Three years earlier (1930), John Heartfield, who was then art director and copublisher of the Malik Verlag, had begun doing satiric photomontages (a marriage of dada and caricature) that graphically ripped the façade off Nazi leaders and functionaries. Montage was key to AIZ in the years of the Nazi ascendancy because, with the Worker Photographer Movement in Germany officially crushed, obtaining usable (socialist) imagery was impossible. Only through photomontage—the ironic juxtapositions of realities in the service of polemics—could the magazine continue to convey strong messages.
The last issue of AIZ to be published in Berlin was dated March 5, 1933; Münzenberg then moved the operation to Prague. But AIZ went from a circulation of 500,000 copies in Germany to around 12,000 in Prague. Attempts to circulate a smuggled miniature version into Germany were unsuccessful. In 1936 AIZ was renamed Volks Illustriete; two years later, when German occupation of Czechoslovakia was imminent, the magazine was moved to France, where it published only one issue. Until AIZ ceased publication in 1938, it was a satiric thorn in the side of the Nazi régime. Most of the picture stories are now forgotten, but Heartfield’s photomontages are celebrated today as prime documents of agitation and protest.
AIZ influenced USSR in Construction, which published monthly between 1930 and 1940. Founded by Maxim Gorky, its declared editorial mission was to “reflect in photography the whole scope and variety of the construction work now going on in the USSR.” Toward this aim USSR in Construction was published in editions of five different languages—German, English, French, Spanish, and Russian. As rotogravure magazines go, with its multiple die-cuts, inserts, and gatefolds, it was exceedingly more lush and inventive than others of its genre. The magazine employed the leading Soviet documentary photographers, including Max Alpert and Georgy Petrusive, and the most prominent graphic designers, notably Lazar El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko (with Varvara Stepanova). Constructivist typographer Solomon Telingater was also brought in on occasion to design the type.
Early issues contained unremarkable pictorial sequences with expanded captions. But by 1931, when John Heartfield arrived in Moscow for an extended visit, he was invited to design an issue on the Soviet petroleum industry. His photographic cover showing oil derricks cropped on a dynamic incline was a stunning departure from the previous, somewhat bland, typographic treatments. The magazine’s nameplate (or title) was composed in a dynamic manner using sans serif letters thrusting, like a gusher of oil itself, toward the sky. Heartfield showed that a graphic designer was capable of transforming the most common photographs into dramatic tableaux. Nevertheless, another two years passed before the editors allowed Lissitzky the freedom to make radical changes in layout and typography.
Despite the attempts of such contemporary magazines as Double Take and Blind Spot, the photography magazine, that weekly window of news and views, is an anomaly today.
Both Heartfield and Lissitzky contributed something that had been missing: a sense of narrative. Lissitzky, who had been practicing book design, seamlessly integrated pictures and text and allowed generous space for mammoth blowups of documentary photos and heroic photomontages across spreads and gatefolds. Juxtaposing unaltered and manipulated images told the story of Stalin’s “glorious” régime and the progress that technology and industry brought to the post-revolutionary Soviet Union. Gradually, USSR in Construction evolved a style of visual rhetoric characteristic of socialist realism. Maxim Gorky introduced USSR in Construction, pushed the boundaries of this genre, and became a paradigm of pictorial propaganda later used in magazines published in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Indeed many of his tropes—overlapping pictures, multiple duotones on a spread, mortised inserts—have ultimately been used in commercial catalogs and corporate annual reports. Maxim Gorky introduced the concept of “romantic realism,” which addressed the idyllic future of the state. But the magazine folded during the war years and returned afterward in a smaller size and with more mundane layouts.
Photography is a uniquely viable medium (and inexhaustible art form); as practiced in these pioneer picture magazines, the journalistic photo essay is all but extinct (except in coffee-table art books). Despite the attempts of such contemporary magazines as Double Take and Blind Spot, the photography magazine, that weekly window of news and views, is an anomaly today.
Direction
PAUL RAND
He favors Le Corbusier’s underlying philosophy … his avoidance of ornament, his dependence upon masses, proportions, and inherencies for success in the solution of a problem,” exclaimed the October–November 1938 issue of PM magazine of Paul Rand (1914–1996), at twenty-four years old the leading American proponent of functional design. “Artistic tricks divert from the effect that an artist endeavors to produce, and even excellent elements, such as bullets, arrows, brackets, ornate initials, are, at best, superficial ornamentation unless logically and reasonably employed,” Rand explained. But at that time these graphic accoutrements were considered soothing to most clients. So how did Rand succeed in expressing himself, and otherwise change conventional practice? The answer can be found in a series of covers designed for Direction magazine between 1939 and 1943.
Rand was reared in the commercial art bullpens of New York and understood the needs of American commerce. He never intended to be a radical, but from the outset of his career he had an instinctive understanding of modern painting, a passion for popular art, and a flair for wedding the two. He was harshly critical of the lack of quality in American design practice, and believed that even the most common aspects of everyday life could be enriched by an artist’s touch.
Although he was enthused by the new currents in art and design, he refused to mimic or follow them blindly. Rand insisted that it was not only wrong but also “uneconomical from the aesthetic point of view” merely to borrow or separate from context without understanding the factors that brought an original into being. He further gave credence to Le Corbusier’s dictum that it is necessary to understand history, “and he who understands history knows how to find continuity between that which was, that which is, and that which will be.” PM concurred: “Rand is unhampered by traditions… . He has no stereotyped style because every task is something new and demands its own solution. Consequently, there is nothing labored or forced about his work.”
Rand’s artistic awakening came in the late 1920s at the New York Public Library where he explored the stacks and pored through volumes of Commercial Art, the British trade journal that published articles on the European avant-garde practitioners, including expatriate E. McKnight Kauffer. He had a second epiphany at a little magazine store adjacent to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where in 1929 he bought his first issue of Gebrauchsgrafik, the most influential German advertising arts magazine ever published. It was in this periodical that Rand learned about the practice of, and the term, graphic design.
By 1938 Rand had produced enough noteworthy design that he caught the eye of Marguerite Tjader Harris, the daughter of a wealthy Connecticut munitions manufacturer. She was intent on having Rand design covers for Direction, an arts and culture magazine that she published on a shoestring, which featured articles by Le Corbusier, Jean Cocteau, and other avant-gardists. She offered Rand no recompense, but plenty of freedom and, ultimately, a couple of original Le Corbusier drawings. But Rand had another motive, “In a country that was used to decorative work, the common sense way to have what I was doing accepted was to do it for free,” he explained.
More than any other project, the Direction covers exemplified the timelessness that Rand attributed to the most significant art and design. “When I designed a cover of Direction, I was really trying to compete with the Bauhaus. Not with Norman Rockwell,” clarified Rand. “I was working in the spirit of Van Doesburg, Léger, and Picasso. It was not old fashioned. To be old fashioned is, in a way, a sin.”
Each Direction cover illustrated a particular theme or point of view; the first, and his most politically astute, showed a map of Czechoslova
kia torn in half, representing the nation’s evisceration by the Nazis. Contrasted with an E. McKnight Kauffer Direction cover showing a realistic hand impaled by a Nazi dagger, Rand’s abstract depiction was both subtle and eloquent. Rand avoided conventional propagandistic tools in favor of imagery he believed would serve as both art and message. His 1940 “Merry Christmas” cover was a visual pun that substituted barbed wire for gift wrap ribbon. Rand photographed real barbed wire against a white background lit to pick up the shadows. Little red circles made by a hole punch represented spilled blood. The barbed wire was a striking mnemonic symbol for oppression. “It pinpoints the distinction between abstract design without and abstract design with content,” he insisted. “You can be a great manipulator of form, but if the solution is not apt, it’s for the birds.”
The surprising juxtaposition of visual elements and universal symbols was born of necessity. Messages had to be conveyed quickly and efficiently. Since there was no budget for materials he often used handwriting instead of type for many of the covers. He even pieced together the stenciled masthead (a precursor of the stenciled IBM logo, perhaps) from letters in type catalogs. His images were often assembled from various elements. “Collages don’t imitate reality,” he stated. “The machine aesthetic dictated that you don’t do things by hand anymore.” Nevertheless, the Direction covers did not slavishly conform to such modern principles, and hand drawing was used on occasion.
Rand was the first to confess that these breakthrough covers were not entirely unique. “I never claimed that this was great original stuff,” he confided. “Other guys in Europe were doing this kind of thing.” But even though he admitted to paying homage both to Picasso and the surrealist art magazines Verve and Minotaur, Rand created a unique visual vocabulary—and a collection of memorable magazine covers—that was unlike anything being done in the United States at that time, or for a long time after.
Book Covers
EDWARD GOREY
The public knows him for his animated titles for the PBS television series Mystery! and the sets and costumes for the Broadway productions Edward Gorey’s Dracula and The Mikado. Through his numerous books and theatrical productions, Edward Gorey (1925–2000)—illustrator, author, playwright, theater and ballet set designer—has carved out a unique place in the world of arts and letters. The imaginary tableaux in his books and stage plays are replete with turn-of-the-century appointments (lace curtains in windows, marble mantelpieces, four-poster beds, vases of aspidistras, and ornate funeral urns) and peopled by a cast of eccentric and sinister gents, dames, and tykes as well as a menagerie of autochthonous hippos, birds, alligators, bats, and cats. Through his macabre crosshatched drawings and staccato linguistic rhythms, Gorey (the name is certainly appropriate) has created a world that transcends all sense of time and place. His surreal black humor is literally a study in light and dark in which the unspeakable is spoken, the unthinkable is thought, and the horrific—murder, mayhem, and unexplained disappearances—is comic.
In 1953, he published his first book, The Unstrung Harp, an odd thirty-page tale illustrated in a satiric Edwardian manner, about the trials and tribulations of the mythical author Clavius Frederick Earbrass, a pathetic figure in a fur coat who lives alone in a stately house full of portraits and statuettes that look exactly like him. That same year, he accepted a position in the art department of Anchor/Doubleday, where he did pasteups and lettering. He also designed about fifty book covers before leaving in 1960. These illustrated covers comprise a small but significant chapter in the history of paperback cover design and in the legacy of the white-bearded, fur-coated man who made them.
All but forgotten today, these covers established a visual personality for a company that was founded to reprint many of the world’s classic texts, some of which were previously published in paperback versions during the late 1930s and 1940s, when virtually all mass-market books were adorned with prurient covers designed to pander to the voyeuristic reader. Then the style was to cover such literary classics as Tolstoy’s War and Peace or Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment with bosomy damsels in distress, but by the late 1940s, cooler, more rational heads prevailed. In the 1950s, certain paperbacks aimed at serious readers were given more sophisticated cover art by such modern designers as Alvin Lustig, Paul Rand, Rudolph de Harak, and Leo Lionni. Gorey’s covers for Anchor/Doubleday were not orthodox modern design but they were astute interpretations of the texts, handsomely designed, and smartly composed.
Gorey’s involvement began inauspiciously. He had known Doubleday editors Barbara Zimmerman and Jason Epstein from his days at Harvard. He visited New York just before Christmas of 1952, when they were starting Anchor Books, and did a few freelance covers for them. In turn they offered him a job in their small art department. “At first I turned it down,” Gorey recalls, “because I didn’t want to live in New York… . So much for that. I realized that I was starving to death in Boston and took the job the next year.”
Gorey was born in Chicago, where he graduated from high school in 1942. He applied to the University of Chicago, Carnegie Tech (as it was known as in those days), and Harvard. “I went to this kind of fancy, intellectually (so to speak) reputable private school in Chicago, so in those days it was fairly easy to be admitted to Harvard,” he explains. “I couldn’t get in now if I crawled on my hands and knees from here to Cambridge.” After he was discharged from the army in January of 1946, he received his acceptance to Harvard and attended on the GI Bill. “So I trotted off to major in French, without bothering to discover whether they had a particularly good French department or not.”
At that time Gorey was drawing pictures, “if that’s what you want to call it,” he quips about his seeming lack of motivations, “with the intent of nothing at all, I assure you. I’ve never had any intentions about anything. That’s why I am where I am today, which is neither here nor there, in a literal sense.” So he took the job in the publishing-house art department, which, he admits, wasn’t too taxing. “In fact, when I saw some of the pasteups that other people did, I thought that these well-known artists [like Ben Shahn and others who did covers] really were all thumbs. I never had much patience with having to redo other people’s pasteups, which looked like they’d just flung the lettering on the page.”
In addition to this menial work, he designed covers. His first, Lafcadio’s Adventures by André Gide, revealed Gorey’s aptitude for classical drawing with an idiosyncratic twist. The style was rooted in nineteenth century representationalism but was not so easily pigeonholed into a specific time frame. His second cover was what he describes as “a kind of tacky little drawing of the Globe Theater from the air, which I found someplace and copied for a book on Shakespeare by Mark van Doren.” In addition to the linear drawing style, Gorey’s finished lettering looked as though it were a comp or a sketch of hand lettering that approximated real type. At that time, paperbacks either had calligraphic or typeset covers, but Gorey’s style was betwixt and between: “I was stuck with hand lettering, which I did very poorly, I always felt—but everybody seemed to like it,” he says. In fact, when he published his own books, all except the first were hand-lettered in the manner of his earlier book jackets.
Gorey was not the first to employ hand-drawn letters. Paul Rand initiated the practice because typesetting was too expensive and deducted from his overall fee; hand lettering ultimately became a defining characteristic of his book-cover design. Gorey was not concerned with the costs; rather, “I didn’t really know too much about type in those days, and it was simply easier to hand-letter the whole thing than to spec type. Eventually, though, I did a lot of things that weren’t hand-lettered, as far as book jackets were concerned.” But lettering became a trademark of his own work, and he also rendered it for other designers who, he says jokingly, “were even less competent in lettering than I was.”
In addition to his regular diet of French literature, he also enjoyed reading British novels and had an admiration for British book-jacke
t illustration, which influenced his overall style. A voracious reader his entire life—“I was much better-read than most of the people who were doing artwork”—Gorey did not, however, do a lot of preparation for his covers. “I was usually handed the assignment, and there would be some little paragraph summarizing the plot,” he explains. It rarely mattered anyway, since his style was so individual that the covers themselves did not illustrate the respective plots as much as they evoked moods.
Gorey developed stylistic and compositional conceits that recur throughout this work. “There were certain kinds of books where I followed a routine,” he admits, “such as my famous landscape, which was mostly sky so I could fit in a title. Things like A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov, Victory by Joseph Conrad, and The Wanderer by Henri Alain-Fournier tend to have lowlying landscapes, a lot of sky, sort of odd colors, and tiny figures that I didn’t have to draw very hard.” He also maintained a muted and earthy color palette—rather surprising, given that paperback convention demanded covers that were miniposters, able to grab a reader’s eye in an instant. Explaining his palette, he says, “It was partly because you had to keep it to three [flat] colors, plus black. I guess I could have picked bright reds or blues, but I’ve never been much for that. My palette seems to be sort of lavender, lemon yellow, olive green, and then a whole series of absolutely no colors at all.” One of these so-called no-color covers was Gorey’s interpretation for Kafka’s Amerika, which shows a Goreyesque character—an almost-skeletal silhouette standing on the closely cropped deck of a ship entering New York harbor. With only a hint of pink in the clouds, this otherwise-dark, lugubrious image is not the typical prequel for Kafka’s critical vision of America but rather a snapshot of every new immigrant’s fears upon entering a strange land.
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