it was all going on all at once

"We [poster artists] were young and swimming in the same socio-political milieu that produced the rock bands, the drug culture & the sexual revolution. All this was going on in a very small part of the world, and it was all going on all at once."

so continues david goines: "The most important poster event of the ‘60s, was a 1965 show of Jugendstil posters at the University of California Art Museum, organized and curated by Herschel Chipp.

"This exhibition was seen by all of the people in San Francisco who were doing posters for the rock ‘n’ roll events of the time, and the very next posters were all but direct imitations of those of the Jugendstil, particularly reflecting the lettering of Ferdinand Andrei (President of the Vienna Secession 1905), and Leopold Forstner of the Wiener Werkstätte, which you will recall as letters all made to fit into a square, or some other shape, and almost illegible."

every one of the earlier posters shown here (and most of them here) were at that exhibition.

more from david goines: "Some of the poster producers were: Berkeley Buonaparte, The Print Mint, The Family Dog, The Food, and Bill Graham. Important designers of that time were: Stanley Mouse and Kelly, of Mouse Studios, Wes Wilson, Victor Moscoso, David Singer, Rick Griffin and Bob Fried.

"More than anything else, the psychedelic poster era, brief as it was, created an audience for posters that had not existed since the turn of the century. The psychedelic and rock poster was not an art reproduction of a poster about a far away event, as was the then-ubiquitous Spanish bullfight poster. They were real advertisements for real events of immediate interest. The posters had a commemorative value as well as being something neat to put on the wall.

"The general acceptance and enthusiasm that greeted the poster designers of the late 60s and early 70s can be attributed to the Fillmore and Avalon posters that preceded them."

when seen in context with what had been going on around the world, the mucha exhibition in london in 1963 and the beardsley in 1966, the influence became vast and intoxicating.

perhaps direct correspondences are harder to find here than in a previous post, but the worm in the bottle is obvious; with squiggley lines, and blowing hair, and the mad swirls of toorop and the decorative elements, the liberties taken with reality, and the general breaking up of our very air, the artists of the secession were in much the same milieu as the stoners 50 years later.

once vision is al- tered, can it ever return?

reference: jugendstil & expressionism in german posters, 1965, herschel b chipp and brenda richardson; regents of the university of california.

the alternate shaping of reality

while some 60s poster artists looked to french art nouveau, others looked to vienna. particularly when it came to lettering, alfred roller's font was nearly ubiquitous.

"The lettering by Alfred Roller in this poster he designed for a Secessionist exhibition in 1903 was the major source of inspiration for Wes Wilson and the other San Francisco poster artists of the 1960s period." 1

other designers of that moment included kolomon moser, but even on his own posters, he used variations of roller's fonts.

david goines borrowed from wiener werkstatte fonts (along with many others) in his posters as well.

when i was living in the haight-ashbury district of san francisco in the late 60s, my favorite poster artist was mari tepper. her work was so different from the rest, but now i see echos of vienna here as well.

why, you might ask, should there be such a strong influence from secession vienna on bay area artists? patience, grasshopper. all will be shown in the end.

beyond the letter- ing, we saw the alternate shaping of reality which may easily explain the way the fonts look different in the hands of wilson versus their originator. what do you think?

the temporary aberration

roxy reminded me in her comment after yesterday's post that many of you probably never thought about that moment in US history when everything changed: the first baby- boomers graduated from high school, everyone started smoking dope, and you could buy posters everywhere. posters were such a big new thing that life magazine devoted a whole cover story to the subject.

i was aware of this, and wondered if there had been some technological advancement had occurred which allowed the manufacture and price of big beautiful four-color posters to be within nearly anyone's reach; i recalled that part of what began the first poster craze was, in part, just this kind of thing.

i asked the brilliant poster designer and printer, david goines, about this and i'll quote you some of his response. One thing that may have had an influence was that while most printing was done by letterpress (newspapers, magazines & books), printing of large images, especially complex ones, such as maps, and cheap ones, such as boxing posters, was done by offset lithography, which was the poor cousin of the much more expensive letterpress process.

The intermediate process of Mimeograph was used for text-only (sometimes with minimal illustration) such as school newspapers, leaflets, class handouts, but wasn't really useful for images. Ditto (spirit duplication) was useful for very small quantities of illustrated class- room handouts (grade-school teachers used it a lot).

In the early 1960s technological innovations began to make offset lithography not only competitive with mimeograph, but actually replaced it by around 1966. (more from david to come....)

Interest in Art Nouveau underwent a revival in the Seventies when reproductions of posters of Sarah Bernhardt by the Czech designer Alphonse Mucha became popular. The Art Nouveau revival is understandable in the context of the magpie approach of Pop graphic designers. Spurred on by museum exhibitions of the work of Alphonse Mucha and Aubrey Beardsley, British designers took up the style to the extent that Queen magazine was describing an ‘Art Nouveau fever’ in 1964. 1

In its brief heyday around the turn of the century, the tendrilous international style of art nouveau swept over Europe, dominating the design of everything from the Paris Metro stations to ordinary knives and forks. The inevitable reaction against it was particularly violent, and the whole movement was dismissed as a rather ludicrous, if temporary, aberration. Artists like Alphonse Mucha, if remembered at all, seemed as dated as gaslight and their work as decadent as Oscar Wilde's sun flower. But lately art nouveau has been getting a new look. Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art had a big show of it three years ago, and in London last week Alphonse Mucha was once again a big name with simultaneous shows at the Grosvenor and Jeffress Galleries and the Victoria and Albert Museum. 2

i'll be examining further these mentioned exhibitions, and the particular effects they had depending on where they were held. and there were many other regional happenstances that bear mentioning. to come. we'll look also at the wider picture of art nouveau, as well as more on posters.

david byrd is a brilliant poster artist who has worked in many media and in many styles. as we've seen, mucha's style was a prototype for many of the artists, and for some even more than that. david's web site says this one was inspired by a muybridge series, but i don't know.

check out another mucha piece, some preliminary drawings 4, and let me know what you think. even if you agree with me and find it irredeemably mucha-ish, the hand that made it is clearly also a master.

you also may be beginning to understand how many questions are involved in this one. not just the return of mucha himself, but of his many shadows too.

temporary aberration? uh... no. i just don't think so.

what i learned from a shogun

i found myself thinking of an artist whose work i used to love, richard amsel, whose work often appeared on the cover of tv guide. of course, when i looked him up i saw that line again, the one that's with us still. was amsel aware of it? we'll never know.

some artists clearly recognize the japanese influence in their work; we've mentioned, already, kuniyoshi, steinlen and goines.










millions of artists work today are keeping that line alive. dominic bugatto recognizes it... but even he (sometimes) forgets. and come to think of it, given how little credit is paid the japanese for


their influence by so many people, think how many there must be who never knew it at all.

déjà vu all over again

in the street of persimmon

i will begin this post geographically rather than chronologically. david lance goines, as i have mentioned before, lives and works here in berkeley, and one sees his posters everywhere.

then one day i was looking at the mfa's fine collection of japanese postcards, and i came across this one, which looked like one of those 'direct link' kind of things with david's work.

studying these, and a number of the older woodblock prints from japan, i realized that while it was clear that the practice of outlining in this way originated in the japanese prints, one development added as it evolved into art nouveau was that the line thickened. the postcard is easily from after this had happened.

the rest was more or less stream of con- scious- ness.



but then i came across another print, this time of a wigmaker.

and her kimono reminded me of this stencil design for a kimono that i had found.

and wouldn't you know it,








the kimono design reminded me of another david lance goines poster.

(inspiration)