PM
August 1937
Robert L. Leslie and Percy Seitlin [Editors]
Robert L. Leslie and Percy Seitlin [Editors]: PM [An Intimate Journal For Art Directors, Production Managers, and their Associates]. New York: The Composing Room/P.M. Publishing Co., Volume 3, No. 12: August 1937. Original edition. Slim 12mo. Printed yapped wrappers. Similetone cover by Robert Carroll. 64 pp. Illustrated articles and advertisements. Wrappers lightly edgeworn and uniformly, mildly soiled. A very good copy.
5.5 x 7.75 Digest with 48 pages of of articles and advertisements.
- Norman A. Munder of Baltimore, Recollections of Munder by Frederick Goudy. Scratch board portraits by Raymond Lufkin.
- Robert Carroll: color profile of Bob Carroll
- Legibility! What’s That!
- The Didots
- Learning Design and Its Production: 6 pages on the W.P.A. Design Laboratory by Liame Dunne. The W.P.A. Design Laboratory at the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians (FAECT) at 114 East 16th Street, New York. The Design Laboratory won a reputation as the only school in this country devoted to the ideal of " reuniting art with industry" along the lines laid down by the now defunct Bauhaus at Dessau, Germany, which was founded by Walter Gropius, now in this country teaching architecture at Harvard. “This is one of the most interesting and creative teaching projects under the Federal Art Project, and we are hoping for a great many things from it.”— Holger Cahill
- Ruth Gerth: beautiful 4-page insert designed by this groundbreaking female Industrial Designer
- PM Shorts mention S. M. Adler,Max Jaediker, Lester Cornelius, Lillian Lustig and Hortense Mendel.
- Book Reviews: Photography by Dr. C.E. Kenneth Mees; African Negro Art - ed. James Johnson Sweeney; Modern Painters and Sculptors as Illustrators by Monroe Wheeler; New Horizons in American Art - Museum of Modern Art and Typographische Gestaltung by Jan Tschichold.
- Listing of Advertisements: Intertype; Merganthaler - Linotype Co.; Reliance Reproduction Co.; Whitney Press; Flower Electrotypes; Tileston and Hollingsworth Co.; Russell - Rutter Co.; The Georgia Press; Wilbar Photoengraving; Zeese - Wilkinson Co. Inc.; William E. Rudge’s Sons.
Ruth Gerth (1897–1952) was an artist and an industrial designer. In 1936 she was president of the Artist’s Guild, a group whose mission was to establish and uphold fair practices for the use of freelance artists. Some of her industrial clients included: Chase Brass & Copper Company, Bates Mfg. Co., and R.E. Dietz. Ruth designed extensively for Chase Brass & Copper Company in Waterbury, CT. She designed many objects for the company’s gift line as well as planned the offices, gift shop, and showrooms. She was married to William Gerth, also a designer.
Robert Joseph Carroll (1904 – ?) studied at Syracuse University. He came to New York in 1921 and worked at Calkins and Holden while attending the New York School of Design. His paintings have been exhibited at the Boyer Gallery, 1939, The Brooklyn Museum and the Marie Harriman Gallery. He worked as an artist at Bonwit Teller before joining CBS. He was a contributor to Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and McCall’s.
From the thesis “Marxism, Abstraction, Ideology, and Vkhutemas: The Design Laboratory Reassessed, 1935-1940” by Mandy Lynn Drumming: “ The Design Laboratory (1935-1940) exists today as a critical, but little-known moment in American design history. Supported by American industrialists and the Federal Art Project, a division of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, the school embodied a utopian desire to merge the aspirations of the Machine Age with the social policies of the Depression Era. With a faculty and advisory board including some of the most significant names in the arts, namely Gilbert Rohde, the school’s director, and Meyer Schapiro, an influential Marxist art historian, the Design Laboratory sought to educate a semi-skilled labor force for careers in industrial design.
“Most related historical articles tend to compare American modernist industrial design and its teachings at the Design Laboratory with the Bauhaus, a German school that espoused an idealist, utopian vision to create a new design concept to bring about democratic change in society. The personnel, curriculum and objects of the Design Laboratory essentially do relate to the Bauhaus. Former Bauhaus students Hilde Reiss, Lila Ulrich, and William Priestly served as Design Laboratory faculty members, and Gilbert Rohde traveled to the Dessau Bauhaus in 1927.
“The preliminary course, “Basic Courses: Tools of the Designer,” and other classes offered at the Design Laboratory closely relate to the curriculum of the Bauhaus and its famed preliminary course, Vorkurs. Even the student and faculty-designed work evoke a utilitarian aesthetic commonly termed as “Bauhaus style.” However, comparing the Design Laboratory to the Bauhaus reveals several historical misunderstandings.
“The genesis of the Design Laboratory occurred during the rise of a dissident group of influential New York Marxists such as Design Laboratory affiliates Gilbert Rohde and Meyer Schapiro. Supporting the communist ideology of Marxism/Leninism, they concerned themselves with culture, ideology, politics, and the general theory of the mode of production. Through these foundational elements of Marxist critical theory, they sought to make possible radical political change.
“To advance the Marxist/Leninist, cultural dimension of revolution, the New York Marxists critiqued formalist art theory, endorsed by the dominant cultural institutions of not only American elitist art historians and critics, but also rigid, Stalinist Official Soviet Marxism. The New York Marxists drew attention to not only the inflexibility of the Stalinists and various other dominant communist groups who banned experimental art which they thought to be cut off from reality and isolated in an ivory tower in favor of the 1932 Social Realist doctrine, but also the elitism of traditional, formalist art historians and critics. Many of the historians and critics were closely associated with the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), an agent of both the United States government and the Rockefellers, who based the value of art on superficialities rather than context and tended to depoliticize art of radical political content.”
PM magazine was the leading voice of the U. S. Graphic Arts Industry from its inception in 1934 to its end in 1942 (then called AD). As a publication produced by and for professionals, it spotlighted cutting-edge production technology and the highest possible quality reproduction techniques (from engraving to plates). PM and A-D also championed the Modern movement by showcasing work from the vanguard of the European Avant-Garde well before this type of work was known to a wide audience.