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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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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We’ve just received materials from the 2005 exhibition The Design of Dissent donated by designer Mirko Ilić, who, along with Milton Glaser, collected the materials and created a book on the project.

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For large patches of his later career Heinz Edelmann focused on quickly producing posters for arts events and series productions: these typically made use of a fairly regularized typographic template for information, and wild, allusive but enigmatic illustrations. For one season in the mid-1980s, he worked with the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus theater, playing off the plays’ angsty plotlines with evocatively deformed bodies.

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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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Chermayeff & Geismar Collection: Drawer 7, Folder 2. Mobil Masterpiece Theatre.

Masterpiece Theatre was the principal portal into British television for American audiences in the seventies; Mobil, the sponsor, drafted their longtime designers Chermayeff & Geismar to make posters for various features.

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School of Visual Arts Collection: Poster for Robert Weaver: Retrospective 1956-1977.

Pioneering illustrator Robert Weaver was a major figure at SVA beginning in 1950s.

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WDR. Die Ausgewogenheit (3): Die Scharfe, Aber Erlaubte Kritik [The Balance: The Pointed, But Allowed, Critique]. n.d.

In the 1970s and 1980s Heinz Edelmann designed many posters for the West German public broadcasting station Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR).

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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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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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Left: Cover of Hot Chip’s One Life Stand (Astralwerks). Right: Poster for The Crucible, by Arthur Miller (Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus). Designed by Heinz Edelmann, 33 × 47 in. n. d.

You were the cute bearded guy on the F train this morning. I was the somewhat pallid but classically beautiful girl. I thought we were a good match but it was as though we were pulled apart by powerful ropes. Want to have coffee sometime?

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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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Chermayeff & Geismar Collection Box 48 Folder 14: Milton Resnick exhibition at Howard Wise Gallery.

Chermayeff & Geismar designed a series of exhibition posters for the Howard Wise Gallery in the 1960s, highlighting the artists’ works. Wise exhibited abstract expressionists including Milton Resnick and Edward Dugmore, and later specialized in kinetic art and light sculputure.

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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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George Tscherny Collection: Get to the point! poster for W.R. Grace & Co., 1982.

We’re continuing to receive great stuff from George Tscherny, and here’s the latest.

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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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Heinz Edelmann Collection: Folder 14 Item 93.

While preparing for a class visit a couple of weeks ago, I rediscovered these gorgeous posters Heinz Edelmann did for Theater der Welt (Theater of the World) in 1981.

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This detail for a 1956 poster for the Cartoonist & Illustrators School by George Tscherny. Rebranded as the School of Visual Arts later that year, the designer had a long and fruitful relationship with the institution.

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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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Esteemed designer and illustrator Heinz Edelmann passed away on Tuesday. I had the great pleasure of getting to know him a little bit while coordinating his gift to the Glaser Archives. He quickly became one of my favorite people to chat with; despite his deteriorating health, he was always charming and extremely funny. His mordant sense of humor betrayed a clear frustration with the current state of the world. Above are a couple of pages from his 2008 holiday card.

I feel very sad, but also grateful that we’ll be able help keep his legacy alive through his amazing body of work.

Enjoy a few of the acclaimed posters he produced for Germany’s Westdeutscher Rundfunk radio station after the jump. And click here for a characteristically witty and illuminating interview with Edelmann in Graphis.

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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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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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Steven Heller Collection: Posters.

The best translation I can come up with is “Only so!” which could be completely wrong. In any case, surely the image in this poster from the World Health Organization speaks for itself.

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Tony Palladino Collection: Box 9, Folder 21.

Here’s a 1957 poster by Tony Palladino. Substitute ’09 for ’57 and it still works. Click here for the full image.

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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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Direct from Stuttgart, we’ve received 151 posters and 9 books from the truly delightful Heinz Edelmann. Edelmann is best known as the influential art director of The Beatles’ film, Yellow Submarine. He’s worked in Germany, England and the Netherlands since the late 1950s, doing design, illustration, advertising and animation.

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Steven Heller Collection: Posters and Prints

Here’s a 1981 print from highly influential graphic artist (and longtime SVA instructor) Gary Panter advertising Paul Reubens’ Pee-Wee stage show in Los Angeles. The show was the springboard for Reubens’ feature film, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, and later his acclaimed series, Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. Panter was the head set designer for the TV show and this early poster displays his trademark jagged lines and surreal sensibility. Now scream real loud when you hear the secret word…

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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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