05.19.08 5:00 AM CDT
• Pop Culture
• Jamie Malanowski
Anyone who cares about magazines should drop by Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art, where there is an exhibit devoted to George Lois, who was the art director of Esquire between 1962 and 1972. The word iconic gets thrown around a lot these days, but during his tenure, Lois produced one cover image after another that truly deserve the name iconic—Sonny Liston in a Santa suit; John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King standing amid the tombstones of Arlington; Muhammad Ali as the arrow-pierced martyr St. Sebastian; Andy Warhol drowning in a can of Campbell’s tomato soup. Working before PhotoShop and other software programs made image manipulation easy, Lois had to combine meticulous photography and painstaking craftsmanship to execute some of his ideas. But of course, that was the technical part. Lois’s great genius was to imagine, again and again, the simple, striking, brilliant image that not only would jump off the newsstand, but that would complement the story inside. In the process, he became the foremost visual commentator of a tumultuous era. Here’s the greatest praise I can give Lois: again and again as I looked at the 24 covers mounted on the wall, I itched to flip them over and dive into the article.
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Comments on this entry:
There was a time when Playboy's covers were just as distinctive as those done by Lois for Esquire, and I constantly pine for the day when the Bunny mag returns to those roots.
"Here’s the greatest praise I can give Lois: again and again as I looked at the 24 covers mounted on the wall, I itched to flip them over and dive into the article."
The covers of Playboy, too, used to make you want to grab the magazine off the newsstand and buy it (certainly in the Art Paul era). The covers these days, though...