POSTERS
Fifty Artists And Designers Analyze Their Approach, Methods And Solutions To Poster Design & Advertising
W. H. Allner
New York: Reinhold, 1952. First edition. Oblong quarto. Tan cloth titled in black. Printed dust jacket. 119 pp. 51 full page illustrations in black and white and color. An Ex-Library book with expected, yet minimal institutional markings. Pockets and labels removed from endpapers with vintage tape marks. Complete and reasonably well preserved dust jacket. A nice reference copy of this important early work.
9.5 x 12 oblong hardcover book with 120 pages and 51 illustrations in black and white and color. Most of the reproductions are full-page and there are many unusual examples of some high-profile designers lesser-known work. Each designer is also represented by a black and white portrait photograph.
This volumes' excellence stems fromt he fact that each designer presents one of their posters and discusses their creative process for realizing the final artwork. Highly recommended.
Includes designer portraits, short biographies and work by Walter Allner, A. F. Arnold, Rudi Bass, Herbert Bayer, Lester Beall, Donald Brun, Will Burtin, Fritz Bühler, Dick Elffers, Hans Erni, Gene Federico, Josef Flejsar, André Francois, Robert Gage, Abram Games, Pierre Gauchat, George Giusti, Kenneth D. Haak, Yoshio Hayakawa, Honegger-Laveter, Gyorgy Kepes, Karel Kezer, George Krikorian, Matthew Liebowitz, Herbert Leupin, Lewitt-Him, Wolf Lieschke, Richard Lindner, Leo Lionni, Josef Low, Roy McKie, Jean-Denis Malcles, Hans Moller, Josef Muller-Brockmann, Jacques Nathan, Constantino Nivola, Fritjof Pedersen, Celestino Piatti, Jean Picart Le Doux, Giovanni Pintori (For Olivetti), Paul Rand, Manfried Reiss, Raymond Savignac, Jerome Snyder, Saul Steinberg (with portrait photo by Charles Eames), Ladislav Sutnar, Bradbury Thompson, Rafael Tufiño, Arne Ungermann, Paul Lester Wiener, and Erle Yahn.
Here are excerpts from Steven Heller’s obituary titled “Walter Allner, 97, Noted Art Director of Fortune Magazine, Is Dead” published in the New York Times on July 24, 2006: “Walter Allner, the Bauhaus-trained graphic designer and art director of Fortune magazine from 1962 to 1974 who introduced a European Modernist typographic sensibility to American magazine design, died Friday at his apartment in Manhattan. He was 97.
“During his 12 years at Fortune, in addition to maintaining the magazine’s Bauhaus-inspired contemporary typography and elegant overall design scheme, he personally created 79 covers, which ran the gamut from minimalist graphic abstraction to complex photographic collage.
“In 1965, after taking a course at M.I.T., he experimented with the first computer-designed cover on a national magazine for the annual Fortune 500 issue. A company press release at the time proudly noted that the image, consisting of arrows in upward flight behind large illuminated numerals, was generated on a computer’s oscilloscope and then photographed.
“Long before the personal computer revolutionized the methods used to produce graphic design, Mr. Allner predicted the integration of aesthetics and advanced technology, and so worked directly with computer engineers whenever he could.
“Allner’s interest in science, coupled with a venturesome spirit, has led him into exciting new design fields,” wrote John Lahr in a 1966 article in Print magazine.
“This spirit was evident with other comparably ambitious Fortune covers, notably one in which he arranged for dozens of windows on 20 floors of the Time & Life building in New York to be illuminated at night to spell out 500. To create this huge temporary electric sign he had to persuade everyone in the offices — many not employed by Time Inc. — to cooperate. After a rainstorm thwarted his initial attempt, the project was eventually photographed from a nearby hotel.
“Born in Dessau, Germany, on Jan. 2, 1909, Walter Heinz Allner enrolled at the Bauhaus, the legendary German design school, in 1927, two years after it moved from Weimar to his hometown and six years before the Nazis closed it. He studied typography, poster design and painting for three years, at various times under leaders of the Modern movement, including Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee.
“While on a short leave from the Bauhaus he worked at the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Vienna with Otto Neurath, the creator of universal sign symbols known as isotypes.
“Mr. Allner was decidedly restless, and so after graduating he worked in the Netherlands under Piet Zwart, an influential Dutch typographer, and in Paris with the poster artists Jean Carlu and A. M. Cassandre. Yet it was Albers’s precisionist abstract geometric graphics that had the most influence on Mr. Allner’s later art and design work.
“Two years after founding his own design firm, Omnium Graphique in Paris, Mr. Allner left it in 1936 to devote himself exclusively, if temporarily, to painting abstract works and exhibited at the Salon des Surindépendants in Paris. He eventually returned to graphic design, first as editor of the Swiss design journal Graphis. In 1948 he founded the International Poster Annual, earning a place as one of the world’s leading experts on poster history.
“Upon immigrating to the United States in 1949, he was a freelance design consultant for R.C.A., Johnson & Johnson, the American Cancer Society, I.T.T. and I.B.M. The Outdoor Advertising Association of America commissioned him to design all of its billboards for a national traffic-safety campaign. In 1951 he designed a startling poster for Life magazine, “Enjoy LIFE Every Week.”
“After leaving Fortune in 1974, he taught and lectured. His motto for students and professionals was “Raise the aesthetic standard — the public is more perceptive than you think.” He also continued to design posters based on principles he learned at the Bauhaus: shunning any superfluous ornamentation and conveying messages with brevity and simplicity.