1/20/2024 0 Comments Grateful dead fonts art decoWes Wilson The eagle in this poster clearly harkens back to the curving details of Art Nouveau Likewise, the era-defining font used in this poster is derivative of typefaces created by Vienna Secession artists Victor Moscoso Moscoso designed posters as well as comics for publications like Zap, an underground comic to which many psychedelic artists contributed This poster exemplifies two of Moscoso’s signature strategies. Many artists, most famously Wes Wilson, Victor Moscoso and Bonnie MacLean, were headquartered here, and received a great number of commissions for poster designs from local rock ‘n roll concert venues like The Fillmore and the Bill Graham auditoriums. San Francisco-specifically the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood near Golden Gate Park-was by virtually every measure the epicenter of hippie culture in the United States. Bridget Riley’s huge, vibrating vortex epitomizes Op Art Andy Warhol’s iconic painting uses silkscreen technology to reproduce Marilyn Monroe’s face, which he saturates in various combinations of bright, highly contrasting color Pyschedelia takes off in San Francisco Both strategies would make a strong impact on the nascent psychedelic cohort. Pop Art was popular as well, using techniques of mass reproduction, such as silk-screening, to reconfigure the images of commodity culture. At this time, art and design spectators in Britain and the United States were having their minds regularly blown by the achievements in Op Art, which exploits principles of optics to make paintings that seem to vibrate and move. Art Nouveau A poster design by William Bradley shows bright colors and curvilinear patterns This iconic poster by Alphonse Mucha exhibits incredible detail and a female figure who seems to be in psychedelic reverie Vienna Secession Gustav Klimt’s famous portrait shows a woman emerging from a symbolist milieu of spiral and other patterns The striking typefaces of the Vienna Secession movement were a direct inspiration for psychedelic designers like Wes Wilson Surrealism Salvador Dalí’s “The Persistence of Memory” … doesn’t get much more psychedelic than this Another surrealist painter, André Masson, paints fantastic, often metaphysical scenes that prefigure the darker side of psychedelia Immediate influences: Op and Pop Artįast forward to the early 1960s, with the world of psychedelic design just on the cusp of coming into existence. It’s no coincidence: these are the movements that the psychedelic generation, many of whom were educated in art, looked to for inspiration. All of these can be found in the art and design of fin-de-siecle and early 20th century Europe specifically, the movements of Art Nouveau, Vienna Secession, and Surrealism. Early influencesĬonsider some of the primary attributes of psychedelic art: fantastic subject matter, kaleidoscopic and spiral patterns, bright color, extreme detail, groovy typography. And who said hippies were lazy?īut the story begins about 80 years earlier. To keep this post manageable, we’re going to focus on the movement in the United States, where it flourished the most, around its high water mark, 1967-the year that Victor Moscoso designed no fewer than 60 posters in 8 months. The history of psychedelic design is of course vast: it crossed countless borders and dominated the graphic arts for a good decade, between the mid 1960s and the mid 1970s. Specifically, we wanted to explore the phenomenon of psychedelic design-a style that nowadays gets recycled often in commercial work, while its original history threatens to fade from collective memory. Today, we’re taking a look back at that hazy yet brilliant period of artistic fluorescence: the later 1960s.
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