What a trippy poster man!

As I read through chapter 21: The Conceptual Image this week, I found all of the artists and their graphic design innovations fascinating. This is an era of graphic design that produced styles and imagery that appeal to me more than anything else this quarter, but nothing quite like the psychedelic posters from the 1960s. Sparked by protest against the Vietnam War, the Civic Rights Movement and Women’s Liberation, not to mention the assassination of several civil leaders, the American public was motivated towards change and questioning what was socially normal. Experimentation with drugs and a new concept of freedom was popularized, and the resulting music and art was very representative. Rock and Roll posters and album covers were the canvas for a revival of art nouveau—with a twist.

The sinuous, graceful curves of the art nouveau can be seen in Wes Wilson’s Grateful Dead concert posters (below) where the letter forms are almost indecipherable, requiring some decoding from it’s hippie readers. These posters are great examples with their brightly colored curving lines around the solemn face and distorted hand drawn text, curvilinear to the face as well.  

Searching through the internet for 60s psychedelia, I found many websites to buy posters but not much that just talks about them. Wes Wilson is the exception here perhaps because he was repeatedly commissioned by Bill Graham, one of the biggest live music promoters in the 1960s. Wilson created so many posters for Graham over the years that the internet is flush with them. The posters below show how nudity was becoming excepted during this time of expressing your freedom.

You may notice a commonality in the typeface used in most of the examples above. Any articles online about Wilson mention his affinity for using a a typeface inspired by Alfred Roller's font from the art nouveau era. Below you can compare the two where Wilson's is on the left and Roller's is in the right (a section taken from his Secession poster, 1903) . Wilson Seems to barrow the overall aesthetic of the plump letters with very little to no space between their varying elements. Wilson adds a sixties flare by changing the size of the letters and curving their edges around the other imagery in the posters.

Another example of Wilson's use of graphic design concepts derived from art nouveau is his use of geometric shapes in some of his art. Below you see how Wilson used symmetry and parallel lines in combination with bright colors and distorted text, modernizing the nouveau style. The one on the right gives a sort of barber pole effect, with the text twisting between the concentric lines and the one on the right is almost a mushroom cloud of geometric shapes.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Graham_%28promoter%29

http://androom.home.xs4all.nl/biography/p016778.htm

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/where-hard-rock-meets-pop-art/

Image sources:

(in order of appearance)

http://www.collectable-records.ru/images/post/wilson/14.htm

http://www.csun.edu/~pjd77408/DrD/Art461/LecturesAll/Lectures/Lecture09/Psychedelic.html

http://www.wes-wilson.com/

http://www.collectable-records.ru/images/post/wilson/10.htm

http://www.collectable-records.ru/images/post/wilson/11.htm