Posters for the people Art of the WPA

A man carrying rapeseed, from "In the Footsteps of Abraham: The Holy Land in Hand-Painted Photographs." BEFORE color photography, and long before the computer made colonization easy, hand-painting with oils and dyes on photographic glass plates was a common way to bring black-and-white images to life. Hand-colored photographs had an otherworldly appearance: not quite real, but close enough to suggest an exotic parallel universe. That made them perfect for travel snapshots - especially of places already rich in fable and legend. IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF ABRAHAM: The Holy Land in Hand-Painted Photographs (Overlook Duckworth, $65), by Richard Hardiman and Helen Speelman, reproduces hundreds of hand-colored pictures taken during the 1920s by the Matson Photo Agency, which was run by American Christian expatriates in Jerusalem. In 1966, those expatriates - G. Eric Matson and his wife, Edith - gave their entire photographic collection to the Library of Congress. As the curator George S. Hobart notes in an introductory essay, Eric Matson was devoted to the prints; even years after donating them, he spent long hours "cleaning, identifying and organizing his beloved group of photographic negatives." The Matsons belonged to a small Christian community, the American Colony, founded in Palestine in 1881. As a commercial venture, the colony sold hand-colored prints to tourists. One of their biggest customers in the 1920s and early 1930s was a wealthy Dutch Christian, Arie Speelman, who selected more than 1,200 images of landscapes, people and structures for his "Palestina Evening" slide shows, promoting pilgrimages to the Holy Land. His collection was eventually donated to the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, and it provides the pictures for this book. (Speelman's granddaughter Helen is one of the authors.) Each image takes up a full page. Most are incredibly sharp, some are painterly, and many are so finely detailed - colored with single-hair brushes, even - that they're hard to distinguish from actual color photographs. The stone buildings in "Bethlehem Alleyway" and the clothing of the "Bedouin Girl" could almost be digital prints, they're so precise. Although not intended as sociological studies, the photographs do offer a vivid record of change. But most extraordinary is the way some seem to reveal a land where nothing ever changes. "Spring at Cana" - showing Bedouin women and men at a well, possibly in the same town where Jesus is said to have turned water into wine - might be mistaken for a snapshot directly from biblical times, had cameras been invented yet. If audio recordings had been available alongside those biblical cameras, we could hear how the original Jewish prayer songs sounded. Instead we have to make do with recordings like Jan Peerce's "Cantorial Masterpieces" or "The Best Cantonal Works of Cantor David Roitman." During the 1950s and '60s, a relatively large number of these things were available, from the likes of Shaindele di Chazante and Herman Malamood. "Bing Crosby. Michael Jackson. Elvis Presley. Frank Sinatra. Four of the best-selling artists of all time have been male solo acts," Roger Bennett and Josh Run write in the Talmudically titled AND YOU SHALL KNOW US BY THE TRAIL OF OUR VINYL: The Jewish Past as Told by the Records We Have Loved and Lost (Crown, $24.95). "It should not be surprising, then, that the Mosaic equivalent, the cantor, dominated the early Jewish record market too. The sheer number of these studio liturgical recordings is a reflection of the massive fan base who once hungered for these gems." In fact, Jewish records in general were in great demand, and this book seems to revive them all: Sol Zim's "Great Jewish Melodies," Ruth Rubin's "Yiddish Love Songs," the Irving Fields Trio's "Bagels and Bongos" - they're all here. The book features more than 400 album covers from a wide variety of Jewish LPs: "Bagels & Lox!" by Pearl Williams; "Mazel Tov, Mis Amigos," by Juan Calle and His Latin Lantzmen; "The Voice of the Seder," by Rabbi Isaac C. Avigdor; and "Jewish Wedding Dances," by Sam Musiker. My favorite is "Batman & Rubin," by the comedy duo Allen and Rossi. Although only a few of these album covers were designed with more sophistication than a deli menu, for those raised on a steady diet of them the book will be a holiday feast, heartburn and all. The airbrush, patented in 1876 by Francis Edgar Stanley (of Stanley Steamer fame) and perfected by Abner Peeler, came into its own on an entirely different kind of album cover. Unlike traditional bristle brushes, these penlike spray guns use compressed air to force ink, paint and dye evenly through a fine nozzle. The result is often an ultravelvet surface that appears more mechanical than handmade. In the late 19th century and much of the 20th, the airbrush was used primarily for retouching and manipulating photographs or rendering drawings for commercial advertisements and political propaganda. Starting in the late 1960s, airbrushing became one of the most popular illustration styles, known for its luminescent fluidity and hyper-realistic aura. Many leading conceptual airbrush artists lived in California, for one simple reason, according to Mike Salisbury, a former art director of Rolling Stone: "There was so much illustration work in L.A. beginning about the year that 'Sgt. Pepper's' was released," Salisbury writes in his introductory essay to OVERSPRAY, by Norman Hathaway (PictureBox, $50). The book contains many of the most memorable examples from four prolific airbrushers - David Willardson, Charles E. White III, Peter Lloyd and Peter Palombi - in the realms of editorial work, record covers, and music and film promotion, showing how it evolved into a youth-culture visual style. Despite some famous pictures, however, the overall impression is like the '70s itself: too much gloss and too little substance. Or maybe, in a chemical sense, too much substance. "The airbrush generation grew up during a time when pot was highly incriminating but your best friend's mom had diet pills in the medicine cabinet of her husband-the-doctor's yacht," Salisbury writes. Unlike the psychedelic art of the hippie generation, this graphic style didn't extol the drug culture, but it clearly implied it through opulence and sensuality. Willardson's album covers for Pacific Gas & Electric's "Are You Ready" (1970) and for "American Graffiti" (1973), and his Steely Dan cover for Rolling Stone (1974) have a sexy pinup style that helped define that swinging time. Peter Lloyd went even further, with caricatured women like "Tropicana Groupie" for Oui magazine (1975), complete with shimmering breasts and shiny red nipples. But not all airbrushing was this sexual. In his most memorable work, Charles E. White III celebrated pure craft and execution. His 1972 cover for the National Lampoon album "Radio Dinner" featured an absurd TV dinner tray in the shape of a 1940s radio, with peas and carrots you could almost taste, and his 1977 "Bumper" was a close-up of chrome so shiny you looked for yourself in the reflection. Technique abounds here, with each artist trying to outdo the next in shimmering highlights or syrupy goo. This era of graphics was significant, yet it doesn't really hold up. Excess pervades "Overspray," and while some stylish art gets better with age, this genre is far too ripe. IT doesn't get any riper than the art in DOPE MENACE: The Sensational World of Drug Paperbacks, 1900-1975, by Stephen J. Gertz (Feral House, paper, $24.95), which offers an array of the most overdone, vivid covers of this pulp fiction genre. The styles vary - hyper-surrealism by Bill Fleming for "Marihuana," steamy pseudorealism by Frank Cozzarelli for "The Junk Pusher," expressionism by Leo and Diane Dillon for "Gentleman Junkie," underground comic by R. Crumb for "Laughing Gas" - but they all share desperation or depravity, or both. Sex is also dominant, particularly in books about impressionable students, like "Campus Sin Cult" (1968), with a cover to die for by Robert Bonfils. For those who thought the addled drug scene came of age in the psychedelic '60s, Gertz traces the obsession at least as far back as the 19th and early 20th centuries, when drug culture was often identified with the new or exotic. In 1905, for example, the novel "King of the Opium Ring" carried the tag line "Big ChineseAmerican Sensation." And the genre got much steamier after that. In NASA/ART: 50 YEARS OF EXPLORATION (Abrams, $40), James Dean and Bertram Ulrich collect a group of spacethemed pictures in oils, watercolors, graphite, colored pencil and - strangely, perhaps - no airbrushing. Since 1963, when NASA and the National Gallery of Art asked eight artists to document the last Mercury flight, the space agency has turned to figures including Norman Rockwell, Robert Rauschenberg, Nam June Paik, Fletcher Martin, James Wyeth and many other painters, printmakers and illustrators, commissioning them to interpret the American space program in any manner or style. On this, the 50th anniversary of NASA's founding, the artwork in this book celebrates America's achievements. That makes it propaganda in a sense; but unlike conventional propagandists, the NASA artists had considerable license. When NASA was founded in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Act required it to "provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities and the results thereof." Hiring artists helps it do that - and it's fun for the artists too: "Through their 'back door' access, artists witness NASA programs and missions in a way that the public cannot," Dean and Ul- rich write in their preface. The imagery in this book runs the conceptual gamut, from Pierre Mion's science-fiction-like "Speck of Dust," showing two tiny astronauts on a mammoth moonscape, to Barbara Prey's "X-43," a photorealist watercolor of a supersonic aircraft in flight, to Keith Duncan's "New Frontier," a surreal col- lage depicting "the International Space Station in an allegorical context," with Icarus and Daedalus "hovering angelical- ly over the Earth's surface." Some of the work is comically abstract, like Matthew Benedict's "Man on the Moon," featuring a moon man apparently shaving (it's really a superimposed picture of the astronaut Jack Schmitt), while others, notably Rockwell's "Behind Apollo 11," are unabashedly heroic. Although the quality of the images varies from masterly to mundane, the theme of space exploration never ceases to fascinate. Yet the book as a whole has a dated aesthetic - its lenticular cover flashes between two images, and its inside typeface has a nostalgic '70s vibe - perhaps wistful for an era when space travel still felt mythic rather than humdrum. From top: "And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl"; "NASA/Art: 50 Years of Exploration"; and the road as canvas in "Signs: Lettering in the Environment." Arguably the most consistently impressive government-sponsored American art occurred when artists were "put to work for America" as part of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, which went into effect 75 years ago. The largest agency in this program, the Works Progress Administration, brought a range of cultural events to Depression-weary citizens through the Federal Art Project - which among other things commissioned a huge number of posters, "to raise awareness and promote a wide range of programs, activities and behaviors that the Roosevelt administration believed would improve people's lives." So writes Ennis Carter, the author of POSTERS FOR THE PEOPLE: Art of the WPA (Quirk, $50), a rich album of hundreds of rare and well-known graphic images from the era. W.P.A. posters promoted workplace safety, health, education, conservation, community, theater, dance and music. Although artists were employed by regional agencies like the New York City Art Project or the Pennsylvania Game Commission, the W.P.A. style was fairly consistent in all states. The overarching graphic conceits include a streamlined version of Art Deco ("Your Family Needs Protection Against Syphilis") and a variant of Russian Constructivism (the Sioux City Camera Club's "Second Annual Exhibition: Photographs"), with a dose of surrealism thrown in (the New York and New Jersey "Regional Poster Exhibition"). America never had a truly national design style, like Germany, or a national typeface, like England, but the W.P.A. posters came close to imposing an aesthetic - an amalgam of modernistic, classical and even frontier typefaces and flat, sometimes abstract but mostly representational artwork (no photographs were used). This was, in fact, a golden age of graphic art in the service of society. Just compare the graphic virtuosity of "Don't Take Risks" (a poster for workplace safety) or "Balanced Diet for the Expectant Mother" with the cautionary choking posters posted in restaurants these days, and you can't help feeling nostalgic for this more alluring - not to mention more effective - design. W.P.A. and social realist propaganda posters have inspired a lot of contemporary alternative art and design. These heroic and romantic images are extremely easy to parody or manipulate as commentary on today's social and political woes. Shepard Fairey, the street artist whose OBEY logo is one of the most ubiquitous and best known guerrilla art projects, blends socialist realism with other retro design conceits and has developed his protest style into a branded business, which he uses to critique the commercial and political system. But commerce (his fashions and accessories sell in trendy boutiques) and politics (he is routinely fined or arrested for posting his work on city streets) are not always great bedfellows, and Fairey has become a lightning rod - critics claim he has sold out, while admirers applaud his ethos. "In so many ways, today, Shepard Fairey is the artist to beat," Sarah Jaye Williams writes in OBEY. E PLURIBUS VENOM: The Art of Shepard Fairey (Gingfco Press in association with Obey Giant, $29.95), an imagerich catalog of posters, prints and murals produced in 2007 for an exhibition originally shown at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery in New York. Why the artist to beat? Because in the past decade, Fairey has gone from posting street stickers and flyers on lampposts to hanging gigantic wall coverings in galleries and cultural institutions. "E Pluribus Venom" highlights many of his common themes, including the antiwar posters "Greetings From Iraq: Enjoy a Cheap Holiday in Other People's Misery" and "Obey Bayonets," which combines silhouetted bayonets (borrowed from a wellknown British World War I poster) with a peace sign in a flower collaged on top. Many of Fairey's images overtly and obliquely address war and peace, the environment and the economy. But this collection includes something unique to his oeuvre - immense murals that co-opt the classic filigree motif of stock certificates and American currency. Here we find two installations juxtaposed, "Two Sides of Capitalism: Good" and "Two Sides of Capitalism: Bad," each bearing political slogans. (One reads "Obethence Is the Most Valuable Currency" and "In Lesser Gods We Trust"; the other reads "Power to the People." Guess which one is good.) The funniest and most stinging piece in the collection is "Proud Parents." With the slogan "U.S. Treasury: Bringing Dreams to Life," it shows a 1950s-style mom and dad holding their newborn a shiny baby bomb. Fairey is certainly one vandal who has made good. Pulp covers by Nick Perrelli and Evan Hunter From "Dope Menace," top, and the installation "War by Numbers" from "Obey: E Pluribis Venom." Fairey's work is a sign of his times. But if you want to see a plethora of real signs from around the world, SIGNS: Lettering in the Environment, by PhiI Baines and Catherine Dixon (Laurence King, paper, $19.95), provides an exhaustive survey of street signs and architectural inscriptions painted, tiled and engraved; on buildings, stores, gates and pavement; mass-produced, one-of-akind and stenciled with indelible dyes. Various other books have been devoted to the aesthetics of monument inscriptions or antique road and store signs, yet this is the most instructive comparative study I've read in connecting form to function. Signs are the most common form of graphic communication. When they fail, the design and designer are usually blamed; when they succeed, the graphic design is taken for granted. But as Baines and Dixon, both design educators in London, note in this fascinating collection, naming and lettering are interconnected. "Naming and the use of lettering to identify specific locations are an essential part of negotiating our public environment," they argue. "Our sense of place is not just about a pragmatic awareness of our spatial orientation. What we find is that more than just providing a literal identification of location, the essential dynamic between utility and expression allows for lettering to say something more about the spaces and places around us." In other words, signs tell us where we are and, every so often, who we are.