Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Steven Heller is Senior Art Director at The New York Times. He is also editor of the AIGA Journal of Graphic Design and co-chair MFA/Design Program of the School of Visual Arts in New York. He is author and co-author of numerous books including Graphic Style: From Victorian to Post-Modern and Graphic Wit and Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design. In 1996, Heller received the New York Art Directors' Special Educator's Award.

Armin Hofmann is one of Switzerland's foremost graphic designers who taught with Rand at Yale and at the Brissago Summer School.

George Lois, wunderkind of American advertising, says he owes everything to Rand. In his own right, Lois is the first among equals in the creative revolution in US advertising - he was responsible for the original VW campaign - and no more eminent figure exists in the field. He is author of The Art of Advertising and his most recent book What's the Big Idea? (1991) was widely acclaimed.

Jessica Helfand, a former Rand student at Yale, is the new-media columnist for Eye magazine and writes regularly for i-D, Print and the AIGA Journal on design issues. She runs a design studio devoted to new media and is a highly respected writer.

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Paul Rand

Phaidon Press

Chapter One

Routes: The boy art director

A salesman from a graphic arts house was in the other day with nothing apparently on his mind. Queried, he said, `My boss says the great Paul Rand works here, and I thought I might get a look at him.' Just then Rand swept through the room. Asked if he was impressed, the salesman said, `But he's so young.'

`Paul Rand', The Insider, September 1939

When Paul Rand died on 26 November 1996 ateighty-two, his career had spanned six decades,three generations and numerous chapters ofdesign history. In the late 1930s he began totransform commercial art from craft to profession.By the early 1940s he influenced the lookof advertising, book and magazine cover design.By the late 1940s he proffered a graphic designvocabulary based on pure form where once onlystyle and technique prevailed. By the mid-1950she altered the ways in which major corporationsused graphic identity. And by the mid-1960s hehad created some of the world's most enduringcorporate logos, including IBM, UPS, ABCand Westinghouse. He was the channel throughwhich European modern art and design ? RussianConstructivism, Dutch De Stijl and theGerman Bauhaus ? was introduced to Americancommercial art. The first of his four books,Thoughts on Design, published in 1946 when hewas thirty-two, was a bible of Modernism. Inhis later years he was a teacher, theorist andphilosopher of design. Although intolerant offaddish trends, Rand ended his career with thesame guiding belief as when he had begun:good design is good will.

    Rand did not set out to reform graphicdesign, he just wanted to be the best at what hedid. Reared in the commercial art productiondepartments ? or `bullpens' ? of New York'spublishing and advertising industries, he understoodthe demands of the marketplace andaccepted that design was a service not an end, oran art, in itself. Yet he was critical of the pooraesthetic standards that prevailed, maintainingthat everyday life ? especially commercialart ? could be enriched by the artist's touch. Hemodelled himself on avant-garde artists, such aspainter Paul Klee, designer El Lissitzky andarchitect Le Corbusier, each of whom advocateda timeless spirit in design. Adhering to LeCorbusier's dictum that `to be modern is not afashion, it is a state', Rand devoted his life tomaking what he modestly called `good work',and what others called exceptional design.

    When Rand was twenty-four, just barelyinto his career, PM (October/November 1938),America's leading graphic arts trade magazine,hailed him as the most promising younginfluence on American graphic design. He wassingled out for editorial, advertising andpromotional work that was so original in formand content that it caught the conservativegraphics magazines so unawares that theysubsequently ignored him. But PM demandedthat Rand be taken seriously because neitherdogma nor fashion dictated. `Rand is unhamperedby traditions,' the magazine declared.`He has no stereotyped style because everytask is something new and demands its ownsolution. Consequently, there is nothing laboredor forced about his work."

    Hard sell, copy-driven American advertisingthat spanned the turn-of-the-century throughthe 1930s was laboured and forced. The GreatDepression of 1929 had brought America'sphenomenal post-war economic growth to astandstill, yet the marketing strategy known asforced obsolescence, which when introducedduring the 1920s ushered in an era of fervidconsumerism, continued to demand aggressiveadvertising campaigns in order to capture whatconsumer dollars remained. A handful ofinspired advertising campaigns were exceptionsto an overall industry standard that favouredproven formulas and tired clichés. The credowas, if at first it did succeed, milk it for all it isworth. Clients demanded the squeezing ofsuperfluous decoration on to layouts like icingon a wedding cake. And what passed for artwas what Rand derisively called the `Uncle Joeschool of realistic illustration'.

    Rand repudiated what passed for acceptabledesign. He argued that it was wrong just tomake pictures of Uncle Joe. `It doesn't solveany problems ... it's run-of-the-mill thinking.It depends completely on the skill of theillustrator; and back then there weren't manygood ones.' Looking to the European Modernsfor inspiration, he developed a fresh andindividual approach to visual communications.His magazine and advertising layouts weddedfunctional simplicity to abstract complexity.They did not cater to the common denominator.Devoid of ornament, they were conceptuallysharp and visually smart. Every detail wasstrategically planned to attract the eye andconvey a message. Yet nothing was formulaic.The page was a stage on which Rand performedfeats of artistic virtuosity. `He is an artist's artist,yet he delights the man in the street with hiswit, inventiveness, and showmanship,' hailedPercy Seitlin in American Artist (1942); `It isquite an accomplishment to make art andentertainment out of advertising.' Rand's workwas so distinct from both his traditional andfaddish contemporaries ? so radically counter tothe accepted norms yet progressive in waysthat acutely tested the limits of the printdesign ? that his admirers called him the Picasso ofGraphic Design.

    Paul Rand was born Peretz Rosenbaum on15 August 1914 and was raised in the Brownsvillesection of Brooklyn, New York, in a strictOrthodox Jewish home, along with his twinbrother Fishel (Philip) and an older sister Ruth.His father, Itzhak Yehuda, an immigrant fromGalicia, Poland, and mother, Leah, fromBrooklyn, worked long hours running a neighbourhoodgrocery store. Rand remembered thathis father's clientele included mobsters from the`Jewish mafia', the notorious Murder Incorporated,`who were always polite and paid incash'. Besides working in the store, as youngstersRand and his brother attended a Brooklynstate school by day and studied the Talmud atthe local Yeshiva (religious school) in theafternoons. Their grandfather, who was laterbrutally bludgeoned to death by a robber whiletaking a ritual bath at a Mikvah, referred to theboys as the `two goyim' because they occasionallycut religious school for sojourns outside theneighbourhood. But the first sign of Rand'srebellion had emerged much earlier.

    At three he began copying pictures of theattractive Palmolive models shown on advertisingdisplays hanging in his father's store. `I useda tiny stool as my table and I drew withoutstopping,' Rand recalled; adding, `But yourealize, in the Orthodox religion you don'tdraw the human figure. It's against the rules.'Showing his independence, however, he violatedthe religious strictures and drawing becamehis emotional and creative release. While theneighbourhood children played outside, heremained inside the dark back room of thegrocery store devoted to his precious scraps ofpaper. His artistic interests were later piqued bythe comic strip `Krazy Kat' by George Herriman,Frederick Opper's `Happy Hooligan', and thecomic women by Mel Brinkley in The New YorkWorld. And as his secular interests broadened,Rand recalled that on numerous occasions hewas scolded for reading comic books: `We willlose you because you live in a secular world,'chided his father. `Your language is Yiddish, andyour faith is Hebrew. Reading this will spoil you;it will destroy you as a Jew.'

    The two brothers were torn betweenobserving their parents' religious traditions andaspiring to live in the outside world wherebasic urges were not arrested by ancient ritual.Together they took baby steps and then giantones further from the fold. One chose art andthe other became a musician (Philip played indance bands in his twenties until he was killedin an automobile accident on his way to a jobin the Catskill Mountains). Rand's friend andformer colleague, Morris Wyszogrod, explainedthat `they both somehow ventured out becausethey wanted to see how the weather lookedoutside ? and they managed to do so. UltimatelyPaul realized you can live in the world andbelieve in your faith.'

    At Public School 109 in East New York, Randcreated signs for school events and painted alarge mural with a picture of a stone bridge thathung behind the faculty sign-in desk. Theseextra-curricular duties, he explained, got himexcused from `not-so-interesting classes, likegym, math, social studies, and English.' Heearned the title `chief class artist' and drew inthe realistic styles of American illustrators J.C.Lyendecker and Norman Rockwell. `As a matterof fact,' he confessed, `I went Lyendecker andRockwell one better.' While they used models ofphotographs, Rand did not. `I thought [an artist]had to sit down and do something without anyreference. And I never did.' Later on, in highschool he knew people who used to producewhat he called designs ? 'abstract things withoutreference which I could do too'. And oncein elementary school, he recalled makingwallpaper: `I think it was trees, very simplifiedforms, and I didn't have any great difficultydoing it. But I thought that that was only fordecorators. It was something less than being ableto draw soldiers dying on the battlefield whichis what I used to do ? Civil War, World War I,soldiers in the trenches ? childish notions ofwhat art should be.'

    When Rand entered high school, otherstudents prepared themselves for jobs orprofessions that guaranteed liveable wages in aDepression-ravaged city, but he was intent onmaking artwork. Putting his religious convictionsaside, Rand's father frequently warned that artwas no way to make a living. Nevertheless, hisfather agreed to advance the $25 entrance feethat enabled Rand to enrol in night school artclasses at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn on thecondition that he attend Harren High School inManhattan during the day. While riding theCanarsie subway back and forth across the EastRiver left little opportunity for recreation, Randwas most content to pursue his passion. In 1932he successfully earned two high schooldiplomas ? a general one after four years at HarrenHigh and an art certificate after three years atPratt. Though proud of his accomplishments,these documents were ultimately empty symbols.

    Neither school had offered Rand enoughstimulation to satisfy his needs. Harren Highbarely had an art department and Pratt Institutewas mired in convention. In later years heseverely criticized his teachers at Pratt who, heinsisted in retrospect, went out of their way toignore Matisse, Gris and Picasso. `I literallylearned nothing at Pratt; or whatever little Ilearned, I learned by doing myself.' Heremembered a painting teacher who did beautifulwork but he used to walk around talking aboutRaphael. `Not that you could learn anything fromhim; he would just say things like "Raphael wasa great painter," and other meaningless historicalstatements.' He also recalled another teacherwhose entire pedagogy was `how to indicate thethree-dimensional by having a highlight on oneside, and the darkest near the lightest spot'.Indeed if Rand wanted knowledge, he knew hehad to acquire it on his own.

    Perhaps school soured him, or his father'spragmatism swayed him, or simply growing uppoor was enough motivation, but Rand decidedearly on that `I was too practical to want to be apainter.' Making money, at least earning morethan his parents earned, was an importantdeterminant in how he saw his future unfolding.He therefore focused on the commercial side ofart as a career. One of the keys to economicsolvency was learning to letter. But even thispractical skill was not well taught in art school.`You'd be given a book, and you'd copy thealphabet,' he reported. `There wasn't anyexplanation of basic principles, like the verticalsshould be the heaviest optically, the horizontalsare the lightest, diagonals are in between, theround letters are bigger than the others ? younever had any of that. I just did it myself.' Thereason for this paucity of such useful informationwas that most of the art teachers were illustrators.They were not concerned with layout andlettering per se, but with exactly how modelslooked and what kind of clothing they wore.Rand summed up his years in art school as`all fact, no fancy'. But in truth, there was noteven enough fact.

    Rand's genuine education had alreadybegun in 1929 at Macy's department store inManhattan. `My mother and I used to buycigarettes to sell in our store at Macy's becausethey were cheaper there than from wholesalers,'he related. While his mother filled upher shopping bag, he used to look aroundMacy's bookshop and there he found a boundvolume of Commercial Art, the leading Britishgraphics trade magazine. `I'd never heard ofPicasso or Modernism until reading about ithere.' Coincidentally, that same year, at a smallbookstore adjacent to the Brooklyn Paramounttheatre, he stumbled upon his first copy ofGebrauchsgrafik, Germany's premier advertisingarts journal, which routinely showcased aninternational array of leading practitioners. `Thecover was a sort of imitation of Léger ? not verygood,' he recalled. `But I never forgot it.'And from that moment on he collected all thebilingual issues, which later became thecornerstone of an expansive design library. Inthat single issue, he discovered such notables asthe Bauhaus master Lázló Moholy-Nagy;the painter Richard Lindner, who had originallydesigned posters in Germany; and a virtuosoGerman trademark designer, Valentin Ziatara.But Gebrauchsgrafik offered more than anintroduction to contemporary graphic artmasters; it opened his eyes to the formal issuesinherent in all art, especially commercial art.

    One memorable issue contained thereproduction of a cigarette poster that usedclassical forms as props rendered in a contemporary,modernistic style. A figure shownsmoking a cigarette was wearing a laurel wreathof victory, in which the overlapping leaves werepointed ovals. Rand was intrigued that the tipof the cigarette shown in the poster was also anoval marked by points along its curves: `I askedmy teacher "How is it possible to draw an ovalwith points?" He replied that "the [poster artist]just didn't know how to draw." But I said tomyself that this couldn't be ... Everything elsewas so beautifully done ... Then I realized thatthe interesting thing about [this poster], whichmy teacher failed to see, was that the artistwas repeating the oval shapes everywhere else.It was not only a beautiful drawing, it wasbrilliant design.'

    It was also Rand's first epiphany that art anddesign were unified ? a notion that foreverchanged his attitude and set him on the coursethat would lead him to reject forever pureillustration in favour of graphic design.

    Still, Rand complained that the teachers atPratt encouraged students to identify themselvesonly with the great artists Michelangelo andRembrandt, because they represented thehighest level of human endeavour. `Graphicdesign was rarely mentioned,' he opined. Despitethe revolutionary modern design being practisedin Europe, Rand regretted that such things wereignored, and that discussions of the avant-gardenever surfaced in his classes. `Being at PrattInstitute, you didn't know about [Jan]Tschichold [the codifier of the New Typographyin the mid-1920s],' adding sarcastically, `or forthat matter, you didn't know about him if youwere in Brooklyn, or Brownsville or East NewYork. What you knew about were gangsters andicepick murderers.'

    Discouraged by the dearth of practical informationabout design and a surfeit of what hecalled `misinformation', Rand consoled himselfbehind the large oak doors of Room 313 at themain branch of the New York Public Library onFifth Avenue. In this grand old reading room,he consumed the library's rich collection of artbooks, European design annuals, and printingand type journals. It was here that he learnedabout the work of Cubist-inspired advertisingposter artists in France and England, A. M.Cassandre and E. McKnight Kauffer. Throughtheir abstract and symbolic compositions fordepartment stores, shipping lines and railwaycompanies, he could see the intersection offunctionality and imagination. He began tounderstand that in Europe art was not hiddenaway from view, entombed in exalted institutions,but rather was part of ordinary life.Commercial art was one means of disseminatingart to the masses. And this total experience,he learned, was the mission of Europe's modernart movements and schools.

Continues...

Excerpted from Paul Randby Steven Heller Copyright © 2000 by Steven Heller. Excerpted by permission.
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