A poster, a mere one-sided sheet of printed paper, could not have the same destructive power as even an infinitesimal fraction of the napalm used to defoliate the Vietnamese countryside.
End Bad Breath, designed in 1968, was not as emotionally wrenching as War Is Not Healthy … or And Babies? But through comic surrealism—the juxtaposition of a typical mass-market advertising slogan, the familiar characterization of American patriotism, and the childlike rendering of an air raid—the poster spoke eloquently of the criminal and banal that was American Southeast Asia policy. It suggested that behind the façade of Americanism, this nation was keeping the peace by engaging in an unjust war in a distant land.
Furious that President Lyndon Baines Johnson ordered American B-52s to bomb Hanoi in order to pound the North Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh, into a humiliating submission, Chwast, like others within the growing antiwar movement, believed that the immorality of such increased US intervention would have disastrous effects on both nations. This also forced Chwast to explore ways in which a solitary citizen might somehow influence government policy. A poster, a mere one-sided sheet of printed paper, could not have the same destructive power as even an infinitesimal fraction of the napalm used to defoliate the Vietnamese countryside, but it could have a curative effect. Short of acts of civil disobedience, which were increasingly frequent during the late 1960s, a poster was the best means for Chwast to express his own growing frustration. And just maybe, through its visibility and recognition, the poster might reinforce the antiwar stance of others.
End Bad Breath was not the first antiwar visual commentary that Chwast, who cofounded Push Pin Studios in 1956, had created for public consumption. Nor was it the first time he was involved in antigovernment protests. In the early 1950s Chwast was a member of SANE, a group that advocated and demonstrated for nuclear disarmament and included the support of artists and designers. SANE was the first well-organized postwar effort in the United States to build grassroots support against testing of the atomic and hydrogen bombs. In 1957, a few years before American advisers were deployed in Vietnam, Chwast wrote, illustrated, and self-published The Book of Battles, a collection of woodcuts that ironically represented historic battle scenes not as heroic but banal events. The small, limited-edition book was in the tradition of artists’ commentaries that dated back to the seventeenth century and included Jacques Callot’s collection of prints The Miseries and Disasters of War (1633–1635), depicting the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War; Francisco Goya’s prints Disasters of War (1810–1820), about the Napoleonic occupation of Spain; and Pablo Picasso’s 1937 painting Guernica, memorializing the bombardment of a defenseless Spanish town.
But Chwast’s effort was even more consistent with a genre of antiwar fables, exemplified in The Last Flower (1939) by James Thurber, with its childlike drawings and terse text that served as a cautionary parable on the nature of armed conflict, and War is No Damn Good (1946) by Robert Osborn, the first antiwar book of the nuclear age, the first time that the mushroom cloud is transformed into a death’s head. In this same spirit Chwast used a simple visual lexicon to show centuries of warfare’s futile recurrence.
In the early 1960s American military advisers were sent to Vietnam, followed by a limited number of ground troops. In 1964, just prior to the launch of massive U.S. buildups, Chwast designed his first protest poster, WAR IS GOOD BUSINESS, INVEST YOUR SON, the slogan based on a button that he had seen. During this early stage of the burgeoning “alternative youth culture,” head shops as well as poster and button stores were popping up in so-called bohemian districts like the East and West Village of New York City and catering to a rebellious clientele. Wearing political and social statements on their clothing was fashionable, and buttons became one way of publicly expressing antiestablishment points of view. In addition to the ubiquitous peace sign and buttons with slogans like I Am an Enemy of the People and Frodo Lives (a reference to J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit), War is Good Business … touched a very raw nerve among draft-age baby boomers.
Chwast borrowed the slogan for use on his darkly colored (blues, purples, and reds) poster, which included nineteenth-century decorative woodtypes and old engravings of a mother and a soldier. It looked akin to one of those vintage call-to-arms broadsheets that summoned civilians into battle in the days when war was a heroic exercise. Chwast sold the idea to Poster Prints, one of the leading commercial poster and button outlets, where it was retailed among an array of cheaply printed movie, rock-and roll, and protest posters. Although it appeared decorative, War is Good Business … was by no means benign. Without employing such frightening images as dismembered bodies and napalmed children, the poster cautioned that war (and particularly the Vietnam conflict) exacted the most costly price.
By the time that the United States had committed total man and firepower to the Vietnam quagmire, LBJ decided not to run for a second term as president (acknowledging public dissension). Nonetheless, he continued to aggressively pursue the war, which had gathered such momentum that it was not about to be concluded at that time. End Bad Breath acknowledged the frustration Chwast—and many Americans—felt over the inevitability of an out-of-control war.
End Bad Breath was distributed through Poster Prints, and—compared to the other inventory of celebrity and psychedelic posters—it was fairly strident. But Chwast admits it was by no means an innovation. “This was the kind of illustration method that was being done in those days,” he explains. “Little people on shoulders, things in mouths—so I didn’t break any new ground.” The woodcut, which Chwast chose to use because of its sudden-death immediacy, was not new, either. It was the medium of choice for German expressionist artists, many of whom were members of left-wing political parties during the early twentieth century. Anyway, novelty was less important to Chwast than effectiveness, and the poster did have an impact “if only as an icon for those of us who had already made up our minds about the war,” Chwast comments. “But it certainly didn’t change any minds.”
Chwast does not harbor any false illusion that his, or any, poster made a difference in the eventual outcome of the Vietnam War. But when taken as one piece of ordinance in a larger arsenal, its impact is very significant. It may not have had the same widespread exposure as the nightly network news broadcasts (which arguably changed Americans’ perceptions more than anything else); it may not have been as influential as rock songs like Country Joe and the Fish’s “Fixin’ to Die Rag.” But it was a mnemonic representation of government folly that underscored deep-seated dissent and an effective component of the larger antiwar campaign. It was also ubiquitous in graphic design magazines and competition annuals, which presumably helped to raise the awareness, if not stimulate the activism, of those in the design profession.
Men with No Lips
ROBBIE CONAL
The notice Post No Bills was coined in mid-nineteenth-century England to prevent the hangers of illegal placards from littering London’s otherwise dreary streets. By law, the Post No Bills notice had to appear approximately every four feet along a wall or hoarding for it to be considered a placard-free surface; but even the threat of fine or arrest didn’t daunt the erstwhile posterist in the performance of his duty. Since then, Post No Bills has become an invitation to engage in the act of posting. Once the only method of displaying advertisements and proclamations for those without access to mass media, postering is still the cheapest and most defiant means of reaching the public.
Few have challenged posting ordinances more than Venice, California–based artist/activist Robbie Conal (b. 1944). As the leader of a national band of agitators, he has flown coast to coast armed with rolls of incendiary paper to supply an army of poster snipers. In reality, this army is a loose network of urban poster guerrillas who in the wee hours of the morning plaster their respective cities and towns with messages that addressed a variety of social ills. Since the mid-1980s, Conal has produced, at his own expense, an average of three posters a year on subjects he belie
ves mass media has failed to cover.
Conal’s first foray into confrontational street art was an enigmatic though provocative poster titled Men With No Lips, an attack on former President Ronald Reagan’s cabinet, whose tight-lipped responses to public inquiry obfuscated the dismantling of social welfare programs at home and the undermining of sovereign governments abroad. This poster, originally designed to fit standard traffic light switching boxes—the most ubiquitous unofficial poster surface in Los Angeles—was simultaneously hung on building walls, hoardings, and lampposts in New York and Chicago. A hybrid of fine art and agitprop, Men With No Lips was often mistaken for a rock band advertisement. Yet after a few sightings the intent of the message to tweak Americans’ hearts and minds out of complacency became clear.
… after a few sightings the intent of the message to tweak American’s hearts and minds out of complacency became clear.
Conal admitted his decision to become a postermaker was part of a “plot to escape from the friendly confines of the art establishment,” which he joined as a painter after majoring in psychedelic drugs in college during the late 1960s. He called his brand of agitprop “infotainment,” and admitted that the last thing he wanted to do as a non-sanctioned public artist on social issues was to be deadly serious. “I knew that people on the street would ignore the humorless message on their way to work in the morning, and besides, I had a sardonic twist to my sensibility. So taking a little lesson from advertising, I thought I would just pique people’s interest. I wasn’t interested in telling them what to think as much as getting them to think along with me, and giving them a little chuckle, too,” he explained.
Conal’s social activism stems from being a “red-diaper baby” raised on the “upper left side” of New York City by parents who were labor organizers. “The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree,” he said. Although he spent a few years trying to reconcile the often rocky relationship between art and politics, Conal eventually discovered a process of painting and postermaking whereby he could publicly express his indignation on issues such as Iran-Contra, women’s reproductive rights, and censorship.
His second poster titled Women With Teeth was the opposite of Men With No Lips. “Considering myself something of a feminist, I figured I should give [women] equal time and image,” he said. The series included portraits of Nancy Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and Joan Rivers (whom Conal felt had traded in her alternative culture birthright for an establishment pedigree); these also sprang up around the nation thanks to the increasing number of volunteer snipers he and his friends had recruited. The response was gratifying. “There was a lot of silent resentment on the streets,” he reasoned, “so when stuff started showing up in this subversive way, I think it was like a voice for a lot of people who had been silent. This grassroots little yelp had become a chorus.”
The theme of accountability runs through Conal’s work. And so his third poster titled Speak, which featured Conal’s expressionistic rendering of Iran-gate principal Colonel Oliver North, was a mammoth wanted poster. Conal regretted that he did not have enough money to print two others in the series, Hear and See, featuring portraits of President Ronald Reagan and his security aide, John Poindexter, but he did succeed at getting Speak hung in some of the most visible locations around the country, including site-specific Washington, D.C.
MASS MEDIA
Jugend and Simplicissimus
In 1896 not one but two revolutionary periodicals were introduced in Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany. Jugend codified a distinctly modern graphic style, and Simplicissimus translated it into graphic social commentary. Both signaled a rebellion of youth against court-sanctioned romanticism and dehumanizing industrialization. Jugend, published by Dr. Georg Hirth, gave a voice and a name to Jugendstil, or “youth style,” and Simplicissimus, edited by Albert Langen and Thomas Theodore Heine (1867–1948), harnessed the graphic power of this new movement as a polemical tool.
Jugend, a Munich weekly published from 1896 to 1926, was the principal outlet for the dissemination of Jugendstil art and literature. Its fanciful cover illustrations and changing logotypes defined a style that was built on the rejection of the familiar and antiquated. Jugendstil dismantled entrenched artistic conventions, including classical approaches to rendering. It replaced realism with abstraction and rococo embellishment with curvilinear decoration. Jugend revealed a French influence (some of its artists emulated Henri Toulouse-Lautrec), but was nevertheless quite German in its adoption of gothic lettering and imagery. Page layout was often dictated by the complexity of the illustration, causing untold headaches for the printer whose job it was to rag the type to conform to the curvilinear designs.
Satire was the fuel that fired the profoundly influential Simplicissimus, also a Munich weekly published from 1896 to 1944. Co-edited by Thomas Theodore Heine, a poster artist and cartoonist, Simplicissimus, also known as der Simpl, was at once the progenitor of a new graphic style and a thorn in the side of the Kaiser (who saw to it that the artists were harassed and imprisoned more than once). Although der Simpl’s covers were not as adventuresome as those of Jugend, it nonetheless pioneered a graphic style that influenced other pictorial journals throughout Europe. Most images were given full-page display, accompanied only by a caption and headline. Der Simpl’s stable of contributors included modern cartoonist Bruno Paul (1874–1968), whose woodcut-like brush-and-ink drawings were said to have influenced the German expressionists, and Eduard Thony (1866–1950), who lampooned the Junker—or military aristocracy—with such beguiling subtlety that even his victims admired the work. Issues such as political corruption, religious hypocrisy, and militarist stupidity were assailed, while the virtues of the Volk, or peasant class, were extolled in beautifully proportioned, stylized vignettes, and caricatures.
Jugendstil was a component of a short-lived but exuberant pan-European cultural episode that began in the late nineteenth century and ended before the outbreak of World War I. It was similarly practiced in Paris as art nouveau, in England as the arts and crafts movement, Scotland as the Glasgow school, Italy as Liberty, Austria as the Secession, and Czechoslovakia as the Bohemian Secession. Each nation imbued the style with its own social and political characteristics, but there was also a shared visual language rooted in a rejection of all things sentimental. Art nouveau inveighed against parochial nationalistic movements while promoting the international exchange of ideas. It refused to acknowledge any distinction between the “fine and lesser arts” and was both decorative and expressive.
Art nouveau was influenced by the simplicity of traditional Japanese design. Its practitioners swore allegiance to the natural object and cultivated an appreciation of symbolism. Theirs was a lexicon of sinuous, naturalistic, curvilinear forms. Jugendstil combined these organic impulses with a geometric edge. Pervasive in Jugendstil design was what one critic called “fantastical melancholy,” communicated through Teutonic wit and folkloric symbology. Jugendstil took nourishment from William Morris’s arts and crafts movement in England but did not reject all industrial things, which it instead sought to cover with decorative motifs. Jugendstil artists rejected traditional typography, choosing instead to render unique ornamental typefaces that worked harmoniously with an image. Brushed letterforms were used on posters and advertisements, while a few eccentric faces, notably those by Otto Eckmann, became emblems of the era.
Jugendstil was a component of a short-lived but exuberant pan-European cultural episode.
Exponents of Jugendstil believed in the ideal that good design could change the world. While it had an impact, this was an unrealized goal that came to an abrupt end prior to World War I. Today Jugendstil is a stylistic reminder of rebellion against the status quo. The magazines Jugend and Simplicissimus were its clarions. Although it might seem tame in the postmodern epoch, Jugendstil possessed a quality that transcended the moment and continues to influence contemporary illustration and design.
PM and AD
The Compo
sing Room of New York was no mere type shop. It was the vortex of progressive design activity from the late 1930s to the 1960s. No other type business promoted itself more aggressively, or so determinedly advanced the art and craft of type design, and in the process made such a significant contribution to practice and history. What began as a campaign to attract typesetting business from advertising agencies and book and magazine publishers evolved into one of the most ambitious educational programs that the field has ever known. It initiated type clinics, lecture series, single and group exhibitions, catalogs, and one of America’s most influential graphic arts periodicals, PM (Production Manager), later called AD (Art Director), published bimonthly between 1934 and 1942.
The program, conceived and sustained for almost forty years by The Composing Room’s cofounder, Dr. Robert Lincoln Leslie (1885–1986), was rooted in graphic arts traditions yet was motivated by his personal willingness to identify and promote significant new approaches even if they rejected tradition. What made The Composing Room so profoundly influential, in addition to being a recognized leader in quality hot-metal type and eventually photo-typesetting, was a commitment to explore design approaches with a blind eye toward style or ideology. Despite his own preference for classical practice, “Doc” Leslie (he was a licensed physician) or “Uncle Bob,” as he was affectionately called, gave young designers a platform on which to strut their stuff.
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