GEBRAUCHSGRAPHIK
April 1956
Eberhard Holscher [Editor]
Eberhard Holscher [Editor]: GEBRAUCHSGRAPHIK. Berlin: Gebrauchsgraphik, 1956. Original edition (Volume 27, Number 4: April 1956). Text in German with English summaries. Slim quarto. Printed wrappers. 64 pp. Illustrated articles and advertisements. Cover by Erik Nitsche. Wrappers rubbed and soiled, but a very good copy.
8.25 x 11.5 vintage magazine with 68 pages of editorial content. The issue stand-out is a feature on the advertising art of I. Miller & Sons, produced by a fresh face on the NYC commercial art scene: Andrew Warhol.
Warhol’s whimsical shoe illustrations for I. Miller & Sons’ advertisements (10 pages) look as fresh as they did fifty years ago. This campaign introduced a new technique for advertising — superimposing line drawings over photographs. Warhol worked with Ed Rostock, an Art Director for the Irving Serwer Advertising Agency, and Peter Palazzo, I. Miller’s in-house Art Director on this legendary campaign, which resulted in “soaring sales.”
Contents:
- Pfau Fashions. Advertising for ties and scarfs: Walter Breker, Art Director
- Color photos as advertising media: Adolph Wirz, Graphic Designer
- Firm’s marks and signets: Helmut Matheis, Graphic Artist
- Adolph Menzel as commercial artist
- The art of the small format. On the artistic problem of the postage stamp
- I. Miller & Sons, Inc., USA. An American shoe company advertises: Five two-page spreads featuring shoe illustrations by Andy Warhol: 10 pages.
- Jugo-slav travel publicity
- “Primadonna,” a type of the type foundry Ludwig & Mayer, Frankfurt a.M.: Typeface designed by Helmut Matheis
- Plagiarism corner: A Gebrauschsgrafik-like illustration ends up on a French scarf
- And more.
Gebrauchsgraphik was the leading voice of the Avant-Garde influence on the European Commercial Art and Advertising industries before World War II. In the thirties, all roads led through Berlin, and Gebrauchsgraphik spotlighted all of the aesthetic trends fermenting in Europe -- Art Deco and Surrealism from Paris, Constructivism from Moscow, Futurist Fascism from Rome, De Stijl and Dutch typography from Amsterdam, and of course the spreading influence of the Dessau Bauhaus. A journal that was truly international in scope, all articles and cutlines are presented in both German and English.
Gebrauchsgraphik was in the perfect place to showcase all the latest and greatest European trends and rising artists for the rest of the world.Gebrauchsgraphik was an incredibly influential journal and agenda setter, most notably to a young man in Brooklyn named Paul Rand. According to his biographical notes, Rand's exposure to Gebrauchsgraphik in the early thirties created his desire to become a Commercial Artist. The rest is history.
Gebrauchsgraphik utilized the latest printing and press technologies and often included custom colors, bound-in samples and advertising fold-outs, foil stamps, die-cuts and other special finishing effects.
“Andy Warhol couldn’t think of anything much to say except that he has eight cats named Sam, when asked for a character portrait, despite the facts, most of them gleaned elsewhere, that: he studied painting and design at Carnegie Tech in home-town Pittsburgh; came to New York in 1949; found Vogue, Glamour, and Harper’s Bazaar, among others, very pleased with such blotting-paper drawings . . . and won an Art Director’s Club medal for a drawing he did for the Columbia Broadcasting System.” — Interiors Cover Artists, Interiors and Industrial Design July 1953
From the Andy Warhol Foundation: “More than twenty years after his death, Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987) remains one of the most influential figures in contemporary art and culture. Warhol’s life and work inspires creative thinkers worldwide thanks to his enduring imagery, his artfully cultivated celebrity, and the ongoing research of dedicated scholars. His impact as an artist is far deeper and greater than his one prescient observation that “everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes.” His omnivorous curiosity resulted in an enormous body of work that spanned every available medium and most importantly contributed to the collapse of boundaries between high and low culture.
“A skilled (analog) social networker, Warhol parlayed his fame, one connection at a time, to the status of a globally recognized brand. Decades before widespread reliance on portable media devices, he documented his daily activities and interactions on his traveling audio tape recorder and beloved Minox 35EL camera. Predating the hyper-personal outlets now provided online, Warhol captured life’s every minute detail in all its messy, ordinary glamour and broadcast it through his work, to a wide and receptive audience.
“The youngest child of three, Andy was born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928 in the working-class neighborhood of Oakland, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Stricken at an early age with a rare neurological disorder, the young Andy Warhol found solace and escape in the form of popular celebrity magazines and DC comic books, imagery he would return to years later. Predating the multiple silver wigs and deadpan demeanor of later years, Andy experimented with inventing personae during his college years. He signed greeting cards “André”, and ultimately dropped the “a” from his last name, shortly after moving to New York and following his graduation with a degree in Pictorial Design from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1949.
“Work came quickly to Warhol in New York, a city he made his home and studio for the rest of his life. Within a year of arriving, Warhol garnered top assignments as a commercial artist for a variety of clients including Columbia Records, Glamour magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, NBC, Tiffany & Co., Vogue, and others. He also designed fetching window displays for Bonwit Teller and I. Miller department stores. After establishing himself as an acclaimed graphic artist, Warhol turned to painting and drawing in the 1950s, and in 1952 he had his first solo exhibition at the Hugo Gallery, with Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote. As he matured, his paintings incorporated photo-based techniques he developed as a commercial illustrator. The Museum of Modern Art (among others) took notice, and in 1956 the institution included his work in his first group show. “The turbulent 1960s ignited an impressive and wildly prolific time in Warhol’s life. It is this period, extending into the early 1970s, which saw the production of many of Warhol’s most iconic works. Building on the emerging movement of Pop Art, wherein artists used everyday consumer objects as subjects, Warhol started painting readily found, mass-produced objects, drawing on his extensive advertising background. When asked about the impulse to paint Campbell’s soup cans, Warhol replied, “I wanted to paint nothing. I was looking for something that was the essence of nothing, and that was it”. The humble soup cans would soon take their place among the Marilyn Monroes, Dollar Signs, Disasters, and Coca Cola Bottles as essential, exemplary works of contemporary art.“