration with his wife Kristen.

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Steven Chorney

Steven Chorney was born in 1951, Washington, DC, and raised in Buffalo NY. He did have any formal art education, but according to him his father, a trained commercial artist in Toronto, Canada "made the largest impact on my decision to follow this chosen field". In 1971, Chorney moved to Southern California to pursue his dream of becoming a visual artist. He landed a job with a small independent agency, doing animation and designing television commercials. In 1976, his entry to the Chicago International Film Festival garnered the First Place Award for Animated Television Commercials. Soon the marketing departments of some of the major Hollywood studios discovered his charmingly refined and thoughtful artistic talent.

Over the 1983-86 period, Chorney created dramatic art designs for over 50 TV Guide ads for CBS and NBC television programs, including, Dynasty, Miami Vice, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, T.J. Hooker, and Cagney and Lacey. In 1987 his work on the popular television series Designing Women won First Place in The Hollywood Reporter Key Art Awards for television. Chorney’s drawing skills and dramatic technique have been applied to over 120 motion picture campaigns for many of the major studios including Disney, MGM and Warner Bros. Recognized for his design and conceptual abilities, Chorney has frequently been asked to develop the direction and design of the final One-Sheet concept for movies as diverse as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, License to Kill, Indiana Jones, and the Last Crusade.

Steve Chorney’s work in the pop culture includes illustrating books such as the popular Star Wars young reader series as well as creating works for Universal Studios Parks, Paramount Parks, and Knott’s Berry Farm. He currently lives in Santa Barbara California.

I wrote Chorney to ask why some of his movie posters are also credited to a number of other artists, his response is fascinating in that provides a glimpse into the inner working of art departments of movie studios;

Often artists were used to create initial designs and layouts for presentation while yet another might actually finish the final painting. At times it was a scheduling reason, (sometimes one artist was faster than another or already busy on a another assignment) other times it was a conscious decision for a certain look. Some artists visualize well, others paint well, sometimes they did both.

Deadlines were of such critical importance there was little time to wait for sending art to another area for creation, revisions etc. There were no computers to immediately transfer electronic data as seen today. The general rule of the day: only artists from the Hollywood area were called in. As a result, the pool of talent was a relatively small roster of reliable artists who could withstand the constraints of producing artwork 'on demand'. At times the completion of the final poster painting would be required within 24 hours! A demanding profession indeed! But it was exciting too!

STAR TREK Adventure, Univesal Studios tour.

Zathura

Jumanji meets Buck Rogers in Columbia Pictures sci-fi adventure Zathura.
Based on the best-selling book by acclaimed children's writer Chris Van Allsburg

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Drew Struzan

Drew Struzan was born in 1947 in Oregon City, Oregon. At the age of Eighteen, he enrolled at the Art Center College of Design, in California. According to him; "The first thing the counselor asked me was 'what do you want to major in,' so I asked what the choices were." After being told that he had two choices: either fine art or illustration, and if he chose fine art he could paint what he wanted, but as an illustrator he could paint for money, it didn't take him too long to choose his course of study. "I'll be an illustrator," he decided. "I need to eat." In his first year, he married and became a father.
After graduating in 1970, with honors and a Bachelor of Arts degree. Struzan resided in West Los Angeles, California. He would also complete two years of graduate studies and eventually return to the school in later years (the campus relocated to Pasadena, California) to teach for a short time.

"I was poor and hungry, and illustration was the shortest path to a slice of bread, as compared to a gallery showing." Struzan has said, "I had nothing as a child. I drew on toilet paper with pencils – that was the only paper around. Probably why I love drawing so much today is because it was just all I had at the time."

In the mid-70’s, Struzan landed some commission to do movie posters, and soon he got his first break with the re-release of Star Wars in 1978. Working with fellow artist Charles White III, they created a poster that was later dubbed “the circus poster”. After discovering that there wasn’t enough room on the original poster for the actors and crew names, the poster was expanded to look like an original torn poster stuck to a wall. Nevertheless, “the circus poster” gave Struzan's career a big boost.

Struzan's association with George Lucas, expanded later on . He created a logo for Lucasfilm division Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), and worked on the posters for both the Star Wars saga and Indiana Jones which was Created by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. As well, Struzan illustrated the posters for the Special Editions of the original Star Wars trilogy, and subsequently created the posters for The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith.

By the late 1990’s as the production and design of the movie posters utilized digitally composed photo montages, and the conventional posters were abandoned, Struzan began to work on comic books, US Postage stamps, board games and Franklin Mint collectible plates. Struzan retired in 2008. His life became the subject of a 2010 a documentary, Drew: The Man Behind the Poster, directed by Erik Sharkey. Struzan works have been the subject of a number of books including; The Movie Posters of Drew Struzan (2004), The Art of Drew Struzan (2010) and Drew Struzan: Oeuvre (2011).

According to Steve Chorney who has kindly provided comments and suggestion on this chapter;

we used to be close in the 70s/80s and that poster from Jeff Bridges Nadine was done in an Agency called Tony Seineger Advertising. He was sometimes called the 'grandfather of the Movie Poster' out here in LA. Like Bill Gold but the fastest, most furious group at the time.

Add caption

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Steve Frankfurt

Resist the Usual,

Stephen O. Frankfurt was born in the Bronx, New York in 1931. His mother worked as the secretary to a president of Columbia Pictures, and the highlight of her life was a date with Rudolph Valentino. When Frankfurt was eighteen, he enrolled at Pratt Institute, and was graduated after three years of study in 1952. A year later he went to Hollywood and visited every major studio and ad agency, but not one of them had any interest in either him or his talent. It was James Cantwell at KNX, the CBS affiliate in Los Angeles, who tried to help the young man's career. He assigned Frankfurt to redesign the KNX logo week after week. Cantwell also put him in touch with the growing UPA studio, which made a tentative job offer. An interesting scholarship offer from Pratt and Cantwell's astute admonition sent Frankfurt back to New York. He began to work at UPA-New York, where he had to paint backgrounds, which gave him some exposure to animation and camera techniques. But, UPA was New York's busiest studio and Frankfurt, the youngest employee there, could not keep up with the pace of work, so he lost his job. But his experience with animation and camera together with his considerable artistic talents made him a force to be reckoned with in the advertising world. When he was still working at the UPA, Frankfurt, shuttling film cans between the studio and Young & Rubicam, a prominent ad agency, became acquainted with Y & R executives Jack Anthony and Jack Sidebothom, who offered him the job of assistant art director in their fledgling TV department.

In 1956, he married Suzanne Allen who was working at Y & R. Allen was an interior decorator who popularized 18th- and 19th-century Russian furniture among corporate raiders of the 1970-80's; she was also an early collaborator of Andy Warhol. In 1957, Frankfurt was promoted to a TV art supervisor and a producer, a position that offered him a considerable freedom to launch his creative talent through the full phases of a project from the start to finish, that is from artistic concepts through to completion. As a producer, his innovative and sophisticated commercials helped to redefine the role of the art director in the industry. Frankfurt divorced Suzanne Allen in 1968, the very same year that that he became the president of Young & Rubicam Advertising. As the youngest man in history, and as an art director, holding the office of the presidency of a major corporation he gained international fame. It was at this time, that Frankfurt learned that his assignments at KNX had been just make-believe jobs created by Cantwell's charitable character to help him.

In 1962, when Alan J. Pakula, a director of many psychologically penetrating and celebrated films decided to produce To Kill A Mockingbird he thought of Frankfurt's award-winning commercials, and thus hired him to design the main titles for the film. Frankfurt design ranks amongst the most sophisticated and thought provoking opening title sequence in this history of cinema. Both as an extraordinary creative designer, and a brilliant marketing executive Frankfurt revolutionized the art of publicity, where he saw all the promotional materials including; the titles, posters, trailers and ads as part and parcel of the same package that must convey a common look and theme. In 1968, Frankfurt and Phil Gips, an internationally recognized Yale designer, joined forces to create the industry changing advertisement campaign for Rosemary’s Baby. In !972, Aubrey Balkind, a Colombia MBA with post graduate studies in Architecture, joined them. Frankfurt Balkind's office was opened in LA in 1987, focusing on entertainment. In 2002, Peter Bemis assumed the leadership of the agency and its name changed to Bamis Balkind. Nevertheless , the penetrating influences of Frankfurt are discernible in many of the movie posters of Bemis Balkand.

The posters for Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Dracula Has Risen from the Grave(1968) Downhill Racer (1969), The Front (1976), The Good Son (1993), Wolf (1994), and Spartan (2004) all are among the most exquisite posters ever made, and reveal Frankfurt's tasteful and elegant style in his strive for simplicity, directness and meaning. He brought to design a European-style sensibility--strong graphics and a bold, fresh look that didn't fit into any formula. According to Frankfurt;

... clients come to us expecting to see something different. We tend to come at things in an unexpected way. We offer a point of view on a film. We try and create a strong copy line or image that everything else can be hung on...You have to reflect the film's essence. You have a generation of fast-forward kids out there zapping movies. The challenge is to find a way to be different. The people who come here to work are misfits. They don't fit in anywhere else. These people go out and have fun together at night. Bill Murray dropped by and took them all out to dinner. You can't fake that.

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Rudy Obrero

Rudy Obrero was born in Kaneohe, Hawai‘i, in 1949. He attended Castle High School, where his classmates remember him in the chemistry class of Mr. Chocks drawing all the time. After graduation in 1967, he joined the Air Force; "I loaded bombs for B52s. I just happened to be stationed on Guam where there was nothing to do. I was 18 years old." Finding Guam too small and having nothing to do, Obrero went to the island's hobby store.

I just happened to buy a sketchbook instead of a car model. I was going to build plastic models of cars but I found a sketchbook instead. I started sketching from there. I sketched throughout my time in the military. I wasn't very good but it was something to do.

Upon his discharge from the military Obrero enrolled at Leeward Community College in Pearl City, Hawai‘i. Leeward was a regional community center, creating both an environment for academic learning and a center of cultural life for the community, it allowed Obrero to create an art portfolio which he submitted with his application to Los Angeles Art Center College of Design. He was admitted and in 1973 earned his B.F.A. Trained in classic illustration, he began his freelance career with New York West, an ad agency soon he was commissioned to illustrate posters for movies like Never Say Never Again, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Earnest Goes to Jail, and A Fish Called Wanda.

According to Obrero Here is how it works;

The studio would commission a bunch of ad agencies to do a bunch of different ideas and compositions for each promotion. I was just one artist working for one agency among many... I was limited to the references I got and to the art direction involved. Each agency gets a direction from the client, each agency works and hires a number of different artists and we get our own directions so that our works don't overlap. It would be useless for three people to be working on the same idea.

I had the montage and all the action stuff and the two ladies and James Bond which is the 'big head'. It's called a 'big head plus the ladies'. I had action elements in there, which they all were taken out. All of those were removed for legal reasons. The lawyers got involved. Which is really sucks when you think about it. At time we had lawyers trying to tell artists what they should do. Although it was based on "Thunderball", they would cross out any issues that might give rise to legal problems. They kept pulling the pieces out one at a time. It had to not look like any James Bond movie at all. If you'll notice there is no flames in the poster. No fire, no explosions. We had to keep the fire out which is kind of weird for an action movie not to have explosions. When you think about it, it looked as if it might have all been done in ice as there was no big orange flame. But, what are you going to do?

I got two or three thumbnails. I worked in pencil so it looked more accurate as to what it's going to be. Then the art director chose one of those sketches, or bits and pieces from them and they assembled one composite layout that they liked. I went ahead and did a full sized 'comprehensive'. It is a painting that is as tight as a finish but in some small ways it is not a finish. I did three for the Bond movie. The most challenging aspect of the work was having it make sense every time an element would be pulled out. I'd have to have this big spot that was big and empty. All of a sudden, how did I accommodate the big and empty space and balance it out again? Because, this layout was symmetrical. It was balanced on both sides. When you pulled one element out it looked heavy on one side. It wasn't digital back then, I had to paint out and redraw and put it back in.

Obereo's repertoire of freelance assignments includes work in advertising, ad concepts, illustration, and photo collages and retouching. His list of clientèle includes; Disney, Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal Studios, Trans World Entertainment, Fox 11, Burger King, Indy Mac, The Los Angeles Zoo, Los Angeles Magazine, Toyota, and many more.

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Robert McGinnis

Robert Edward McGinnis was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1926 and grew up in Wyoming, Ohio. He lived almost all his life in Connecticut, but his root could be traced in Midwestern conservatism and rural depression Ohio, where his parents, Nolan "Dutch" McGinnis and Mildred Finch, first noticed their son's artistic talent, "Dutch" encouraged him to draw his beloved "Popeye" and other cartoon characters, and Mildred insisted that he should attend a drawing class held on Saturdays at the Cincinnati Art Museum.

After finishing high schoolin 1943, McGinnis hitchhiked west to become an animation and cartoon-illustration apprentice at Walt Disney studies. The onset of World War II forced McGinnis to return home. He enrolled at Ohio State University to study fine art and took night classes at the Central Academy of Commercial Art. After wartime service in the Merchant Marine McGinnis and his wife Ferne, a talented artist and musician, moved to New York City, in the mid-Fifties; and landed a job at at the Fredman-Chaite Studios where he created advertising posters. A chance meeting with Mitchell Hooks in 1958 led him to be introduced to Dell Publishing where he began a career drawing a variety of paperback covers. This was a game changer for McGinnis' artistic career, as he began to create a striking body of figurative art, studying female beauty, that was aesthetically profound, well balanced and stylishly expressive.

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Richard Amsel

Richard Amsel was born in Philadelphia in 1948. A 1969 graduate of the Philadelphia College of Art -- now The University of the Arts, Amsel created some of the most recognizable, iconic show business-related imagery of the late 20th century before he died in 1985. His “AMSEL” signature can be found on posters for more than 30 major motion pictures, close to 40 TV Guide cover illustrations and numerous album covers and concert posters.

The early 1970s Amsel created a number nostalgia art for the release of old records, old movies, and old stage shows, including RCA Victor's re-release records of Helen O'Connell, Maurice Chevalier and Benny Goodman classics. As well, Bette Midler chose Amsel's art for the cover of her first Atlantic Records album and a number of her subsequent records. Amsel created posters for the movies such as "Up the Sandbox" (Streisand), "The Sting" (Paul Newman and Robert Redford), "Lucky Lady" (Liza Minnelli), "The Shootist" (John Wayne and Lauren Bacall), "The Late Show" (Lily Tomlin), "Julia" (Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave), "Flash Gordon," "The Muppet Movie" and "A Star is Born" (both the 1976 Streisand remake and the 1983 reissue of the Judy Garland classic). Amsel also provided illustrations fot TV Guide, including a 1972 cover of a made-for-television movie chronicling the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's love affair; as well as portraits of Mary Tyler Moore, John Travolta, Elvis Presley, Ingrid Bergman, Katharine Hepburn, Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable and many more. The most memorable among Amsel's portraits was that of Lucille Ball which was for an article discussing her retirement, and commemorating her 23 years of television career. According to Amsel;

I did not want the portrait to be of Lucy Ricardo, but I did not want a modern-day Lucy Carter either. I wanted it to have the same timeless sense of glamour that Lucy herself has. She is, afterall, a former Goldwyn Girl. I hoped to capture the essence of all this.

Amsel's last assignment for TV Guide, completed shortly before his death, featured the portraits of TV news anchors Tom Brokaw (NBC), Peter Jennings (ABC) and Dan Rather (CBS).

Despite his considerable artistic talent, Amsel was a modest man,. He once remarked:

Commercial art can be and sometimes is art, but if someone hangs a poster, it is still a poster pretending to be something it's not. My work is basically for the printed page, and not for hanging in living rooms... If, however, I paint or draw something that takes people into the realm of fantasy, then I feel that I've accomplished something.

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Reynold Brown

Reynold Brown (1917-1991) was born William Reynold Brown in Los Angeles, California. His father, a locomotive engineer, was Wilhelm Rheinhold Brown, who had run away from his home in Hays, Kansas, and settled in California. He married, Ada Fairley, Reynold's mother, who had immigrated to the US with her mother from Belfast, Ireland. Brown's maternal grandfather was William Fairley, a member of the British Royal household, who had lost his wealth and left the family destitute. After his death his wife, Mary Agnes (Magee) Fairley, and her children immigrated to the US, where she placed them in foster homes until she could establish herself. When Reynold Brown arrived in California he boarded in the home of Mary Fairley fell in love with her daughter, Ada,a hat maker, and married her.

Encouraged by his protective mother Ada, Reynold Brown, a left handed artist, started to draw from his early childhood. He attended Theodore Roosevelt Grammar School in San Gabriel, where the teachers tried to cure him and eventually forced him to become right handed in his writing, but he continued to draw left handed. In 1931, the Brown family relocated to Temple City where Reynold continued his education at Alhambra High School. He was an admirer of famous illustrators such as Leyendecker, Cornwell, Rockwell and N.C. Wyeth. Needing a job, Brown began work on Tailspin Tommy, the very first aviation oriented cartoon strip, created by Hal Forrest. Later, Brown met Rockwell who advised him to leave the cartoon business if he wanted to learn to be an illustrator.

With the outbreak of the WWII, Brown worked as a technical illustrator at North American, where he met his wife Mary Louise Tejeda, also an artist. Later on, Brown did many phantom drawings and illustrations for a number of popular books and magazines including; Flying, the Earl Stanley Gardner, Perry Mason series while living in New York. After the war, Brown's illustrations appeared in Saturday Evening Post, Argosy, Popular Science and Popular Aviation. He also drew many paperback book covers. While teaching at the Art Center College of Design, he encountered Misha Kallis, the art director of Universal Pictures. Kallis, offered Brown his first movie poster commission for the Gregory Peck film The World in His

Arms (1952), and many other such commissions, such as John Wayne's The Alamo (1960) established Brown's career as a movie poster designer. Reynold Brown suffered a severe stroke in 1976 which left his left side paralyzed and ended his commercial work. But with the help of his wife he continued to paint landscapes until his death in 1991.

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John Alvin

Resistance from those with a less creative view of the task ahead and politics get in the way. I try to overcome these and any other unforeseen obstacles by persevering with why I'm there in the first place: to create imagery. In the face of resistance, this is sometimes the most difficult thing to commit to and accomplish. Also, over the years, I have developed an unfailing belief in myself and my skills. Now, with greater experience, I have finally learned to trust my instincts and it is paying off in spades.

John Alvin (1948-2008) was born in Hyannis, Massachusetts. His parents Albert and Rena Troutman Alvin, both have been career Army officers, moving around various military bases before finally settling down in Monterey, California. From his early childhood Alvin became fascinated wit movie art, when he would inspect carefully the Sunday newspaper's movie ads.
"From the time I was 12, I guided myself toward the entertainment industry, at times unknowingly. The closest I could get to the movies without being an actor, author or cinematographer, was to draw 'terrific art' about them."
Awe-struck by movies like "The Vikings" and "The Time Machine" he sketched his recollections of scenes. In 1971, he graduated from the Art Center College of Design, which was then in Los Angeles (now in Pasadena). After college, Alvin found himself working for the prestigious Hanna-Barbera animation studio.

In my first years out of art school, freelance work was irregular and as my wife Andrea and I were beginning our life together, Hanna-Barbera offered me a chance to bring home a weekly paycheck. Andrea was then a professional animator and for a short while, we both worked there. I designed and drew layouts that set up the scenes for animators.

He worked as a freelance animator for three years before getting his big break, when when a friend invited him to work on a poster for the upcoming Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles, which was released in 1974. The poster was an outstanding visual communication art, once the posters went up, they were immediately torn off the wall by admirers, and every time they went back up they were taken off just as quickly. The poster was as much of a hit as the movie itself. "Mel Brooks liked it," Alvin said in a 2007 article in the Santa Fe New Mexican. "I didn't look for work for about 15 years after that; it came to me. I just kept getting calls from strangers who asked, 'Are you the guy who did so-and-so film?'. He said that his work "created the promise of a great experience" and in that he never failed.

In a career that spanned more than three decades, Alvin worked on such films as "Young Frankenstein," "Gremlins," "City Slickers," "Batman Returns," "The Color Purple" and "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy. He also created anniversary posters for "Star Wars." He entered the industry at the time when the major studios were shutting down their publicity departments; yet, because of his artistic skills, he was able to obtain commissions despite the fact that the demand for traditional poster artists had collapsed.

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Jack Davis

I work pretty loosely and if it’s something I really enjoy drawing, it goes pretty fast. When it gets down to doing really tight work and the client is pretty picky, you can have it, because I don’t want it.

John Burton "Jack" Davis was born in 1924, in Atlanta, Georgia. At the age of 12, Davis saw comic book publication and he contributed a cartoon to the reader's page of Tip Top Comics on December, 1936. He drew for his high school paper and then spent three years in the Navy, where he contributed to the daily Navy News. Attending the University of Georgia on the GI Bill, he did drawings for the campus newspaper and helped launch an off-campus humor publication, Bullsheet, which he described as "not political or anything but just something with risqué jokes and cartoons." He worked one summer inking Ed Dodd's Mark Trail comic strip at The Atlanta Journal, a strip which he later parodied in Mad as "Mark Trade" . A training manual he illustrated in 1949 for the Atlanta-based Coca-Cola company earned him enough money to buy a car and take off for New York, where most of the good cartooning jobs were to be found. Attending the Art Students League of New York, he found work with the Herald Tribune Syndicate as an inker on Mike Roy's The Saint comic strip. His own strip, Beauregard, which involved humor in a Civil War setting, was carried briefly by the McClure Syndicate. After rejections from several comic book publishers, he began freelancing for William Gaines' EC Comics in 1950, where editors Al Feldstein and Harvey Kurtzman found his unusual style ideal for such titles as Tales from the Crypt, Two-Fisted Tales and The Vault of Horror. It was at EC that he achieved the highest accolade that can ever be bestowed on an illustrator of horror comics — two of his panels were reprinted on the opening page of the art section of anti-comics crusader Fredric Wertham's 1954 book, Seduction of the Innocent, as shocking examples of the sort of comic books that were corrupting America's youth.

His style of wild, free-flowing brushwork and wacky characters made him a perfect choice when Harvey Kurtzman launched Mad as a zany, satirical EC comic book in 1952. Davis contributed to other Kurtzman magazines - Trump, Humbug and Help! - eventually expanding into illustrations for record jackets, movie posters, books and magazines like TIME and TV Guide. In 1961, he wrote, drew and edited his own comic book, Yak Yak, for Dell Comics. In 1965 he provided "serious" illustrations for Meet The North American Indians by Elizabeth Payne, and published by Random House, New York, in their children's Step Up Books line. His publishing and advertising client list includes many of the US largest corporations. In the 1960s Davis’s work first appeared on film in the theatrical trailer for the Stanley Kramer film, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World. The photomation sequence consisted of a variety of camera shots; zooming in and panning across the artwork, Davis created for the film’s official one sheet movie poster. Around this same time Davis crossed paths with Arthur Rankin Jr.

Rankin, a fan of Davis’s work; hired the illustrator to design the characters for the Rankin/Bass full length, stop-motion animated film called Mad Monster Party. The film boasted the voice talents of Boris Karloff, Phyllis Diller, Alan Swift, and Gale Garnett, with music by Rankin/Bass staff composer Murray Laws.Jack Davis was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2003. He also received the National Cartoonists Society Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996. A finalist for inclusion in the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1990, 1991 and 1992, he received the National Cartoonists Society's Advertising Award for 1980 and their Reuben Award for 2000. In June 2002, Davis had a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Society of Illustrators in New York. He was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 2005.

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Bob McCall

McCall is the nearest thing we have to an artist in residence in outer space. Isaac Asimov

Robert Theodore McCall (1919, 2009) was born in Columbus, Ohio. He had wanted to be an artist since he was ten years old, and was fascinated with airplanes and looking at Moon craters through a telescope. His first drawings were from the skating scenes on ice covered ponds around the Columbus area. "I drew the blades and lacings of speed skates, figure skates-anything I could think of." He was also inspired by the artistic illustrations in the books and magazines such as one by N.C. Wyeth,"He was a giant; the passion and drama that he developed in his work were just remarkable." Young McCall frequently visited the rare book room at the Carnegie Public Library. "They had these beautifully bound books by artists like Audubon. I could spend hours looking at page after page of these beautiful, hand-colored lithographs and illustrations." He had a life-long fascination with painting armor-clad and uniformed knights and other heroic figures. "I drew their likenesses from the books of fairy tales that we had." McCall was proficient enough by age 17 to work as a commercial artist for a local silkscreen company while on a scholarship in the Columbus School of Fine Arts for two years. and served in the Army Air Forces during World War II as a bombardier instructor. With the outbreak of the WWII he was enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1941 as an aviation cadet. He wanted to be pilot, but being color blind under certain lighting conditions, he had to serve as a bombardier instructor in the AT-11, B-17 and B-24. McCall used his off-duty hours “painting pictures of Airplanes”.

After the war ended, McCall married, Louise Harrup, and the couple moved to Chicago, where he worked as an advertising artist, while aiming "to become a first-rank illustrator, like Norman Rockwell or N.C. Wyeth," and by By the mid-1950’s, his work appeared regularly in full color national advertising campaigns for major aerospace corporations such as United Technologies, Pratt & Whitney, GE, Douglas, Boeing, and General Electric. McCall also used his skills in drawing airlines and parts for TWA, Pan Am and SAS as well as art for Mobile Oil and Champion Spark Plugs.

In 1949, McCalls moved to New York, where in the early Cold War years he found himself documenting national defense issues for LIFE Magazine, Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post. "One of the first jobs I got for Life was doing a series of illustrations of the events at Pearl Harbor. It was a real challenge and a fabulous opportunity". These large works are on display in the National Air & Space Museum. McCall’s expertise naturally led to major works for LIFE documenting the early space program. His growing expertise in this new subject led to his being invited by NASA to cover the Mercury, and Gemini programs where he lived and worked among the pioneer astronauts. "I became directly involved with NASA in 1956, when I met astronauts and visited actual launch sites." As a member of the Society of Illustrators, McCall was given wide access to NASA, its plans and projects, this close association provided the inspiration for the rest of his career. He went on to create hundreds of vivid paintings, from representations of gleaming spaceships to futuristic dream cities where shopping centers float in space. His most famous image may be the gargantuan mural, showing events from the creation of the universe to men walking on the Moon, on the south lobby wall of the National Air and Space Museum on the National Mall in Washington. More than 10 million people a year pass it.

Evidence of this expertise was not lost on Stanley Kubrick who engaged McCall for the advertising posters for his 1968 movie classic “2001: A Space Odyssey”. He was to create conceptual paintings for other movies such as Disney’s “Black Hole”, and Paramount’s “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.” McCall also designed more than a dozen stamps for the United States Postal Service, and a set was ceremoniously canceled on the lunar surface by David Scott, commander of the Apollo 15 mission.

McCalls moved from Chappaqua New York to their home and studio in Paradise Valley, Arizona in the 1970s. They have worked in media ranging from line and wash, watercolor, oils and stone lithography. They also worked in glass, creating the remarkable stained- glass Chapel-in-the-Round in their Valley Presbyterian Church in Paradise.

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Frank McCarthy

Frank McCarthy was born in New York City in 1924. His interest in drawing started at his grade school years in Scarsdale, New York. Enthralled by superheros such as; Prince Valiant, Flash Gordon, and the N.C. Wyeth's characters he drew them and covered the walls of his tree house with these sketches. In 1938, as a teenager, he studied during a summer at the Art Students League under George Bridgma n, in Manhattan. Bridgman, instilled in McCarthy an appreciation of a strong grounding in human anatomy. McCarthy then studied with Reginald Marsh, a well-known painter of the Depression Era. After his high school, McCarthy enrolled at Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn New York. where he was accepted. Later on he recalled with modesty; "I was by far not the best student — but somehow I managed to muddle through." Being totally captivated by art, he attended frequently the Society of Illustrators listening the lectures given by artists such as John Gannam, Al Parker, and Harold Von Schmidt. Soon after graduation, McCarthy worked as an apprentice at Illustrators Incorporated, where he did many errands, including wrapping packages, making deliveries, and assembling mechanicals. When he finally became a staff artist he started with many Saturday Evening Post ads for which he had to retouch his own screened photographic prints, a task that before the advent of Photoshop required meticulous attention to pattern, value, and contrast. This attention to minute details become a sought-after hallmark of McCarthy's work. In the early 1950s he joined Fredman Studio, which would later become the Fredman Chaite Studios. His reputation began to grow as that of a talented illustrator of both paperback covers and magazine stories — especially those with Western, action-oriented, or as McCarthy puts it, "shoot 'em up bang bang" themes. For five decades he painted illustrations for magazines, such as Collier's, Outdoor Life, Redbook, True, and publishers, including Avon, Dell, and Fawcett. When in the 1960s film studios finally realized that that illustrators, are much better in dramatizing a scene, relative to photographers, their demand for McCarthy's promotional materials for major movie studios like Paramount, United Artists, Universal, and Warner Brothers surged. "Anything they couldn't photograph, they'd have me paint," recalled McCarthy. He created works that became posters for such movies as "The Green Berets," with John Wayne, "Thunderball," with Sean Connery, "The Ten Commandments," with Charlton Heston and "The Great Escape" with James Garner. He left the world of commercial art in 1968, when Charlie Dorsa, a good friend from his first studio job, introduced him to a sales person at a gallery who, upon seeing McCarthy's paperback covers, remarked, "If you can do that for me, I can sell them." and thus began McCarthy's fine art career of painting Western art after moving to Sedona, Arizona.

Retrospective showings of Frank McCarthy's paintings have been held at the Museum of the Southwest, Midland, Texas; the R.W. Norton Museum in Shreveport, La.; the Thomas Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Ok.; and in 1992, at the Cowboy Artist of America Museum in Kerrville, Texas. Frank McCarthy was invited
to join the prestigious Cowboy Artists of America organizaton in 1975 and was an active member in the CAA group for 23 years. He was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 1997.

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Frank Frazetta

Frank Frazetta (1928 – 2010) was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. At the age of eight, at the insistence of his school teachers, Frazetta's parents enrolled him in the Brooklyn Academy of Fine Arts, a small, short-lived art academy with the sole instructor Michael Falanga, an award-winning Italian fine artist. From 1936 to 1944, Frazetta studied at the academy with Falanga, who was greatly impressed with Frazetta's artistic talent, so much so that he dreamed of sending Frazetta to Europe, but he died suddenly in 1944 and the Academy was closed about a year after his death. At 16, Frazetta was forced to find work to earn a living.

Frazetta started drawing for various comic books. By the early 1950s, he landed commissions with EC Comics, National Comics (including the superhero feature "Shining Knight"), Avon and several others where he collaborated with his artist friends Al Williamson and Roy Krenkel. While working on the Buck Rogers' covers for Famous Funnies, Frazetta began to work with Al Capp on his Li'l Abner comic strip. As well, Frazetta began to produce his own strip, Johnny Comet, while assisting Dan Barry on the Flash Gordon daily strip. In 1961, after nine years with Capp, he left for Harvey Kurtzman doing the parody strip Little Annie Fanny in Playboy magazine. In 1964, an art director in United Artists studios noticed one of Frazetta's magazine ads. and approached him with a commission to do the movie poster for What's New Pussycat. Frazetta accepted his offer and earned his yearly salary in one afternoon. Soon a number of other movie posters followed. Many publishers then approached Frazetta to produce paintings for paperback editions of adventure books, including the cover for the sword-and-sorcery collection Conan the Adventurer by Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp, published by Lancer 1966, that created a buzz. The demand for Frazetta's illustrations surged. He illustrated covers for paperback editions of classic Edgar Rice Burroughs books, and many other books. In 2003, a feature film documenting the life and career of Frazetta was released entitled, Frazetta: Painting With Fire.

Finally, a series of strokes impaired Frazetta's manual dexterity to a degree that he had to switch to left hand, until his death on May 10, 2010, in a hospital near his residence in Florida

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Andrea Alvin

Andrea Alvin was born in 1949 in California. She graduated from the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles (now of Pasadena) in the advertising design class of 1969. After graduation, she immediately began working as an animation designer and animator at film production houses making television commercials. She contributed creatively to many national and regional commercials such as Tootsie Roll, Chicken of the Sea, Six Flags, and numerous films for The Children’s’ Television Network. She later produced and directed three films for the Electricity exhibit at the Los Angeles Museum of Science and Industry.

In 1976, she began painting and exhibiting her unique art in various galleries and venues throughout California. In 1989, she joined ranks with her husband, John Alvin, creating their own design and illustration studio specializing in key art for movie posters. Andrea Alvin has contributed to the design and creation of ad campaigns for such movies as “Batman Returns,” “Batman Forever,” “The Mighty,” “Innocent Blood,” “Grumpier Old Men” for Warner Bros.; “Pinocchio,” “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” “Hercules,” “Mulan” and “The Little Mermaid” for Disney Studios; and “Doc Hollywood,” “Dragonheart” and “Jurassic Park” for Universal. She is also known for the cover art for the MCA/Universal Classic videos of the Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Claudette Colbert and Cecil B. DeMille collections.

Andrea Alvin co-illustrated books for Disney Publishing with John Alvin, including “Simba’s Pride,” various story books for “Tarzan,” “A Bugs Life,” “Toy Story,” “101 Dalmatians” and “Winnie the Pooh.” Together they created package art for Disney consumer products for supermarket food product lines geared toward children, ranging from Kellogg’s cereals, Blue Bunny ice cream, and fruit drinks and bottled water from Coke. In 2003, she moved from Los Angeles to New York’s Hudson Valley to pursue her fine art career. She continued to paint throughout her commercial career, and it is now her full-time occupation. Her work is influenced by Pop and Photorealism. After the untimely and sudden death of her husband, she is managing the estate and legacy of John Alvin.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Chapter 46: A history of the American Movie Posters

2011-09-08T23:19:00.000-07:00

I have to analyze the problem. What is the movie about? What is the story about? What is it trying to say? Whatever is the style of the movie? What kind of audiences I want to appeal to -- so that they get some sort of inkling about what the film is gonna represent. We try not to dissuade them from the realism of what the story is, and yet, we don't want to tell them too much.
Usually, we started by getting people in the department to do some logos, designs of what the lettering should look like. I usually read the scripts or I'll go to see the footage of the movie. I'll try to decide what would be the most marketable thing to say about the movie, and how to project it into a piece of art. Most of these things we did by hand and do the lettering and positioning and pasted all together and if we had to make a change we had to reap it apart and start over, With a computer you just almost press button and move things into place.

Bill Gold, Art Director and Graphic Designer

Perhaps the very first movie poster was the one created by Jules Cheret, in 1890, for a short film called Projections Artistiques. The lithograph poster depicted a young girl holding a poster announcing the times of the show. Two years later, he created another poster for Emile Reynaud's Theatre Optique called Pantomines Lumineuses.

Marcellin Auzolle, L'Arroseur Arrosé, 1895

However, it is the poster for L'Arroseur Arrosé that is considered the first poster for a featured film. The poster was designed by Marcellin Auzolle, Shot in Lyon in the spring of 1895, the film portrays a simple practical joke in which a young boy steps on a gardener's hose while he watering his plants. When the gardener inspects the hose, the boy releases the water. The stunned gardener, whose hat is knocked off, chases the culprit, and after catching him administers a spanking.

In 1903, Edwin S. Porter, created the first American motion picture The Great Train Robbery, which proved to be a big hit, and its popularity led to the establishment of "nickelodeons," the early movie theatres, the first of which was established in 1905 in Pittsburgh, and by 1907 their numbers surged to almost 5,000 throughout the United States. Perhaps the very first movie poster was the one created by Jules Cheret, in 1890, for a short film called Projections Artistiques. The lithograph poster depicted a young girl holding a poster announcing the times of the show. Two years later, he created another poster for Emile Reynaud's Theatre Optique called Pantomines Lumineuses. However, it is the poster for L'Arroseur Arrosé that is considered the first poster for a featured film. The poster was designed by Marcellin Auzolle, Shot in Lyon in the spring of 1895, the film portrays a simple practical joke in which a young boy steps on a gardener's hose while he watering his plants. When the gardener inspects the hose, the boy releases the water. The stunned gardener, whose hat is knocked off, chases the culprit, and after catching him administers a spanking.

By the end of the first decade in 20th century, there were many movie studios established in the US, and the most prominent among them were Biograph, Essanay, Kalem, Kleine, Lubin, Selig and Vitagraph. The movie posters were created by the studios art departments, whicg they shipped the original artwork to the lithographers, who handled the making of the printing plates. The lithographers, then sent their plates to the printers who used them to print the posters. Some of the major lithographers were: Donaldson Print Company which printed the American Entertainment Company stock poster of 1900, Miner Litho Company which was used by the United Artists. Thomas Edison who considered the motion picture one of his inventions, in an attempt to restrict his competition created the Motion Picture Patents Company, which was a cartel made up of the major film studios. One of the first acts of the newly-formed cartel was to set standards for advertising materials.

Snare of Society, Lubin Studio, One Sheet, 1911.
The contribution of graphic design in transmission of information in this early 20th century movie poster is at minimum. The image is basically a classic representation of two characters in a balanced composition in which the enigmatic color pallet plays the most crucial role. The function of the simple black typeface at the top of the poster is just to provide a title for the film, and there is no attempt by the illustrator to integrate and engage the typography with the overall design. Nevertheless, the pure conventionality of the design renders it somewhat agreeable to a modern taste. The main character, Florence Lawrence, originally became known as the "Biograph Girl" and worked at that studio under the direction of D.W. Griffith. She left Biograph in 1909 to join Carl Laemmle, who had just started Independent Motion Picture Company, or IMP in New York. She and her husband, Harry Solter were IMP's first featured players.

A Good Little Devil, 1914, Edwin S. Porter. Unfortunately, Porter was not a great director, and his Good Little Devil was little more than a photographed stage play, something well reflected in this poster of the blind heroin.

The Champion, 1915, Charlie Chaplin. This simple poster represents one of Chaplin's finer early movies. It illustrates Charlie and his dog Spike. Apart from the tramp character and Spike, it is the sharp and clean typeface that is of notice in this poster.

The Dawn Maker, 1916, William S. Hart. A powerful poster depicting the main character Joe Elk, half-Indian, half-white, who attempts to secure for his tribe the benefits of schools and medicine such as he had seen on a trip to Montreal

New York City - Batiste Madalena (American, b. Italy, 1902–1988) was hired by George Eastman during the late period of silent cinema to design and hand-paint film posters for his theater in Rochester, NY—at the time the third-largest cinema in the U.S. His works were certainly the most definitive set of original film posters in America.

The early movie posters rarely, if at all, provided any information about the actors on the posters. This was due to the fact that the film producers were concerned that such publicity would contribute to the propagation of the stars fame, and would encourage them to demand higher wages. However, when Carl Laemmle, poached Florence Lawrence from Biograph studio, things began to change. Laemmle, the father of Universal Pictures, was reputedly the most good-natured and least neurotic of the studio bosses. Laemmle had established a film distribution business thatlater became one of the largest in America. In 1909, he produced his first picture, Hiawatha (1909), a 15-minute version of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's famous poem. By this time Laemmle had become a leader of the "Independents," producers and distributors who defied the would-be monopolists of Thomas Edison's Patents Company. As a publicity stunt Laemmle started a rumor that the lovely "Biograph Girl" was dead and then published a full page ad in a St. Louis newspaper stating that he had "nailed a lie" and would be presenting Florance Lawrence in St. Louis. This resulted in gathering of a huge crowd to see the "Biograph Girl" alive. The publicity made Lawrence famous and increased Leammle's profits and consequently, other companies followed suit. Lawrence left IMP and moved to Lubin Studios the following year. From then on studios understood the power of stars in making a film profitable. Since then the posters were designed to take the maximum advantage of the star power, and the typographic design and the size of the fonts began to reflect the relative significance of the 'leading lady" and "leading man." In return the stars agents demanded clauses in their contracts that would specify the size and placement of their client names on the movie posters.

The art directors in the movie studios conceptualized what a movie needed. The studios usually had some preconceived ideas about what they wanted in a poster before the sketching began. The goal was to market the movie to the audience, promising an interesting story without completely giving the story away. Most studios frowned upon the art directors who in their views were artificial or slick about the the way they worked. They wanted the director to concentrate on the story, and rarely wanted to know what an art director can show. Generally, the graphic designers were given a rough cut of the movie, and after watching it, they were asked to draw a few different designs based on their impressions of the film. The artists were encouraged to draw their interpretation of the movie and shy away from just recreating one of the frames. After the initial designs were done, they were edited from various marketing perspectives, often by different artists than the originals. Gradually a set of visual parameters were developed and these were etched into the collective consciousness of the industry, determining the "truth" of the movie and such criteria became part of the culture of the studios art departments. As Michael Bierut, a graphic design critic has argued; a static image, in theory, can’t possibly have the same power as a 90-minute film, yet a poster designer should somehow encapsulate the adventure a viewer going to see in 90 minutes. Thus, the designer needs to find a way to match the movie to the right style. “In a way, that is the opposite of what a film critic would call the auteur theory". A good poster designer should manage to be a complete chameleon so that it kind of obfuscates his own handwriting on the poster.

The original piece of artwork for posters, created by the graphic designers of the film studios who remained mostly anonymous in the early decades, was called "reflective" or "hard" art, the designers also created a a "mechanical" art, which depicted the location of titles and credit information on the posters. The early lithographers made their plates from limestone slabs, and thus their technique was called Stone Lithography. Soon they substituted zinc. They then sent these plates to printer, or if they has a printing press they themselves printed the posters. The printed posters then were sent to studio exchanges, independent poster exchanges, or later National Screen Service. According to Edison's standards, the size of a movie poster was set at 27"x 41". Each studio had its own stock poster borders printed in either two or three colors. A white panel at the center printed the title and a synopsis of the movie's plot, and often included a photograph from a scene in the movie.These posters were called the "one sheet," and were placed prominently in glass display cases inside and outside of movie theatres.

Over the Top, 1918, Wilfrid North. The graphic design for the war movie poster, Over the Top, adapted from the best-selling novel by Arthur Guy Empey, is a powerful and well balanced composition, with innovative modern sans serif typeface that is designed to add to the drama of the scene.

Convict Thirteen, 1920, Edward F. Cline & Buster Keaton. The poster depicts Keaton with four cops in an intriguing situation that conveys his bleak humor as we expect him to outmaneuver the police with his usual cunning and athleticism. The typography is very much conventional for the period.

The Illiterate Digest, Goldwyn, 1920, One Sheet.
In this poster the graphic design and the typography are integrated fully. The signature of Will rogers and a colloquial quot "It's A Dog Gone Good Novelty. See It Every Week" adds a touch of intimacy. The character and his cowboy lasso are drawn extending beyond the black canvas at the center. Will Rogers began his entertainment career in vaudeville, charming audiences with his down home comedy and iconic American cowboy appeal. His popularity in the Ziegfeld variety review Midnight Frolic lead to his engagement with the more famous Ziegfeld Follies. By 1918, Hollywood and Goldwyn came knocking, allowing Rogers to branch out into silent films. Until his contract ended in 1921, Rogers completed twelve movies for Goldwyn, and during the same period he also made the Illiterate Digest film-strip series for the Gaumont Film Company. Although not this stage performers strongest medium, Rogers would go on to make 48 successful silent films, and with the arrival of sound in 1929, he would become a leading star in that medium.

The Haunted House, 1921, Buster Keaton. This early poster again depicts a scene from the movie in which Keaton as a bank teller gets into trouble when he accidentally spills glue on some money which gets stuck everywhere. One wonders was it the poster that publicized the film, or was it the comedian that publicized the poster?

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, 1925, Fred Niblo. This highly mannerism style poster does do justice to this original Ben Hur movie, which was more artistically inspired that its spectacular remake by William Wyler in 1959.

The Big Parade, 1925, King Vidor, The Big Parade was one of the greatest hits of the 1920s, boosting Gilbert's career, and making Adorée a major star. The film was groundbreaking for not glorifying the war or its human costs, exemplified by the lead character's loss of a leg from battle wounds. In an Art Nouveau style, the artist subtle reference to boy's leg is of note in this poster.

The General, 1927, Buster Keaton. A magnificent poster for this masterpiece of dead-pan "Stone-Face" Keaton comedy, generally regarded as one of the greatest of all silent comedies and undoubtedly the best train film ever made.

The introduction of the of new color offset lithography printing technique that was developed by Morgan Litho Company dramatically changed the artistic quality of posters, and shifted the emphasis from the illustration to photography. Lithography is based on the principal that oil and water do not mix. Thus lithographic plates undergo chemical treatment that render the image area of the plate oleophilic (oil-loving) and therefore ink-receptive. The non-image area are rendered hydrophilic (water-loving). During printing, dampening solution, which consists primarily of water with small quantities of isopropyl alcohol and other additives to lower surface tension and control pH, is first applied in a thin layer to the printing plate and migrates to the hydrophilic non-image areas of the printing plate. Ink is then applied to the plate and migrates to the oleophilic image areas. Since the ink and water essentially do not mix, the dampening solution prevents color to affect the non-image areas of the plate. In the offset printing technique ink is applied to the printing plate to form the "image" and then transferred or "offset" to a rubber blanket . The image on the blanket is then transferred to the paper to produce the printed product. While not as colorful as the stone lithography posters, the color offset process produced sharper images. Over the next twenty years, the two processes would continue to be used. However, by the 1940's, color offset would replace stone lithography for all poster printing.

The Divorcée , 1930, Robert Z. Leonard. Though everything about this film from the direction to the production design was terribly mediocre and conventional, its' poster was innovative and groundbreaking with a bold typography. Filmed before the Production Code, this film about a dysfunctional marriage under the taint of infidelity is represented by the above poster which provides a subtle hint of Norma Shearer's liberal attitude. Once the Hayes Code was enacted, movies stopped dealing with adultery and suggestive sexual contact until the 1970s.

All Quiet on the Western Front,1930, Lewis Milestone. This American epic, based on the book by Erich Maria Remarque is based on a tragic and harrowing memoir of a young soldier in World War I. Sombre, contemplative, and minimalist, this poster invites the viewer to participate in the mental reconstruction of the horrors of the war.

Gold Diggers of 1933, 1933, Mervyn LeRoy.The choreographer Busby Berkeley and Director Le Roy innovations in this musical was truly groundbreaking. They used the "stage musical" as a vast arena for their artistic self-expression using camera work and cinematography which played a key role in the dance sequences. The camera itself danced among the bevy of girls in their scanty costumes, giving the viewers a point of view it had never seen before. By creating the image of two overlapping posters, the graphic designer of this poster appears to transfer the scene from th musical into the world of the viewer.

Devil Dogs of the Air, 1935, Lloyd Bacon. This Warner Bros propaganda film was released to help with the war preparations. This poster, with its dynamic emphasis on speed and action together with its diagonally oriented typography, is influenced by the Italian Futurist style of the early 20th century.

Secret Agent, 1936, Alfred Hitchcock. This is a Hitchcock's early poster during his British phase, it reveals his distinctive taste that was later transpired into his American film posters. Note how typography is well integrated into the elegant composition

Modern Times, 1936, Charles Chaplin. This poster for the last Chaplin "silent" film, mocking the Machine Age, again focuses on Charlie's signature character. The typeface for his name is, in fact, four times larger than the title of the film.

My Man Godfrey, 1936, Gregory La Cava, Universal. This film is a definitive screwball comedy, and resonated with the depression era audiences for its statements on morality and class. The well balanced poster with its bold and creative use of typography is a fine representation of the film social commentary on life during the 30s.

Jezebel, 1938, William Wyler. This poster created by Joe Tisman, the art director of Warner Brothers’ advertising department, represents Jezebel an arrogant imprudent Southern Belle in Antebellum Louisiana who loses her fiancée due to her stubborn vanity and pride. The image of Davis together with the red and black typography create a sumptuous poster that is now considered a classic.

Bachelor Mother,1939, Garson Kanin. Using multiple view points to represent another screwball comedy, this poster with its well-placed, and fine typography is an above average visual communication design.

'''Wizard of Oz''', 1939, Victor Fleming, MGM. This fantasy movie adopted from the children book by L. Frank Baum, narrating the adventures of Dorothy Gale, a girl from Kansas, who awakes in a mysterious place and travels a golden path to the Emerald City, with a lion, scarecrow and tin man. From such an array of rich images nothing appears to have inspired the imagination of the poster designer. The typography of the poster is also unimaginative and crude.

The 1930's era is dubbed the "Golden Age of Movies," as some of most memorable films in movie history in various genres, including musical , western , gangster and horror movies were released during this decade. As the production of films increased, some graphic designers were given the chance to experiment with various styles and various typographies.

Winter Carnival, 1939, Charles Reisner, United Artists. In this poster the artist uses multiple view points in conjunction with a clever use of typography and a color scheme that minimizes the cluttering effect of the text. The cold blue of the background provides a wintry feel for the onetime Snow Queen at the carnival, Ann Sheridan, in this her first really big movie since she became known as the "Oomph" girl. Because the film was produced by one of Hollywood’s first independent producers, Walter Wanger, the design of the poster appears to be less conventional for the era.

Gone with the Wind, 1939, Victor Fleming. This iconic poster was created by the Selznick studio prop department, showing Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) sweeping Scarlett O‘Hara (Vivien Leigh) off her feet and carries her up over the declining fortunes of the Southern Confederacy after the fall of the city of Atlanta. The image on this poster was not drawn from the film footage; rather, it was created independently by still photographers and artists before or during production of the film.

The Maltese Falcon, 1941, John Huston. This minimalist poster, with its powerful typography is a stunning representation for this classic film noir. The decorative typeface used for the title and its strategic placement in the poster appear to give the viewer an inkling of the role of Mary Astor as the femme fatale in the movie. Director Howard Hawks knew that screenwriter John Huston wanted to direct, and suggested that Huston adapt Dashiell Hammett's novel "The Maltese Falcon" which was already owned by Warner Brothers.

Saboteur, 1942, Alfred Hitchcock. The poster for this, the first of Alfred Hitchcock's wartime propaganda films is intriguing and well executed with a very smart use of typography.

Out of the Fog, 1941, Anatole Litvak. This is another film noir poster, in which the bold and somewhat sensual typeface for the movie title, and its placement help to define the role of Ida Lupino as the femme fatale of the movie. Adopted from the play The Gentle People by Irwin Shaw, this dark drama was ahead of its time, but ended much differently from the stage version. Shaw's more pessimistic play makes a symbolic plea against fascism and calls for a united front in Europe. The film-script was changed and a more hopeful ending added, where the bad guy, unlike the stage version, gets punished.

Going My Way, 1944, Leo McCarey. The multiple view points illustration together with various typefaces are used smartly to create an agreeable poster for this musical movie. The towering image of Father O'Malley at the center aptly represents the main portrayal of him in the movie that as one critic argued "seems like a character generated by a marketing arm of the Catholic Church. He's too good to be true - a trait that sinks the character and the movie along with it."

Spellbound,1945, Alfred Hitchcock. This hauntingly beautiful poster, with its strikingly elegant typography is fitting well with the Hitchcockian theme of the movie and his signature camera-work. It is interesting that despite the fact that Salvador Dali did the artistic design for the movie, the poster does not use a surrealist theme.

The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1946, Tay Garnett. The graphic designer, Rudy Obrero, has created this US version of the poster that its characters appear very rigid with a typography that is very cluttered and uninspiring. Lana Turner, looks more like a innocent young girl being seduced by a middle-aged man and not a femme fatale. However, this was a tremendously tense and dramatic film noir, which gave Lana Turner and John Garfield the best roles of their careers, and the artistry of writers and actors made it a sincere examination of an American tragedy.

This French version of the poster correctes the shortcomings of the English version. The composition is much more balanced, and its typography much better integrated in the design.

Gilda, 1946, Charles Vidor. The graphic artist how designed this elegant poster has taken the full advantage of the stunning beauty of Rita Hayworth in her signature role as the ultimate femme fatale. The beautiful typography by its red accented special font of Gilda, emphasizes this point in the script which is aesthetically a superb complement to the image.

Gentleman's Agreement, 1947, Elia Kazan, The poster powerfully depicts the moral indignation of Phil Green a journalist who decides, for the purpose of writing a magazine reportage, to pretend that he is a Jew and who cruelly becomes the subject of harsh and painful discriminations and social snobberies. The subtle red partition, separating the spaces between the characters, which the central character is trying to cross by overstepping the barrier, and the elegant typography makes this poster a fine communication design.

Born to Kill, 1947, Robert Wise. Based on the book "Deadlier Than Male", which Wise stumbled upon in the RKO story files, the story of a twisted woman's attraction for a psychopathic murderer provoked the criticism from the Production Code that said this is "the kind of story which ought not to be made because it is a story of gross lust and shocking brutality, and ruthlessness." The poster however tries to remain within the conventional parameters a film noir.

The Lady from Shanghai, 1948, Orson Welles. The poster designer again relies on Rita Hayworth enigmatic beauty to represent a deceptive, seductive femme fatale to represent a sophisticated film noir that studies the malicious relationships among a group of people inflicted by corruption, selfishness and violence, intermingled with haunting wisps of pathos.

An American in Paris, 1951, Vincente Minnelli. A quasi-Dadaist poster, with a salad-bar typography for all sorts of announcements, such as " What a joy to see M.G.M's Technicolor musical!", or "Adventures of an Ex-GI in the city of romance. Art Student's Ball biggest, most daring ever made. Screen's most spectacular musical!"

All About Eve, 1951, Joseph L. Mankiewicz. A synthesis of De Stijl, Viennese method, and Swiss Grid styles, this stylish poster represent one of the best movies of the twentieth century. Joseph Mankiewicz received an Oscar for his film script that had the famous line: 'Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night.' which in sense is what poster also suggests.

A Streetcar Named Desire, 1951, Elia Kazan. This powerfully executed poster provides a glimpse into Brando's raw nakedness, who in the words of Roger Ebert; "held nothing back, and within a few years his was the style that dominated Hollywood movie acting. This movie led directly to work by Brando's heirs such as Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Jack Nicholson and Sean Penn.

Singin' In the Rain, 1952, Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly. The poster really captures the spirit of this colorful, and witty "MGM's Technicolor Musical Treasure." The wavy typography over the umbrellas, What a Glorious Feeling, is an apt description for this delightful and unpretentious artistic design.

Dial M for Murder, 1954, Alfred Hitchcock. This incredibly powerful poster by Bill Gold depicts the coffin-like setting of the original play's singular location, the living room of Tony and Margot Wendice, in Frederick Knott's popular stage play of the same name. The polished typography with a boxed red colored M is the integral part of the design.

On the Waterfront, 1954, Elia Kazan. To maximize the star power of Marlon Brando, the only freedom left for the graphic designer was to divide the poster into couple of blocks, and even then one of those blocks was reserved to place the main artist's credit.

Rear Window, 1954, Alfred Hitchcock. The voyeurism theme of this poster masterfully represents Hitchcock's classic that is considered by many as his best feature film. The blue repetitive and monotonous typography conveys the feeling of the trapped and impotent L.B. Jefferies (James Stewart), who in a leg cast is confined for six weeks in his Manhattan apartment "with nothing to do but look at the neighbors."

Rebel Without a Cause, 1955, Nicholas Ray. Warner Bros. released the film on October 27, 1955, less than one month after Dean's fatal car crash. The poster also unabashedly capitalizes on the celebrity status of James Dean

The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1956, Alfred Hitchcock. This poster looks rather mediocre, and even inferior to the poster for the earlier version of the film, released in 1934. It seems Hitchcock himself was unhappy with the earlier version but, debate still rages as to whether the remake made any sense since the original film was far superior; tight, gripping and unpredictable.

Giant, 1956, George Stevens. A powerful poster depicting Edna Ferber's Texan love triangle among rancher Jordan "Bick" Benedict (Rock Hudson), Leslie Lynnton (Elizabeth Taylor), and the laconic ranch hand Jett Rink (James Dean). In a layout design form for a magazine-reportage, the poster depicts the almost documentary style of the film, showing how oil exaggerated and confused the virtually feudalistic ways of living of the old Texas landowners and cattlemen.

The Ten Commandments, 1956,Cecil B. DeMille. Among many publicity posters for this film, perhaps this came closest to a fine poster. The typography of the poster appears to suggest a religious theme, but the placement of the name of director immediately above the film title, with a font of almost the same size, is a nuisance

The Prince and the Showgirl,1957, Laurence Olivier. A remarkable poster for this Anglo-American movie depicting the simple American actress,Elsie Marina, played by Marilyn Monroe, and the Regent of Carpathia, Laurence Olivier. The graphic designer complements the composition with a beautiful arrangement of a simple typeface.

Gigi, 1958, Vincente Minnelli. A delightful, imaginative and daring use of typography in a poster.

Some Like it Hot, 1959, Billy Wilder. A terribly bad executed poster, of a beautiful concept. Could it be that the designer aimed at a Dadaist poster?

North by Northwest, 1959, Alfred Hitchcock. This is beautifully executed Dadaist style collage poster, with appropriate melange of italic typeface. It incorporates the inspiration for film described by Hitchcock himself to the script writer Ernest Lehman that he’d always wanted to make a movie involving a chase scene across the Presidential faces on Mt. Rushmore. It depicts the visual tour de force of the film's powerful airplane chase, with the iconic photomontage of Hitchcock himself in the lower right hand corner carrying a cardboard cutout of a pointing hand under his arms.

The Apartment, 1960, Billy Wilder. Designing a well balanced typography poster is a demanding task, and requires an artistic creativity. While this poster focuses on typography as its main element, the artist has enhanced its humanity by strategically placing simple black & white photographs of the main couple, and their key to stress the sweet interplay between them in the development of their relationship.

Psycho, 1960, Alfred Hitchcock. The graphic designer for this chilling poster has understood the Hitchcockian setup of the story of Marion Crane, and the schizophrenic Motel owner Norman Bates. By choosing a pallet of black, blue and yellow he has expressed the anxiety of Marion, sitting in her bed while two men are suspiciously staring into the dark and empty space, and the broken typeface of Psycho provides a hint of the split personality -- or as some may call it; Dissociative Identity Disorder.

The Misfits, 1961, John Huston. This exquisite black and white poster, depicts the main idea of The Misfits, the final film for both Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable, which tells the story of three misfits lusting after Roslyn Tabor a dancer who descends upon Reno to be divorced. In a series of misfitted rectangular images that even dislocate the typography of the film, the poster depicts various scenes from the movie that has its origins in a short story that Arthur Miller had written for Esquire magazine.

Lawrence of Arabia, 1962, David Lean. A minimalist and powerful depiction of this enigmatic personality who was incomprehensible even to those who knew him personally. Lawrence's keen intelligence, charisma and barely concealed madness is decipherable against the backdrop of a majestic Arabian desert that in the film is both unforgiving and romantic.

Pink Panther, 1963, Blake Edwards. The pink panther, and his pink typface are very much at home among all the good and messy characters in this beautifully organized poster.

Irma La Douce, 1963, Billy Wilder. This sprightly poster depicting the comedy about a Parisian policeman who becomes the lover, and unwilling pimp of a carefree street-walker, uses a creative geometric constructivist approach, with a Dadaist salad bar of typefaces. The result is a strikingly well-crafted piece of art.

A Man For All Seasons, 1966, : Fred Zinnemann. The poster depicts the character of Thomas More from the behind in silhouette, and it is left to the viewer to imagine the character of this pious Catholic, who could not in good conscience serve as the Lord Chancellor of England for King Henry VIII after the King announced his plan to end his marriage to Catherine and marry Anne Boleyn, and thus gave up his high office and eventually his life. The outstanding typography in yellow against the black background create a superb focus for this delicately balanced composition.

The Fox, 1967, Mark Rydell. This charmingly rendered art nouveau style poster depicts all of the main elements in D.H. Lawrence’s 1923 story of a complicated love between two females, living in a farm, and a unyielding man. the “fox in the henhouse”.

Barbarella, 1968, Roger Vadim. A splendid photomontage in the Swiss Grid style, depicting the adventures of a 41st-century woman, Barbarella. This exquisite poster, using a swanky typography in its upper and lower margins, while reserving the main body to depict the adventures of Barbarella, in her role as the interstellar representative of the united Earth government, who is dispatched to save humanity by locating scientist Durand Durand.

The Godfather, 1972, Francis Ford Coppola. A minimalist poster with the iconic image of Don Vito Corleone.

Star Wars, 1977, George Lucas, The poster is illustrated by Drew Struzan, depicting Luke Skywalker who leaves his home planet, teams up with other rebels, and tries to save Princess Leia from the evil clutches of Darth Vader. The poster gives the impression of old sci-fi comics. The couple posing for the artist's reference were none other than graphic artist Steven Chorney and wife Catherine.

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