socialist realism. “I was trying to make the image of a martyr,” said Davis
about this artifact of the era. “I didn’t realize the potency of the symbol at
the time. But when the cover and later the poster appeared,Evergreen’s
offices were firebombed [by Cuban émigrés].”
With this image he began a formal shift from the stiffness and
motionlessness of his primitives to a more photographic sensibility. “I tried
to erase the traces of American primitive art because it was becoming a
trap,” he admitted. “I wanted to rid my work of all the elements that referred
to other styles. And within a year or two after this, I had eliminated a lot of
self-consciousness from my work.” Soon Davis began to “depend more on
the beauty of objects,” and depicted scenes rather than ideas.
Davis’s most significant contribution to American graphic design
is his theater posters. His rendition of Hamletand subsequent posters for
Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival done during the mid- 1970 s
challenged the conventions of contemporary theater advertising. First, they
were not encumbered by the usual bank of “ego” copy. “Those early posters
didn’t say anything: No Joe Papp; No Shakespeare Festival; No actors. I
didn’t even sign them at first (and only self-consciously used my initials
when I first began to do so). The only lettering was the title of the play
and the name of the theater, though we realized later that it wouldn’t hurt
to mention that this was, in fact, a Shakespeare Festival production and
began to include a logo.” Second, without mimicking style, Davis’s posters
referred to the late nineteenth-century European tradition of poster art,
which was ignored by contemporary posterists.
His Public Theater posters were stark, employing a central image
with simple type either stenciled or silkscreened directly on the artwork (as
he did on Hamletin collaboration with art director Reinhold Schwenk) or
seamlessly integrated into the composition (as with the Three Penny Opera).
“The history of the Shakespeare Festival posters says a lot about the way
the posters are used,” he said. “I have often made comments in the posters
about the way posters look on walls and in the environment in which they
are hung. Many of my posters for the festival have had that self-conscious
quality about being a poster.” One example,For Colored Girls Who Have
Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, showed the main figure with
the title lettering scrawled on a tiled subway wall where, in fact, the poster
was intended to be hung. The third, and final challenge to conventional
theater posters was his basic methodology. Davis read the play, went to the
rehearsals or readings, and talked to the actors and directors. “They seemed
to think,” he said, “that I was doing this revolutionary thing by actually
reading the scripts.”
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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