School of Visual Arts Collection. Detail of poster illustrated by Phil Hays and designed by Ivan Chermayeff, 1960s.

SVA’s early subway posters helped raise the school to a new plane of artistic and intellectual pursuits.

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Tony Palladino Collection, Box 19: Color poem book for Collier Engraving, 1967.

This deceptively casual promotional piece typifies the whimsy and poignancy found in much of Tony Palladino’s work.

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Chermayeff & Geismar Collection: Book Jacket, 1961.

In 1961, Ivan Chermayeff designed and illustrated Sandol Stoddard Warburg’s Keep it like a secret (Chermayeff and Warburg had previously collaborated on The Thinking Book in 1960). The charming title, with its childlike connotations, was later appropriated by the band Built to Spill for their 1999 album. Sadly, we only have the jacket, not the book itself, but I did discover another version of the jacket out there.

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Milton Glaser Collection Box 112 Folder 24. Push Pin Graphic No. 11, December 1957.

Milton Glaser tips his hat to French poet, playwright, and critic Guillaume Apollinaire.

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Another lovely artifact appeared in the Archive unexpectedly last week: Allan Kaprow’s Words, from 1962.

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Milton Glaser is closely associated with a visual style emphasizing expressive illustrations and resonant cultural symbols, but revisiting different periods in his career one is reminded that he was constantly developing new approaches, and in the Glaser Collection one can find an astonishingly wide range of approaches to design problems.

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James McMullan Collection, Box 1 Folder 7: Caprolan Nylon advertisement, 1966.

James McMullan designed and illustrated this piece for Caprolan nylon during his first year at Push Pin; it appeared in the September 7, 1966 issue of Women’s Wear Daily.

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Chermayeff & Geismar Collection: Box 22, Folder 3. Interactive Data Corporation.

If Chermayeff & Geismar could be said to have one particular speciality, it would probably be the knack for distilling complex organizational systems into extremely reduced graphic ideas: their calling card in this respect was the Symbol Signs project. But this poster for Interactive Data Corporation, with its monochrome figuration for a symposium, also falls neatly into the category (along with work for Xerox). Click through for the full page.

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Chermayeff & Geismar Collection: Pepsi-Cola World, February 1960.

The design firm of Brownjohn, Chermayeff & Geismar established their reputation for brilliant corporate identity work with one of their earliest clients, Pepsi-Cola.

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Milton Glaser Collection Box 108, Columbia Records: Jazz Odyssey Vol. II: The Sound of Chicago, 1964.

Milton Glaser’s early album covers express his understanding of the ineffable qualities of music.

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James McMullan Collection: Roche Laboratories brochure for Taractan, 1965.

Well before the boom of direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising, highly adventurous drug advertising was aimed almost exclusively at physicians.

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Tony Palladino collaborated with R.O. Blechman in the late-1960s. One of the best examples of their combined sensibilities appeared on their covers for Architectural & Engineering News.

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James McMullan Collection: The New York Times advertising supplement for Westinghouse Broadcasting Company, March 5, 1967 / Fort Wayne by James McMullan.

From the James McMullan Collection, a look at some of the best illustrators who got their start the 1950s and 60s.

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Milton Glaser Collection: The Art of Seeing announcement, 1962.

A symposium of “provocative visual material” inspired Milton Glaser to come up with some of his own.

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School of Visual Arts Collection: Passion cover, 1970.

Milton Glaser and Henry Wolf’s magazine workshop pays tribute to the landmark erotic publication Eros.

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Chermayeff & Geismar Collection, Box 40 Folder 11, Xerox booklet, 1960s.

Which ladder will you climb at Xerox?

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And yet…

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Rummaging through some old SVA publications, we came across this invitation for an unveiling of the XIX Olympiad graphics, featuring Lance Wyman’s classic symbol for the games.

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School of Visual Arts Collection, Bob Gill self-promotional pamphlet, c. 1959.

Designer and illustrator Bob Gill was one of the earliest faculty members at SVA, joining right around the time George Tscherny taught the school’s first design course.

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School of Visual Arts Exhibitions: Sketch for Groups exhibition poster, November 11 – December 3, 1969.

We love our LeWitt here at Container List, and we recently found some very early exhibition announcements for his work at SVA and other galleries.

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Ten years before the rise of the supermarket generic brand, Champion Papers produced these colorful generic packaging designs for a series of print advertisements.

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Steven Heller Collection: Identity Programs by Noel Martin, identity for Xomox Corporation, manufacturers of valves, actuators and surgical implants.

Noel Martin was a renown self-taught typographer and designer who studied drawing, painting, and printmaking at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. He later became an instructor there and was the long-time designer for the Cincinnati Art Museum, as well as a prolific free-lance designer. Martin was celebrated for modernizing museum graphics and industrial trade catalogs. In 1953, he was featured in MoMA’s landmark design exhibition, Four American Designers, along with Herbert Bayer, Leo Lionni, and Ben Shahn. His spiral-bound self-promotional piece, Identity Programs, presents some of his iconic minimalist logos.

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The AIGA Journal for December 1969 featured the association’s annual review of textbooks and teaching aids. The latter ranged from sets of workbooks to a crate-size tool chest with several drawers of Platonic solids. Dangerous Parallel, pictured, was a Korean war simulation.

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Steven Heller Collection: All the King’s Men cover by Jerome Martin (Time Reading Program), 1963.

Steven Heller recently gave us 82 books from the Time Reading Program; check out his recent article in Design Observer about their wonderfully eclectic covers.

While going through the books myself, I was particularly taken with the three covers done by an illustrator I’d never heard of, Jerome Martin.

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Milton Glaser Collection, Box 93 Folder 27: Colorvision for Phoenix Clothes and Hanover Hall, 1963.

In what essentially looks like a lost issue of the Push Pin Graphic, Colorvision (“an entirely new concept of color in clothing!”) describes the magic of a Blendescent.

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James McMullan Collection: Borges book covers for E.P. Dutton, 1960s-1970s.

This summer we received a great donation from illustrator, poster designer and long-time SVA faculty member James McMullan.

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Tony Palladino Collection: Box 10, Folder 20

About a decade before Tony devised his ‘guerilla marketing’ self-promotion campaign, the designer took a similarly witty but somewhat more traditional approach. Four versions of this card were printed, each in three colors on heavy stock, and sent to publishers without any additional pitch. Set simply with his address and isolating a single area of specialization, they relied on a single strong image to convey their point.

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Comment was a promotional periodical produced by consortium of printers in the early sixties. Issue 200 included contributions from Saul Bass, Will Burtin, and Henry Wolf.

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SVA Collection, RG 15 Exhibitions

Milton Glaser designed this poster for an exhibition at the Visual Arts Gallery in late 1965. Twen, a West German magazine for “people in their twenties: from 15 to 30,” was wildly influential in design circles worldwide—with a grid system composed of twelve small modules combined in an internally regular but widely varying page layouts, and liberal full-bleed spreads photographed by Art Kane, Will McBride, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon and others (and illustrations by Heinz Edelmann). It introduced many design students to Willy Fleckhaus, the magazine’s art director and sometime editor, who became famous for his virtuosic combination of close-set typography and tightly-cropped images. The rigid geometry of this poster, though not usually associated with Glaser, was a mode he employed often for SVA exhibition posters (more can be seen here and here). Though the graphic austerity is a contrast to his earlier work, the underlying expression of concepts through tactile visual representation is, I think, unmistakable Glaser.

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The Henry Wolf Collection: Box 1, Folder 41

Henry Wolf art directed and photographed “Toys of a Decade” for the October 1960 Esquire. The text was full of familiar connoisseur’s details about an eclectic range of 1940s bric-a-brac. But it was presented in classic sixties prose style: partial acknowledgment of excess clothed in mock-rapturous anaphora:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive! While the world was impoverished, America rejoiced in its material goods, and honest goods they were. Lionel trains had a third rail down the middle, and telephones came in any color, if it was black … Johnny hawked his Philip Morris cigarettes (in plain brown wrappers) on the airwaves. Charles Eames’s plywood chair, built to sustain the bottom, has lasted until today, while brain food like Collier’s and Flash Gordon became period pieces. God, we were content! The only subversive voice was Baby Snooks every Friday night, she would ask, all feigned innocence, “Why, Daddy?” … Then, suddenly, it was 1950. North Korea invaded South Korea; and next spring Baby Snooks was dead.

(Esquire casually omits Ray Eames’ credit on the DCM.)

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Milton Glaser Collection: Box 3, Folder 12

One of the main attractions of the archive as a research tool is as a document of artistic process. (The effect of the overwriting of drafts by computers is a subject I have written about elsewhere.) There were several stages to Milton Glaser’s development of a poster for the Visual Arts Gallery exhibition “Inside the Big Apple” (1968) — the above shows his collage of different versions of the figuration, which arrangement ended up contributing the composition that he used in the final version (other versions and the final poster follow).

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SVA Collection: RG 5.2 Continuing Education, course announcements

During the 1960s, SVA published a series of course announcements advertising the practical aspects of its evening classes. The text was often dry but the graphics were playful and eye-catching. Here, having some fun with type, are Ivan Chermayeff and Tony Palladino. Chermayeff and Bob Gill are after the jump.

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Chermayeff & Geismar Collection, Box 44, Folder 3.

Lincoln Center’s groundbreaking ceremony took place in on May 14, 1959, so this book cover designed by Chermayeff & Geismar must have been created some time in the early 1960s. According to the text, Lincoln Center would make New York City “… the international capital of the performing arts, just as the United Nations makes it a capital for world affairs.”

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Tube Floor Lamp, 1968. Tony Palladino (American, born 1930) and John Mascheroni (American, born 1932). Polished aluminum, h. 50” (127 cm). Manufactured by John Mascheroni Furniture Co., New York, NY. Gift of the designers.

More Tony Palladino at the Museum of Modern Art: “Tube Floor Lamp,” part of the museum’s permanent collection since 1968, is currently on view in the exhibition What Was Good Design? alongside objects by Charles and Ray Eames, Hans Wegner, Arne Jacobsen and Bruno Munari.

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Tony Palladino Collection, Series 3: Slides

Tony Palladino contributed this sign — a found object — to the 1966 Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Object Transformed. Curated by Mildred Constantine and Arthur Drexler for the museum’s Architecture and Design Department, it featured works by Jasper Johns, Man Ray, Bruno Minari, Meret Oppenheim, Robert Rauschenberg, and others. In the New York Times, John Canaday wrote,

“The Object Transformed” is a collection of utilitarian objects—chairs, books, mattresses, radio sets, cutlery, articles of clothing and the like—that artists or designers have transformed in a variety of ways, sometimes humourously, often monstrously, but always expressively in one direction or another.

In the introduction to the exhibition’s catalogue (designed by Massimo Vignelli), Constantine describes the objects as “apparitions of everyday reality, complete with overtones of grim absurdity,” and suggests “for the 20th century they may be the most appropriate kind of still life.” Admission was $1.25.

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Milton Glaser Collection: Box 112, Folder 24, Push Pin Graphic (undated)

Stan VanDerBeek (1927-1984) was best known as an experimental filmmaker but he was also a gifted painter and sculptor. This undated issue of the Push Pin Graphic features photographs of VanDerBeek’s whimsical creations.

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Milton Glaser Collection: Box 48, Folder 13

Milton Glaser worked on many book jackets for Philip Roth (both with Penguin and Houghton Mifflin), including the original Zuckerman trilogy; American Pastoral; Goodbye, Columbus; and others. Above is the sketch for his cover to Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). I really like the figuration of hands, and the Goreyesque flowing coat, gently bulbous in high early-Milton style. Though I think it may be a bit literal as jacket covers go, it does directly engage the controlling principle of the book, as listed on the first page (as if an imaginary a psychology encyclopedia entry) —

Portnoy’s Complaint n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933- )] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature.

Flying after apparently-unoccupied parachute-like skirts at full sprint is a kind of perversion I guess.

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SVA RG 14.9.1 Media Arts — Wonder magazine, 1962.

Wonder was the product of Henry Wolf’s class, Making a Magazine, at the School of Visual Arts. Conceived, designed, and written over the course of the Fall 1961 and Spring 1962 semesters, this one-off children’s magazine communicated with its audience in an exuberantly playful manner that never condescended. And it’s certainly the coolest-looking kids magazine I’ve ever seen. Wolf’s students included William Ingraham, Walter Bernard, Sullivan Ashby, Robert Giusti, Herbert Migdoll, Shirley Glaser, David November, Antonio Macchia, and Henry Markowitz.

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Milton Glaser Collection: Box 77, Folder 9: Opera News, March 22, 1969 — Turandot.

In the category of personal favorites go these beautiful Opera News covers, done by Milton Glaser between 1966 and 1970, while he was at Push Pin.

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From the Henry Wolf donation, not archived

In the 1960s Kodak returned developed Kodachrome in these slide boxes. It’s an elegant packaging system, simple and well-proportioned: pushing on the side that reads PUSH HERE (not, say, the one that reads PUSH FROM OTHER SIDE) reveals an elegantly built-in paper hinge and divider for the two sections.

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Madison Avenue, October 1969. From the Henry Wolf Collection, Series VI. Box 19, Folder 6.

Pictured: Sandy Kiersky, media director for Trahey/Wolf advertising and her fantastic eyeglasses. Click through for the full frame of this shot and pictures of their futuristic mid-century office at 477 Madison Avenue.

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Milton Glaser Collection: Drawer 11, Folder 26.

XTC’s Andy Partridge readily admits to using Milton Glaser’s 1964 poster for radio station WOR as the inspiration for the cover art for XTC’s 1989 album Oranges and Lemons (viewable here). He has also professed his love of the work of Yellow Submarine art director and designer Heinz Edelmann, who is also a new addition to the archives — sneak peek to come!

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