Catcher of the Eye

For image-makers who want to learn to cut through the clutter of today's information glut and quickly grab people's attention, here's a chance to learn from one of the true masters. The Museum of Modern Art in New York just announced a forthcoming exhibition, George Lois: The Esquire Covers from the 1960s and early '70s. Along with large-scale prints of many of the final covers, the show will also show Lois's original artwork for several of the designs, including the renowned picture of Andy Warhol drowning in a soup can (above), which illustrated a May 1969 story about the decline of the American avant-garde.

This shot is particularly clever because, in the days before Photoshop, Lois and photographer Carl Fischer created it out of two images — one with the can of soup (Fischer says they dropped marbles in it; Lois says it was a stone) and the other a posed portrait of Warhol (he said, "Oh greaaaaat," Lois recalls). These were combined in a "C-print that was printed together and retouched," Lois told Kurt Andersen in an interesting interview recently broadcast on NPR's Studio 360. It will be fascinating to see the "images behind the icons" at the MoMA show — it runs from April 25 through March of 2009 (for a preview sampler of the Esquire covers you can go here).

George Lois is one of those creative geniuses for whom the word "brilliant" seems like faint praise. Now in his late 70s, he's still going strong, having recently put out a book (his seventh) with Tommy Hilfiger called Iconic America: A Roller-Coaster Ride through the Eye-Popping Panorama of American Pop Culture. But back in the early 1960s Lois pioneered the concept of Big Ideas advertising — a single bold photograph with a short message that created a gotcha effect on viewers. "I was a guy who worked a little differently. Edgier. More punch-in-the-mouth," Lois told New York magazine.

It was Esquire editor Harold Hayes who let Lois take over the covers. "He said, 'Do us one as an example,' " Lois told Andersen. Lois presented a cover with a photo of heavyweight champ Floyd Patterson knocked out in a ring to illustrate a preview of Patterson's showdown with Sonny Liston — in effect, predicting the outcome (right). Luckily for Lois, Liston won in a knockout and the issue set sales records. When asked if he would continue, Lois replied, “When you turn down the first one, I’m gone.” Thereafter he had free reign — no more covers by committee — and he employed his single-idea, stripped-down, in-your-face concepts to everything from Ed Sullivan (in a Beatles wig, above left) to Hubert Humphrey with Lyndon Johnson (in the gatefold creation below).

Lois's chief photographic collaborator was George Fischer, as American Photo pointed out in an 2004 article, when Fischer's work was getting some long-overdue gallery exposure. But Lois worked with many photographers, sometimes concocted his designs with stock photos and found imagery, and always managed to supply a grabber tag line. After his Esquire stint ended in 1972, he went on to coin such phrases as "I want my MTV" and the product name "Lean Cuisine" for Stouffer's. Lois is not shy about his achievements. As the New York Times once wrote, "George Lois may nearly be as great a genius of mass communications as he acclaims himself to be." Lois is matter-of-fact: "I was hungering to get my face into changing the culture, my way. I like to do things that change people's minds." Nowhere is that more evident than on those amazing Esquire covers. — Jack Crager

Comments

[Nicole Bock]

These are rather excellent covers. I certainly agree with the in your face quality and the idea that these will be on display in a museum setting. I just hope that they won't be deconstructed. The comment above about how "it will be fascinating to 'see the images behind the icons'" makes me a bit leery. I of course haven't seen the exhibition, nor will I because of distance, but the preview on Lois' site lends some relief. I personally don't think there are any images behind the icons. The icons are the images. I feel like there's been a turn for the worse in the world of magazine covers in recent years and it's a bit disappointing. We need to be more like the Dutch and respect the design involved in all things!