SUSPECTS, SMOKERS, SOLDIERS, AND SALESLADIES
COLLAGES BY IVAN CHERMAYEFF
Ivan Chermayeff, Joseph Giovanni [essay]
Ivan Chermayeff, Joseph Giovanni [essay]: SUSPECTS, SMOKERS, SOLDIERS, AND SALESLADIES: COLLAGES BY IVAN CHERMAYEFF. Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 2001. First edition. Quarto. Blue cloth. Photo illustrated dust jacket. Red endpapers. 248 color plates. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Slight wear to top jacket edge, otherwise a fine, fresh copy.
6.75 x 9.75 hardcover book with 248 full-page color plates of collages produced from 1985 to 2000. Essays by Joseph Giovannini and Ivan Chermayeff. Having made an ongoing collection out of the remnants of the past, Chermayeff assembles abstract shapes and discarded textures to make contemporary works on paper that recall Modernism, yet look to the future of man-made materials and technology. The mixed media collages betray the complexity and effort that Chermayeff has invested in the minimal, playful images that result. Emerging from shapes and colors come faces and expressions, as well as titles that make a play on words and offer humor in the midst of clean and stoic design elements.
Ivan Chermayeff (1932 – 2017) was an artist and internationally known graphic designer. Named to the New York Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 1982, he was a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and a past president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts. For twenty years he served as a trustee of The Museum of Modern Art in New York and as a director of the International Design Conference in Aspen. He was a trustee of the Parsons School of Art and Design, the New School for Social Research, and the Smithsonian Institution. His art and illustrations have been exhibited in the United States, Europe, and Japan.
When Ivan Chermayeff arrived at Harvard in the early 1950’s he presented the Dean of Undergraduate Studies with an unusual request. Rather than majoring in any particular subject, Chermayeff wanted to major in professors. A man of obvious perception, the Dean gave his approval. As a result, Chermayeff’s program of study was a crazy-quilt of courses, semantics and anthropology and history and what-have-you, but each course was taught by an interesting, exciting or provocative professor. Here is an early clue to what Chermayeff himself calls his “pack rat” personality, what writer and editor Russell Lynes more charitably calls his “magpie” approach to life. His partner Tom Geismar sees him from quite another angle: “Ivan combines the sensitivities of the artist with the decisiveness of the corporation executive. This unusual combination is fueled by an extraordinary energy level.”
Chermayeff was a principal with Tom Geismar and Sagi Haviv in their firm, Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv, specializing in identity design, exhibition design, motion graphics, and art in architecture.