James McMullan illustrated Nabokov’s Transparent Things for Esquire in 1971.

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New stuff in our collection by Swiss-born designer Fred Troller.

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A series of talks at SVA in 1971 and 1972 featured a pretty spectacular line-up: Carl Andre, Larry Bell, Michael Heizer, Donald Judd, Allan Kaprow, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenberg, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, and Andy Warhol. The poster art, by John Sposato, reads as minimalism sent through the Push Pin filter (even though Sposato, who still teaches at SVA today, was, to my knowledge, never employed by the studio), right down to the slowly unfolding plays on depth and perspective.

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From the Push Pin Slide Collection: what appears to be a study for an alphabet based on the 1971 PBS identity designed by Lubalin Studio.

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Forever potent and still open to interpretation despite its ubiquity, the skeleton has surfaced many times in the early work of Milton Glaser.

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SVA Event 17. America Today lecture series, 1971-1972.

In light of the goings-on today in the US, here’s a quick snapshot of the poster for the School of Visual Arts’ America Today lecture series, from November 1971 to April 1972. Designed by Bill Naegels and Push Pin Studios, it enlists the studio’s characteristic use of variation within iterations of a larger structure (here, a simple grid).

Speakers included the expected art critics (“Miss” Barbara Rose) and philosophers (William Irwin Thompson), along with neurobiologist George Wald (who was a recipient of the 1967 Nobel prize for his work on the mechanics of vision), director Dusan Makavejev (who showed what would be his most famous film, WR: Mysteries of the Organism, in Cannes the previous year), and, finally, on 13 April 1972, one Lieutenant John Kerry: “veteran and anti-war spokesman; full-time political activist.”

Slightly more legible version of the snapshot available on our Flickr.

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One regular advertiser in the Push Pin Graphic was Metropolitan Printing.

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Milton Glaser’s architectural lighting and three-dimensional design for restaurants.

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Some type-based design from Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast.

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Milton Glaser created this album cover in 1972 for legendary guitarist and folk singer Doc Watson.

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In the grand tradition of magazine quizzes comes “The Whatchamacallit Game” from Esquire.

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An exhibition of Navajo Weaving at the Visual Arts Gallery in 1972 described a loom made of cosmic forces, and blankets rendered in “cannel-coal, turquoise, abalone, and white bead” but developed during a “devastating acculturation process.”

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One of the earliest exhibitions of Andy Warhol’s provocative “Sickle and Hammer” series was an exhibition of the pencil-and-watercolor drawings of 1976 at the Visual Arts Museum.

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In 1970, Childcraft Education Corp. turned to Milton Glaser to design their flagship store at 150 E. 58th Street.

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Are you a member of Saturday’s Generation?

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The continuing story of the Windows On The World restaurant and its satellites in the World Trade Center, designed by Milton Glaser in 1976 and redone in 1996.

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One curious feature about the Glaser collection is its organizational style, which was based on the way the materials were donated by the designer. Subseries G of his Printed Materials contains many of the menus he did for businesses at the World Trade Center.

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Detail from SVA Collection, Events: Fine Arts Department. ‘Artist and Critic: The Nature of the Relationship’ (March 1979).

Another example of paintbrushes (standing in for the artist) combined with another object (here, amid or as the hammers on a typewriter) follows the one we featured last week. The poster this detail is from originally was made to promote a panel discussion between the artists Alice Aycock, Alex Katz, and Lucio Pozzi with critics Lawrence Alloway, Hilton Kramer and moderator Donald Kuspit on the relationship between the artist and critic.

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Henry Wolf’s work for Saks hearkened back to his days at Harper’s Bazaar and Show.

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Milton Glaser plays with fire for Poppy Records.

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Lou Dorfsman’s epic promotional piece for CBS’s coverage of the Apollo 11 mission.

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Cy Twombly was the subject of two solo exhibitions at SVA, in 1973 and 1977, just before his idiosyncratic work found new favor with the rising generation of neo-Expressionists.

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Letterhead from early in Steve Heller’s career as an art director.

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James McMullan did stunning work for the short-lived West magazine.

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Milton Glaser teamed with celebrated photographer Duane Michals in 1972 to create this metaphysical album cover for bluesy folkie Chris Smither.

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The BFA Fine Arts department has long shown film or video art in the SVA Amphitheatre. These rough posters, spanning three decades, announce screenings of milestone works.

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Panel discussions and talks sponsored by the Fine Arts Department in the heady conceptual late-70s and early-80s often adopted a DIY or punk aesthetic in their announcements.

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Milton Glaser Collection Box 68 Folder 17. Bird for UNICEF poster, late 1960s – early 1970s.

Container List is on Twitter! Follow us for new post alerts as well as anything else we find that we think may appeal to you, beloved readers.

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Chermayeff and Geismar published a spiral-bound portfolio of their trademarks in 1979, a precursor to the 2000 volume TM, published by Princeton Architectural Press.

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SVA’s subway posters established the school’s graphic presence by using abstract concepts to convey a deeply pragmatic message.

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Next in our Design and Illustration Study Collection is the work of environmental design pioneer Deborah Sussman.

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Folk art at the Visual Arts Gallery in the early 1970s.

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Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the BBC has just posted a 30-minute radio documentary on the history of Milton Glaser’s iconic I ♥ NY logo. The logo has become so ubiquitous that I think we sometimes forget the fact that it was actually designed by someone. The program traces the genesis of the project back to 1977, when NYC was not the tourist magnet it is today. The New York Chamber of Commerce turned to Glaser to help reverse the state’s economic fortune; Glaser created the logo pro bono. Of course, no one foresaw its enormous cultural impact.

The piece will be available for free for the next six days at the BBC web site.

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Milton Glaser applies his passion for music to record labels.

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The third exhibition directed by Jeanne Siegel at the Visual Arts Museum riffed on the Guggenheim’s The Shaped Canvas.

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The transfigured shoes of Push Pin Studios.

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James McMullan Collection Box 4 Folder 7: Ramon Novarro and the Ferguson brothers original art for The White Album, New West, June 4, 1979.

James McMullan’s expressive illustrations add layers to Joan Didion’s novelistic essays.

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For Time magazine, 1970: several versions of Elliott Gould, by Milton Glaser

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Another chapter in our series of posts on George Tscherny’s work for Pan Am.

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Glaser’s typefaces combine Pushpin-era Deco motifs with conventions adapted from hand-painted signs, but share a tendency to imbue generic letterforms with geometric dimension.

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Milton Glaser Collection Box 57 Folder 6: Grand Union on E. 86th Street, New York City, 1988 (pear sculpture by Jordan Steckel)

In the mid-1970s, Milton Glaser was approached by Sir James Goldsmith to take on a dramatic redesign of the supermarket chain Grand Union.

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We looked at some of Edelmann’s political posters for the West German radio station WDR back in June. But there was also a lighter side to his collaboration with the broadcaster.

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George Tscherny was one of the heraldic “here comes modernism” designers of the ’70s: along with Chermayeff & Geismar, his name seemed to be high on the shortlist when design became a hot item in the boardroom—though the bigwigs did not necessarily always follow through with a whole, or lasting, campaign.

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Detail from an advertisement in Print, May/June 1979.

The thing that fascinates me most about Push Pin Graphic is how unpredictable they manage to be all the time. Even apart from the contents of each issue, every promotion contains — no matter how generic the thing as a whole may be — some off-kilter element that has a defamiliarizing effect on the whole endeavor. The Cherie Currie-esque figure here has no other reference anywhere on the page, she’s just hanging out in the margin of the tearaway.

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George Tscherny Collection: MG2008.3 Box A

George Tscherny completed a bogglingly wide range of work standardizing the graphics for Pan Am in the early ’70s, redesigning everything from timetables to stewards’ aprons over the course of two years. These city guides are of a piece with the company’s other projects of that era, recalling both the bold imagery of Chermayeff & Geismar’s posters for the company and Tscherny’s own modular environmental graphics.

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James McMullan Collection: Big Tree Records, Run Joey Run, 1975.

Though I suspect the overlap between readers of this blog and viewers of the tv show Glee amounts to one person (me), I feel compelled to post the album cover for David Geddes’ Run Joey Run. The cheeseball classic title track was featured in a recent episode of Glee devoted to “rehabilitating” bad songs.

Daddy please don’t, it wasn’t his fault, he means so much to me.
Daddy please don’t, we’re gonna get married, just you wait and see.

Needless to say, that wedding never took place, not after Julie accidentally took a bullet intended for Joey from Daddy’s gun. Classing up the joint considerably are James McMullan’s expressive illustrations for the album’s cover, which covey a sense of desperation and actual emotional stakes.

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The most recent addition to the Chermayeff & Geismar Collection is twelve boxes of old and rare art books, ranging from annuals to architecture; Switzerland to Japan. As always, there were plenty of surprises: one was the catalog for an AGI exhibition from 1976, which featured, alongside reproductions of their work, dramatic photos of the designers.

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School of Visual Arts Archives, RG 9.4 Student Galleries. Exhibition 726. Exhibition announcement for the SVA Gallery’s “Performance Spaces.”

Many of the artists and critics who were invited to guest curate the SVA Gallery in the 60s and 70s were emerging figures in the avant-garde, including Lucy Lippard, Phyllis Tuchman, and Mel Bochner. In May, 1972 they invited Vito Acconci.

This striking invitation features an image of the artist cupping the interior curve of two mounds of earth. The washed-out monochrome palette makes it all blend together, giving the sense of the artist as an organic component of the environment: which aptly reflects this exhibition’s emphasis on the intersection between installation and performance art. Featured in Performance Spaces: a series of printed scores (“songs written for specific birds and athletes”) and the documentation for “Silent Ping Pong” by Bill Beckley, a performance installation by Terry Fox, a confrontational sculpture by Howard Fried, and Dennis Oppenheim’s “Gingerbread Man.”

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Tony Palladino worked for Siegel & Gale in the mid-1970s — one of the accounts he worked on was Conrail, a new railroad organization created by the federal government.

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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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Poster for the exhibition American-Type Sculpture, Part 2, which opened at the Visual Arts Gallery in 1973. Curator Phyllis Tuchman brought together a prophetic list of artists for the show, including Louise Bourgeois, Sol LeWitt, and Richard Serra.

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In the early 1970s, Push Pin Studios produced a line of candies under the name “Pushpinoff Sweets.”

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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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In the 1970s, the Mead Library of Ideas held exhibitions showcasing the best contemporary graphic design; they commissioned announcement posters from designers including Tony Palladino, Chermayeff & Geismar, and Seymour Chwast.

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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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Chermayeff & Geismar Collection: Drawer 9, Folder 15.

In 1971, Chermayeff & Geismar designed these posters for Pan Am, which are now featured in the latest issue of Eye magazine as part of the article Flight of the Imagination. In it, SVA Design Criticism student Frederico Duarte investigates this fruitful period in the company’s history:

Under the supervision of Patrick Friesner, Pan Am’s head of sales and promotion, Chermayeff & Geismar was one of a handful of studios taken on to produce, at a frenzied pace, promotional materials that carried the new identity; others included George Tscherny, Rudolph de Harak and, in London, Alan Fletcher.

We have written on Tscherny’s artwork and modular displays for Pan Am. And now we’ve also uploaded more of C&G’s posters in the series (in our Flickr).

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Chermayeff & Geismar Collection: Box 16 Folder 13. Dictaphone System 1, 1970.

Is it a top secret missile defense system? A world-wide clandestine computer network designed to topple rogue governments? The futuristic and vaguely ominous-sounding System 1 was actually an office furniture system from Dictaphone’s furniture division Marble/Imperial.

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Seymour Chwast Collection: P 192

In 1971, Phyllis La Farge and Seymour Chwast collaborated on the children’s book The Pancake King, which described the rapid ascent of a young master of the griddle pan. It spoke of the joy of breakfast, the perils of fame, the importance of family and of maple syrup. More spreads from The Pancake King are viewable on Flickr (thanks to Norman Hathaway), and show Chwast’s dexterous use of scale and bleed between spreads, and tidily-set Bodoni. The book was included in AIGA’s Fifty Books of the Year.

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Seymour Chwast Collection: Box 4, Item 28 (burger not included)

In 1979, McDonald’s hired Seymour Chwast to contribute one version of the packaging for the introduction of their new product, the Happy Meal. The promotion cost one dollar, and comprised a hamburger or cheeseburger, twelve-ounce soft drink, a small order of french fries, and a McDonaldland Cookie Sampler (not pictured). Along with their comestibles, the first customers could look forward to discovering either a McDoodler stencil, puzzle book, a McWrist wallet, an ID bracelet or McDonaldland character erasers.

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Milton Glaser Collection: Drawer 20, Folders 10-12.

In 1970, Milton Glaser did a series of three posters for RCA’s Computer Division entitled Memory Unbound. They express the abstract promise of technology that was at least a decade away for most people.

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Ivan Chermayeff designed this poster for AIGA’s “Color” exhibition in 1974, which collected work by artists, photographers and designers. Tightly flowing script creates a pattern made out of textual gibberish, where exaggerated descenders are punctuated at intervals with large blobs of ink. Click through for the whole image, with Chermayeff’s colorful signature.

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Detail from Sol Lewitt, All Combinations of Arcs from Four Corners, Arcs from Four Sides, Straight Lines, Not-Straight Lines and Broken Lines (1976).

In March 1976, Sol Lewitt had his first solo exhibition at the Visual Arts Museum (209 E. 23rd Street). The work exhibited wasn’t the piece itself, but rather the result of instructions he gave to third parties: they assembled a large graphic combination drawn from a vocabulary of white-on-black linear figures provided by the artist. Instead of hiring technicians or specialists to screen the shapes in a particular order, the artist made explicit that the idea or set of instructions for the art was itself the art, rather than the artifact it produced. He continued the process across several similar pieces, some of which used the same graphic forms — one, Wall Drawing #260, was the subject of a recent focus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

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George Tscherny designed this installation for Pan American Airways, to be sent to travel agencies promoting their vacation locations. Details about the modular system follow.

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Tony Palladino Collection, Box 10, Folder 21.

In 1971, Tony Palladino sent out this note to a selected but wide group of media contacts to solicit work. He printed the note in color and ripped each one by hand. The tactic worked! He successfully got work as a result of the mailing, and doesn’t recall a negative backlash.

Palladino made a point of choosing business associates who would get the joke, and would recognize his initials, T.P. He also says he wouldn’t dare pull a stunt like this today.

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SVA Tribeca Gallery Show No. 4, April 3-14, 1979. Works by Gary Sherman and Julie Cohen.

Earlier, we highlighted a look at the SVA Tribeca Gallery, which was open from 1979-1980 in the American Thread Building on West Broadway and featured SVA student work in a professional gallery setting. The complete history of this seminal gallery is now available on our web site (designed by Archives staff member Zachary Sachs). Some featured artworks follow.

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Pentagram Partners’ Feedback, five volumes, London 1976–1996

Among the ephemera in the Henry Wolf Collection are five early editions of Pentagram’s Feedback — guidebooks for globetrotting designers. Excerpts from David Hockney, Olivier Morgue and Bob Gill follow.

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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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Chermayeff & Geismar Collection, Box 44, Folder 5 — Norlin Annual Report 1974.

From the Chermayeff & Geismar Collection comes this Norlin Annual Report shaped like an album cover. Inside, along with the actual report, is the record Norlin Salutes The Music in America, which includes works by Morton Gould, Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and William Schumann.

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George Tschnery Collection, Grace Annual Report 1985 first quarter.

We’ve just received our next batch of materials from George Tscherny: a wonderful case study of his identity work for W.R. Grace. Video after the jump!

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Milton Glaser Collection, Series 2: Box 106, Folder 9

Milton Glaser designed this irregularly-shaped, cut-out menu in 1973 for Galeonen Bar, at the Plaza Hamburg hotel. Their vintage cocktail menu follows.

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Ed McCabe Collection, Series II: Box 2, Folder 8.

The copy for the beloved Maxell “blow-away guy” ad (ca. 1979) was composed by Ed McCabe.

I cannot count how many times I tore through this sparse bachelor pad on packages of XLII tapes. The translation to TV (here, courtesy of YouTube) isn’t quite the same, since however loud-sounding “Ride of the Valkyries” may be, it cannot be as powerful as the imagined decibels conveyed by the print ad, with tie and lampshade frozen permanently in full blow-back amid gusts of high-fidelity.

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We’ve just received the first installment of our new George Tscherny Collection, which includes gorgeous modular displays for Pan Am terminals, corporate style manuals, and branded promo items and service uniforms.

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