Advertising Arts, September, 1933. (With cover of the original NRA logo by Charles T. Coiner.)
New York: Advertising and Selling Publishing Company, 1933. 4to Spiral bound. 40pp. + inserts. Silkscreen cover by Charles T. Coiner (1898-1989). In 1933 Coiner was asked to design a symbol for the National Recovery Administration, the federal agency created to encourage industrial recovery and combat unemployment. His Blue Eagle design, that he sketched on a flight to Washington, DC, was displayed by businesses all across the United States and as its much publicized creator, Coiner became something of a household name.
Photograph by Ruth Bernhard.
When Advertising Arts made its debut during the Great Depression, the economy was at its nadir and desperation was at its zenith. Unless advertising and public relations men like Calkins could help resuscitate the economy, the nation would plummet further into the abyss — and with it the advertising industry. Advertising Arts, edited by Frederick C. Kendall and Ruth Fleischer, was developed as a vehicle to encourage innovative work and celebrate the determination of advertising designers to manipulate popular perception using pseudoscience. It was indeed a magazine with a mission. So rather than publish the usual diet of gossip, trade talk, and technical notices, Kendall and Fleischer tapped the movers and shakers of what was then called “art for industry” to flag the new progressivism. Touting their own achievements as “artists” and imbuing art with commercial value was a massive public relations effort that required the most articulate practitioners. Granted, the readers of Advertising Arts were primarily other advertising artists and designers, but nonetheless the magazine gained authority within the offices and boardrooms of industry. The articles validated contemporary design in ways that business men could understand it.
Provenance : Estate of CCAC/CCA professor Steve Reoutt, who passed away May 14, 2008. He was born in 1938 in Shanghai to Russian parents. He came to the United States when he was just 12 years old. He went on to co-found the San Francisco chapter of the AIGA, including serving a nine-year board position as design historian. In 2001 Reoutt received the AIGA Fellowship award for “personal and professional contributions to raising the standards of excellence within our design community." Item #51-2327
Price: $225.00