Bernie Fuchs Busts a Move on Mid-Century Modernism

American illustration in the mid 20th Century is often referred to as the mid-century modern movement. From magazines and books to billboards, just about every publication imaginable was flourishing with overly glossy views of modern life (think Norman Rockwell and your there). As the century moved on, however, the print world was in desperate need of another view.

“Floundering publications sought salvation in acquiring a new image—anything different and in snyc with the times enough to retain the attention of a wavering public. These conditions produced a opportunity for the illustrator to be truly creative with a freedom from the past never before experienced”

—Illustrator Austin Briggs

In the 1950s American illustration began its great thaw from the ice age of representational, sentimental work that had dominated the first half of the 20th century.

Illustration’s old ways were fading fast, and the 1960s began a period of great spirit, creativity and change. No artist was closer to the center of that movement than Bernie Fuchs.

He began his career painting photo realistic illustrations of products and cars, but by 1960 he was at the forefront of a wave of experimental, high energy, impressionistic illustration that started a tidal wave of redefining the field.

“Getting the idea, that’s the hard part. I try to find the thing in the story-whether it is an incident, a portrait of a character, a symbol, or whatever-that I feel is most worth translating into a picture.”

In 1984 Illustration historian Walter Reed described Fuchs pictures as “probably more admired and imitated—than those of any other current illustrator.” His composition and simplified values and color made him well known around the world as he set the standard for modern illustration.

“The very first time I ever held out for something I believed in, I won. I turned in a rough for an advertisement, one I liked. The client give it back and suggested other ideas I might try. I didn’t like any of them—too corny. I didn’t know what else to do with the picture so I told them if they didn’t like my version, maybe they should get another artist. Then the client called me and said, you can do it your way. After the ad was published they had a big response to it. All of a sudden I was a hero. You give on both sides the try to take three steps forward and only two back. In some way you develop period.”

What gets you, though, is when they want you to do something like the things you did five years ago. They haven’t seen what you can do, or if they have they don’t want it. That’s your fight for survival. Each job you do has to be a little more exciting than your last. This is always in the back of your mind on every new job-to improve an experiment and be a little bit different than you were before.

— Bernie Fuchs

The Genius of Boris Artzybasheff

The Scary Retro Art of a Master 

It's Halloween time and no better time to visit the scary and sometimes whimsical retro art of Boris Artzybasheff. The Russian born American artist was for many years one of Time Magazine's top cover artists. Boris immigrated to America from a Russia at the age of 20.

I stumbled across him doing work for the Barrows company in 2015 and then again when I began teaching illustration at Moore College of Art and design in our anthropomorphic project we use for the Sophomore class. Boris is best known for anthropomorphizing machines which basically means giving them human features. While these wildly bizarre machines are sometimes nightmarish, they also give you an exact feeling of how it was during (and post) World War II and the Cold War.

Artzybasheff's work is certainly not well known, but it deserves a peak into the past especially during hollowing Halloween time. His work is not only highly inventive, but it shows the young artists the precise use of value scale (white to dark) along with telling an incredible story with each illustration. Most of his work exists in black and white advertising machine parts or machinery. This helps the beginning illustrator who might be a little bit anxious about using color concentrate on concept and value alone. When Boris uses color, he does so judiciously.

Mind you, they are not all horrific and some are downright playful, but often there is a darker note there, either Nazi power, the Cold War, or in the example below with depictions of anxiety, repressed hostility or timidity and frustration. 

The more you look at these Artzybasheff concoctions you begin to see extra touches he has tucked away in the secondary areas of the illustration. Keep looking at his illustrations and you'll find special surprises in hands, feet or even a occasionally tongue or muscle.

In the 1950s and 60s art directors sought out Boris's work for the covers of their magazines. Most famous for his machines, he also illustrated many other subjects including portraits, fairytales and even maps.

Poor Shaydullah/Published 1931

For the last five years at Moore College of Art and design we've been giving out the anthropomorphic project, and I have to go no further than Boris for the best example of these treatments and retro illustration. He's been dazzling every young artists that I ever taught and raises the bar for the computer generation. 

His satire and technical skills––all done by hand––are an inspiration. A personal goal is make this incredible artist's work become as popular today as it was during the 1950s and 60s.

The Victorian Poster

The Victorian Poster Was All There Was in Advertising

In Victorian times advertising can tell you a great deal about the consumer and what it was like to live in the day of the industrial age.

It was a time when masses of people left behind existence on the land for employment in factories. Cities were growing rapidly and wealth was distributed more widely. The overall standard of living in Europe and America improved dramatically during the 19th century. However, working 13 hour day shifts the Victorian society very much needed a break from it all. Advertising promoted the break and the enjoyment was in product consumption, traveling circuses and side shows.

I cannot avoid mentioning the master of this era’s entertainment and celebrity- PT Barnum.

Its been said that some have called Barnum the Shakespeare of advertising.

As a teenager Barnum discovered ingenious ways to make money. He ran his own lottery in Connecticut and he sold tickets for various amounts of winnings. From twenty-five dollars down to twenty-five cents he made a lot of money until Connecticut outlawed the business. Accustomed to making close to eleven thousand dollars in today’s worth a week, he eventually set out to find other ways to keep his income going at that level.

Barnum eventually moved to New York. Keeping an eye on what was going on with the sideshows in England, he decided to purchase his first actor (then called freaks and not so appropriately now). He purchased a blind paralytic former slave and made up a sensational story to support his presentation. This, of course, was something he would become well known for. Her name was Joice Heth and she was being portrayed by Barnum as 160-year-old nursemaid of George Washington (she was 81). The Victorian society bought into this ridiculous exploitation. When ticket sales begin to drop he wrote an anonymous letter to a Boston newspaper admitting that the whole thing was fraudulent. In the letter Barnum stated that she was actually a robot made of whale skin and wood. Ticket sales rose again. The purchase was for a thousand dollars and he made that every week in sales.

In 1842 Barnum began his next hoax that he called the Fiji Mermaid.

This was basically odd taxidermy. The head of a monkey sewn onto the tail of a fish that he purchased from Japanese fishermen. Leasing it for twelve dollars and fifty cents a week, Barnum then printed up pamphlets to support his theories that this was the real thing. His partner posed as a scientist to validate this oddity. This helped convince the newspapers his scientist/partner supplying letters that the Fiji Mermaid belonged to science.

In the 1840s Barnum opened a museum in New York on Broadway. He then discovered that he had a distant cousin named Charles Stratton who was only three feet five inches tall. He named his new sensation General Tom Thumb, dressed him up in adult suits, and quickly made him part of his sidekick show. Teaching him to sing and dance playing Cupid and Napoleon, Tom Thumb was our first international celebrity. For fifteen years Tom Thumb would visit Queen Victoria and travel Europe as well as throughout the United States. Queen Victoria met with him twice and Barnum made so much money off of the first European tour that he was able to buy his museum outright.

Tom did not do bad for his role as a Victorian celebrity making over $4,000 a week and retiring very well off. Barnum made an equally huge sensation out of the Tom Thumb wedding and quickly thereafter he and his sidekick visited the White House to be introduced to president Lincoln. When he died he had 20,000 people at his funeral.

His sideshow included a 6 ton elephant named Jumbo. Victorian Style posters announcing the arrival of jumbo with their typefaces filling every available inch of space were plastered on every wall PT Barnum could find. Barnum created Jumbo mania that people in the Victorian era just had to see.  

Sadly for Barnum (and Jumbo), the elephant was accidentally killed by a train. Always the clever and resourceful showman, Barnum had his skin and skeleton mounted on a wagon and followed by Jumbo’s tearful widow Alice. Jumbo’s widow was trained to wipe her eyes with her trunk as she followed behind in the parade.

The phrases that Barnum created for his commercial posters still exist in our modern media more than a hundred years later. You’ll find them on junk mail, websites and magazines: order now, all items must go, don’t miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity! PT Barnum was the master of attention getting graphics and phrasing that caught the attention of the Victorian audience.

The Best Advertising Strategies of the 20th Century

The Volkswagen Beetle vs the American Luxury Automobile 

By the early part of 1960 the United States was performing nuclear tests in Nevada, Russia had launched the first man in space, and the cold war was getting a bit colder. It was an era of overblown advertisements glorifying the size, power, aerodynamics and stature that came with America the great. Not surprisingly, these powerful characteristics also came with owning the American luxury automobile.

With the Volkswagen beetle, the challenge that the New York ad agency Doyle Dane Burnback and writers Helmut Krone and Julian Koenig were up against was to convince the consumer about the advantages of owning a smaller vehicle. It was a bold attempt to lure consumers away from their luxury automotive so popular in America’s “big and fast” car market.

Enter the baby boomers. The postwar youth that came of age in that decade.

Against all that was established in that era, the Volkswagen beetle became a symbol for counter culture thinking. The young drivers embraced the funky bug as the way to show rejection of what they saw as the mainstream materialism of their parents and generations before.

Later in that decade, as the psychedelic era sprung into place, the cars were soon ablaze with flowers, peace symbols and florescent colors. Hippies became especially fond of the beetle-based microbus because it was so easily turned into a rolling bedroom. Not far from the car I searched out as a young teen –– the Chevrolet Vega. A car (like the VW bus) that easily fits two lying down with the back seats rolled flat. The VW Beetle was a car that was affordable, easy to fix and modify, that fit in well with the youth of that decade.

Take a look at the role of the women in the above ads. A clear focus of how a spouse was viewed during this decade. The ads read- “If you can sell her on this you can sell her on anything” and “Do you have the right kind of wife for it?”

This was retro advertising at its best! A history lesson of that era like no other that can’t be found in books or movies. The advertising tells all. Writers Helmut Krone and Julian Koenig established a calm but quirky voice in 1959 for a completely different set of values from the established norm in marketing. The “Think Small” campaign developed that year was to become what many consider to be one of the best advertising strategies of the 20th century.

In the hard sell advertising market of this time period, the Volkswagen wit described its product with the self-effacing humor tearing down the use of advertising space which, in turn, started a trend in simplicity. The ad design and copy were a comedy performance in minimalism and a very accurate mirror of the product itself. Take a look at these two facing pages of my August, 1965 Post magazine.

The amount of copy in the two ads gives you an idea just how far these writers went out on a limb to stand out with intense white space.

As a collector of all that is retro art in magazines and books, I’m often amazed how Doyle Dane Burnback ads pushed the pendulum in a completely opposite direction. These ads owned a tremendous amount of simplicity and white (or negative) space around their product. 

In doing so, the readers’ eyes are immediately drawn to the small car.

The tiny car becomes the complete focus of the page!

Set in a simple Futura font and printed at the bottom of the each ad, they quickly established a brand for the Volkswagon beetle that was both comical storytelling and clever writing. You couldn’t help but love a company willing to poke fun at their product. One ad depicted a slightly damaged beetle above the word “Lemon” explaining how Wolfsburg inspectors rejected the entire car because of one blemished chrome strip on the dash.

Doyle Dane Burbach and their advertising team increased sales throughout the 1960s to remain America’s top-selling foreign (and let us not forget post WW II, Germany) make.