see also:

Art Deco

7 American Art Deco and the Second World War

 

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

The American Magazine

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

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

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

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

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

Fortune

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mehemed Agha and Vanity Fair

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

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

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

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

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

see also
collection:

Georges

Lepape

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

see also collection: Georges Lepape
 

Conde Nast, Vogue, and Fashion Photography

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

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

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

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

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

Cipe Pineles

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

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

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

7.12 Cipe Pineles, Seventeen Cover, July 1949.

Alexey Brodovitch

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

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

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

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

PM Magazine

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

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

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

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

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

7.15 Lucian Bemhard, Bemhard Gothic Typeface, 1929.

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

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

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

Government Patrons
 

The Great Depression

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

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

FAP Posters

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

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

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

      The FAP posters were viewed by a dramatically larger audi­ence than the educated elite who read Fortune, Vogue, or Vanity