Today, there’s a renewed scholarly and curatorial interest in Latin American furniture, product and graphic design. MoMA is currently exhibiting Crafting Modernity: Design in Latin America, 1920–1980. The recently published Diagramming Modernity: Books and Graphic Design in Latin America, 1920–1940 covers a largely unknown swath of publication and typographic history. And the forthcoming A Modernist Regime: Cuban Mid-Century Design—the first comprehensive museum exhibition dedicated to Cuba’s Modern design movement—will feature objects never exhibited outside of the country. The exhibition opens at Cranbrook Art Museum on June 15, and will run through Sept. 22; the excellent eponymous book is available now.

A Modernist Regime was co-curated by Cranbrook Art Museum Chief Curator Laura Mott, design historian and curator Andrew Satake Blauvelt, and curatorial fellow Andrew Ruys de Perez. The show originated with Abel González Fernández, an independent curator who was based in Cuba when the project began but is now Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.

I recently conducted the following interview with Blauvelt, who also wrote essays in the book on the highly regarded OSPAAAL posters and the export of Cuban graphic design as means to globalize Castro’s ideology.

In your revelatory book I am particularly struck by the photo of Fidel Castro lounging in a Modern-furnished room. The photo suggests the “hope” that Modernism symbolized, but also suggests the American and European influences that were so prevalent in pre-Castro Cuba. Can you explain what you mean by A Modernist Regime?
“A Modernist Regime” is a way of identifying the idea of Modernism within the Castro regime that comes to power in 1959. We usually associate Modernism with socialism and capitalism, historically. What struck us about this story is how Modernism transforms in Cuba under different political economies: first, under an autocratic capitalism of the Batista regime, then under a promise of social democratic reforms by the early Castro regime, and then again under a communist dictatorship. All three phases are influenced by the Cold War politics of the U.S. and U.S.S.R., of course, as well as the non-aligned nations that sought autonomy from these superpowers.

Was Cuban design Modern by default, having been imported into the country by the previous regime, or was it symbolic of the new era to come?
Modernism in design was introduced in the 1930s by Clara Porset, and important furniture designer who had studied it in Europe and the U.S. Interestingly, she advocates for a Modernism that could be adapted to the Cuban culture and climate. Although she was from a well-to-do family, she was drawn to the social, egalitarian promise of early European Modernism. These political beliefs led her to be exiled from Cuba for most of her adult life as she fled the Batista regime for Mexico. She briefly returned to Cuba when Castro came to power, hoping to see the transformation of Cuban society and to lead a design school there, but that did not happen and she returned to Mexico after a couple of years.

Midcentury Modernism was definitely a presence in Cuba, especially Havana, which was the tourist center for the country, and given its proximity to the U.S. and the volume of American visitors it would take hold. At one point Knoll furniture company even opened a showroom in Havana. This was definitely an imported Modernism, more capitalist and Western in nature. There were Midcentury residences and hotels built before the revolution, for example.

The book and exhibition cover the designers who were associated with progressive design movements and groups. Was this encouraged as an alternative style compared to the previous regime?
The idea of Modernism shifts after the revolution. In the show, we focus mainly on furniture design. Since there is no private enterprise under the Castro regime, the government becomes responsible for design and thus creates companies or enterprises to deliver those goods. Inevitably, it inherits whatever was in place before 1959. So, design continues on, but it adapts to its new socio-economic-political circumstances. The regime creates a Modern furniture company called Dujo, whose design director is Gonzalo Cordoba, who was a furniture designer before the revolution but chose to stay in Cuba when many others fled.

Dujo furniture was created mainly as an export product and was shown and sold in Europe. It resembles Danish modern furniture but utilized native woods and local materials. I should note, however, that Scandinavian design took much of its inspiration from the tropical environs of the Global South, exotic woods and rattan or corded upholstery, for instance. So, the idea of influence and innovation under Modernism is a complicated story! Dujo furniture was also used in the offices and homes of high-ranking government officials. So, we find it in Castro’s office. Later, the government began focusing on domestic furniture needs and designers responded with explorations in new ways of making such goods in large volumes. It created a new company called EMPROVA and the Light Industry Group to explore such things as panelized and user-assembled furniture, flat-packed goods, and modular designs.

Was Cuban design deliberately attempting to reject Soviet-style communist/socialist “Modern”?
Interestingly, the country did not adopt a national style like social realism in the USSR under Stalin or in China under Mao. Social realism was the rebuke to Modernism and abstraction, in particular. As Cuba fell under the influence of the Soviet Union (it was under an embargo by the U.S. since 1960), it adopted more of its products and thinking. For example, prefabricated architecture emerged in Cuba before the revolution, where it made sense because of the lack of certain materials and manufacturing capabilities on a small island. This exploration continued after Castro came to power but eventually gave way to more expedient solutions imported from the U.S.S.R., like concrete slab construction for housing. It was efficient, I suppose, but ill-suited to the climate and aesthetically non-descript—the exact opposite of the glamour associated with Midcentury Modernism, for instance.

You state in your foreword, “Cuba also presents an interesting subject for design history given the country’s colonial history and multicultural legacy.” How does this manifest in the Midcentury aesthetic in Cuba?
For the furniture, we see especially in the Dujo line, a recourse to Cuba’s indigeneity—even the title of the company is a reference to a duho chair, a ceremonial lounge chair used by the Taino peoples who inhabited the Caribbean before Columbus. Some chairs referenced Taino artifacts and objects. There is a moment of historical reflection in Cuba, on this particular past, that I equate with the need to link to precolonial histories, a way past the dominant colonial legacies of exploitation, slavery and extraction. This I see also in the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL) posters, which were designed for mostly non-Cuban cultures, countries also escaping their colonial histories and legacies. For OSPAAAL, we see the use of the precolonial warrior figure as analogous to the contemporary freedom fighter or revolutionary. OSPAAAL also supports the American Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the U.S., drawing linkage between its own Afro-Cuban legacy of slavery and diaspora.

Another packed quote to unpack: “European modernism was transformed as it was introduced to pre-revolutionary Cuba.” How, in fact, did this transformation manifest? Did the designers ultimately have to conform to a state-sanctioned aesthetic? Or did Castro’s regime give license within the parameters of available resources?
In most ways, Modernism, understood as a European project, was transformed anytime it left its origin. That said, it was transformed when it came to Cuba, as I mentioned above, when it encountered a tropical environment, for instance. Porset was good at explaining that traditional heat-trapping upholstery would not be the best in Cuba, so the use of natural fibers woven with air circulation in mind. Or the use of local woods, called “exotic” in European counties. The OSPAAAL posters are also an intriguing blend of many styles and influences. It is so eclectic in fact it’s hard to call it Modernist by any strict definition—maybe pan-Modernist. Perhaps I would even call it Proto-Postmodernist when one views it collectively. All of this happens within a small historical window of opportunity—when Modernism could be imagined to be a more egalitarian solution to the people’s problems. Ultimately, many of these artists and designers grow disillusioned with the Castro regime and its increasingly authoritarian policies. This culminates today in a state which strictly controls what can be produced by artists, imprisons and forces into exile voices of dissent.

Where did all these artifacts come from? Who or what has been collecting these rare Cuban Modern examples? And is Cranbrook the first North American museum to display them?
We are indebted to two individuals for this project: Marco Castillo, who recognized that this furniture needed to be preserved and has done so. Most of the furniture is from his collection. And, curator Abel Gonzalez Fernandez, who recognized the importance of telling this history. Some designs, particularly in the 1970s, were only ever prototypes, so some of these are being recreated for the show with the assistance of the original designers. The objects have been on view in Cuba in smaller exhibitions but not in a museum in or outside of Cuba. This will be the first time at Cranbrook. The OSPAAAL posters are different and were quite celebrated in their own time, along with other forms of Cuban graphic design, particularly the country’s film and propaganda posters of the 1960s and 1970s.

The exhibition is, as you say, mostly about furniture and architecture, but let’s talk briefly about the posters. Cuban posters have long been on the cutting edge in terms of entertainment, information and propaganda. How do they fit into the book and exhibition’s focus on Midcentury Modernism?
I wanted to include the OSPAAAL posters and some examples of experimental architecture from the same period (1960s and 1970s) because they also deal with Modernism in their own unique ways. In my essay, “Becoming Modern: Importing Modernism, Exporting Revolution,” I wanted to show how graphic design and architecture participated in the same flows—being transformed by Cuban hands and minds but also by the state and its ideology, particularly when it left Cuba and was on an international stage.

Our stereotypical American view of Cuban design focuses on a frozen time period—mid- to late ’50s-era cars, architecture, signage—all nostalgically yet practically/functionally preserved. So, how has this project altered the perception of Cuban revolutionary style?
Interestingly, this furniture is now being preserved, refurbished, but only because it’s being collected. Typically, objects in Cuba are used until they are no longer able to be used—such is living with the scarcity of materials and goods under an embargoed Cuba. The Cuban government has not been interested in preserving this part of its history. The stories exist with the designers, many of whom are no longer alive, unfortunately. I hope we are able to help preserve this history and to enlarge the circle around it. I also hope that we can reflect on Modernism through a different lens. What would the story of Modernism be if it were written from the perspective of the Global South instead? I’d like to hear more stories like that.

For over 40 years Summit Magazine was a top periodical in its genre. “And its impact was—and continues to be felt—well beyond the climbing world, in large part due to the avant-garde aesthetic that Jean and Helen cultivated with the Summit‘s covers: sometimes chic, sometimes stark, sometimes playful,” says Michael Levy, its new publisher and editor-in-chief.

This spring, a refurbished Summit Journal (issue 320) was reborn as a print-only, biannual, oversized, coffee-table-quality magazine devoted to longform storytelling and large-format photography. The first issue came out in February, and the next is due in August. Previously, Levy spent five years working for two other outdoors magazines, Rock and Ice and Climbing. As has happened with so many other print properties in recent years, the print editions of those titles “went the way of the dodo.”

“As someone who loves print as a medium for longform storytelling, it seemed like the perfect time to take a crack at starting a new print magazine,” Levy says. “Rather than start a brand new magazine, though, I loved the idea of breathing new life into a historic title. Summit, in the climbing world, is as historic as it gets.” He acquired the rights in February 2023, and put out the first new issue in over 27 years.

Here he talks about his climb back up the summit, as well as some of the covers art directed by Kilness and Crenshaw, who have been unheralded in the history of magazine design.

Why have you revived the magazine as a journal in print only? Doesn’t that seem to be counter-intuitive?
On its face, there’s definitely something counterintuitive to being print only. But in another way, it seems exceptionally rational to me? That is, if you can get the material in the magazine online, doesn’t that decrease the perceived value of the print product?

My feeling is that with the glut of content online, there’s something to be said for a highly curated physical product. There’s so much out there on the internet that a lot of stuff, much of it quite good, just gets lost in the noise. But something tactile that you can feel between your fingers and read over a cup of coffee or a beer, that prioritizes longform … it might not reach as many people, but the people it does reach will be that much more invested. Print feels a bit like vinyl to me; what’s old is new again, and the collectability of it, the quality of the physical thing itself, is important. Just like vinyl isn’t going to replace Spotify, print isn’t going to replace digital, but there is a very real audience out there (and I’m in it) that likes analog media, and appreciates reading things that aren’t on a screen.

And building off that, print also felt like a more achievable business model, in a strange way. Though print has a higher bar to entry–the hard costs to get it off the ground were greater, and if I didn’t attract enough subscribers, the whole thing would have been dead on arrival–once cleared, the way forward felt much clearer. You can only fill a magazine with so many articles, after all. 

Of course, I’m a storyteller: What matters most to me is pursuing quality longform journalism. If the articles and image curation inside the magazine are no good, it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on. But given what I think is the extremely high quality content we have managed to fill the magazine with, my feeling is that the exterior should match.

The magazine was founded by two committed climbers. Tell me a little about their goals and feats of magazine publishing.
Jean and Helen were trailblazers, plain and simple. … They were iconoclasts.

Jean and Helen were serious and eminently capable climbers. They lived in Big Bear, CA, in the San Bernardino Mountains, and would head out for adventures in the mountains, and climb at smaller cliffs close to home. Another fun story: Sometimes, so busy were they with their adventuring, they’d forget what issue number they were on, so there are a couple of the old ones that have the same month!

In the hundreds of issues they published, they were actively shaping the culture of the nascent sports of rock climbing and mountaineering in the U.S., pursuits that had a longer history in Europe. In addition to publishing the essays and accounts of cutting-edge ascents by the best climbers of the day—guys like Yvon Chouinard and Royal Robbins, who are household names today—they also published trip reports by families out in the hills or on a fishing trip. They cultivated an egalitarian ethos with their magazine, in content and authorship, publishing an outsized number of women.

What do you think is or are the most significant graphic element(s) of the magazine in its original form and format?
Summit’s old covers are just so distinctive. Particularly in the 1960s, they had a really bold aesthetic, combining bright colors, illustration, playful geometric shapes and different media. Most of the covers are devoid of coverlines, and many have a very minimalist look, e.g., a single pinecone against a blue background, or a silhouetted climber on a cliff against a bright yellow background. My favorite cover is probably September 1967: a minimalist illustration of a lone figure silhouetted on a hill looking up at the night sky. It’s beautiful in its simplicity.

They also used color in paradoxical ways—e.g., a mountaineering scene bathed in neon green or neon pink—and sometimes used ultra close-up shots—e.g., one section of a climbing rope.

One of the cool things in resurrecting the magazine has been to see how far its legacy extended beyond the fairly insular climbing world. I’ve had a whole host of people from the design world reach out to me to express their love and affinity for the old covers and their style.

What have you done to bring it valiantly into the 21st century?
One of the fun parts of reviving an old magazine versus starting one from scratch is that we can lean into the old stuff. The new Summit very much has one eye on the past, while also keeping one eye on the present and future. One example of this: For our debut issue in February, we had two covers. One was an illustration, one was a photo. The illustrated cover, by a great young French artist named Thomas Danthony, was very much an homage to Summit’s covers in the ’60s. The photo cover is very much a splashy, modern climbing photo, full of motion. The stories inside reflect this duality too: We publish both modern reportage, and stories about the history of climbing and climbing culture.

Physically, the magazine has also gotten a big overhaul. The new version is 10″ x 13″, so quite large. It’s printed on heavy stock, uncoated paper. It feels closer to a coffee table book than a newsstand magazine.

In terms of the aesthetic, the inside has what I’d consider a pretty modern look overall: Most of the imagery is displayed in full-page or spread format to really take advantage of the magazine’s size. My art director, Randy Levensaler, has been working on print magazines for decades, and has an incredible eye for effective yet eye-catching layouts

That being said, in terms of the text, we’re very much charting a classic look. I can’t tell you how much Randy stressed over the font choices, text size and spacing—and I think it shows.

We also retitled it as Summit Journal. For six years in the 1990s, after Jean and Helen sold the magazine, it was rebranded as Summit: The Mountain Journal. It closed up shop in 1996, and hasn’t been published since. So going with Summit Journal felt like a way to nod to both former iterations of the mag, yet once again signal that this is a new magazine for a new era.

Do you have to be a climber to be a reader?
Definitely not. I myself am a passionate climber, but at the end of the day my mission is to fill Summit Journal’s pages with quality journalism, photography and art.

The best piece in the first issue is by a brilliant young writer named Astra Lincoln, and it is about the advent of photographic surveying in the Canadian Rockies at the turn of the 20th century, and how this a) led to a boom in mountaineering, and b) is also inextricably related to episodes of ethnic cleansing in the area. It’s masterful.

Some of what we publish is surely a bit lingo heavy, but most of it, I’d say, should be totally accessible to the non-climber.

What is your longterm goal for Summit?
To make a magazine that people want to keep on their shelf to read and flip through again and again over the years.

During the ’20s and ’30s the Italian artist Paolo Garretto was a giant of international advertising design and editorial art, as inventive as A.M. Cassandre, as prolific as Jean Carlu, as witty as Miguel Covarrubias. There was hardly a noteworthy American magazine that had not published Garretto’s work at one time. There were virtually no French, Italian, English and German poster hoardings or kiosks on which his advertisements did not regularly appear. His airbrushed caricature epitomized Deco styling. His geometric conceits captured the romance of the industrial age. Paul Rand called him “one of the world’s most formidable draftsmen.” Yet by the ’50s his ubiquity was on the wane. Art directors called his work a vestige of pre-war innocence. As happens to all stylists, the vagaries of fashion took their toll. Garretto’s approach was no longer in demand, eclipsed by Modern and faux Modern tendencies. Though he never completely vanished from view, and continued working until his death in 1989, his memory might have been forever consigned to the years between the wars if not for the Postmodern ethos that caused designers to quote, borrow and steal from history. In one such appropriation, Garretto’s spirit, if not his actual form, was briefly revived.

Garretto’s fame in the United States was due to the regularity with which his work appeared in Fortune, Time, Vogue and The New Yorker, but even more directly owing to his work in the original Vanity Fair. As one of Vanity Fair‘s three most popular caricaturists (the others were Covarrubius and William Cotton), Garretto’s work was regularly shown to millions on its covers and inside pages. In 1983 when the inheritors of Condé Nast’s publishing empire (but not necessarily of his wisdom) decided to revive the mothballed Vanity Fair, they tried to imitate its original formula (wrongly, as it turned out, since times and interests had changed). Because Garretto had given the magazine a portion of its graphic identity, it was reasoned that a modern-day Garretto would provide the same allure.

Caricaturists were found who were practicing similar moderne conceits but lacked the insight that Garretto brought to his pictures, insight and intelligence that made his work transcend mere ephemeral style. It was further reasoned that if Garretto, who had not worked for Condé Nast for 40 years, were alive and still capable of making art, perhaps he would lend a nostalgic glow to the fledgling publication. In fact, Garretto was then in his early 80s, and living in Monte Carlo.

He was located by Lloyd Ziff, then Vanity Fair‘s art director, who commissioned him to do several covers. They were, however, rejected by the new editors for apparently being too nostalgic.

Ziff’s discovery awoke my own interest in this artist, which actually began after I was introduced to his work some years prior. And late in 1986 I began a regular correspondence with Garretto that continued until a month before his death in August 1989. My questions to him focused on his professional life, the development of his distinctive style, the people he knew and admired, and why he faded from view. Well into our correspondence I somewhat timidly broached the subject of his early entanglements with the Italian Fascist party and the stories I had read about his having designed the Fascist uniform and being one of Mussolini’s elite bodyguards. From the outset his letters to me were surprisingly candid, open and warm, and amidst the countless references to, and apologies for, his failing health, he recalled his many triumphs and failures, including his flirtation with Fascism.

This article is based on these letters, on conversations with people who knew him and additional biographical material.

Garretto was born in 1903 in Naples. “I began doing caricatures when I was very young, just as an amusement,” he wrote. “Never thinking that I was going to be a caricaturist all my life.”

In 1913, at age 10, his family moved to America so that the elder Garretto, a scholar from the University of Pisa, could do research for a history of the United States that was commissioned by an Italian publisher.

“I knew very few English words at the time,” Garretto recalled, “and was only able to explain myself in school through drawings on the blackboard.”

The family ended their stay in 1917 when Garretto’s father was recalled to serve as an officer in the Italian army. Paolo and his mother settled briefly in Florence. At war’s end his father became a professor in Milan, and Paolo attended the Fine Art School of Brera where, “I always had trouble with my professors inasmuch as I liked Futurism and Cubism and they did not like the [odd] way I saw our models,” he mused in one of his letters. “For I did some sketches in the manner of these movements that shocked my teachers.”

Garretto’s naive interest in the avant garde and his youthful rebellion against authority was consistent with the social and cultural turmoil brewing in Postwar Italy that was splitting the society into two extremes—the Communists and Fascists—and ultimately led the nation to its totalitarian destiny.

In 1921 Garretto’s father assumed a teaching post in Rome and Paolo enrolled in the Superior Institute of Fine Arts to study architecture. He and some friends began to frequent Rome’s famous Cafe Aragno where artists, actors, and politicians assembled to drink, eat and debate the hot issues, and where Paolo began drawing crayon caricatures of these celebrities on the white marble tables.

“One night I happened to sketch a good one of Pirandello and a better one of Marinetti, and a journalist who was there asked me to sketch them on paper. His name was Orio Vergani, a poet and writer of comedies, and soon through him I began to sell my caricatures to the Roman newspapers.” His drawing became more than a mere hobby, and he decided that he too wanted to be a journalist. “I did everything from then on,” he recalled, “writing little pieces that I illustrated and doing posters and decoration for the movies.” In fact, the fickle Garretto quickly switched his ambitions to a career in the film industry, after initially serving as an assistant to one of his professors who was a scenic artist for the director Fred Niblo while in Rome filming the original Ben Hur (with Raymond Navarro). Niblo used Garretto as a translator and hired him to do some graphics too. However, the tiring daily routine on the set was “not for me,” wrote Garretto. “I have always been, and hoped to remain, quite independent.”

But not everything in the young Garretto’s life was so fancy free. As a young boy he had developed a “visceral” and long lasting anti-communist attitude after learning that the Imperial Russian family, “including little [Prince] Alexis,” were murdered by the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution. He wrote that “I can still remember my father reading the article [about their assassinations] to my mother, who was horrified.”

So in 1921, as Italy’s political situation grew worse, Garretto was shocked into what for him would lead to a moral stand.

“I had suffered a terrible experience,” he wrote as if the event were yesterday. “During the anniversary of the 1918 victory over Austria my father went to a gathering at the tomb of the unknown soldier where he was assaulted and beaten by a mass of Bolsheviks. Father came home with a head wound, his uniform in pieces, his war decorations stolen. We were all furious! But father was one of the best men who lived in Italy. He told us to be calm and said about his foes in true Christian spirit: ‘they do not know what they are doing.’ But in those years nearly all my good friends were Fascists [because they too hated the communists]. At school and Aragno they all asked me why I did not join them. But my father had forbidden me to adhere to ‘that bunch of people who are not worth more than the Communists,’ and in those times one generally listened to fathers. Then one day in June 1922 a bunch of Communists passed [my house] shooting, hollering, shouting and carrying red banners. We all went to the balcony to see what was happening and saw them beating the local food merchant, stealing his wine, flowers, fruits, salamis and hams. They also smashed in the windows of the corner cafe before running away. The next day I went to the Fasio to join the Fascist party. But I was too young and was told to join the Vanguardista [the Fascist youth movement] until I turned 21 years old.”

Garretto’s father was furious with his son for disobeying him, and was heard to say repeatedly and seriously, “I have three sons—two are OK, but the eldest is crazy in the head.” Yet Garretto, like so many other young Italians, had been swept away by revolutionary fervor as well as the glamour of Benito Mussolini’s black-shirted legions. The only problem Garretto had was a sartorial one. “I did not like the way they were all dressed up: they had only one common garment—the black shirt. As for the rest of their uniform, they wore anything they liked, such as long pants of any color. So I designed for myself a uniform that was all black—shirt, cavalry pants and boots. My friends who liked the attire copied it. In fact, four of us, Mario and Carlo Ferrando, Aldo Placidi and me became known as the Musketeers.”

By accident this ad hoc collegial group became Mussolini’s formal honor guard. For in 1922 after being rebuffed by Parliament in a crass power play, Mussolini gathered his legions around the Royal Palace in Rome to give an ultimatum to King Victor Emanuele. The King received the bald soon-to-be dictator and named him to head the government.

Garretto recalled the thrill of that day: “Mussolini and the other Facist leaders came down among us. The Musketeers were all lined up at attention, and when Mussolini saw us in our crisp new uniforms he asked Gino Calza-Bini, the founder and leader of the Roman Fascio, ‘Who are these?’ My friend Placidi was prompt to answer: ‘We’re the Musketeers!’ To which Mussolini responded, ‘…they shall be my Musketeers!’ and passed on. In the evening we were ordered to the Fascio and told that we would become 33 instead of four. Calza-Bini was happy and we were too, but we did not know what kind of an ordeal it was going to be from that day on. This was the beginning of a period that [in hindsight] I did not like at all.”

With Il Duce’s approval, Garretto became a charter member of the manipolo (a formation of 33 men based on Julius Caesar’s plan of military organization in which three manipoli equal one legioni) whose expressed task was to escort Mussolini and his four lieutenants to various ceremonies. “There were always six or eight of us on duty,” Garretto wrote. “And who was the one that was nearly always on duty? Not being married nor having any business to attend, I was one of those. You can imagine my life at home,” he added with a touch of sly humor. “My father was furious inasmuch as I could not attend my Art Academy and continue studying to become an architect. My mother was worried to see me always on the run, but there was nothing to be done. For in the meantime Mussolini had founded the Milizia Volontaria Sicurezza Nazionale [the volunteers for national security], which enlisted all its Fascist members for life. So I found myself militarized forever.”

Garretto’s conscription lasted only one year. Though his biography in a 1934 issue of Vanity Fair called him an “enthusiastic Fascist and founder of Mussolini’s body guard,” he insists it was an act of folly that he tried to overcome. One day, in fact, his father interceded on his behalf with the general in command of the Milizia. He explained to the general that his son’s duty to Il Duce was ruining his chances for a position in architecture, and asked if Paolo could be given a leave of absence until graduation. Miraculously, the general agreed. “He asked me to give my name, date of birth, and address to his secretary,” recalled Garretto, “who typed it up, got it signed, and gave it to my father. We bowed, went outside, and to our surprise we saw on the paper that he had signed a permanent discharge.” To this day it is still a mystery whether the order was deliberate or a classic example of Italian efficiency.

As for the anti-Communism that caused him to embrace Fascism, it prevailed until his death, but regarding his flirtation with the party. “I consider all these years of my youth a great, useless lesson inasmuch as I am still not able to say what is right and what is wrong.” Garretto also wrote about 1925, the year of his reprieve, with a decidedly palpable sense of joy and innocence. “Aside from the Academy I started to really live.” At this time that he was drawing caricatures for more Roman newspapers and satiric journals, but his primary aim was to get a passport and start traveling. The first stop in what would become a peripatetic lifestyle was Paris, where Garretto hoped to find a market for his caricatures (which by his own description were “very different and modern”). After two weeks, however, he had not made any significant contacts and returned to Rome. But in 1927 he was urged by some former art school friends to return to Paris; since they had found work there they assured him that he would too. Their jobs were with Dorland Advertising, the largest agency in the world. Garretto was introduced to their boss, one Mr. Maas, who loved his drawings and suggested that he go to London where there were many color magazines requiring good illustration. Maas was the representative for the “Great Eight,” a group of British publications including The Illustrated London News, The Graphic, The Bystander and The Tatler, among others. With a glowing recommendation letter, Garretto flew to London, where he presented some decidedly unconventional caricatures of Chamberlain, Lloyd George, D’Annunzio and Mussolini. “They [the editors] asked me to leave the drawings as well as my address in Paris so they could contact me. However, after a few weeks without any word from them I returned to Rome [dejected] and proceeded to focus my energies on getting my architecture degree.”

The impatient Garretto gave up too soon. For one day, shortly after his return, he recalled receiving a phone call from one of his friends in Paris who excitedly said, “Paolo … how did you do it? How did you get into the British press?” The friend explained that in the current issue of The Graphic were printed four color caricatures with a caption announcing that these were “new ideas of a young French caricaturist.” Garretto was ecstatic (though he definitely did not want to be “branded as French”) and bought all the copies of The Graphic on sale at his local Roman newsstand. He also learned that the “Great Eight” was looking for him all over Paris so that they could award him a contract for regular contributions. Thus began what he called “the beginning of my international artistic adventure.”

Many monumental things happened in 1927. In addition to embarking on the road to fame and ubiquity as a graphic artist, “I also married [his first wife Ariane], went to live in Paris and worked in London,” Garretto wrote. “But my wife did not like London so I had to commute every week by airplane (Fokkers from the war that were adapted by Air France to make the trip over the Channel).” Over the years he made hundreds of caricatures for the “Great Eight” and for advertising clients too. “It was pleasant for a while,” but then he admitted, “with the years passing by, the faces to caricature were becoming scarce.”

To find other challenges he began doing some work in Italy for Gazzetta del Popolo in Turin (a newspaper for which he designed a format), Rivista del Popolo d’Italia (Mussolini’s flagship magazine), and Natura, a beautiful Milanese magazine for which he designed the covers, and which were reproduced in the leading advertising arts magazines in Europe and the United States.

The late ’20s was not only a time of political upheaval, but a period when artists believed in the power to change people’s thoughts through graphic design.

“As all others, I was pushed by Cubism, Futurism, Divisionism (what our professors had called ‘stupid inventions to get attention and fame any way possible’). I tried very hard to be different,” wrote Garretto about the genesis of his personal style. “We were all conscious that we were pushing and trying to change something or everything. I recall when Fortunino Mantania, a very famous [art nouveau] illustrator from the turn of the century, came to my father’s house one evening. To get his opinion, I showed him a drawing I had made for a new brand of coffee. He told me to forget, what he called, my ‘fantasies and useless tricks’ and design a nice, nearly naked girl embracing the package instead of my smiling Neapolitan cafeteria (coffeepot) pouring coffee in a demi-tasse.” Garretto respected him, but thought his ideas were old fashioned. So instead, “I did my idea and it was bought.”

Garretto’s approach was based on simplification of primary graphic forms into iconic depictions and loose, but poignant, likenesses. Vibrant, airbrushed color was his trademark, and he also experimented with different media to create exciting new form, including experiments with collage and modeling clay, which proved fruitful. Without his superb draftsmanship what is now pigeonholed as Deco styling would surely have been a superficial conceit, but his conceptual work was so acute, and his decorative work was so well-crafted, that he eschewed these pitfalls. Writing in a 1946 issue of Graphis, his old friend and sponsor from the Cafe Aragno days, Orio Vergani, describes Garretto’s ingenuity this way: “Once the constructive theme of his images is discovered, Garretto proceeds to the invention of the media necessary for executing them. I believe he has painted, or rather constructed, his images with everything: scraps of cloth, threads of rayon, with the bristles of his shaving brush, with straw, strips of metal and mill board, with iron filings and sulfur, tufts of fur and wings of butterflies. His colors are born of a strange alchemy of opposed materials in the light of an artificial sun; he seeks for the squaring of shade as others have sought for the squaring of the circle.”

Though Garretto lived and worked out of his flat in Paris, the City of Lights was no more than a base from which to work for publications and agencies in other major world capitals. He visited Berlin often, where he worked for the Berlin Illustrated News, Leipzig Illustrated, Der Querschnitt, Der Sport im Bilder, and others (until Hitler assumed power and had expelled many of the Jews on the creative staffs of these journals). In London he did advertising work through the London Press Exchange, the most important advertising outfit in the British Empire, basically because Charles Hobson, its director, asked him to do some “modern and surprising posters.” Owing to his own globe-trotting and the consequent lack of time for what he called “mondanities,” Garretto did not nurture many friendships in Paris. He did, however, know the French masters of poster art, A.M. Cassandre, Jean Carlu, Charles Loupot and Paul Colin, and was briefly connected to their advertising “agency,” Alliance Graphique, owing to his friendship with a Montmartre printer named Dupont. For this agency he did a sketch of a poster for Air France’s new airline, La Fleche d’Orient. It was immediately bought by the client, apparently ruffling the feathers of the other Alliance members, whose own attempts to sell their ideas had failed. Avoiding silly rivalries and business minutia was why Garretto invariably preferred to handle most of his other advertising accounts directly with the client. Around this time he met Alexey Brodovitch at his office at Les Trois Quartiers, the chic Parisian department store, for which he was art director. It was an acquaintance that would have interesting consequences later in Garretto’s career.

“I had seen some of Brodovitch’s work,” recalled Garretto, “and was very enthusiastic about his new way to advertise men’s clothes, shoes, and women’s beauty products. For me, an admirer of the [raucous] Futurists, it was very exciting to meet this very calm, controlled Russian.”

Garretto’s caricatures were published in the United States, first by the Philadelphia Ledger and the New York Sunday World, then Fortune Magazine started using covers, and later he did drawings for The New Yorker‘s profiles—but his really significant American exposure occurred in October 1930 when Clare Boothe Brokaw, one of Vanity Fair‘s chief editors, requested his services in a “flattering but unexpected” letter sent to his Paris home:

“Dear Monsieur Garretto,

“The Editors were very much impressed with your cartoon of Gandhi in the August issue of Fortune. We had also in our files some excellent caricatures made by you for the December, 1927 issue of the Graphic. It occurred to us that you may possibly have some other caricatures of prominent people, or cartoons of a political, artistic, or social nature, which you maybe able to send us. We should be very glad to consider them for publication in Vanity Fair.”

Garretto, however, did not respond until late December after Brokaw insisted in a second note that:

“We are indeed anxious to see your work, and if there is something we can use, we are anxious to do so in a forthcoming issue.”

Garretto no longer hesitated, and immediately sailed to New York to meet his new clients.

“Aside from the satisfaction that I always had through my work, I must say that the Vanity Fair period was really the most exciting of my life,” he recalled with a distinct melancholy about the special time that had passed. “I never had the slightest problem with them—[Frank] Crowninshield was a kind and most comprehensive editor, and what can I say of those beautiful and bright, intelligent Clare Boothe Brokaw (later Luce) and Helen Lawrenson? It was really a joy for me to go to New York every time. Not to speak of my friendship with M.F. Agha [Vanity Fair‘s legendary art director] whom I had met first in Berlin when he was art director of German Vogue.”

He spent time with Condé Nast in Paris and New York, stayed at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, and cultivated friendships with many of New York’s rich and famous. It was a charmed life. Fortunately for Garretto’s bank book he was commissioned by the New York office of the Italian Lines to execute some travel posters. For in addition to his fee they provided him with 50% discounted tickets on their transatlantic steamers. Since Garretto commuted to the United States almost as frequently as he went to London, the savings were well appreciated. When he elected to stay at home his working relationship remained unhindered by what today is a comparatively slow means of travel and communications. Indeed, he said that it was faster in the 1930s to send a drawing from Paris to New York (usually it took five to six days) than to send a package to Milan (taking 10 to 15 days). Moreover, his rapport with the editors was exemplary, given the commonplace interference in visual matters exercised by editors today.

“In general I would be told that [Vanity Fair] wanted a cover for a certain month and I would conceive it, send it, and then see it published,” he explained. “Only once did I have to rush another cover drawing because the one I had sent could not be used.” In this case the new one became a classic example of Garretto’s caricature as design in the service of polemics. It was rather prescient too, for this cover showed the world sweating under the heat of the Japanese flag (in a reference to an important world naval convention that Japan refused to sign). “Condé Nast wrote me a complimentary letter asking how ‘I came to nurture this idea.’ I told him that I knew the Japanese had no interest in signing a treaty that would limit their control. To me it was quite clear that Japan was growing fast and was very hungry for [power].”

Most of Garretto’s concepts were his own, and were often based on his sometimes profoundly acute—yet other times devastatingly naive—understanding of world politics. In addition to his commercial work, Garretto considered himself a journalist. He had been affiliated with newspapers for a long time, and so, as the war clouds over Europe began to darken and swell in the late ’30s, Garretto was allowed to travel, owing to his longstanding affiliation with the Italian Press Association, which made it possible for him to get visas for almost any country. When the war suddenly broke out in 1940 he was, however, in Turin art directing—”changing the face”—of the Gazzetta del Popolo and, because he was an Italian citizen could not get a visa to return to Paris to be with his wife (whom he later divorced) and son, who where stranded when the French frontier was closed to foreigners. Instead, he left for New York from Naples on the steamship Conte di Savoia, which was filled to capacity with Americans fleeing the future battleground. On board he shared a table with John Paul Getty, “who wanted to be left alone and was upset when he learned I was a newspaperman, but was mollified when I drew a caricature of him. He later told me to call him if I needed anything in the United States.”

Back in New York, Garretto worked for his friend M.F. Agha, who took over at Vogue after Vanity Fair had folded. He did covers for others. One such commission was earned a year before, through Brodovitch and editor Carmel Snow, who offered him a contract to design the 12 1940 covers for Vogue‘s competitor, Harper’s Bazaar. But as an American war with Germany and Italy was quickly becoming inevitable, Garretto’s past association would prove an insurmountable obstacle in his attempt to do more work and be allowed to stay in New York. The first problem arose with Harper’s Bazaar. Before leaving for Turin in 1939 he had completed finishes on two of the covers. When he returned he was anxious to complete the rest. But neither Snow (who was working with her publisher, Hearst, in California) nor Brodovitch (who was on vacation) could be found to discuss the jobs.

“So I started to work on ideas for covers for February and March,” he recalled. “Some time after this I reached Brodovitch, who told me in the nicest and kindest way he could that my contract was broken.” Garretto learned through the grapevine that a biography, titled Fascist Artist, printed in Vanity Fair in 1934 was making the rounds of Harper’s Bazaar, and given the tenor of the times the editors refused to give this “Fascist Artist” any work. “Happily for me,” wrote Garretto, “I always had Condé Nast and Fortune to accept me, so I carried on, nevertheless with a bit of bitterness, as you can understand. I later heard from Agha that Brodovitch had told him that he suffered but had to ‘obey orders.’ In my opinion he obeyed orders too strictly.”

Garretto was also given certain jobs to keep spirit and soul alive, including the re-rendering of Cassandre’s original Dubonet Man. It was assigned to Garretto by Paul Rand, then the art director of The Weintraub Agency that handled the account. Rand told me: “Garretto was a masterful artist, and accepted this job without any reservation or resentment even though I was not asking him for his own ideas.”

Because of the danger of war, President Roosevelt had stated that no German or Italian citizen could get a quota visa for the United States, and Garretto’s visitor’s visa allowed him only a few months sojourn. Covarrubias had assured him that he could help obtain a permanent visa in Mexico, so as to avoid deportation to the Virgin Islands. Unfortunately, this never materialized. However, since one of the many dignitaries Garretto met during his travels was Secretary of State Cordell Hull, he was told by Hull’s secretary that if he returned to Italy he could come back to New York to apply for permanent residency.

“But there was no time for this,” Garretto recalled. “Italy entered the European war. (And in the meantime I married my second wife in New York.) I was arrested, as were all other Italian newspapermen, and taken first to the Tombs [a New York prison], and then to the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs to join the Italian, German and Japanese diplomatic internees. After six months we were embarked on the Grottingholm, a Swedish boat as old as Noah’s ark, to Lisbon, where wagon-lit trains were waiting to take us to our respective countries.”

Just as his fling with Fascism was tolerated in America before the war, his farcical caricatures of Mussolini and Hitler (published in the United States) were only tolerated in Italy until war broke out. Garretto had heard that Mussolini was not pleased with a certain anti-war article he had written a few years earlier. So when he returned to Rome, Garretto was not in favor. And when he refused to do propaganda (owing, he wrote in a rather far-fetched statement, to an FBI declaration that he signed before being deported not to do any anti-US propaganda), he was forced to come up with an idea that would prove his patriotism and not land him in an Italian prison for insubordination or treason. His brilliant idea, which is quite funny in hindsight, was to help teach Italian to those peoples conquered by the victorious Fascist forces.

“I had patented an idea to teach our vocabulary through the movies,” wrote Garretto. “One would see a cartoon, a short (with live actors) and through the sound, the image, and written captions could learn the language.”

Garretto was sent with his new wife, Eva, to Budapest to put his invention into practice. His stay was rather pleasant until Mussolini was deposed, exiled and then reestablished as a puppet by Hitler. This meant that if an Italian living in a German-occupied country did not become a “new Fascist” in support of the new Duce, he or she would be interned as an enemy alien by the Germans. Such was Garretto’s fate for nine months until he and his wife were evacuated by the Germans in the face of the Russian advance. They were eventually deported to Trento, Italy, where they were able to escape from a transport train during an allied air raid, and managed to flee to Milan, where Garretto and his wife were helped by friends, even though they were “suspect citizens,” according to a document they were forced to carry.

With the war’s end, Garretto returned to Paris as an “ex-enemy.” Though it took time to reestablish himself, he made covers for the fashion magazine Adam and a few other small journals. In Italy he published a children’s book that he had written while interned in Hungary, and worked for several magazines, including Arbiter, Per Voi Signor, and others. In 1946, with the help of some friends, he was able to get a visa to return to the United States, where he designed a perfume bottle that was produced by Lucien Lelong. But generally speaking, in the United States his work was not as sought after as before the war.

“It is not me who stopped working for the American magazines,” he wrote in answer to the question of why he terminated his American associations, “but the American magazines changed a lot. They published less and less drawings. In my time, maybe there were less photographers. And the old art editors died or changed and maybe the new ones did not even know my work! My last serious appearance was in Vogue, in a special section dedicated to [the musical] South Pacific. So you see I did not stop … they did.” Dejected, he returned to France, where he worked for the Italian magazine Panorama and other “low-circulation, low-paying magazines.”

In 1952 Garretto found that living in France became a big problem. He “started to be singled out by the income tax operators in Paris, who found that I had not paid income tax in France on what I was earning in the US, Italy, etc. It was useless to tell them that I paid regularly in those different countries. So they fixed a big fine—too big for me to pay—and I decided to leave Paris and start again in Monaco where there is no income tax, but they tax you indirectly through prices that are higher than in France or Italy.”

Until Garretto’s death in August 1989, he actively pursued his life’s work. Though appearing only once in an American publication since the early ’50s—actually in a subscription flyer for Condé Nast’s Traveller—he has had many exhibitions throughout Italy and a critical biography about him was published in Naples. Yet despite today’s retro-illustrators who have borrowed and made a success of the Garretto approach, his own contemporary work, including portraits done in his 1930s style of The Beatles, Margaret Thatcher, and Liza Minnelli, is quite out of sync with the times. Stale even. Regardless of Garretto’s formidable drafting skills, his more recent representations of contemporary personalities lacked the intuitive strength that underscored his earlier work. Perhaps it might also be argued that the famous and infamous of the ’20s and ’30s are bigger than life while today’s are merely human scale. Maybe Margaret Thatcher could never be as powerfully charged a portrait as Benito Mussolini. Whether Garretto’s contemporary work holds up or not, the work he did during his heyday will be remembered among the most innovative caricature and illustrative design of the golden age of graphic style.

“One of the main purposes of this survey,” write the co-authors, “was to try and transmit the importance of the visual construction of modernity” through a trove of book and magazine covers. “These areas often became spaces for formal experimentation in the case of artists who were more used to working on canvas. … As a result, the artists enjoyed a fair degree of freedom, further encouraged by their incipient interest in using striking designs to catch viewers’ attention in store windows [italics mine].” Sometimes the illustrations, typography and compositions echoed “the same freedom” and even were “continuations of outer designs.”

The title of this book suggests the co-authors’ decision to avoid the term avant garde as focusing on European work that would force the “subordinate” view of Latin American design. Their achieved goal is to show that Europe alone was not the entire inspiration for what was Modern. They point to Mexican Stridentism and muralism and Chilean Runrunism as more homegrown and indigenous. For them “modernity” describes attitudes that were adopted by key artists and associated groups, which when seen together impart a holistic yet individualistic practice. In Diagramming Modernity the idea was not to prioritize nationalities but to describe and analyze “small societies” of progressives who have been forgotten or ignored. The names of these pioneering artists/designers are doubtless unknown to most of us in North America and Europe, but thanks to Gutierrez Viñuales, Boglione and other proactive design historians, they are now revealed for future scholars and collectors to newly explore.

On May 11, The New York Times published an obituary about a pioneer of graphic design who many, particularly on the East Coast, may not have known much about.

The following excerpt from The Moderns by Greg D’Onofrio and me is a testament to Stauffacher Solomon’s incomparable legacy. The doyen of California modern design died on May 7 at 95.

“Learn some rules,” Armin Hofmann said. “Follow them. Later, if you’re brilliant enough, you can break all the rules. Fine. If not, you will be competent at your profession.” Barbara Stauffacher Solomon mastered the rules.

Under the tutelage of modern Swiss masters in Basel, she became an early and devout practitioner of Swiss Style design starting in the late ’50s. In the early ’60s, she brought these ideas to America, merging them with a bold, expressive and enthusiastic California spirit and pioneering the world of large-scale forms, murals, and signage—supergraphics.

“I was a Californian. I went back to San Francisco and I broke all the rules. My designs were bigger and bolder than my Swiss classmates’ solutions had been. Give me a big white wall and I covered it with big red stripes,” she recalled. She may have been the first American designer to use Helvetica. In San Francisco, “local typesetters used Times Roman, Baskerville, Garamond, Caslon, Bodoni or Wild West-style typefaces,” she said, and “hippies painted squiggles, free, loose and sexy.” For her own letterhead, she typed and specced the text as 10-point Helvetica Medium and mailed it to a friend in Switzerland, as no American typesetters had the typeface. When she received the proofs from Basel, she cut and pasted the type and prepared a mechanical, which she sent to the printer. “My designs were the antithesis of the psychedelic hippy posters made in the Haight-Ashbury,” she said.

Solomon met architect Al Boeke, who was developing a new kind of self-governed, cohesive community—he called it Sea Ranch. This was her first big job; she designed the logo and all printed matter with Helvetica. She used pure colors to paint simple geometric and energetic shapes on the weathered wood of the buildings—giant waves, vertical and angled stripes, circle, arrows, and red hearts—along with signage in large, all-capital letters. “In this superworld … I combined the supersized enthusiasm of California Abstract Expressionism with hard-edge Swiss graphics, and ended up with … supergraphics,” she said. The Sea Ranch opened in 1967, and Solomon’s work was received with fanfare.

From The Daily Heller: Scanlan’s, designed by Stauffacher Solomon, was decidedly more modern-minimalist in the International or Swiss style—which is just what editor Warren Hinckle III wanted. Solomon had known Hinckle socially before he asked her to be art director of Scanlan’s. Her friend June Oppen Degnan (sister of the poet George Oppen) introduced them. Degnan had also given Hinckle $25,000 to help start the magazine.

“Warren and I meet at her political/socialite dinner parties,” Solomon recently recalled. “There were lots of parties in those days.” Hinckle’s office was bedlam back then. So to be able to work without constant interruptions, “Warren and I worked mostly at my office at 1620 Montgomery St. Warren arrived with piles of copy and loose photos and we put it all together, page after page, on my desks and floor.”

Solomon’s Scanlan’s design was unique for counter-culture publications at the time. Although Swiss Modernism was a common corporate design language, it was foreign in this context. Solomon said she practiced “Swiss graphics as I learned from Armin Hofmann in Basel. Warren was familiar with the work I did,” which included the SFMOMA monthly bulletins, books for Lawrence Halprin, brochures and covers for New Directions. “He had a sharp eye for design but never told me what to do.” And then there was the Scanlan’s logo, with its distinct apostrophe: “It was intentional,” she says. “I always designed big punctuation marks. I think I drew it for some reason and Warren said, ‘That’s it.’”

Art Spiegelman revived interest in the poem when he published a newly illustrated version in 1999. Around the same time, two musical productions were in the works. Andrew Lippa wrote the book, music and lyrics for a 2000 off-Broadway version while Michael John LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe launched another musical starring Toni Collette in her Broadway debut.

Producer Jeffrey Seller planned on bringing the award-winning off-Broadway production uptown to the Great White Way. He contacted Drew Hodges and Mark Burdett of SpotCo, creator of posters for RENT, Avenue Q, In The Heights and more, to do the graphic design. The ambitious result, art directed by Kevin Brainard and photographed in luscious black and white by Ellen von Unwerth, involved showing the entire cast acting out the debauchery of the poem.

“It was the best photoshoot Spot has ever done,” said Hodges.

It was “the sexist Broadway cast shoot that never saw the light of day,” added Brainard, who has made an online archive of the full set of 29 images.

The Lippa production won the 2000 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music, the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway Musical; Lucille Lortel Awards for Scenic, Costume and Lighting Design; and the 1999–2000 Obie Award for Best Choreography.

And now, for the first time since the original shoot, here is a selection of images from the all-day photo-orgy, with commentary by Hodges and Brainard—who also break down why the photos were never released.

How was the shoot accomplished?
Kevin Brainard: We did the shoot with the full cast at Nell’s, turning it into a 1920s speakeasy. It was amazing. Like a time machine. Every detail was considered, down to the matches on the table. We did not have a shot list—but there was the full cast in costume, there was booze, and photographer Ellen von Unwerth. Ellen was a whirlwind, running around with two assistants holding lights and shooting from the hip. A couple hours in, I switched the music and started with Prince’s “Sexy Mother Fucker.” All hell broke loose. Clothes started flying off, the cast was full on making out, pulling each other’s clothes off, candle wax was poured onto bodies. Ellen was constantly yelling, “Get naked!” It truly turned into a wild party.

Drew Hodges: We wanted to shoot a real party—kind of “method.” Everyone was, of course, in character and costume—but we took it further. As I recall there was real champagne, and Ellen Von Unwerth was literally being pulled around by the back of her belt through the “party,” room to room, situation to situation. I think her assistant did the pulling, although it might have been me or Kevin? I think it was the most “method” shoot I ever did—we were not looking at images on a monitor—there was no fourth wall. Ellen was just like a guest at a party, shooting constantly.

What were the pluses and hazards of doing it?
Hodges: I guess the hazard was we did not have a comp to match or a storyboard image we were creating. We were waiting to see what came out of the shoot. The actors were cast so well, the characters were so clear in the story, to both the actors and the production team. The obvious plus was Ellen. We had had a lot of success using the very best photographers in the world for Broadway (ultimately Max Vadukal, Amy Guip, David La Chapelle, Andrew Eccles, Len prince, Uli weber, John Dugdale, Brigitte LaCombe, Richard Avedon [stock]). No one had done this before us in the history of Broadway. That meant that budgets were bigger and so were risks. But it was completely fresh for the photographers and they responded with excitement. 

Brainard: This was my first large-scale shoot. I had developed a poster for client approval using a pre-existing photo by Ellen von Unwerth. But we did not have a shot list—which is crazy! Thinking back, I don’t remember being even a little bit nervous. Maybe it was because Spot—and Drew—were so nurturing that I felt no fear. Maybe it was because I knew Drew had my back. Or maybe because Jeffrey Seller—literally the best client ever—was always willing to take risks, and a leap of faith.

The short answer: giant shoot, big budget, full cast, rock star photographer, everything on the line, no plan.

How closely did it follow the actual book? 
Hodges: All the stories and characters matched the book 100%, as far as I recall. 

Why didn’t it see daylight (or Broadway light)?
Hodges: There were two interpretations of the same source material, two Wild Parties in the same season trying to come to Broadway. I begged them both to change the name of one—neither would blink. It was totally unheard of. The other production made it to Broadway based on reviews (and possibly foolhardiness), and a star, Toni Collette. And our Wild Party did not go to Broadway. These images were—mostly—meant for the Broadway campaign. Andrew Lippa’s Wild Party is still considered a legendary score and production. So many people in it became bigger and bigger stars. But at the time, we built a huge, beautiful, first-class campaign, and then the show did not move from off-Broadway to Broadway—so the images never ran. Jeffrey Seller, the lead producer and arguably the most successful producer in the last 30 years, considers it his favorite work we ever made together.

Who was involved in the conception, production and execution?
Brainard: Here is an excerpt from the SpotCo book From Rent to Revolution. This is Andrew Lippa’s recollection of approving the key art we developed:

“What color should the set be? There we were, with three painted panels placed on the empty stage of Manhattan Theatre Club’s Stage 1, comparing puke green, something vaguely blue and, finally, orange-y red? The production team was discussing the monochromatic notion of the set for the original production of The Wild Party and how it would all be painted with the same color wash.

“Oh well, off to a meeting at SpotCo to see what they had cooked up for the marketing and advertising. Getting a show poster of your very own show reminds me of high school when I had posters of Evita and 42nd Street on my wall. I arrive at the meeting and what do I see?  The color of the set. No, not puke green or vague blue. Dried blood. This, my friends, was it. This was the color our set should be and SpotCo told us how to do it.”

What happened to the end result?
Brainard: Besides a musical soundtrack released on CD, it went in a flat file drawer. There were test prints from Ellen of everyone’s favorite images. The thought was all the rest would be used in the Broadway campaign that never happened.

Still, as grand as it is, The Book of Colour Concepts 1686–1963 covers, as you can see from the title, just a slice of color in human history. “No book on colour can provide an encyclopedic record with a cultural, historical, geographical and thematic claim for completion,” Loske adds, noting that “metaphorically speaking” this book is “a coat of many colours.” Exploring 67 color “concepts” in nine chapters, in Vol. 1 the authors feature early charts and tables, circles, wheels and globes, the rise of color theory and nomenclatures and standards; Vol. 2 examines the teaching of color, the early 20th century, spiritualism, occultism and music, Eastern color concepts and, finally, the Bauhaus and beyond.

Lavishly illustrated and generously annotated, this book—published in three languages, as is Taschen’s trademark—is not for the faint of heart or the weak of muscle. The volumes are packed so tightly with beautiful art and essential information that reading them on one’s lap will result in 50 shades of black and blue.

But don’t let the bulk dissuade you from getting this book. It is a masterpiece of erudition on and about the brightest virtues of the natural and supernatural world — colour.

Look closely, now. . .

To the left of Kirk Douglas’ head is a handmade embroidered sampler—the vintage kind that was common for displaying a typographic motto like “Home Sweet Home.” This particular sampler is not as insignificant as it seems; there are three of them hanging around the office, and they underscore an important plot point.

These pieces are a venerable typographic medium. Per Wikipedia:

“A needlework sampler is a piece of embroidery or cross-stitching produced as a ‘specimen of achievement,’ demonstration or a test of skill in needlework. It often includes the alphabet, figures, motifs, decorative borders and sometimes the name of the person who embroidered it and the date.“

Seeing the pieces in the film triggered a few hours of digging through my digital and analog type specimen sheets to find more evidence of the origin of bitmap letterforms. This embroidery is made on a grid, and the letters conform to the size and shape of the grid in a form similar to early digital fonts. Whether this had any influence on bitmapping in the early digital days is supposition. However, I suppose it could have been an inspiring template for those designing ornate decorative wood and metal typefaces.

Just look at the sample pages from Au bon marché: Album de marques & de broderies (1900), which feature 40 plates of marks and embroidery. If this stuff did not influence the design of even a few fonts, I’ll eat my sampler.

Ward Schumaker, a veteran painter and illustrator, anticipates the 2024 election will be a war of words. So, as the campaign kicks into gear, he turned scores of Donald Trump’s most quotable bon mots into typographic broadsides—modern-day samplers—that measure 37″ x 25″, painted with acrylic + paste (along with some collage elements).

He’s been met with various responses, not all of them positive. For example, Schumaker told me that when he gave a talk about his Trump work at a museum, he was “harassed verbally” by a member of the board of directors: “These are all lies,” the board member barked. “Trump never said half these things!” And when showing them at Jack Fischer Gallery, a stranger threatened to pound him. These incidents happened in San Francisco, theoretically a safe place for such artworks. “Yet in Nashville, a pro–Trump stronghold, I was greeted with kindness, applause and appreciation.”

Schumaker is expressing himself in the media he knows best. I asked him what he hopes readers take away from it all.

I have a reasonable idea what triggered these broadsides, but can you put it in your own words?
I’d never been very political, but about seven years ago I asked my grandson what he’d been studying in school that day. “How not to be a bully,” he answered. Then added: “You know, like Donald Trump.” At the time I was making large, one-of-a-kind, hand-painted books, many using hand-cut stenciled words, and I decided to do one using Trump’s words. It was not the kind of subject I’d regularly use, and when I finished I didn’t know what to do with it. One night I woke thinking I should show it to my gallerist (at the time, Jack Fischer). I sent him jpgs, insisting he promise to show no one.

He promised. But the next day a woman came into the gallery and asked to see my work—she might buy a painting. Jack apologized, and said he’d only recently moved, and all my work was still at his old address. She sighed and started to leave. Jack stopped her: “But would you like to see an interesting project Ward’s been working on?”

Then he broke his promise. After seeing three of the spreads, the woman said, “Stop. Can I get my husband in here? He’s out in the hall.” The husband came in, looked at the work, then said, “I’m with Chronicle Books; do you think Ward would let us publish a facsimile of this?” In record time, Chronicle produced it as a trade book: Hate Is What We Need. The title is from one of Trump’s quotes.

And that might have been the end of it. But about the time I finished that first book, white supremacists marched through Charlottesville shouting “Jews will not replace us,” and Trump stated that there were “good people on both sides.” I felt compelled to make another book, this time including not only Trump’s incendiary words, but the words of others, both in support of Trump and those opposed. (That book is now in the collection of the Achenbach Foundation of Graphic Arts.)

However, my books are seen by few people, so I began making large broadsides in hopes of exhibiting them. I thought I might create 10, maybe even 15. I ended up creating 350. I am extremely grateful that the Letterform Archive has given each and every one of them a home in its collection. See their book Strikethrough. While I thought I’d quit a long time ago, I recently started doing more, which I mount on Instagram and Facebook.

Was it your intention to, shall we say, seduce the viewer into reading these?
My intentions vary, but first is always simply making certain others have seen and digested the latest vile words from Trump and/or his minions. If I have time, I might try to be clever, but most often it has been: What can I do quickly and still get my regular work done? And of course there is the fact that I’m a painter, not really a designer at all, so I have often embarrassed myself trying to be clever. I know some great designers and ask their forbearance.

You’ve succeeded at, in my view, what many “political artists” try and often fail to do, which is make intriguing art with a message that stands on its own. Was this your intent?
Thank you. I recognize that I don’t have the particular talent of esteemed illustrators (i.e. Edel Rodriguez) but I do value my paintings—and they’ve included words since I started painting, as a kid, back in the ’60s. So it has been a matter of simply doing what I do best: words-as-paintings.

How long did it take to make these broadsheets?
I started working on these in 2017 and I’m still making them. Each one is created using hand-cut stencils, so the longer the quotation, the longer it takes. The wordiest have taken three days to accomplish, others have been completed in one day. Often I start cutting words with no plan at all. I think of them as paintings, and my paintings have always followed that Rauschenberg rule: Do something, then do something else to it. It may not be the wisest way to work, but it’s what I know.

Is your work a kind of anti-DIY/DIY aesthetic?
As a kid I often raised my grade by doing what was termed as extra credit: making a book cover for biology class, for example, by pasting cut-paper words that said “Clothes don’t make the man, cells do.” As a 12 year old I was very proud of that. Of course I should have been embarrassed. Later, at the age of 35 I began illustrating, and my best work was definitely DIY because I didn’t know what I was doing.

Why haven’t I seen your Trump work on social media?
Early on I tried mounting the Trump Papers on Twitter. I was almost immediately thrown off. I wrote [to Twitter], asking for an explanation. Over and over I wrote. I got no response. Years later, a couple months after Biden was elected, I got a note from Twitter saying I could once again post on their site. Of course, I quit.

What do you feel is the most powerful piece among these?
Trump: “Women: You have to treat them like shit.”

Liz Cheney: “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”

And the most frightening—Trump: “This could very well be the last election this country ever has.”

How will you put these to use in the coming battle?
Truthfully, I don’t know.

What’s next for you in terms of where you’re feelings will drive your work?
Just before I hit 80, I started working in clay, and that’s been a joy. But Trump is running again and very possibly will win, so what can a person do?

Both were champions of lesser-known artists, and I was preparing to do a story on them for Graphis. I was excited to learn that they had recently moved to Lakeville, CT, near my own country home. That was 40 years ago. During those years they worked together producing beautifully designed and illustrated books for Creative Editions. Rita had a distinct classic-contemporary style that harmonized with Etienne’s uniquely fanciful artwork (as well as others she hired for the publisher). They were a fixture in the industry—Rita for her splendid art direction, and Etienne for his iconic conceptual illustration.

He was well-known and highly influential in the United States but was a high magnitude star in Europe, especially his native Switzerland, where exhibitions of his work were frequent and his books were constantly in print. All told, he illustrated more than 80 titles.

Etienne passed away on April 22at 83. He had been difficultly recovering at his home in Lakeville from a stroke two years earlier that had left him partially paralyzed. His death triggered a memory of a major moment in my own professional life.

Etienne produced the first printed color artwork to appear in The New York Times when I was working for the paper. The only direction I gave him was the title “The Sins of Summer” for our annual seasonal reading issue. I felt that running his image (seen below) was a personal triumph, since there was an unwritten rule that snakes were prohibited in the daily Times (a decree that annoyed me). This being the Sunday Book Review, it luckily passed under the radar. The publisher and editors were, in fact, more concerned with how our first attempt at a live color section (after months of faulty practice runs) would look and be received. Etienne successfully created the perfect image, using colors (the publisher had certain preferences) that passed muster. He also did a black-and-white version at the eleventh hour, just in case something went terribly wrong. Anticipation ran high. Yet nothing went awry. The color wall was breached. Most naysayers said yay. And over the ensuing years Etienne created around half a dozen more covers.

During the following decades he continued to illustrate and author books and exhibitions. He proudly mounted Les Maîtres de l’Imaginaire in Lausanne, Switzerland, to honor and archive Rita’s incomparable book and typographic design. (Which, he told me, being modest, she was reluctant to have done. He insisted.)

After learning of his death, I poured through the “Delessert” file I had been updating over the years. More than transcribing a list of his achievements, of which there are many, these funny, poignant, satiric, acerbic images speak volumes about his sense and nonsense—and do more justice to his legacy than I can do in words.

Schubert’s talents are new to me. She is, in fact, one of the industry’s best-kept secrets, having worked with Matthew Barney, Pope L., The New York City Ballet, Dev Hynes, Laurie Anderson, former president Bill Clinton, and SOPHIE.

Edited by Claire Marie Healy (who worked on A24’s dazzling look at cinematic dance), photographed by Jason Al-Taan, and designed by Wkshps, the book includes mini essays and photo tutorials on beauty makeup, special effects makeup and makeup for the screen—a unique talent that demands flawlessness. Ultimately, Beauty of the Beast redefines the stereotype of the gendered “powder puff girl” diminutive used against women makeup artists, and the masculine world of horror makeup by mixing the two approaches in a hybrid style.

In postwar West Germany, twen‘s luminescence brightened up the creative space in ways that are difficult to measure. Now, a new book, twen [1959–1971] by Hans-Michael Koetzie, Serge Ricco and Stephane Darricau, produced by Bureau Brut, brings its inspiring legacy once again to the fore. Below are some pages that underscore the intelligence endemic to Fleckhaus’ inventive, editorial typography and cinematic page flow.

The following is a translation of a French essay by Hans-Michael Koetzle excerpted from twen [1959-1971] .

The most influential, and thus the most important, magazine in postwar Germany was called twen. It was published from April 1959 to May 1971 and, although it never sold millions of copies like Stern (Hamburg) and Quick (Munich)—to name but two of the most widely read publications in the early days of the Federal Republic—it did have genuine international reach. It remains the only West German periodical to have attracted a readership not only in Europe but also in America.

With its innovative photography and spectacular layout, twen set a benchmark for editorial design and, it would seem, still inspires young designers, typographers, art directors and creative types of all kinds today. Avenue and Nova would not have seen the light of day without twen.

… Art director Henry Wolf described it as “the last individualistic magazine,” and David Hillman said it was “like no other magazine, past or future.”

In 1964, Milton Glaser staged a major twen exhibition at New York’s School of Visual Arts, and four years later the magazine was awarded a gold medal by the Art Directors Club of New York. As the editorial of the July 1970 issue proudly announced, this was the first time a European magazine had received such an accolade.

A new kid on the block, twen (“teen”) was founded in the late 1950s by two young Cologne publishers, Adolf Theobald and Stephan Wolf. It started out as a “mere” supplement to the student magazine Student im Bild, which Theobald and his team had been publishing since 1957. The aim of this new project was to reach beyond the campus to all types of young people between the ages of 20 and 30. The title was taken from the ready-to-wear clothing brand Wormland, whose … Twen jeans were hugely popular at the time.

The name was original—a first even for English-speaking countries—and a fresh reminder of young West Germans’ interest in the United States, less than 15 years after the end of the Second World War. Yet, despite the fact it covered jazz, literature, art, cinema, fashion and, first and foremost, photography, all topics of interest to this particular readership, twen was neither a magazine for young people nor a photography magazine, a cultural review or a traditional illustrated publication. It transcended all the usual categories and stood out not only as a magazine that was brazen and provocative, with a penchant for the erotic, but also for its generous and masterful layout.

The first issue hit the newsstands in April 1959 and was 104 pages long with a 36.5 × 27 cm format (slightly larger than subsequent issues, which were all 33.5 × 26.5 cm). It was printed in rotogravure by the long-established printer and publisher DuMont (Cologne), which guaranteed not only production quality but also efficient nationwide distribution. According to Stephan Wolf, the first issue of twen sold out very quickly, not least thanks to the coverage it received from the mainstream press.

(Editor’s Note: Fleckhaus invented the position of the “art director,” which did not yet exist in Germany. He acquired the nickname of “Germany’s most expensive pencil.” This is further explored in Design, Revolt, Rainbow (Hartman Books), the first comprehensive monograph on Fleckhaus. It includes texts by Michael Koetzle and Carsten Wolff, both experts on Fleckhaus’ work.)

(Note: Vecchio is currently chair of SVA MFA Illustration as Visual Essay, replacing the late founder of the program, Marshall Arisman.)

Would you explain the concept behind the drawings in your special issue of Un Sedicesimo?
31 Degrees is a participatory art project that sets out to draw attention to historically neglected populations and defunded neighborhoods in NYC, areas suffering from environmental and climate injustice that are disproportionately negatively impacted by heat, in an effort to aid local activism in their efforts to increase tree canopy in the areas that need it most. The project aims to partner with local grassroots organizations who are currently engaged in bringing attention to issues of systemic racism in their struggle to resolve environmental and climate injustices, as well as educational and cultural institutions.

Where does your project’s title come from?
The project’s title, 31 Degrees, takes its name from a collaborative study, part of a larger heat-mapping initiative in cities across North America, that heat-mapped parts of upper Manhattan and the Bronx, helping identify areas where environmental justice issues are a concern. The study found that due to low levels of tree coverage and green space, poorer neighborhoods, predominantly communities of color, are disproportionately negatively impacted by heat. Not only is heat distributed unequally in NYC, creating what is known as urban heat islands, its distribution follows other patterns of inequality such as race and income inequality. 31 Degrees references one particular day in July when the temperature difference varied by that amount from one upper middle class area in Manhattan to one of the city’s poorest communities of color in East Harlem and the Bronx.

The drawings have a print quality …
The drawings themselves take inspiration from old masters such as Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) and Albrecht Altdorfer (1480–1538), two artists considered the first landscape artists in the Western canon, who were painting trees and landscape without religious or other context, appreciating nature for its own sake. With this background, I created drawings of trees originally native to the New York area, like pines, fir and spruce, but which will become increasingly less widespread with the escalation of climate change.

What are you thinking about scale?
The project anticipates the drawings will be translated into both large- and smaller-scale murals. For the more intimate murals, each drawing will be printed as a poster-sized sheet, and with the collaboration of the public, they will be wheatpasted onto donated wall space to create site-specific tree designs imagined by the participants themselves. The purpose of the murals is to underscore the lack of tree canopy in these neighborhoods, while at the same time adding some arboreal beauty with the drawings in areas where walls are more prevalent than trees.

What is the significance of the mural to the cityscape?
For 31 Degrees, muralling is used as a vehicle to bring people together to participate in a creative process that provides the background for dialoguing around the parallels between climate inequality and income and racial inequality, and how we can raise our collective voices to correct this. The aim is to work together with organizations that are already present in the community focused on local issues, and through a hands-on creative process to encourage a sense of agency. But first, people must become aware of the issues, and then, that there are steps that can be taken to correct these problems. There are even newly enacted laws (both at the city and state level) that communities can call upon to hold our elected officials accountable.

What will it take to plant the trees?
On a practical level, only the NYC Dept. of Parks and Recreation can legally plant trees in the city. All requests for trees and all coordination must be approved and go through them. But, the real answer is, it takes the will and mobilization of the community to demand a healthier environment, one that they are legally, and according to the NYS Constitution, entitled to.

In a recent Museum Arnhem exhibition and book, Art in the Third Reich: Seduction & Distraction, curators/authors Jeller Bouwhuis and Almar Seinen explore the prejudices and preferences of Adolf Hitler as curator of the Third Reich’s artistic styles, movements and schools—his belief in the rightness of exactitude in idealized and mannered representation, and his vehement hatred of experimental and avant garde approaches. Although many loyal Nazis had a diversity of perverse interests that included Modernism, the dictatorship imposed official Nazified taste and denigrated or forbade the rest. German “volk” were indoctrinated through sanctioned annual traveling art exhibitions, often overtly curated and, not incidentally, featuring a large proportion of pieces owned by Hitler himself.

Seinen’s historical research astutely leans toward the underbelly of culture and art. This particular theme is addressed in our interview that focuses on the proclivity for art, architecture and design that conforms to Hitler’s view of his own place in history. Joseph Goebbels said that Hitler’s first love was art, but he was driven by his duty to restore Germany’s greatness. After he succeeded at that, Goebbel’s asserted, Hitler would return wholeheartedly to making art. I spoke to Seinen about the demigod’s mission and unwavering imposition of his tastes—and the curious revisionist qualitative nuances that arose in the art world of Nazi Germany.

What inspired your scholarship of Nazi-era art and artists?
I am interested in the margins of art history, in the stories we prefer not to tell the reasons why some art is—and other art is not—seen and canonized as “real” art. The fact that art is politically controlled, even today, does not fit in with our contemporary idea of the independent, autonomously operating artist. All these issues about how we relate to visual art, who is and who is not allowed to participate, who we cancel and the reasons behind it, it all comes into play if you study the art of the Third Reich attentively and with an open mind.

There have been books about Hitler’s propensity for heroic realism and romantic representation. What did you learn that adds to this body of knowledge?
Hitler’s personal preference, or taste, is often seen as limited and mediocre—petty bourgeois genre paintings, romantic landscapes and historical painting. Broadly speaking, this view is correct, but I think it is good to separate Hitler’s personal preferences from how he saw the role of art in his Germany. Art had to be clear, recognizable, appealing, narrative, optimistic and, above all, expertly made; within these parameters there was a lot of room for artists, even for Modernist experimentation, as Gregory Maertz explains in Nostalgia for the Future.

The Nazis plundered some of the greatest art in the world. How do you explain their affection for “nationalist” art?
Hitler saw the German people and the Aryan people historically as great culture bringers and culture creators. To underline this, art and cultural treasures from all over Europe were selectively stolen, looted and purchased to be widely displayed in, among other places, the large Führer Museum in Linz. The visual arts that would flourish again under National Socialism had to stand and continue in the tradition of all these old masters.

Was there any artist or piece of art that surprised you?
To compile the book and the exhibition that I made in Museum Arnhem, I went to see as many works as possible in real life. Like most of us, I knew the works mainly from books, and then only as small black and white images. Being able to see and study all the works in real life turned out to be really important, and in many cases was very surprising. I have tried—however difficult it is—to forget under which regime the works were created in order to have as neutral a view as possible. When you succeed in this, you suddenly see completely different things. You see brush strokes, craftsmanship, passion, even virtuosity. To your surprise, you see that there is indeed quality in these works that have been canceled by art history. Some works are simply of high quality. I was and am most impressed by the paintings of Edmund Steppes, a painter who weaves together Romanticism, Symbolism and Magical Realism in an inimitable style. All of the works exhibited by Steppes at the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung were purchased by Adolf Hitler himself, which just goes to show that there is more to the art of the Third Reich than we want to know.

What has happened to the majority of these artworks?
After the Second World War, a lot happened that caused art from the Third Reich to be consigned to art history obscurity. Art that is associated with a pernicious regime is replaced by good art that is at odds with it in content and form. Just like Entartete Art before the war, Nazi art was now banned from museums and locked in the cellar.

The artists presented in the German art exhibitions were clearly skilled, but other than technique was there any substance to their work?
Our idea of what Nazi art is is based on a handful of works that were taken by the Americans as war booty and thus remained visible in the public domain. Many thousands of unknown artists and works of art still need to be traced and studied to get a true picture of what Nazi art actually was. But no one wants to embark on this quest, and as long as this does not happen, the image we have of art from the Third Reich will remain stubbornly maintained. With the book and the exhibition I have tried to nuance the image of this art by dealing with it, actually for the first time, in a more neutral art historical way.

Co-chair Lita Talarico and I are very proud of our students. Guided by devoted faculty and advisors, they have developed their own products—from idea to prototype to business plan.

If I were asked to give a commencement address tomorrow, I’d show this work as one example of how today’s designers ready themselves for tomorrow (and beyond). We have been in a world where making superlative work is the essence of what we do, or should be doing. At any level—associate, BFA, MFA, Ph.D.—the mandate is to train designers to think, make and do.

It is a rewarding process. A gift for all concerned.

This one-off exhibition—set for May 22–23 at One Art Space—will feature original pieces from significant and influential Italian, Italian American and American designers. All the materials come from the archives of AIAP, the Italian Association of Visual Communication Design.

The exhibition and book is supported by Fedrigoni & Monotype and organized by Bryan Edmondson founder of SEA X Pentagram. Francesco E. Guida, coordinator of the archives, has curated the selection with Lorenzo Grazzani and edited the contents of a book that will also be launched during the exhibition. Featured work includes pieces by John Alcorn, Walter Ballmer, Giulio Cittato, Silvio Coppola, Mario Dagrada, George Giusti, Milton Glaser, Franco Grignani, Max Huber, Anita Klinz, Balilla Magistri, Armando Milani, Claudia Morgagni, Bruno Munari, Ferenc Pinter, Giovanni Pintori, Paul Rand, Sergio Ruffolo, Massimo Vignelli and Heinz Waibl.

I almost threw the envelope holding the miniature book out. Fortunately, I felt a small roll of bubble wrap wedged at the bottom that contained this tiny gem. Ironically, if it had been discarded, this collaboration between the Croatia Post and School of Design Zagreb, Faculty of Architecture, University of Zagreb, to address dire global environmental concerns, would have itself become a part of a landfill. Moreover, if not for the small bump of bubble wrap—a dubious environmental material—I would not have even noticed it. But now it’s forever part of my consciousness. The students did a great job on this stamp project, and the following text reveals the scope of what you are about to see.

Designers: Tia Slovenc, Lucija Kapetanic, Lara Dragojevic

The Brief:
Plastic waste in the seas is one of the most serious environmental problems of today’s society. Plastic waste, including bottles, bags, packaging and micro­plastics, pollutes seas around the world, threatening the marine ecosystem and human health. According to data from the European Parliament, by 2050, plastic waste could exceed the number of fish in the seas. The key is to reduce the amount of plastic waste entering the environment, encourage recycling and replace single-use plastic products with sustainable alternatives.

The Project:
At the invitation of Croatia Post, the School of Design actively engaged in raising awareness about this pressing issue, which stands as one of the most significant and far-reaching global concerns. Successfully  conveying the message within the constraints of a micro format measuring 35.5 × 42.6 mm, the School of Design effectively communicated the urgency and  gravity of the matter.

Designers: Enea Knezevic, Luka Nera Sibila, Valentina Fuzul

The students, under mentorship, designed and developed their solutions for a commemorative stamp for a little over a month. They dealt with different interpretations of the impact of plastic waste on the flora and fauna in the sea, which results in a threat to human health, losses in the economy and a negative effect on climate change. The youngest generation of designers seriously considered pressing global problems, issues of green transition and their environment as long-term climate neutral and sustainable.

The communication value of this project is specific precisely because of the given format. The result was 26 original proposals for postage stamps. Six solutions were shortlisted, the authors of which are students Lara Dragojević, Valentina Fuzul, Lucija Kapetanić, Enea Knežević, Luka Nera Sibila and Tia Slovenc.

The committee of the Croatia Post decided to [publish] the work student Enea Knežević created under the mentorship of associate professor Tomislav Vlainić. The work shows a fish made of a plastic bag—a transformation that unequivocally and clearly communicates the threat to the survival of animal life in the sea as a result of pollution by plastic waste.

The nominal value of the stamp is EUR 1.14, and it was printed in 30,000 copies and in a sheet of 10 stamps on the eve of Earth Day.

Participating Students:
Jelena Bakač, Karla Braovac, Lara Dragojević, Sven Fajdetić, Valentina Fuzul, Goran Gajić, Vita Hrgetić, Lucija Kapetanić, Enea Knežević, Rosa Kobasić, Maja Krsnik, Sunčica Lovrić, Tea Lucek, Lara Luić-Kmezić, Mia Maurović, Alen Marković, Emilija Novosel,Enea Piškor, Luka Nera Sibila, Tia Slovenc, Ana Sunara, Neva Šavorić, Tereza Šestanović, Andrej Vern, Ema Vuković, Glorija Zaić.

Photos: Karla Braovac, Enea Knezević, Glorija Zaić

The designer of USModernist’s new refreshed identity, Alexander Isley, says he was given a gift when he was asked to do this job. It brought him back to the fundamentals that Vignelli captured as his signature, while extending its range into the present.

Here, Isley talks about his reverence for midcentury architecture and how he expressed that through his color palette, typography and the “Butterfly Chair” mascot.

I understand there is history for you with George Smart, founder and CEO of USModernist. How did you get involved with this client?
George Smart (known in some circles as “Mr. Modernism”) go back a long way, to around 1970, to be exact. Our fathers were partners in an architectural firm in North Carolina. My dad headed the Durham office, and George’s father headed the Raleigh office. So we knew one another as children from the occasional beach trip and birthday party, but didn’t get to see each other a lot.

George and I kind of lost touch over the years, but when he started what was then called the NCModernist website, I became a fan. (North Carolina is home to the largest number of residential Modernist houses in the U.S., after Florida and California, due to the influence of what was then known as the NC State University School of Design.)

I had no idea …
We reestablished contact a few years ago, and George asked me to create an identity for their “Moon over Modernism” series of house tours and fundraisers.

As the scope and influence of the organization has grown, they assembled a national advisory board and made the decision to upgrade the visual presence of the organization. That’s when George and Chief Advancement Officer Michela O’Connor Abrams (past CEO of Dwell, among other accomplishments) asked my studio to get involved.

What is the actual reach of USModernist in terms of its archival holdings? And where is it physically located?
USModernist is America’s largest open digital archive of Modernist houses. The organization presently documents over 20,500 iconic houses and 130 important architects, and over 4.3 million pages of architecture and design magazines, all online. They add about 1,000 pages of content daily. I still have no idea how they do this, but they clearly have a very efficient scanning operation. 

Among some contemporary scholars there is controversy over the use of the terms Modern and Modernist. So many things are called Modern, when they are actually “contemporary” or “Postmodern.” Is USModernist real Modern, Retro Modern or, ahem, faux Modern?
When I think of a “Modern” house in the U.S., I think of something designed between the late 1940s and the end of the ’60s that follow a specific aesthetic and philosophical approach. In terms of housing I think most people get what it means: flat roofs that leak.

The archive includes houses completed up to this day, so it’s probably not a good idea to think in terms of eras but rather approach. On their homepage, USModernist has a nice description of what they mean by “Modernist house.”

Back to your role—what is the context for your visual concept?
When I first saw the existing logo, built around the BKF “Butterfly” chair, I had some questions. Why not a house? But the more I thought about it, the more it kind of made sense. If you were to show a house, which one would it be, and what would you be excluding by being specific?

I think the use of the iconic chair as the signifier for Modern was an inspired choice, and one that I can’t take any credit for. All we did was clean it up and develop a more consistent typographic system.

As part of our work, we also developed a series of associated identifiers for the organization’s events and programs, all using a limited palette of typefaces and a consistent use of red and black.

Red is a trigger color. It represents more than Modern. Do you have any feelings about the color?
Red is bold, simple, and when combined with black, seems to me to be a pretty easy choice to make. 

Color is of course subjective, but when I see it in this context I don’t feel a sense of danger or anger or other feelings that might come from seeing red. In developing the new website and communication pieces, I leaned into the red and black, and took cues from Modern master Massimo Vignelli’s theater posters as the foundation for a way to organize information in a formal, easy to understand way. Red and black were famously good enough for him, so they were good enough for me, too.

Personally, I love the look you conceived. Was it love at first sight for the client?
They were very excited and told me this was even better than they were hoping for. I see our work here as more of a refresh, building on the ideas that were already in place. Sometimes the role of a designer is to avoid the temptation to scrap everything and start anew, but rather to build on what’s good and make it better.

In this case, ours was an act of appreciation and preservation—very much in keeping with the ethos of the organization.

You have a lot of components already. Will the graphic scheme grow in any way?
We provided a simple foundation of elements that will allow the look of USModernist to remain consistent as their reach and offerings continue to grow.

I look forward to the expansion of the look throughout the website and email outreach materials and, of course, tote bags and caps. I’ve been inundated with requests for the baseball caps, so we need to do something about this.

The moment I saw this gorgeous volume sitting on a pile in a bookstore, I turned all shades of green with envy. It is one of the most richly illustrated, beautifully designed and intelligently researched books of 2024 (a year that has already had its share of extraordinary art and design offerings).

Color Charts offers a full spectrum of inspiration as it reveals through text and image the various methods used to create an incredible number of colors and hues. It contains an awe-inspiring array of original writing and vintage texts on color creation and promotion through such artifacts as swatches, fabrics, charts and dyes. Sample books and notebooks are qualitatively reproduced, and the cover (designed by Katie Osborne) is a gem as object and document.

As Varichon writes, “For centuries, people have preserved documents containing color samples, creating a treasure trove for future generations of researchers.” This is among the most generous collections of those materials I have ever seen.

I asked Varichon to detail, anthropologically and viscerally speaking, her color theories, what color means, and how these cards, posters, guides and samples fit into human perception and behavior. This interview (and the book) was translated from the French by Kate Deimling.

What inspired your collection and scholarship in this unique realm of color?
In the 1980s, I curated exhibitions for various museums, including the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the Louvre, and others. Color came up all the time, but there were no books discussing the people who produced color or describing how and why, with what materials, and for whom color was manufactured. So I started doing research to explain the purpose of this strange thing, which is so hard to define, often requires great efforts to produce, and has little practical use, but still exists everywhere, and has existed since the dawn of humanity. In 1998, I published Couleurs, pigments et teintures dans les mains des peuples, an anthropological overview of the producers, materials, processes and uses of color, starting in ancient times and covering various cultural areas. This book is still in print and has been translated into several languages. The English edition is Colors: What They Mean and How to Make Them. I continued to do research in this area and gradually I had an intuition that in the Western world, color samples had catalyzed developments in science, technology and aesthetics over the centuries, while also causing crucial transformations in the way society thought about color. But I still needed to prove this hypothesis!

I’m impressed by how deeply you delved and how far back these go.
I started working on color samples in 2007, kind of feeling my way around, as often happens when you tackle an area that hasn’t really been explored. I was immediately charmed by these documents and their enchanting power, which was exactly the thing I wanted to try to decipher. And right away I was also so amazed by the variety, beauty and poetry of color charts that I wanted to share these documents (the vast majority of which had never been published and were inaccessible) with as many people as possible. That also meant giving readers ways of understanding these color charts, and a sense of how each one was part of the construction of a constantly changing relationship to color. This research took 16 years. Finally, the images of the color charts had to be perfect. Philippe Durand Gerzaguet, who took all the photos, managed to pull this off.

You have a section on naturalists using samples. How universal was this for scientists in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries?
Scientific disciplines, in the modern sense of the term, were for centuries essentially European. When color references were used outside Europe, it’s because they traveled with Western researchers. For instance, when Darwin traveled to the Madeira Islands, he took with him a copy of Werner’s 1821 nomenclature of colors that was completed by Syme. This allowed him to record the colors of the plant and animal species he sampled in his explorations. But many cultures never needed samples to observe and understand their environment and were able to use other methods to develop bodies of knowledge whose depth more than competes with modern science.

Was there a mystical as well as scientific interpretation of color for which color samples were used?
There have certainly been mystical interpretations, but I’ll just respond here to their scientific use: Yes, color samples were part of the rise of science in the West. In the hands of practitioners, such as dyers or painters, they were helpful tools well before the Enlightenment. They facilitated the memorizing of experiments and contributed to more precise communication of discoveries. So these color samples were crucial links, because they already implemented a logic that would ultimately be taken up and developed in scientific protocols. 

You discuss nomenclature. How did colors get their names?
The lexicon of color charts depends on when the document was designed, by whom, for whom, and for what purpose. The first color charts made by naturalists often indicated colors by the names of the pigments that produced them (for instance, Minium in Waller’s work for a red obtained from lead). It was the same for manuals of artistic practices (Geele Orperement for a yellow obtained from orpiment in Boogert’s manuscript, for example). Dyers, who excelled at creating a wide array of shades, had to be more inventive from the start. Their color names constantly evoked references that embodied a certain color (Cabbage Green, Mouse Gray, and even Goose Shit). For instance, Antoine Janot’s brown shade called Cinnamon has no connection to the spice, but is the result of combining yellow, red and gray from weld, madder and oak gall. The terms would remain image-based, or even poetic, in textile color charts (with names like Dawn, Geisha or Zenith appearing in ribbon color charts during the interwar period). But chemists’ color charts would adopt intimidating yet very specific names from molecules (such as Rhodamine 6 J Extra in a color chart of dyes for Galalith from the 1920s). Only the color charts for decorative paints and artists’ paints would construct a descriptive and somewhat stable lexicon (Medium Turquoise Blue, Wood Tone, Train Car Green, etc.). Other names were inherited from ancestral pigments (Red Ocher, Ivory Black), even once they became exclusively synthetic. For instance, a gouache shade was still called Indian Yellow in the 1950s, when this pigment, suspected of being obtained from dehydrating cows, had already been replaced by a substitute a long time before.

Can you discuss the upheaval with synthetic colors?
To summarize in a few words: The discovery of synthetic dyes and pigments starting in the mid-19th century, combined with the growth of industrial processes, made affordable color available to everyone. Finally, color was not restricted to the elite. This is what I call the color revolution. The flipside of this is that the arrival of synthetic color wiped out the immense knowledge of colors from nature, first in Europe and then around the world, ultimately leading to a profound transformation of humanity’s relationship to color.

Were color charts frequently revised?
Color charts could be reproduced identically for decades (such as color charts for Ripolin paint from the early 20th century). Textile color charts had to follow the rhythm of fashion, which was always changing. For instance, the ribbon color charts made by the Silk Federation changed every six months. Since the 1950s, color charts have been subject to the increasing speed that has affected all human activities. Today, they often last no longer than a butterfly.

Was there a universal language of color?
I don’t think there is a universal language of color. Its use is universal, yes, because color is a signal that is immediately perceptible, even from afar. So it is used everywhere to make visible—especially through clothing—categories of individuals (a wealthy person, a widower, a foreigner). But the way in which a community takes hold of color to express meaning depends on its particular culture at that time. Color is thus a parallel language for all societies, but specific to each one and constantly evolving.

How much of the colors used in textiles, paints, etc., came from flowers?
Dyes were produced from plants for a long time—not only flowers, but roots, leaves, bark, wood, and also berries. Insects and shells were additional resources for color. Minerals provided pigments, but even in prehistoric times, they were also formulated from the products of combustion, fusion or oxidization (charcoal, smalt, lead white, etc.). Cultures were very inventive, determined and brave in the ways they produced color from the resources found in their environment.

These charts from the past are such beautiful artifacts. Were they seen as art or purely functional ephemera?
For a long time, color sampling was private, remaining in the personal world of correspondence between scholars or inside workshops and factories. And even when the commercial world took hold of them in the late 19th century, color charts were distributed sparingly because producing them with samples of fabrics or feathers, or applications of paint or pastel, was expensive and labor-intensive. These rare, beautiful documents were preserved in workshops, stores and families. They inspired new productions and, over time, taught both the names of colors and ways of classifying them. So color charts developed as tools, lexicons, textbooks … and sources of dreams. Starting in the 1950s, when color printing replaced physical samples, color charts were distributed much more widely. Today, they are found everywhere, even on ordinary leaflets. Of mediocre quality and often ugly, these color charts have lost their poetry and sometimes they can’t even claim the noble function of tools.

Am I correct that during the world wars, color was muted, and after, color exploded?
Yes and no! Of course, restrictions on pigments and dyes due to wartime limited access to color, and during times of crisis, dark fabrics that could hide stains and signs of wear were emphasized. But the desire for color is also linked to customs, which evolve slowly. Right after World War I, everyone wore black because every family had to mourn someone who was killed in the trenches or struck down by the Spanish Flu. The postwar period of the 1950s was different: The rules about mourning were more flexible, and Western society was stimulated by the optimism of the period known as “les Trente Glorieuses” in France. Movies and magazines began to overflow with colorful images, the rise of ready-to-wear encouraged variations in clothing styles, and, finally, the petrochemical industry provided many innovative materials, pigments and dyes. Society could joyfully shift into color.

Of all the information that you researched, what was the most exciting surprise?
Great question. I think I was surprised every day during all my years of research as I discovered unknown color charts that had been forgotten in dark warehouses or had sat inert for decades on library shelves. Even the most insignificant ones had something to say about some aspect of the history of color. Of course, there were some I found especially fascinating: the color chart of silk velvet ribbons by G.G. & Cie, the color charts for artificial flowers, or those made by chemists during the interwar period, which are very humorous and aspired to add color to everything, from bicycle tires to soap. The major discovery of my research, however, was to realize that these innocent fragments of color had been the economic instrument, and then the political instrument, of hegemonic industrial development. By distributing color charts, industrial society not only crushed ancestral know-how everywhere, but it also globalized methods for classifying color that came from a way of thinking focused on quantitative analysis and productivity. Other concepts of color, which could be based on the depth and delicacy of shades or its relevance for a particular use, did not survive. The replacement of the product sample by printed color was their death knell, as color was now dissociated from its medium. The sensory experience was forgotten, and all the factors were in place for color to gradually be reduced to a bare reference number. I think that is where we are today. We have managed to “distribute the whole world with a single code,” as Georges Perec wrote in his essay collection Penser/Classer. Fortunately, the absolute necessity to escape from harmful overconsumption is beginning to make the pendulum swing back in the other direction. The future will certainly be full of surprises!

In their sculptural form, the lost and tossed gloves below, photographed by Arnold Schwartzman, have a unique history that we’ll never know. What happened to them? How can something be so functional one minute, and so ephemeral the next? These are not simply ethereal articles but evidence of human helplessness, requiring a hand to make them whole. It’s sad to consider that these bits of apparel no longer function in the literal sense—but they’re beautiful in their disfunctionality.

They beg various questions: Who owned them? Were they used to help or hurt others? Did they have special significance to their owners? Is their existence now forever relegated to the city’s landfills?

“Armed with my trusty iPhone, I keep my eyes peeled on the sidewalk, which is littered with post-COVID refuse,” Schwartzman says of the collection. But he’s doing more than taking random photos—he’s compiling a record of what now has purpose anew thanks to his lens.

Joshua works at Pratt Institute, and her illustration has been featured in Buzzfeed, NPR, New York Magazine, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Our conversation examines the struggle to heal the heart and mind through intimate narrative and raw images.

What prompted you to write and illustrate a book devoted to your mother’s mental illness?
My book is about faith, the preciousness of life and unconditional love. The book discusses the reality of our situation living with a parent with a mental illness, so I break that down in various chapters, but that is not solely our experience. This book is dedicated to freedoms in our childhood and our earliest and most precious memories. Not only that, the book is about our journey together, so it’s written to share the perspectives from my brothers and my mom. Our life wasn’t just about my mother’s mental illness. I wanted to encapsulate our livelihood and the joys we experienced together.

Was this book a hard sell on your part?
The publisher reached out to me, admiring my illustration style, and they wanted to work with me on a project, whether that was a book cover or graphic novel. After a few meetings, I decided to pitch the idea of making a book devoted to my family and our journey together. The publisher was all for the idea, so it wasn’t a hard sell at all. Everything was very seamless.

Your provocative title suggests that you are working out the very question I would ask about how to make such difficult memories become an engagingly universal story. How did you do it?
I wouldn’t consider the title of my memoir provocative. While thinking of title ideas, I was literally asking myself how I was going to do all of this—draw and write not only my memories, but my family’s memories. And, how was I going to marry everything together with prose, drawings, comics? And photographs? I decided the title should be the very question I was asking myself.

There are many of us who have relatives, loved ones or friends whose suffering is deeply felt by all around. How did you address the angers, resentments and fears in relation to the love and empathy for your mom?
This book became a healing journey for me. From the start of the book I navigated fear, particularly fear of perception. But as I continued to move through the process and have conversations with loved ones and conversations with myself, I learned parts of their experience I either forgot or didn’t know and I gained perspective. Any animosity I carried in childhood and young adulthood I was able to let go of after having honest conversations with my loved ones and with my mom.

What about your experiences determined where you went in terms of form and design?
I knew I wanted this book to be a collaboration, and I didn’t want this book to follow a traditional comic style that is a graphic novel. I wanted it to literally feel like a scrapbook, so that meant combining spreads dedicated to photos, spreads that felt like a vivid dreamscape through illustrated flashbacks, and some to be dedicated as prose chapters. I wanted to really delve into prose without leaning on imagery necessarily. I love the art of writing, so writing out certain chapters to channel the memory was really fun and beautiful.

How has your family responded to the book?
My family loves the book! They were my biggest cheerleaders through the process and I am forever grateful to them for giving me the space to write this book and share our story! I’m looking forward to celebrating with my family in the next few weeks. I’m glad I was able to make this book come to life, not only for myself, but for my family as well. As I mention in the book, our journey together is what got us through, and for anyone going through a difficult time, remember that it’s OK to lean into your support system, whether that is your biological family, extended family, or chosen family. We have to lift each other up to get through difficult times.

How cathartic was it for you to relive your “living” past?
This book was a beautiful journey for me. I gained perspective, I healed old wounds and I made a lot of discoveries about life and the connection between things along the way. I could never have imagined where I would be today when I started this process, but I’m so happy I went on the journey to write this book. Reliving my past made me reflect on everything from my childhood, especially the joys that I experienced even when things were difficult. Writing also helped me unpack more about mental health and the conversations I never had with my mom until going through the writing process. Having these conversations that are revealed in the book really helped build our relationship outside of this written time capsule.

Is there more you’d like to say and show, or have you put your memories in their place?
I think there will always be more that I want to say, so I think of this book as a catalyst for the work I’ll do moving forward. I want to do more community work as it relates to the arts. I’d love to act on some of the things that I touch on toward the end of the book, which is being a mentor and creating workshops and programs to help the youth explore their creativity.

What do you want the audience to take away?
I want the audience to know they’re not alone in their journey. I want them to know that mental illness is serious, but it’s nothing to be ashamed of, whether it’s what you are directly going through or a loved one is going through. Lean into your community and public resources. I mention some of the resources in the book, like “A Place for Mom.” As I discuss in the book, I wasn’t just raised by my parents, I was raised by my maternal and paternal grandparents, and I had an incredible support system. Not only that, I want readers to reflect on the good in their life. Trauma can consume us, but one small thing that can help is to reflect on the joys of life and reflect on who and what you love. That’s why I write about the joys of my childhood and the moments we had together as a family. That’s why I write about love in so many different ways. Love is what carried us through our journey.

In 2021 plans were made to produce a book commemorating the 75th anniversary (1947–2022) of the School of Visual Arts in New York City. I have studied at the school, was expelled, taught in undergrad and grad, directed some conferences and co-founded five MFA programs during 54 of those precious years. So, it was particularly emotional for me to witness on a sunny, chilly April morning the unveiling of the sign designating 23rd Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenue as SVA WAY.

“School of Visual Arts is an anchor for creativity and talent on the East Side,” said NYC Council Member Carlina Rivera. “Renaming a street in New York City is a long process that requires multiple approvals from the local Community Board, City Council and the Department of Transportation. With its international reach, notable alumni and contributions to New York City’s vibrant arts community, SVA has earned this recognition for 75 years of work.”

As for the book, it was conceived, designed and produced by the SVA Visual Arts Press. It too was a little late in coming … but spring has sprung; it is now published. I wrote the brief introduction for it—a version of which is excerpted below.

75 Years: A Foreword Retrospective

Imagine that 75 years ago Silas Rhodes and Burne Hogarth did not found the Illustrators and Cartoonists School in Midtown Manhattan.

How would the void have altered the creative arts in New York City, already becoming a wellspring of painting, graphic design, comics, advertising, photography and film in postwar America? What would become of all those creative people who were migrating to the city, poised to contribute to the cultural wealth and expressive bounty of the city, country and, doubtless, the world?

Conceive of an abyss—a black hole—in the hearts and minds of such a critical mass. Consider who would be missing from our collective sociocultural community. In fact, it’s unimaginable that the Illustrators and Cartoonists School could not have existed, because it would mean that the School of Visual Arts would not be here today. Nor would thousands of students/grads in degree and continuing education departments, hundreds of teachers who have shared their insights with those students and are instrumental in launching their careers, and countless lecturers and workshop leaders who have influenced multiple SVA generations in so many different ways.

Instead of a black hole, SVA is an active volcano, erupting and sending artists, designers and much more into the atmosphere.  

In her new book, Rhonda Rubinstein—creative director for The California Academy of Sciences and co-founder of its BigPicture Natural World Photography competition—turns the lens on the good, bad and tragic in the precious animal kingdom. A decade of searing images appear in Seeing It All: Women Photographers Expose Our Planet (Goff Books). Included are profoundly moving, decidedly awesome and breathtaking photographs of nature’s glory and fragility as captured by 11 visionary photographers who artfully document thriving and endangered environments from Africa to the Arctic.

The urgency of Seeing It All is expressed in the introduction by Rubinstein, plus a foreword by Sylvia Earle and essays by writer/historian/activist Rebecca Solnit, and neuroscientist/writer/stage director Indre Viskontas. I am anxious for you to read what Rubinstein has to say about the excerpted pages you are about to see.

This is a startling and at times heart-wrenching book. How did you get involved in this project?
Seeing It All evolved from a desire to create a book featuring influential female photographers and to share their powerful images about urgent environmental issues. It comes from a photography initiative that I co-founded at the California Academy of Sciences, where I have been working as creative director since 2008. Ten years ago, we launched the BigPicture Natural World Photography competition and exhibition to showcase wildlife and conservation stories in a thoroughly modern way. BigPicture has become one of the most prestigious global photography competitions in its field, revealing provocative stories from around the world and raising awareness about conservation issues.

How did you find these amazing photographers?
All the photographers in the book have been either BigPicture winners, finalists or judges. This made it a little bit easier to select from the many women photographers doing great work in this field.

Why did you choose to focus on women photographers in the wild?
Why not? Most photography books are heavily weighted towards male photographers. 

A few years ago as we were putting the finishing touches on the annual BigPicture exhibition at the museum, we noticed the relatively low number of women photographers’ work on display. That correlated with the lower proportion of women’s submissions in the competition. Not to mention photography in general. As you probably know, women photographers are underrepresented in most publications and media by an average of five to one. So producing a publication was a way to highlight the impressive work by female photographers. A book would allow us to delve deeper into the conservation issues that each photographer has focused on, as well as provide personal backstories as inspiration to young photographers and activists. 

You write that the “beauty of these photographs enables us to look at what we’d rather not see.” Is this book a method of coming to grips with our failings, or a form of redemption?
The strength of Seeing It All is that the book uses beauty to entice and focus our attention on a subject, but there is not a uniform approach to depicting the state of the world. The photographs can be spectacular and beautiful but not necessarily pleasant or pretty. While Morgan Heim, who photographed roadkill surrounded by bouquets of lush flowers, calls this series of roadside memorials “Apologies,” the book is not about coming to grips with our failings nor a form of redemption. It is simply evidence of what is happening at this moment: We all recognize that we’re in this pivotal moment. Some people focus on the doom and despair of the biodiversity and climate crisis, while others see the opportunity of new solutions and actions towards a thriving future. In this case, it’s not either/or. Seeing It All shows us the better and the worse. The potential and the peril. Ultimately it is a book of hope. I believe that by exposing the issues—along with the magnificence and resilience—we will be moved towards the better. It’s a carefully crafted call to do more better and less worse.

The images can be so magnificent on one spread and heart-tugging on the other. Was your intent to take the reader on a roller coaster under the sea and in the air?
The intent was not to bring your stomach to your throat, but it was certainly to elicit emotion! Many of the images are either heart-warming or heartbreaking, and I think it is critical to get that muscle working. It’s interesting to note that most books about the current state of the planet are either all about the beauty of the pristine “natural” world or the desecration that humans have wrought during the anthropocene. (Rebecca Solnit’s essay in the book brilliantly expands on the idea of the new ethos of nonseparation between humans and nature.) We deliberately combined the two in order to have the awe and inspiration of the former, and the anger and motivation to act, of the latter. It’s a way to reconcile the hope/despair dilemma—you can’t ignore what’s happening, but you can’t be overwhelmed in order to act.

All of your photographers take great leaps and risks to capture their shots. What, aside from the obvious feelings toward the health of the planet, do they share?
Yes, they are all committed to the health of the planet but take very different approaches in their work, which allows us to see the world through their eyes. I found three common threads that weave these unique perspectives together: compassion, connection and conscience.

The compassion is for other living beings beyond our immediate family of humans to our more distant relatives: other animals, plants and the planet itself. Jo-Anne McArthur’s work is particularly emblematic of that shift. She talks about the hierarchy of care, where we might feel empathy for the panda or the polar bear club and want to protect them. Meanwhile, there’s a huge category of animals that we raise in order to eat them. She photographs the torments that industrial agriculture has inflicted on individual chickens or pigs and insists we face them.

The connection is to and of everything. Intellectually we know that our lives depend on nature’s interconnected systems: the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat. But Camille Seaman emotionally connects us to all of the world around us. Based on her Shinnecock ancestry, she sees plants, insects and all else as our literal relations, not resources. Even the magnificent Antarctic icebergs, through her lens, become portraits of ancient creatures.

The impact on our conscience is best articulated by Britta Jaschinski, who says, “Photography, filmmaking and journalism are among the most important professions on the planet. Without these, the world’s conscience would wither.” She photographed the National Wildlife Property Repository in Denver, which houses over 1.4 million wildlife products seized by federal authorities. Rhino horns, monkey skulls, stuffed tiger fetuses. It is not easy to gain access to these facilities, and areas that can be photographed are limited. So the impact of the illegal wildlife trade is not readily apparent. Thus the need for these photos as evidence.

Some are interested in life and others are focused on death. What drives the passions of your photographers?
Each photographer has dedicated their work life to documenting a particular aspect of the natural world, whether it is portraying newborn animals and family life in the wild as a way to combat the crisis of kids’ disconnection to nature (Suzi Eszterhas) or revealing the ocean as one of the key solutions to climate change (Cristina Mittermeier). Each photographer has a unique approach to exposing the planet—which we distilled into the manifesto that begins each chapter. The 11 statements help the reader understand the philosophy and visual strategy that each of the 11 photographers employs in their image-making and storytelling.

What do you hope will be the outcome or consequence of this powerful document?
I stated it on the back cover: “These 11 photographers might change how you see the world,” particularly our relationship and connection to the natural world. After all, our wellbeing is only a few interconnected steps away from them. Another desired outcome is that by portraying these amazing, badass photographers who take on difficult and often dangerous shoots, we amplify their work and provide role models for young women.

Combined, perhaps this can help people navigate these extraordinary times. A lesson from these photographers is to focus on what you love and where you can make a difference. As Camille Seaman says, “Choose the one thing on this planet that you don’t want to disappear on your watch, whether it is a butterfly or a tree. Once you identify the thing you love most and cannot live without, you will find other people who are also passionate about it. And that’s where change begins.” We’ve used beauty and design to entice you to look at this book then consider, What is your one thing?

Ed. note: Typefaces used in the book include Bezzia, which was designed by Lettermatic and inspired by the handwritten labels attached to specimens in the Entomology Collections at the California Academy of Sciences.

Ancient Awakening features the work of “self-taught” artist Matthew Marcot, who specializes in Abstract and Neo-Expressionist approaches. During these stressful days at the brink of who-knows-what, I am drawn to words and images of upset and struggle, and particularly an underlying theme in Marcot’s painting: giving visual expression “to unseen ritualistic and cosmic forces”—benign and menacing—that define modern civilization. “This was a facility of ancient artforms based on superstition and religiosity, such as in African sculpture, religious manuscripts and cave drawings,” which Marcot says he invests in “contemporary life.”  

Marcot’s embrace of primal expression includes his hieroglyphic-like calligraphy, biomorphic semiotics and austere geometric portraiture. Through these means “he brings the human being back to their roots.”  

Interested what his artistic intentions are—to express himself or a larger zeitgeist—I engaged him in the following lively inquiry.

There is a volcanic quality to your paintings. What is erupting that causes this sensation? 
The stimulus to begin working for me is friction. It’s a reverberating uneasiness, a kind of feral energy that I can never quench by any outer force. So there comes a moment where some primal force erupting inside of me needs to reproduce itself outward. That’s where the work starts.

Similar to Hilma af Klint, a spiritual medium artist (and perhaps the first recorded abstract artist), I feel that I am being used as a conduit, or a vehicle, for these primordial abstractions to take place. The sensation of friction is what impels me to begin working—but once I am in the midst of working I feel that I am being guided by an outer force to reproduce these expressions. I see that the “volcanic” energy of my work is a relationship between the subtle vitality of the force that is guiding me and the screaming passions of myself. Creating art is my singular addiction, because of what you explain as this erupting quality: It’s a state of unearthly enchantment, endless mystery and wonder.

In your work you use words, letters, numbers, scribbles—in other words, graphic design elements. Where does this influence come from? 
Since I was very young I’ve had the oddest fascination with ancient art, or tribal art. Whenever I would travel infrequently to the Caribbean as a kid with my family, I would always bring back the masks from that region. By the time I finished high school I had a bedroom full of jarring tribal masks. In my early twenties, this fascination with geometric sculpture and tribal masks consumed me, and the deeper philosophy of certain methods of African sculpture began to organically become the overriding ritual of my art—which was the act of rendering spirits as a solid to become sovereign from them. 

It has become apparent to me that the influence of these ancient artforms could not have possibly been born from my upbringing of Matthew Marcot, the white middle-class suburbanite from Long Island. If I found out I was a sculptor of deities for Hindu temples in India in a past life, it would explain the seeming discontinuity between me as Matthew Marcot here and now, and the source of the art that pours out of me. Of course, this is sheer speculation. Either way, I find my artistic expression to be a privilege, and thoroughly enjoy the mystery of it.

Tell me more about the spiritual sense that informs your imagery.
When I was 22 years old I moved into a Hindu Temple on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Having grown up since age 13 in the freneticism of New York City, I felt a deep yearning to take a step back and to develop an imperturbable peace that I could bring to whatever career path I chose. While living at the ashrama I became engrossed in the daily rituals, such as singing bhajan (sacred hymns), chanting on japa beads, as well as delving into ancient texts such as the Bhagavad Gita, wherein I developed an inexhaustible affinity for the intricacies of the Sanskrit language, both phonetically and artistically. This instilled in me an insatiable curiosity for ancient art forms, that would later transform into passions for Islamic manuscripts, Egyptian scrolls, cave drawings and African sculpture. My first introduction into Sanskrit I see now was the inflection point on my interest in crafting modern symbology and language systems that are in relationship with our ancient past.

The use of biomorphic shapes, semiotics and calligraphic elements in my work is approaching my work from the same ritualistic perspective as these ancient artforms—to approach my work from an ancient perspective using modern materials. I find it essential that in a human community that appears to be sacrificing its humanness in the hope of a digital salvation, that I bring my awareness to ancient ways of understanding the world around me—that feel more harmonious in my spirit than what’s being plated for me as a Gen Z’er. By rendering my own calligraphic system of language through my hieroglyphic-like script, while too birthing my own species of forms, I am essentially creating my own pictorial universe to endlessly explore in a world that I feel is being stripped of its underlying humanity … which I guess makes me a Gen Z dropout.

How do you think that being self-taught has molded your art making? 
I’ve many friends who have been classically trained, from different angles of approaching art. And what I hear from them often is that it can sometimes be difficult to forget their technical skills and rawly express themselves without adulteration.

What I’ve found by being self-taught is that I have no art curricula baseline to return back to; I don’t have the burden of memory to bring in the reigns on my immediate expression. I am actually not very interested in art—however I am maniacally focused, and nothing short of possessed, to express and reproduce the avalanche of energy inside of me outward. That’s what I see as the advantage of being self-taught. I feel like endeavoring to make an art career out of being an autodidact is like jumping out of an airplane with no parachute, but there’s also no earth. It’s unbridled freedom.

I’ve always been curious how artists describe themselves. Neo-Expressionist comes to mind. What do you want, if anything, as a rubric? 
I’m reminded of the Jackson Pollock quote, “Technique is just a means to making a statement.” For the viewer, having a historical label I think is useful for penetrating a work of art to contextualize it and thereby make it easier to communicate with it. Personally, I find labels or rubrics to be dysfunctional—even though I would be the first to say that my work does resemble Neo-Expressionism, and my purely calligraphic works could easily be placed under the umbrella of Abstract Expressionism, or Calligraphic Abstraction. 

If I was given the full-ranged facility to categorize my work without placing it in a historical group, I would coin it Primordial Abstraction. My work is about opening myself to these universal forces and ancient ritualistic means of expressing myself, while operating in the arena of modern art. So to answer your question, working through my aversion of labels or rubrics, I would tentatively describe my work as Primordial Abstraction.

Would you call yourself an artist who designs?
I certainly started out as a designer who makes art, but as I’ve moved between mediums over the years, it really has all coalesced for me and become one big playground where such strict categorizations no longer apply. I would even argue that this applies to writing as well, where perhaps at the onset one may apply the kind of design thinking that being a designer tends to train you for, but then once you’re deep in the writing, it’s quite common to enter a kind of lucid flow state often associated with art-making. Ultimately, my favorite works are the ones that encourage one to utilize their design mind as well as enter that elusive flow state.

What are the primary themes of your work?
Challenging established norms, highlighting injustice and speaking truth to power if I can manage it.

Tell me about the plot of The Solar Grid.
Several centuries after a great flood has subsumed much of the Earth and prompted some of the population to migrate to Mars, much of the Earth is now a dry and desolate landfill thanks to The Solar Grid, a network of satellites that orbits the planet and keep it based in eternal daylight, consigning night to legend. The satellites help power solar factories on Earth that operate ceaselessly to manufacture goods exported to Mars, whereby Mars sends the waste of their consumption back to Earth. Two orphans on Earth, Mehret and Kameen, who rummage through the landfills in search of valuable items they can live off, come upon an artifact that will completely disrupt life as they know it.

Fiction or nonfiction—do you have a preference?
Fiction.

What are your plans for other displays of your art?
Nothing on the horizon right now, but as soon as The Solar Grid is complete, I’d love to organize a touring exhibition with all the original art pages along with some contemporary art pieces inspired by the world of The Solar Grid.

“Louis Glackens had a discerning eye through which he observed the human condition,” writes Ariella Wolen, curator of the NSU Art Museum’s (Fort Lauderdale) current exhibition, Louis M. Glackens: Pure Imagination. “However, while his brother was rooted in the realism of the Ashcan School, Louis Glackens chose to deliver his take on reality through a more fable-like world, in which the absurdity of life was captured through an economy of line and an abundance of wit.”

Below, Wolen reveals more about the importance of Glackens to the cartoon and animation worlds.

What separates Louis from other Puck, Judge and Harper’s cartoonists of his day?
Glackens had a particularly fluid style, his draughtsmanship appearing almost instinctive. In William Glackens’ son Ira’s memoir, he described his uncle’s drawings as having, “flowed from his pencil like water from a tap. Like Shakespeare, he never blotted a line.” His confident handling made his imagery very clear and, therefore, well-suited to illustration. His images for Puck are loaded with information and detail, but they remain clear, simple and distinct.

Why did William eclipse his brother’s work?
I would say it was partially a hierarchical matter of painting versus illustration. While illustration held a much more prominent position around the turn of the century than today—with newspaper artists such as Louis Glackens being known to broad audiences—the work was still a commercial endeavor that was made to instruction, so historically it does not have the same level of appreciation as painting.

Was it the commercial versus the “fine art” gambit?
In terms of their personal histories, I think William also had a lot of good fortune, which Louis sadly did not, though Louis had an earlier and more rapid start to success. William was part of an avant-garde artist milieu, he married into a prominent family and was always able to focus on his art. For Louis, after Puck shuttered, he struggled to find his way. He wasn’t favored by studio heads when he tried to break into the world of animation film and, eventually, he moved back to Philadelphia to live with his sister and parents. He never married and never had children. As our museum has been entrusted with the Glackens family estate, we’ve taken on the role of ensuring that not just William, but the many great artists in this family, are remembered.

For 46 years, Tom Bodkin has been the heart and soul of design at The New York Times. His job titles have included Art Director, Designer, Design Director, Creative Director, Chief Creative Officer, Associate Managing Editor and Deputy Managing Editor—only the second time an art department head has ever been listed on the prestigious Times masthead. Bodkin served under more executive editors than I can count … a feat in itself.

“Tom Bodkin plays an essential role as our art and design guru and is one of my most valued and trusted masthead advisers,” [former Executive Editor] Jill Abramson wrote in an e-mail to staff when Bodkin was named Deputy Managing Editor for design in 2011. “He is central to all of our future efforts in digital and print and to the integration of our work.”

Bodkin’s life isn’t all wrapped up in newspaper design, as The Daily Heller reported back in 2011, but the institution in all its forms has consumed at least half of his waking (and dreaming) life (whereas the other half has been consumed by fixing motorcycles and cars, driving tractors, refurbishing antique machines like player pianos, movie cameras, rebuilding a real airplane …). He’s been my friend for at least 44 of those 46 years at the paper. Now, with his leaving, I feel the circle has closed. He was my life support—and last link—to the inner workings of the place I called home for 33 years.

Under his tutelage, the Times has incredibly changed. He’s tripled the size of the art department, altered its management structure and increased respect for design among the newsroom and its editors. Bodkin’s retirement leaves a void that will be impossible to fill for me, and hard for many others in his orbit of colleagues and peers.

Last Friday was his official final day as CCO. Yesterday, his friends and colleagues celebrated his accomplishments and leadership. Now it is time for him to be given a rightful place in the histories of graphic design and visual journalism. Bodkin has never sought the spotlight—his modesty is legendary—but he leaves a major legacy that he did not egotistically promote or advertise. He was simply doing his job … and did it extraordinarily well for 46 years.

You had to be “Tommy” in The Who’s brilliant rock opera of the same name to miss the near total eclipse of the sun in New York City. But I did. And it was right outside my window—the eerie yet beautiful luminescent gray lingered for a moment, which I briefly saw out of the corner of my eye. While everyone I knew was out on the streets or the tops of buildings, most wearing official or makeshift glasses, staring up at the heavens, I was consumed by the blue light of my computer screen, attempting to write a Daily Heller post about the eclipse and how the universe as a whole should win lifetime achievement awards for interactive design.

I had put it on my desk calendar, but it was covered by paper. I neglected to set a reminder on my cell phone, so there was no ping. However, you’d think, I thought, that since bells and whistles were blaring after the minor earthquake last Friday, cellular providers would have provided similar cosmic event signals. As it turns out, I did not feel the earthquake, either, although my Zoom-mate at the moment it occurred was noticeably jolted. Feeling, as she described it, that a train was rumbling under her feet, she asked, “Did you feel that!?”

“Nope,” I said, ready to continue our conversation. After the call, I learned what had occurred.

I was napping during the eclipse in 2017, and can’t believe I missed another natural wonder. I can’t believe I missed another natural wonder. Now, I’ll have to wait until 2044 for the next one passing the continental U.S., and the next New York state total eclipse will not occur until 2079. Thankfully, I can see reruns of this year’s on Instagram. But social media is not the same as being there. And how can I be certain it’s true?!

Arthur Szyk (pronounced “schick”) was a Polish émigré who was known in the United States for his cover portraits for Colliers and Time, cartoons for the New York Post and Esquire, and a large body of images on various Judaic and secular themes. As one of the most prolific visual satirists of his day, his World War II anti-fascist imagery had a visceral impact on viewers that was comparable to Goya’s Disasters of War. But Szyk’s mission went beyond topical satire; he employed art as an engine of spiritual transcendence and human liberation. A victim of anti-Semitism in his native country, he was forced to move to France and later to the U.S. Still, he fervently fought for a free Polish state as both soldier and artist, and later devoted his energies to freeing Palestine from British rule and building a Jewish state. Almost all of his works, even the numerous books of fairytales and fables he illustrated, were imbued with appeals for universal social justice. “To call Szyk a ‘cartoonist’ is tantamount to calling Rembrandt a ‘dauber’ or Chippendale a ‘carpenter,’” declared an editorial in a 1942 Esquire.

By the late 1970s, Szyk’s impressive body of work, which painstakingly wedded the highly crafted detailing of Persian-style miniatures to the symbolic acuity of iconic Renaissance masterpieces, was all but forgotten by contemporary critics, as impeccable draftsmanship had been made unfashionable during the ’70s and ’80s. Nonetheless, a Szyk renaissance seemed to be waiting for someone with a passion for his work. That someone was Irvin Ungar, a former rabbi, who in 1987 became an antiquarian book dealer and was dumbstruck by the work of the Polish émigré illustrator.

Since then, Ungar has devoted himself to Szyk’s resurrection. He founded The Szyk Society, a not-for-profit organization. He has used his pulpit skills to fire interest among scholars, promote history papers, and develop an ongoing exhibition program. The Society website szyk.org aims “to move Szyk,” says Ungar, “forward into public consciousness.”

He curated his first exhibition, Justice Illuminated: The Art of Arthur Szyk, at the Spertus Museum in Chicago. Numerous one-man exhibitions followed, each with different themes and works of art: Arthur Szyk: Artist for Freedom at The Library of Congress (2000), The Art & Politics of Arthur Szyk at The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (2002), a traveling exhibition to three cities in Poland (2005), Arthur Szyk: Drawings Against National Socialism and Terror at The German Historical Museum (2008), and Arthur Szyk: Miniature Paintings and Modern Illuminations at The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Palace of the Legion of Honor (2011).

“Art is not my aim, it is my means,” Szyk said about his metier. And this opens another important aspect of Syzk’s means of communication, an aspect of his pictorial language that has been not ignored but less celebrated than his pictorial means: The exquisite handlettering and gestural calligraphy that is such a seamlessly, essential part of his graphic output and visual legacy.

Herein is a range of Latin, Blackletter and Hebrew alphabets (he also rendered in Arabic and Chinese). These examples reveal not just his reverence for and mastery of classical lettermaking but a deliberate blend of the old and new. In The Great Halleil, the Hebrew letter is composed in such a manner that it is positively moderne. The dynamic layout of Le-Fikhakh-Therefore is the envy of any contemporary typographer. The duality of past and present goes throughout his work, which underscores the magnificence of Szyk’s unique hand.

Author’s note: Syzk’s lettering is one of the many forms discussed in Izzy Pludwinski’s excellent Beauty of the Hebrew Letter: From Sacred Scrolls to Graffiti.

Sharaf, a graduate of SVA MFA Designer as Entrepreneur, has been photographing abandoned places in Kuwait since 2002 using various types of cameras (film, digital and mobile phones). The sheer volume of photographs contained in the collection is a relic of everyday life, “creating an imaginary post-apocalyptic documentation of places once occupied by people, animals and plants,” he says.

Each book in AFTER THE END is made up of 684 pages and divided into chapters based on the different locations in which the photographs were taken. Within these chapters are occasional reflections that were written in response to the photographs by 18 contributors who come from diverse backgrounds.

In this conversation, Sharaf tells us about his method and reasoning.

What was the inspiration behind this book-as-object?
To be frank, I can’t think of one sort of inspiration. It is an accumulation of various experiences and practices that happened throughout the years. I’ve been photographing abandoned places in Kuwait since 2002 using various types of cameras (film, digital and mobile phones). Not really for any particular reason but my obsession with details, grids, lines, frames and overlooked things.

As a designer and typographer, I have been experimenting with words, imagery and the relationship between them. Besides my client-based work, I’ve been producing “posters” that challenge and explore the relationship between word and image. In some cases, they support each other; in other instances they contradict each other—at least at first sight.

After using typography as one of my main tools on digital and print media, I’ve moved into containers/objects where these “words” live. One of these main containers/objects is the book. For example, one of my previous artworks is “The Book.” The artwork is a metaphoric installation of how a sacred text—the Kuwaiti Constitution—is preserved.

Then in 2018, I created “The Cemetery of Banned Books in Kuwait,” a symbolic piece of protest and public art intervention. It was conceptualized on the sidelines of Kuwait’s International Book Fair. A book is one of the most common means to encapsulate stories, and if I was to describe AFTER THE END in one word, I would say it is a story, or multiple stories.

What does that title refer to?
AFTER THE END not only serves as the title of the book but also describes its content and creation process. It signifies the conclusion of buildings, eras, experiences, inhabitance and history.

There are many physical aspects to this book. Is that modernity at work?
I believe that description fits, but I see it more as a reflection of meticulous craft and deliberate design choices. Every aspect of AFTER THE END was carefully considered as a design decision. Imagine receiving the box with the two books inside: You’ll immediately sense the rawness of the object, accompanied by the scent of brown cardboard infused with silkscreen inks. Upon opening it, you’re greeted by two faceless block books. They resemble bricks in appearance and feel. As you pick one up and begin to flip through the pages, you’ll notice the texture, the color and the binding. Then, you will see the photos, presented in three forms. The majority adhere to a vertical full HD ratio (16:9), akin to the way we view stories on our phones nowadays. Additionally, there are squares and full spreads interspersed throughout. Each chapter, sequence and spread was meticulously crafted to convey its own narrative.

Within the book’s chapters, you’ll encounter occasional textual reflections penned by 18 contributors from diverse backgrounds, responding to the photographs. This serves as an invitation for readers to delve into others’ perceptions of the book’s content and to experience their own interpretations.

Titled in both English and Arabic, the books may be browsed from left to right, right to left, or from anywhere in between. This deliberate design makes the books seem almost unprecious, much like the abandoned lives scattered throughout the photographs.

Where does your interest in this theme of destruction come from?
I believe the essence lies not in mere destruction but in the allure of abandoned and overlooked places. Naturally, many abandoned locations surrender to decay and ruin over time due to neglect. However, a significant portion of the book’s content focuses on the aftermath of the second Gulf War, when Iraq invaded Kuwait.

Moreover, I believe my background as a graphic designer (and because I learned photography in architecture school) has profoundly influenced my photographic work. The influence is evident in the book through the attention to grid lines, framing, colors and form. The contrast between the structured elements of buildings and rooms, juxtaposed with scattered articles and objects, creates an intriguing narrative. Each detail within these photographs, whether viewed individually or as a whole, tells a story, or multiple stories.

This looks and feels like a well-put-together book. Is it all handmade?
A considerable portion of the book has been handcrafted. To be candid, we lack the luxury of utilizing advanced artistic techniques and resources for printing and binding here in Kuwait. I was adamant about producing the entire book and its box here in Kuwait exactly as I envisioned it, and I am pretty happy with the results.

There is something eerie and ominous about the content.
The sheer volume of photographs contained in the book becomes an interesting relic of everyday life, creating an imaginary post-apocalyptic documentation of places once occupied by people, animals and plants.

Is there a specific audience you are aiming at?
It doesn’t target a specific audience. However, I believe certain people may find it more captivating and engaging than others. It particularly resonates with architects, photographers and designers. Additionally, it appeals to those who have personally experienced or are experiencing forms of destruction, war, immigration or gentrification.

The second, titled Dinner and a Show, focuses on the covers of menus and programs used by restaurant, cabaret and nightclub owners to pack their venues with patrons hungry not only for food, but for entertainment provided by celebrity performers, risqué vaudeville comedians, titillating burlesque dancers and glamorous showgirls.

In selecting from Levi’s wealth of material for the exhibition, Luca was “struck by just how many venues used images of scantily clad showgirls on their promotional pieces as their chief form of appeal.” In the 1930s, many American nightclub owners looked to the Moulin Rouge and other famous Parisian cabarets as a model for attracting customers. The glamorous Chez Paree nightclub opened in the Streeterville neighborhood of Chicago in 1932 and pulled in patrons for more than two-and-a-half decades by offering fine meals served with a side of vaudeville and chorus girl dancing.

Defying the Depression, in the mid-1930s a business conglomerate (including Lou Walters – father of the late Barbara Walters . . . yes that one) created a chain of stylish dinner clubs with venues in Chicago, New York, London and Miami Beach. From Luca: “Taking over the vacant Rainbow Gardens theater on Lawrence Avenue and North Clark Street in Chicago, they commissioned Jules Stein and Corlett Huff to redesign, redecorate and reopen it in the summer of 1934 as the French Casino. Stein, who served as president of the Music Corporation of America, hired Clifford Fischer, the legendary booking agent and producer of the Ambassadeurs theater/restaurant in Paris, to organize, import and tour a French-inspired cabaret floor show (the “Revue Folies Bergere”) as touring entertainment for the clubs”. Ooh la la.

“The popularity of Chicago’s French Casino likely contributed to the proliferation of other French-themed cabaret clubs in this era,” Luca notes—but they may also have been inspired by the release in February 1935 and April 1936 of two Maurice Chevalier films, The Man From the Folies Bergere and Folies Bergere, perpetuating the French cabaret craze in America.

I’ve heard from illustrators who have tried various AI software claim it portends the extinction of their craft as we know it. I’m agnostic, so I wanted to see for myself. Would I succumb to its power or use it in moderation? Would I be awed or bored?

My starting point was a group of unspecified animals posing for a class picture.

I spent a total of 10 minutes “making” the images below. As I provided various simple prompts, images began to appear (in about 30 seconds on average). The longest wait was around 68 seconds at the outset when I asked the program to shift from a (default) group of benign cartoon beasts to a more sophisticated “Expressionist” drawing style.

Artificial intelligence, or what I call additional intelligence, is quite awesome to watch. We can use it for good or ill, to make us smarter or dumber. It’s “just another tool,” but more so. It is in our lives already, and has been without our knowing it for a long time. But as yet it is not perfect, and my exercise proves it. (As when I asked for party hats on the rabbits, below.) Its understanding of Cubism and Expressionism differs considerably from mine. You can see for yourself where ChatGPT was deliberately defying me.

It is encouraging that it refused to render in the manner of Norman Rockwell. The more artists that prohibit the scraping of their work off the web, the better. But it still bugs me that it put hats on the lions.

What I want as we thrust into the future is an AI that heeds all my wishes. Is that too much to prompt?

In Homer’s Iliad, Book VI, Sisyphus cheats Death by chaining it up so that no one could die. Sisyphus was not selflessly trying to save the world—only himself. Eventually Death was released from its bonds, and Sisyphus had to submit to its will. Sisyphus was further punished by Hades, the Greek god of the underworld, as the penalty for cheating Death.

Who can resist self-satisfied comparisons with cunning old Sisyphus, who Hades, out of revenge for Sis’ litany of misdeeds, doomed to roll a large, heavy boulder up a sharp incline only to reach the top and have it roll down time after time, again and again.

The myth of Sisyphus (not to be confused with Albert Camus’ famous essay of the same name, which argued that life is “essentially meaningless”), has always been apt metaphor for frustration and futility—the struggle against the absurdity of life.

The myth has played out many times, in my own life and lives I’ve known. I’ve seen many creative people push their boulders up the mountain, struggling to reach the summit, lose their stamina, then watch helplessly as the burden rolls backward and then inevitably begin again. The term “Sisyphean” describes a task that is impossible to complete. The corollary is acknowledging that even with all the strength one can muster, one can only go so far. But sometimes further than expected.

I have been having a crisis of will lately, which is clearly visualized by this page from Mirko Ilic‘s as-yet-unpublished collection of comic strips, loosely grouped under the rubric 2020 A.C. (After COVID). For me, the image reveals many challenges, but now, specifically, the dreaded aging process, which I regret to say begins for many of us at age 65. This is the invisible line in the sand—as 18–20 is the marker between kid and adult—the age when the warranty expires and only willpower will power the body and mind to move upward and onward.

Everyone has “design” problems beyond their control. The body was poorly designed for high mileage. I have, for example, a very common but no less severe back problem, which, with the aid of surgery, medicine, therapy and willpower, can be kept under control … sometimes. This morning it was uncontrollable. My intention was to write a few advance Daily Hellers, storing nuts for the coming days. But back symptoms prohibited me from accomplishing that goal. Fortunately, Ilic’s image of Sisyphus helped relax the tension—if not entirely overcoming the chronic pain, at least coming to terms with it.

I postponed working on my posts for another time, and like the last panel of Ilic’s strip, reached an understanding. Life will continue to have ups and downs. I will rest for a while, then push forward once again. (And hey: You get to see a great drawing.)

Palookaville 24 (Drawn & Quarterly), a long-awaited installment of Seth’s longtime series, is the perfect evocation of his contextually complex and graphically precise manner of rendering high-contrast geometrical compositions. The choice of Art Deco–inspired lettering for the title is a satisfying typographic complement to the spare cover image.

Elise Gravel’s microbes (Club Microbe, Drawn & Quarterly) are not exactly the same germs found under a microscope, but maybe with extremely powerful magnification the free-loading organisms that populate our bodies actually do have quirky human characteristics. And why wouldn’t they? Gravel’s lively and engaging cover design certainly makes one consider the possibilities.

Pierre La Police’s cover for Masters of the Nefarious: Mollusk Rampage (New York Review of Comics), translated by Luke Burns, quietly introduces a raging off-center adventure starring two mutant twins who share the job of paranormal investigators. Their mission is to solve crimes and combat evil along with their splotch-faced, bulbous-headed best friend, Fongor Fonzym. The cover art seductively hints at the surreal war with mollusks left in the wake of a freak tsunami.

Unknown Pleasures by Tomer Hanuka (Ginko Press) is not actually a graphic novel, per se, but it is a collection of the artist’s exceptional narrative graphics, with the most inventive lettering (on front and back covers) shown here. (I hope he’ll consider turning it into a font.) The book contains a variety of reimagined film posters as well as illustrations for magazines and self-initiated projects. As a special production feature, the cover and back cover are die-cuts—and I love die-cuts.

I consider myself a polygyphist: a person who is fluent in graphic linguistics. Typoglyphics is the language of phonetic and hieroglyphic (among other glyphic) forms. As Norman Conquest (aka Derek Pell, aka Doktor Bey) points out in the recent number of his niche zine TYPO, there is so much joy to be found in dead languages, the least of which is: The reader cannot find the typos. Since my living prose is riven with typos (prior to editing), I am anxious to become expert in what Conquest calls determinative hieroglyphics.

This “Typoglyphics” article in TYPO: An International Journal of Prototypes (No. 5) is a clever means to pull significance out of two seemingly disparate themes—letters/words and meaning, versus the infallibility of mythic goddesses. Conquest enjoys mixing and matching intellectually stimulating historic material with contemporary concerns. “Typo,” which in most of our half-used-brains suggests a mistake, is in Conquest’s editorial vocabulary an umbrella for the combination of variegated types of information. The themes of the essays he chooses to publish, as suggested by the recognizable and not-so-known names on the cover, indicate that the eclecticism herein is not as far afield of our fixations on typographic mystery as one might think.

Eli was a major influence on modern animation in various media. Upon inquiring about his work, I was referred to his friend and business partner of 21 years, Ralph Guggenheim of Alligator Planet. I asked Guggenheim to share a segment of the brief obituary he wrote—and the following is, in part, adapted from and verbatim of that remembrance.

Eli was a notable figure in the New York animation scene of the 1970s. While an undergraduate at Harvard, Noyes was nominated in 1965 for an Academy Award for his eight-minute animated short film, Clay, or the Origin of Species. It is credited as establishing the genre of clay animation and remains a classic of stop-motion filmmaking. Subsequent animated films employed diverse techniques: animation (Sandman, 1973), pixelated stop motion (Peanut Butter and Jelly, 1976). He went on to make documentaries, animated TV series, and CD-ROM interactive content, usually ahead of the technology curve. He collaborated with the photographer Duane Michaels, created ID packages and TV series for Nickelodeon, even U.S. postage stamps.

Accompanying his father to the Aspen Design Conference, Noyes and Claudia Weill documented the confrontation between established architects and the new generation of socially conscious young talents of the era in Aspen 1970.

Ralph Guggenheim writes:
“An independent artist and animator, Noyes brought his playful creative talents to shape the look and
spirit of children’s programming in the early days of cable TV, especially for the Nickelodeon network. Eli was one of the first creative contributors to Nickelodeon. Nickelodeon’s first show, “Pinwheel,” featured Noyes’ animated pinwheels made with sand. In 1983, Eli and Kit Laybourne started Noyes & Laybourne Enterprises, an independent studio located in NYC’s Soho. In the early 80s Nickelodeon was filled with content it acquired, with a variety of styles and looks. Packaging was the only way to express a personality. Noyes & Laybourne contributed to the look of Nickelodeon and Nick at Nite with playful network IDs. They subsequently created the original shows “Eureeka’s Castle” and “Gullah Gullah Island.” For MTV they also produced network graphics and created a showcase of independent animation in “Liquid Television,” which launched series like Mike Judge’s “Beavis and Butt-Head” and Peter Chung’s “Aeon Flux.” Other clients included HBO, IBM, Scholastic, ABC Sports, Reebok and Xerox.

In 1988 Noyes and Laybourne joined Colossal Pictures. Known for a variety of special effects and animation techniques, Colossal was the ideal home for the wide-ranging curiosity that Eli brought to projects. In 1991 Eli Noyes and family moved to San Francisco, where he directed animation, live action and interactive projects for commercials and TV development. Always early to embrace technology, Eli created “Ruff’s Bone” (1994) at Colossal, a groundbreaking interactive CD-ROM product for Broderbund Software. He moved on to work on interactive projects at Pixar, and with programmers at the Disney Channel and The Disney Imagineers to create one of the first program blocks that combined TV and the internet, ZOOG Disney. Eli subsequently brought that experience to the first “convergence network” Oxygen, as Creative Director in the late ’90s. Noyes partnered with Toy Story producer Ralph Guggenheim in 2003, forming Alligator Planet, where he created film, print and media works including short films, animated segments for documentary films including Oscar nominee The Most Dangerous Man in America (2003). His 2011 “Go Green” stamps for the U.S. Postal Service featured simple actions everyone can take to conserve natural resources and promote the health of the environment.

The first festival was funded by Laura Ashley Foundation, and as part of the activities, “We visited six different communities around Cardiff and gave free print workshops. [Now, we’ve] upped the workshops to 15 and are funded by the Arts Council Wales.”

I’ve spoken to Saunders before about his traveling shows, and here he is again for another year of ink and paper and print.

How has the public’s response been to your Printed Festival?
Fantastic! The whole weekend was swarming with visitors from all over! We designed the festival to be a festival of participation rather than just an arts market. Because of this there was a palpable creative buzz in the air, with seasoned printmakers to complete novices trying their hands at linocuts, screenprint, rubber stamping and risograph printing. 

Is your audience mostly artists and designers, or civilians with a love for handcrafts?
A perfect mix; we don’t want to just preach to the converted and show print fanatics lovely artwork. Our main aim is to reach out to “civilians” and show how printmaking is accessible as a means to access their creativity. 

How and where do you organize these fetes?
I teamed up with the Printhaus, an amazing print studio in the heart of Cardiff, and we started talking about the need of a print festival in Wales that can service the community. We get together and ask ourselves what in an ideal world we would like to see in a print festival, and we try our best to make it happen. Free activities, artist talks and lots of hand-printed swag. It’s a printed dream factory. 

What kind of attendance do you get?
We were so swept up, and it being an open space we didn’t have a chance to count, but everyone who held a have-a-go print activity was swept off their feet with no respite for five hours straight. The venue inside serving food ran out of forks. 

What happens to the work?
People take it home and hopefully cherish it! More importantly, hopefully people can take the prints home, realize their creative potential and hopefully get bitten by the printing bug.

Victor Moscoso: Cosmos, the career-defining exhibition and catalog curated by David Carballal in Coruña, Spain, opened on March 15 at Instituto Cervantes Chicago, where it will stay until June 15. This is a great opportunity to see the landmark designs from the graphic maestro of ’60s rock poster art.

Moscoso was chief among the tribe of graphic linguists and principle form-givers of the sex, drugs and rock n’ roll epoch. He lived through the ’60s and is still able to remember it. The Spanish-born, Brooklyn-raised, Yale-educated artist stumbled into the counterculture and arose to become its genius of a distinct American music-inspired graphic language.

Psychedelic aptly underscored the hypnotic letterforms and vibrating color combinations and retrofitted antique illustrations. Artists of the era used their visual language as a code to vividly communicate to those visionary—or stoned—enough to see the messages through the chromatic haze. While many of the artists who were making cheaply printed flyers promoting ballroom concerts were ostensibly self-taught, their respective work unwittingly redefined a large swath of commercial art, graphic design and fine arts, too (even today).

Moscoso was unique in ways that gave him anomaly status among his peers. He was the only formally trained artist in this otherwise grassroots poster movement. He really knew how to draw in a classical sense and understood design theory. He had studied Bauhaus history and early and Midcentury Modernism. In short, Moscoso had bona fides as a Modernist. But his tenure at New York’s Cooper Union, and later Yale—where he was taught by none other than the renowned color master and Bauhausler Josef Albers—was not so much an advantage as a handicap; to work in his newfound counterculture genre, he had to reverse everything he’d learned.

This exhibition shows his masterworks in comics, posters, lettering and design.

Lerer inhabits the worlds of cartooning, illustration and fine art. He has exhibited his drawings at New York Cityʼs Nexus Gallery, Broome Street Gallery, Lincoln Centerʼs Cork Gallery, and New Century Artists. His illustrations ran in the “Careers Plus” column of the New York Post from 1996 to 1998, and he was the art director of Street News from 1995 to 1996. He has written extensively on comics for The Rumpus, and was assistant editor and designer of Marvel Age Magazine in the early ’80s. On Facebook, Lerer documents the adventures of The Little General, who has starred in a graphic novel and series of mini-comics since 2009.

The arc of this work builds on the premise, What happens when three 18-month-old babies plot against each other with the goal of gaining world power and fame? Although it sounds a bit like a certain presidential candidate, any similarity is purely coincidental (and for that matter, no living babies were harmed in the making of these comics). Here Lerer speaks candidly about his Little General and asks you to draw your own conclusions.

When and why did you launch The Little General and his cohorts on social media?
Facebook is the ideal venue for posting cartoons. I started off in 2009 with simple one-panel line drawings, and they evolved into more sophisticated color multi-part continuities with (drumroll, please) allegorical content that I compile into zines. The fellow who instigated the whole “baby general” idea, a writer named Andrew Coe, was very pleased with my efforts, and the rest is history.

What ideally do you want The Little General to be saying to the reader?
Bottom line? The mission is satire. Jonathan Swift wrote that, “Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.” I think of satire as a mirror. Stan Lee once said that because the news of the world we receive is so heavily sugar-coated, if you present things exactly as they really are, it will come across as satire.

I used to draw storyboards with soldiers galore. As a kid did you draw military figures and stories to excess?
I always drew to excess! But never soldiers or anything military. What I really enjoyed drawing were the vintage Marvel Super-Heroes and Peanuts characters. In fact, my father framed my Charlie Brown and Schroeder drawings and hung them in his office.

There’s a hint of Dada humor in your comic books as well as surreal absurdity. Are they or are they not intended to be political?
You honor me by spotting an element of surrealism in my cartoons and, as I become a more confident draftsman, I’ll be able to dispense with the conventions that I’m now laboring earnestly to master. Political? Well, In the second graphic novel, currently in progress, a character with absolutely no knowledge of how to run even his own affairs claims he knows everything better than everybody else, and subsequently makes a huge mess. Absurdity, in cartoons as in real life, rules. 

How much of The Little General (or his guerrilla pal, Chiquita Bañana, for that matter) is some kind of autobiographical fantasy?
It’s not really my dream to be a Central American guerrilla leader, but I can’t help finding Chiquita Bañana (with the tilde over the n) irresistibly cute. That’s usually how she gets things done, in fact.

Are the three 18-month-old babies who star in the Little General really able to save the world? And if so, how?
In the Facebook continuities, our diminutive hero always responds to any crisis with great earnestness (if that’s a real word), like an American Tintin. In the graphic novel, though, he’s the heavy, more motivated by egocentrism and greed, like, say, Blackadder. In a future graphic novel, I’ll have him explain to the readers in a framing sequence that he’s just a character playing a part, and that offstage he really does respect Admiral Kips-Bay and loves Chiquita.

But “save the world?” Nah. They’re more about frantically clinging to power than helping others, like a lot of babies. 

How regularly do you create different scenarios for your characters?
The first graphic novel was about a real place called La Magliana, a 16th-century papal retreat in the Italian countryside that the babies fight over (I won’t give away the ending). The second graphic novel, which we hope to have ready for MoCCA Fest in 2025 (fingers crossed) is inspired by John Ringling, the circus impresario who longed to be a member of the American aristocracy. 

The recent Facebook cartoons deal with the war in the Middle East and my frustration that the world’s nations were so slow to respond to the invasion of Ukraine. Now I’m doing “Scenes From the Life of the Little General,” which places the little fellow in various historical situations.

Do you have a strong fan base? How do your readers respond?
They’ve been wonderful! We’re developing an enthusiastic readership among people who enjoy sophisticated wit and humor. Our Facebook posts keep getting more and more likes and comments, and we’re winning a lot of support from friends in the cartooning profession like Barbara Slate, Elwood Smith and Craig Yoe. Art Spiegelman himself was very encouraging. What’s most flattering is that I’m hearing from old high school and college chums I haven’t seen in years who love the drawing style.

There seems to be many villains, but I can’t tell who they are. Can you give me a hint?
Again, in cartoons, as in life, most of these characters are their own worst enemies.