Elisa Ragazzini 813067
Ho scelto di inserire nella ricerca per prima cosa la biografia del progettista; mi focalizzo successivamente su alcuni ambiti e punti focali della sua carriera, descrivendoli attraverso varie testimonianze trovate. Infine, sempre attraverso diverse testimonianze e punti di vista, arrivo a definire un quadro descrittivo dello stile del progettista. Il tutto è corredato da immagini coerenti con il contenuto.
BREVE BIOGRAFIA (sunto tradotto e condensato)
Roy Kuhlman nasce a Forth Worth, nel Texas, nel 1923. All’età di tre anni la sua famiglia si trasferisce a Glendale (California) così che il padre, meccanico, potesse trovare lavoro. Da bambino Roy soffre di cuore, e la malattia lo costringe in casa per la maggior parte della sua infanzia; si dedica quindi alla passione per l’arte. Sua madre (liutaia per hobby) lo iscrive, ancora bambino, ad un corso di disegno dal vero di alto livello; da allora Roy continuerà a frequentare corsi d’arte parallelamente al corso della sua formazione scolastica. “I literally goofed off for ten years of my life on working scholarships, thinking I was going to be Rembrandt reincarnated or whoever my latest love was. Art was going to make me rich and well known.” Riceve ben due borse di studio nel corso della sua formazione: Chouinard Art Institute, a Los Angeles, e nel 1946 per l’Art Students League of New York, dove dominano le estetiche della Pop Art e dell’Espressionismo astratto; qui Roy si avvicina quest’ultimo. Frequentò anche la Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, nel Maine. Realizza più tardi che a New York di sola arte non poteva vivere e nel 1951, all’età di 28 anni, mette insieme quello che lui stesso definì “probably the worst portfolio ever seen in New York” e lo presenta a Barney Rosset, editore della Grove Press (casa editrice alternativa focalizzata sulla letteratura d’avanguardia). Rosset era in cerca di uno stile particolare e distintivo, e non rimase colpito dai lavori di Kuhlman. Tuttavia, mentre Roy si appresta ad andarsene, due lavori di arte astratta (preparati per il colloquio successivo con una casa discografica jazz) scivolano fuori dalla sua cartella. Questi ultimi colpirono Rosset, e così Roy venne assunto a disegnare le copertine di Grove Press. Produrrà circa 60 copertine all’anno, pagato 50 $ a copertina fino alla fine degli anni ‘60, quando alzerà il costo a 100 $. Sarà Roy a progettare il formato del magazine culturale di Grove, Evergreen Review, e ne sarà l’art director. Entra anche nell’industria pubblicitaria in Sudler & Hennessy, grazie all’art director Herb Lubalin. Qui si troverà a lavorare insieme a Carl Fischer, Art Ludwig, e Ernie Smith. Diviene poi a sua volta art director e designer di Columbia Records, chiamato a sostituire Neil Fujita nel 1954. Un anno dopo viene assunto dal marchio p.r. Ruder & Finn e fonda un reparto artistico interno all’azienda. Entra poi a far parte di Benton & Bowles, dove crea la famosa pubblicità “Mathematics Serving Man” per IBM. Viene commissionato da IBM anche della creazione di 700 slide e 52 corti animati e filmati per promuovere i computer dell’azienda. Nel 1964 fonda la Kuhlman Associates Inc., una compagnia pubblicitaria che lavorò per diversi clienti, quali AT&T, Hertz, Ciba, Chemstrand e ovviamente Grove Press. Infine viene assunto da Electra Films per creare sequenze di titoli e motion graphics.
Dopo essere andato in pensione, nel 1980, Roy continua a sperimentare con la fotografia. Nel 1995 viene accolto nella Hall of Fame dell’Art Directors Club.
“In this business, if you have a ten-year life span, you’re lucky—mine lasted 35 years.”
Negli anni ‘50 fu sposato a Ellen Raskin (graphic designer e autrice di libri per bambini) e nel 1961 sposa Gilda Hannah (designer editoriale) con la quale ha due figli. Entrambi i matrimoni finirono in divorzio. Roy morirà di pneumonia a Mesa (Arizona) nel 2007, all’età di 83 anni. • • •
NY Times, 5/02/2007 (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/05/obituaries/05kuhlman.html?_r=1&) Aiga archives - Steven Brower, Design History 101: Roy Kuhlman, 2014 (eyeondesign.aiga.org/design-history-101-roy-kuhlman/) Evergreen Review, Marzo/Aprile 1994 - Grove Press at the Vanguard (http://www.evergreenreview.com/107/ print_article/pg60.html)
AMBITI E TESTIMONIANZE
Grove Press (e le avanguardie letterarie) One of Kuhlman’s fondest memories of his career took place in 1951, in a small Greenwich Village office of Grove Press, the fledgling publishing company that eventually brought to national prominence the writers, art, and artists of the avant-garde. He showed his portfolio of illustrations and comps, “mostly bad black-and-white photos, clumsy type, mostly sans-serif,” to publisher Barney Rosset, who was not impressed. Just as Kuhlman was about to close the portfolio, Rosset caught a glimpse of doodles Kuhlman had been planning to show to record companies. When Rosset, who numbered among his friends Willem de Kooning, Kline, and Jackson Pollock, saw them, he said emphatically, “This is what I want.”
Examples of Grove Press covers by Roy Kuhlman
His designs were the perfect counterpoint to the texts Rosset was publishing. Story of O, the erotic novel by Henry Miller, for example, was packaged in a plain white jacket to camouflage what was inside. After Grove—the first to publish third-world titles in the United States— began publishing foreign titles in 1966, Kuhlman produced such covers as The Brave African Huntress by Amos Tutuola and The No Plays of Japan by Arthur Waley, which demonstrate his ability to reach both conceptual and abstract solutions. Rosset rejected only a few cover ideas. “I usually had five seconds to get a yes or no from Rosset. So, I walked slowly across the office toward Rosset’s desk, holding the comp up so he’d have some [extra] time to look at it,” Kuhlman says, adding, “Barney was the greatest client I ever had. He gave me the freedom to explore, to fail, and to win.” •
Roy Kuhlman’s biography from the ADC Hall of Fame, 1995 (http://adcglobal.org/hall-of-fame/roy-kuhlman/)
Rosset became famous as an intrepid trail-blazer who brought banned and avant-garde literature to a deprived American public. Guided by his quixotic spirit, and by such talented editors as Fred Jordan, Richard Seaver, Donald Allen, and later Kent Carroll and John Oakes, Grove Press established itself as a force in publishing. Throughout the ‘60s, Grove was enormously successful in creating an audience, and like Evergreen Review, reflected Rosset’s expanding visual and literary acumen. The legacy of Grove Press is well known within literary circles - how Barney Rosset bought a fledgling but failing publishing company in the early 1950s and changed the world of letters in America, and perhaps the very culture as well; how during the early years of post-World War II disillusionment and materialism - the era of the grayflannel suit and suburban expansion, the Korean conflict, and the rise of McCarthyism - Grove Press brought to national prominence the writers, art, and artists of the avant-garde. Grove offered many readers their first introduction to the European dramatists of the Absurd, the French Surrealists, the San Francisco and New York “Beat” poets, and the New York Abstract Expressionists. Such groundbreaking works as Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby and Naked Lunch by William Burroughs represented a literary vanguard. Grove went on to champion African American, ethnic, and Third World literature, the politics of the New Left, while at the same time fighting some of the earliest and most important anti-censorship battles, setting legal precedents that still stand today. As Grove grew, its interests diversified. Drawing on his prior film experience, Rosset commissioned Beckett, Harold Pinter, Marguerite Duras, Eugene lonesco, and Alain Robbe-Grillet to write scripts. Grove Press subsequently produced Beckett’s scenario. Titled Film, it was directed by Alan Schneider and starred Buster Keaton. In 1988, Rosset was awarded the Ninth Publisher Citation by Pen International for “distinction and continuous service to international letters, to the dignity of writers, and the free transmission of the printed word across the barrier of poverty, ignorance, censorship and repression.” All but forgotten is the concurrent history of design at Grove Press. Equally innovative, and ultimately almost as influential, Grove Press book covers reflected not only the work inside, but also the prevailing zeitgeist. The iconoclastic writing was echoed in the packaging, a marriage of imagery and the written word that had not been seen before, or, perhaps, since. Barney Rosset indeed was the force behind the legendary publishing house, but Roy Kuhlman contributed strongly to its renown with his innovative book covers. •
Evergreen Review, Marzo/Aprile 1994 - Grove Press at the Vanguard (http://www.evergreenreview.com/107/print_article/ pg60.html)
Dall’alto: Barney Rosset; proteste di maccartisti; Rosset di fianco a Samuel Beckett sul set del documentario “Obscene”, incentrato sulle vicende giudiziare di Grove Press
Evergreen Review Founded in 1957, Evergreen‘s mix of high and low culture quickly became indispensable reading to the Beat Generation. At its height, its circulation was close to 200,000, and its writers included an eclectic but always progressive mix of names such as William Burroughs, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, Jack Kerouac, Samuel Beckett, Malcolm X, Henry Miller, Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Jean Genet and Carlos Fuentes. In 1970, barely one year after the Stonewall riots, one of its most famous covers featured a Richard Avedon photograph of Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky embracing—nude. •
Evergreen Review website (http://www.evergreenreview.com)
In its congenial, small, and austere format, the Evergreen Review joined the Modernist little-literary magazine tradition, though its circulation soon exceeded what was normal for a magazine of this type. After its redesign in a larger format with issue 32, it became a Postmodern stewpot of literature, politics, sex, and art. A glossy 8”-by-11” monthly it included work by many popular illustrators and designers such as Tomi Ungerer, Peter Max, and Paul Davis. •
Evergreen Review, Marzo/Aprile 1994 - Grove Press at the Vanguard (http://www.evergreenreview.com/107/ print_article/pg60.html)
I.B.M. (e l’accettazione della tecnologia) Having decided to go out on his own, Kuhlman rented a studio above Fischer’s, on East 54th Street. Influenced by his friends’ photographic skills, Kuhlman began solving design challenges with photography. This led to an introduction to Bill Buckley at Benton & Bowles. While working there, Roy designed the award-winning IBM “Mathematics Serving Man” campaign that appeared inTime, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report, and won the AIGA Best Ads of the Year Award in 1960. Unlike the covers for Grove, the IBM campaign came with a generous budget that allowed Kuhlman to really strut his stuff, both conceptually and aesthetically. The campaign featured his photographs of eclectic objects, like an abacus, arrowheads, and shells, alongside his roughhewn illustrations and generous amounts of white space. Following the success of the campaign, IBM commissioned him to produce 700 slides and 52 liveaction and animated shorts to promote computer sales and relieve the common fear that computers would render human workers obsolete. But during the two-year campaign, computers became more widely accepted, rendering Kuhlman’s efforts obsolete. Unfortunately, he ended up signing a confidentiality agreement to never show this work. •
Aiga archives - Steven Brower, Design History 101: Roy Kuhlman, 2014 (eyeondesign.aiga.org/design-history-101-roy-kuhlman/)
STILE
Roy Kuhlman’s jazzlike improvisational paintings and graphics for Grove Press books in the 1950s and ’60s introduced an Abstract Expressionist style to graphic design. Kuhlman’s solutions were sometimes conceptual, sometimes abstract, and sometimes a combination of the two. He rarely visited bookstores and didn’t particularly pay attention to what other designers were doing. Although he cites Lustig and Paul Rand, who were a generation before him as influences, it was the new generation of painters, the Abstract Expressionists, particularly the “strong, simple” style of Franz Kline, that truly inspired him. Kuhlman gradually began to apply abstract art in a more graphic way, not only to imagery, but also to type. He developed an array of colorful painted and drawn abstract and geometric forms, which were combined with either clean gothic typefaces or roughly sketched, expressive letterforms. Covers were designed and printed in two or three colors, four at a time. Rosset describes Kuhlman’s designs as an attempt to “go between being a purely creative act and a commercial one.” His work was occasionally representational and conceptually based as well. He avoided literal representation, because he said he could not really draw well. Instead, his random color patterns and amorphous shapes seemed totally independent from the texts they were illustrating. He rarely read the manuscripts before designing the covers, and yet every image was eye-catching and posterlike, designed to draw attention to the books on the shelves. • •
NY Times, 5/02/2007 (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/05/obituaries/05kuhlman.html?_r=1&) Evergreen Review, Marzo/Aprile 1994 - Grove Press at the Vanguard (http://www.evergreenreview.com/107/ print_article/pg60.html)
Colonna di sinistra, dall’alto: lavori di Franz Kline (1950), Alvin Lustig (1950) e Paul Rand (1940). Colonna di destra: copertine di Roy Kuhlman.
Just recently, I was looking through two vintage Evergreen/Grove Press books with Kuhlman’s covers: The Apple (1961) and The Maids and Deathwatch (1962). Both suggest the time when Late Modernism ruled the roost, and paperbacks were dressed in conceptual, abstract, and minimalist covers by Paul Rand, George Guisti, Chermayeff & Geismar, Leo Lionni, Rudy de Harak, and more. But as stated above, “Mr. Kuhlman’s minimalist graphic vocabulary was entirely his own.” What set his work apart from others working in this manner was the free-form aesthetic, the painterly swirl and carefree splotches that gave personality to an otherwise abstract (perhaps obtuse) visual idea. Whenever I see these and his other covers, I smile, sigh, and wish I could do that. •
Steven Heller, Remembering Roy Kuhlman, 2012 (http://www. printmag.com/design-inspiration/remembering-roy-kuhlman/)
Ionesco’s The Killer and Other Plays is marked with dense orange and taupe shapes sharpened to points that threaten to touch but instead hover in permanent tension as if refuting themselves and each other. Ionesco’s work deals directly with contradiction, ideological and factual, but it is unlikely Kuhlman knew this. He rarely read a book before determining its cover, preferring to intuit its identity through any means other than knowledge of its contents. When asked years later about his method, Kuhlman said it was simply a matter of what “felt right.” •
Amelia Stein, Roy Kuhlman, 2012 (http://www.ameliastein.net/ roy-kuhlman/)
His approach was loose, spontaneous, and serendipitous, and he worked quickly and instinctively. Because he felt there was a loss of quality if art was resized, he prepared comps in the same size as the final mechanical. Kuhlman developed a graphic language of his own, and anything within reach became part of the developing visual pastiche: old engravings, the insides of bank envelopes, his own photography, photograms, Zipatone sheets and collages, and odd pieces of letterpress type left over from other jobs. •
Aiga archives - Steven Brower, Design History 101: Roy Kuhlman, 2014 (eyeondesign.aiga.org/design-history-101-roy-kuhlman/)
Kuhlman’s quickly conceived experiments simplified objects and images and transformed typography into potent compositions. Reflecting his inspirations from European modernist artists like Matisse and Picasso, Kuhlman used torn films and fragments of photographs to create vivid, semi-abstract collages. His style could be subtle and restrained, as in The other America, or it could be spontaneous and whimsical, as in The girl beneath the lion. In his 1960 cover for Killachter Meadow, Kuhlman transformed a highcontrast photograph of the shadow of a Venetian blind falling across a man’s back to create abstract shapes that suggest a landscape. Covers like Ping pong and Murphy showed that Kuhlman was as adept as any of his modernist colleagues in the use of type as image. Of all the designers working in the wake of Lustig and Rand, Kuhlman had the best instinctive grasp of the potential of modernist spontaneity. •
By its cover - Modern America book cover design (Ned Drew, Paul Sternberger, 2005)
In the late 1980s, Kuhlman went through an obsessive period during which he produced many hundreds of abstract photos much like the one on this cover. This was created with colored gels and beveled glass, most likely a dish. I cannot tell you more about the process because it was his secret method. He amassed a huge collection of beveled glass pieces for this project. This cover is from 1968, so he had been thinking about creating this type of abstract photography for a long time, and was finally able to give it his attention. •
Arden Kuhlman (Kuhlman’s daughter) - Roy Kuhlman Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/RoyKuhlman.GraphicDesigner/timeline)
The only thing that I recall being spoken of in the house, and other people in publishing, was Roy Kuhlman’s incredible jacket, that white jacket with the black-and-white photograph of Malcom on the cover. It’s much smaller than the jacket; in other words, he didn’t let it bleed. A lot of white! The cover and the title, it’s really striking. Roy Kuhlman invented the look of the modern dust jacket. Before Ro’s dust jackets, the use of white for a dust jacket was never considered, and Roy always used white. •
The Grove Press Reader, 1951-2001 - Interview with Gilbert Sorrentino (S. E. Gontarski, 2001)
A fianco, lavori ispirati alle “rayografie” di Man Ray
Hand-drawn type
Roy amava disegnare le sue copertine con quello che gli capitava sottomano; frequenti erano i titoli scritti a mano, in corsivo o nel suo caratteristico stampatello
METARICERCA
Bibliografia I libri che parlano di Roy Kuhlman sono pochi e difficilmente reperibili; fortunatamente sono riuscita via internet ad avere accesso gratuitamente ad un paio di essi e svolgere delle ricerche per parole chiave. • • • •
The Grove Press Reader, 1951-2001 (S. E. Gontarski, 2001) By its cover - Modern America book cover design (Ned Drew, Paul Sternberger, 2005) Evergreen Review (Marzo/Aprile 1994) Design Issues, vol.5 no. 1 (Autunno 1988), Jorge Frascara
Sitografia Nella ricerca sono inoltre proposti vari estratti di articoli riguardanti il designer su diversi blog e magazine, organizzati per tematica e completi di immagini. Per ogni brano è citata la fonte. • • • • • • •
NY Times, 5/02/2007 (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/05/obituaries/05kuhlman.html?_r=1&) Aiga Archives (eyeondesign.aiga.org/design-history-101-roy-kuhlman/) Art Directors Club Hall of Fame (http://adcglobal.org/hall-of-fame/roy-kuhlman/) Evergreen Review (http://www.evergreenreview.com) Roy Kuhlman Facebook page - gestita dalla figlia (https://www.facebook.com/RoyKuhlman.GraphicDesigner/ timeline) Print Magazine (http://www.printmag.com/design-inspiration/remembering-roy-kuhlman/, http://www.printmag. com/illustration/evergreen-the-glossy-of-the-underground/) www.ameliastein.net (http://www.ameliastein.net/roy-kuhlman/)
Immagini Le immagini sono state invece piuttosto facili da reperire; in merito bisogna citare l’enorme archivio on-line dedicato alle copertine del designer, cercate e raccolte personalmente da sua figlia Arden Riordan Kuhlman; al momento conta più di 500 opere. Arden gestisce inoltre la pagina Facebook di Roy Kuhlman, ed è in costruzione anche un sito ufficiale purtroppo ancora inaccessibile. • • • • • • • • •
Roy Kuhlman book covers archive on Pinterest (https://www.pinterest.com/ardenriordan/book-covers-by-roykuhlman/) www.design-is-fine.org bookworship.com The graphic design of Roy Kuhlman archive on Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/groups/1494992@N25/) bookcoversanonymous.blogspot.it www.thisisdisplay.org robertmars.blogspot.it Evergreen Review archive on realitystudio.org (http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/evergreen-review-archive/) chestyprevitt.blogspot.com.ar