The Master Craftsman of the Psychedelic Poster

Wes Wilson and the Psychedelic Poster

I was just a little guy when Bill Graham had those amazing concerts at the Fillmore West, but I was enthralled by the look of those posters. I stumbled across this cover on my iPad from my one of my unread issues of a recent Rolling Stone (RS, June 4). Wes Wilson is still turning out art at 77 years young, semi retired and living on a farm in southwestern Missouri. Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the surviving members of the Grateful Dead, Rolling stone thought it would be appropriate to have Wilson create this retro masterpiece. He said “ I was a one-man operation” and was always kept busy. There was always a concert at the Fillmore! 

The poster offers people the promise of beauty that is ultimately accessible to all, but the history of the modern poster hardly covers two centuries. The beginning is connected with the invention of the lithograph in 1796 by the Bavarian Alouise Senefelder, and further improvements in this technique created by the development of chromolithography. During the second half of the 19 century, the treatment of colors in the photography was greatly improved in Boston, (the home base to a major school of chromolithography), which began an unprecedented flood of these wonderful colored images spread over in billboards and packaging for the most of the globe. 

The psychedelic posters produced in San Francisco between 1966 and 1968 could be compared to the psychedelic trip itself, an instant reflection of contemporary Western culture, loaded with messages turned and twisted for the movement it represented. The music, the drugs, and alternative lifestyles all played a part, but the undeniable power of these posters demands to be observed.

There is unanimous agreement on the importance of the work by the legendary artists known as the Big Five-Wes Wilson, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin, Stanley Mouse and Alten Kelly whose posters were mainly produced for concert promoter Bill Graham at the Filmore Auditorium opened in December 1965 and followed by the Fillmore West in mid 1968, as well as a few hundred other notable San Francisco venues such as the Matrix and the Winterland. 

We also know that the psychedelic posters were almost always hand-lettered and even though the text have been based on existing typefaces of that era, the compositions were truly organic and made much greater use of color contrast that has ever been seen before. It must be assumed then that one would have to have had an LSD experience to produce these vibrating works of art.

Wes Wilson is probably the best known of the big five. His dreamy rock posters helped define the look of the San Francisco rock scene. But it didn’t start that way. His poster produced for the Beatles at candlestick Park in late August 1966 show nothing of the route he would partake in his future work. The text for this poster is highly readable and the passages in his psychedelic concoctions in the future that one would have difficulty reading had yet to be introduced. In his posters of the late 60s and early 70s Wilson uses a softening of the letter forms built up upon asymmetric curves and counter curves. Certainly the influences came from Art Nouveau, but the color sense is a lava lamp of LSD excitement.

Psychedelic rock included phenomenal light shows, with slide projections and strobe lights that were intended to kick in the sensory experience of LSD or mescaline. It is impossible to understand the Utopian vision of the psychedelic era without considering the role of drugs. Timothy Leary’s book The Politics of Ecstasy published in 1968, was well in sync with the findings of Dr. Humphrey Osmond, the author of the studies he made on the use of LSD and mescaline as a treatment for schizophrenia. In an article in Look Magazine in September 1959 none other than Kerry Grant spoke out about a successful treatment with the drug. The posters created in the 60s psychedelic movement with swirls and spirals and clashing complementary colors were a clear reference to LSD participation.

The psychedelic movement was quick to disappear and in the spring of 1967. Wes Wilson discontinued his work for Bill Graham (he noted for financial reasons). In October of that year, and anarchist performance group called the Diggers put together a well publicized San Francisco parade to parody a funeral that they entitled “Death of the Hippie Son of Mass Media”. 

The hippie, as well as psychedelic poster art, had died. The organic curvilinear letter forms like the ones seen on the “Are You Experienced” Jimi Hendrix album cover would be replaced by the memorable sparse design done by Richard Hamilton in 1968 for the Beatles White Album.

Were the 60s psychedelic artist-stoned out tripsters or poster design geniuses? Stoned out or not, the big five artists were master craftsman, geniuses of color and composition that provided an invaluable reference to a culture that is still looked upon with enthusiasm by the younger generation of artists today. They did not copy the Masters of the Art Nouveau movement, but brought their own modern sense of originality that reflected the world around them.