unhampered by traditions.... He has no stereotyped style because every
task is something new and demands its own solution. Consequently, there
is nothing labored or forced about his work.”
Rand’s artistic awakening came in the late 1920 s at the New York
Public Library where he explored the stacks and pored through volumes
of Commercial Art, the British trade journal that published articles on the
European avant-garde practitioners, including expatriate E. McKnight
Kauffer. He had a second epiphany at a little magazine store adjacent to
the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where in 1929 he bought his first issue of
Gebrauchsgrafik, the most influential German advertising arts magazine ever
published. It was in this periodical that Rand learned about the practice of,
and the term, graphic design.
By 1938 Rand had produced enough noteworthy design that he
caught the eye of Marguerite Tjader Harris, the daughter of a wealthy
Connecticut munitions manufacturer. She was intent on having Rand
design covers for Direction, an arts and culture magazine that she published
on a shoestring, which featured articles by Le Corbusier, Jean Cocteau, and
other avant-gardists. She offered Rand no recompense, but plenty of
freedom and, ultimately, a couple of original Le Corbusier drawings. But
Rand had another motive, “In a country that was used to decorative work,
the common sense way to have what I was doing accepted was to do it for
free,” he explained.
More than any other project, the Directioncovers exemplified the
timelessness that Rand attributed to the most significant art and design.
“When I designed a cover of Direction, I was really trying to compete with
the Bauhaus. Not with Norman Rockwell,” clarified Rand. “I was working
in the spirit of Van Doesburg, Léger, and Picasso. It was not old fashioned.
To be old fashioned is, in a way, a sin.”
Each Directioncover illustrated a particular theme or point of
view; the first, and his most politically astute, showed a map of Czecho-
slovakia torn in half, representing the nation’s evisceration by the Nazis.
Contrasted with an E. McKnight Kauffer Directioncover showing a
realistic hand impaled by a Nazi dagger, Rand’s abstract depiction was
both subtle and eloquent. Rand avoided conventional propagandistic tools
in favor of imagery he believed would serve as both art and message. His
1940 “Merry Christmas” cover was a visual pun that substituted barbed
wire for gift wrap ribbon. Rand photographed real barbed wire against a
white background lit to pick up the shadows. Little red circles made by a
hole punch represented spilled blood. The barbed wire was a striking
mnemonic symbol for oppression. “It pinpoints the distinction between
abstract design without and abstract design with content,” he insisted.
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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