Paul Rand designed this cover for
a book called, Modern Art in Your Life, produced by the Museum of Modern Art.
The subject of the book is the way that objects that we use in the home
can either be designed by modern designers or have some of them that are traditional,
like certain types of drinking glasses,
can be seen as objects in modern art and design.
What Rand does is he uses a pun, a visual pun,
by that I mean that is both a word game, and a visual game.
So, Modern Art In Your Life, he shows us a table setting,
except the plate is an old symbol for making art.
It's a painter's palette, right?
It's such a recognizable cliche that on this cover,
you understand that he's created a fork,
a plate, which is the artist's palate and
then the knife is clearly also a brush with a dob of paint on the end.
And then it's set against the red and the black, these very big
brushy forms that ground the whole thing and make you think of modern art.
So again the way that all of these simple symbol of the place setting and
the dobs of paint, all bounce off each other, to make you think about
the complex idea inside the book, done with a minimum of means,
is really what Rand worked at over and over.
Like all of these modern designers, he didn't really want to use pictures
of things, he wanted to synthesize ideas into symbols.
And it's even interesting when he does use a picture
how he reconstitutes it as something else.
This is a paperback book cover for
a set of speeches by H.L. Mencken who is a famous American orator.
Mencken's photo is embedded in the background
of a drawing that Rand has made, this form that is
clearly a torso with a hand pointing upward.
He way an orator or somebody giving a speech might be shaking his hands,
pointing at the audience using his arms to gesture expressively.
He obviously didn't have that expression in the photograph.
But, by superimposing the picture inside that form,
you get the idea, of course, it's a picture of H.L. Mencken giving a speech.
The forms that Rand often uses in his work are quite primitive, and
in fact some of them appear to be almost childish.
Like this poster for an event on Central Park where several different
religious groups got together for what this call Interfaith Day.
So, it's a picture blowing a horn,
again a tradition religious symbol. And the crown and the wing
are indicated in the loosest possible manner.
If you look at it, it's got the innocence of a child's drawing.
Rand wrote a book in 1948 called Thoughts on Design, and
in it he talks about his notion that some forms.
That can be attached to either the abstracted symbol or
something that is as recognizable as child's drawing
have a kind of power that anybody can understand.
He argues that certain kinds of symbols are universal, and
while now people have a tendency not to believe
that symbols have universal power,
and they certainly don't believe that symbols have that power forever,
I think still you look at these kinds of projects of Rand’s, and
you understand how he was trying really hard to find
a visual language that would read to an audience, would appear new.
and would attach the energy that was connected to
contemporary art of the time with other ideas in the culture as well.
Louise SandhausFaculty, Program in Graphic Design
Lorraine WildFaculty, Program in Graphic Design
