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September 16, 2013

Chermayeff and Geismar’s System 1

Is it a top secret missile defense system? A world-wide clandestine computer network designed to topple rogue governments? The futuristic and vaguely ominous-sounding System 1 was actually an office furniture system from Dictaphone’s furniture division Marble/Imperial.

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September 06, 2013

Famous faces

Henry Wolf’s portraiture.

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September 03, 2013

A new Penney

George Tscherny was one of the heraldic “here comes modernism” designers of the ’60s and ’70s: along with Chermayeff & Geismar, his name seemed to be high on the shortlist when design became a hot item in the boardroom—though the bigwigs did not necessarily always follow through with a whole, or lasting, campaign.

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July 29, 2013

Tea for two

Milton Glaser for the Russian Tea Room.

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July 20, 2013

Hot potato

Milton Glaser plays with fire for Poppy Records.

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July 12, 2013

Man in the shadows

He wanted to live in a world in which one could find “Gershwin playing all night in penthouses, while George Kaufman fired one-liners into the guests and Harpo scrambled eggs in their hats.” Milton Glaser’s cover, with its punchy color combined with austere but evocative line, seems neatly suited to such a world.

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July 07, 2013

Twombly at SVA

Cy Twombly was the subject of two solo exhibitions at SVA, in 1973 and 1977, just before his idiosyncratic work found new favor with the rising generation of neo-Expressionists.

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July 07, 2013

Glaser for RCA Computers

In 1970, Milton Glaser did a series of three posters for RCA’s Computer Division entitled Memory Unbound. They express the abstract promise of technology that was at least a decade away for most people.

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June 25, 2013

Candy men

Fanciful candy packaging for Audience magazine.

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June 22, 2013

Notes from the underground

Letterhead from early in Steve Heller’s career as an art director.

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June 17, 2013

Sol LeWitt’s conceptual graphics

In March 1976, Sol Lewitt had his first solo exhibition at the Visual Arts Museum (209 E. 23rd Street). The work exhibited wasn’t the piece itself, but rather the result of instructions he gave to third parties: they assembled a large graphic combination drawn from a vocabulary of white-on-black linear figures provided by the artist. Instead of hiring technicians or specialists to screen the shapes in a particular order, the artist made explicit that the idea or set of instructions for the art was itself the art, rather than the artifact it produced. He continued the process across several similar pieces, some of which used the same graphic forms — one, Wall Drawing #260, was the subject of a recent focus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

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June 04, 2013

Pan Am modular displays

George Tscherny designed this installation for Pan American Airways, to be sent to travel agencies promoting their vacation locations. Details about the modular system follow.

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May 19, 2013

Portrait of a gallery

Earlier, we highlighted a look at the SVA Tribeca Gallery, which was open from 1979-1980 in the American Thread Building on West Broadway and featured SVA student work in a professional gallery setting. The complete history of this seminal gallery is now available on our web site (designed by Archives staff member Zachary Sachs). Some featured artworks follow.

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May 14, 2013

107 graphic designers

The most recent addition to the Chermayeff & Geismar Collection is twelve boxes of old and rare art books, ranging from annuals to architecture; Switzerland to Japan. As always, there were plenty of surprises: one was the catalog for an AGI exhibition from 1976, which featured, alongside reproductions of their work, dramatic photos of the designers.

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April 28, 2013

Alan Fletcher’s “Feedback”

Among the ephemera in the Henry Wolf Collection are five early editions of Pentagram’s Feedback — guidebooks for globetrotting designers. Excerpts from David Hockney, Olivier Morgue and Bob Gill follow.

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April 20, 2013

A stricter side of Palladino

Tony Palladino worked for Siegel & Gale in the mid-1970s — one of the accounts he worked on was Conrail, a new railroad organization created by the federal government.

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March 17, 2013

Opera News

In the category of personal favorites go these beautiful Opera News covers, done by Milton Glaser between 1966 and 1970, while he was at Push Pin.

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March 04, 2013

Talk about the Passion

Milton Glaser and Henry Wolf’s magazine workshop pays tribute to the landmark erotic publication Eros.

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February 27, 2013

Galeonen Bar, Hamburg

Milton Glaser designed this irregularly-shaped, cut-out menu in 1973 for Galeonen Bar, at the Plaza Hamburg hotel. Their vintage cocktail menu follows.

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February 25, 2013

American-Type Sculpture

Poster for the exhibition American-Type Sculpture, Part 2, which opened at the Visual Arts Gallery in 1973. Curator Phyllis Tuchman brought together a prophetic list of artists for the show, including Louise Bourgeois, Sol LeWitt, and Richard Serra.

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