Art Deco - read pp. 170 - 181, and read pp. 256 - 269
Choose three artists/art directors/graphic designers discussed in your text.
For each artist find 3 images of their work to post to your blogs. This is a total of 9 images, three per artist. Include the artist, the date and the title. Explain how the artist's work exemplifies American Art Deco OR discuss the artist's style in detail. minimum 200 words per artist
1. Lester Beall was able to grasp the art deco style very efficiently and become one of the more successful artists during this movement. His artwork is distinguished from other art deco artists is the way in which he uses a more simplified Constructivists style. He uses very crisp, clean lines and a lack of stylization to get his message across and get directly to the point without over doing it. His use of what is considered an everyday writing for his font in Rural Electrification Administration and smiling children who look average to show a friendly touch that can appeal to the everyday average person. His posters also tend to use a patriotic theme with red, white, and blue being the predominate colors. And along with that the white tends to be focused in a horizontal line signifying the stripes of the American flag, bringing out the patriotism in the viewer. Even though he tried to make his art different from others so it would be more distinguishable, his work still fit with the generalization of the Art Deco style. It contained geometric shapes and a clean modernist style. He conveys his message clearly and with as few words as possible, with usually one word as the focal point.
2. Adolphe Mouron Cassandre was hired by Alexey Brodovitch in 1938 to create a series of covers for a magazine called Harper’s Bazaar. One of the covers he designed had hints of the art deco style with his crisp clean lines and his use of geometric shapes but it also showed ruminants of abstractism due to the use of disembodied human body parts like an eye and lips not directly put on a face how you would normally imagine it to be, but shown in close up and over-lapping one another. In the ad he did for a cruise company you can clearly see the art deco style. His design is very symmetrical and precise, once again using the clean lines and coloring of the style. He uses a simple, easy to read font with one large main word to get his point across to the viewers quite concisely. Another feature of the style is the fact that nothing has a clear concise outline, he uses colors and shapes and the different shades to help you differentiate between objects in the poster.
3. Cipe Pineles was hired on as a protégé of Agha. She created a cover for Vogue magazine in 1939, a very simple design of a cropped photo angled to direct the viewers attention at the name of the magazine. She later took the skills and techniques she learned while under Agha and began to work for Glamour magazine. One of the main points of her career was that she was the first woman art director of a major magazine which led her to even greater magazines and boosted her career further. When she began to work for Seventeen magazine, instead of randomizing the cover every issue like they did in Vogue, she wanted to keep the same basic format for every cover, including font, to show a concise look. She is acquired many firsts in the world of a woman working in the graphic art world such as being the first art director to hire fine artists to illustrate mass-market publications; the first woman to be asked to join the all-male New York Art Directors Club and later their Hall of Fame. Her skills allowed her to surpass many and succeed in life.
1. Saul Bass had a phenomenal career in the graphic arts, and was later intrigued by the cinema which is where he made his real debuts. Before Bass was there to make the intro to the movies, the lists of cast and crew members which passed for movie titles, they were so dull that projectionists only pulled back the curtains to reveal the screen once they’d finished. One of Bass’s memorable intros was to feature an animated black paper-cut-out of a heroin addicts arm. Knowing that the arm was a powerful image of addiction, Bass had chosen it over the face of the leading role character to show on posters and in the intro of the movie. This movie caused a sensation that allowed people to see the intro as an art form rather than something dull and lifeless. His style was unique and his own, his posters were amazing in the way they depicted a deeper meaning to the movie. He took this opportunity to create something which would ultimately enhance the experience of the audience and contribute to the mood and the theme of the movie within the opening moments. Bass was one of the first to realize the creative potential of the opening and closing credits of a movie. Even though he is very famed for cinematic works, he also designed many logos which still exist today such as airlines and AT&T’s logo.
   
2. Paul Rand’s work was synonymous with the International style. He realized the importance of not only creating a design to fill up a blank space but to create a visual language with his works that were more than just a pretty picture. His logos were thought to be simplistic, but he was quick to point out in A Designer’s Art that “ideas do not need to be esoteric to be original or exciting. He point out that his use of minimalism allows his logos to withstand the test of time. His ideal of minimalism with simplicity created designs such as the one for IBM, ABC, UPS, and Enron which are still used today and very iconic. He used the ideal of de-familiarizing the ordinary or making the familiar strange. This had played an important part in Rand’s design choices. When he began to work with manufacturer, a new challenge arose in utilizing his corporate identities to create loud and original packaging for mundane and everyday items. He was labeled by many as one of the greatest graphic designers ever. |
