F. Agha, art director of Vanity Fairand Vogue, where, as a novice at
publication design, she received an invaluable education from this brilliant
taskmaster. “We used to make many versions of the same feature. If we did,
let’s say, twenty pages on beauty with twenty different photographers we
made scores of different layouts in order to extract every bit of drama or
humor we could out of that material. Agha drove us to that because he was
never happy with just one solution. And he was right too. We learned that
magazine design should never play second fiddle to advertising,” Pineles
explained. Five years later she was appointed art director at Glamour, a poor
relation to Vogue, targeted at women who couldn’t afford the high cost of
dress-up. Pineles was told that while money was no object at Vogue,at
Glamourshe’d have to do whatever she could on a meager budget. She
made the proverbial silk purse, but was so indignant over Condé Nast’s
demeaning posture over this magazine that she left Glamourin 1944 to
become art director of Overseas Woman, an army magazine for American
servicewomen stationed abroad. From there she moved to Seventeen,a
magazine that defined the teenage market for girls.
“That was the best job I had because the editor was attuned to the
audience, and no matter what anybody else did, she and I knew that for
seventeen-year-olds the subjects had to be done in a special way,” Pineles
recalled. She personalized her art direction in the sense that if she showed a
cape, she chose the model, the accessories, and the atmosphere in which
the garment was presented. Often, she also conceived the issue’s theme.
“Subject to the collaborative process with editors, art assistants, and artists,
my personality was pervasive but not obtrusive.”
As art director she transformed American illustration from a
saccharine service to an expressive art. “I avoided illustration that was
weighed down by cliché or convention, and encouraged that which was
unique to the editorial context,” Pineles said. She launched the illustration
careers of the likes of Seymour Chwast and Robert Andrew Parker (whose
work was then showing in art galleries) and commissioned illustration from
painters Ben Shahn, Jacob Lawrence, Kuniyoshi, Raphael Soyer, and
Robert Gwathmey. She was convinced that the magazine’s audience of
teenage girls was intelligent enough to appreciate sophisticated art and so
she gave her artists unprecedented freedom. The convention in the late
1940 s and 1950 s was for art directors to give the illustrator rather detailed
instructions of what passage or sentence to illustrate. Rather than force her
artists to mimic the text, Pineles allowed them to paint what they felt. “If
it was good enough for their gallery then it was good enough for me,” she
explained. The artists also made her design differently. “My sense of
magazine pacing was altered because I had to separate one artist from
tuis.
(Tuis.)
#1