Matthew
Leibowitz
PMSIA Catalog
1938-39
IBM 2420 Brochure
Dollars for Research
Smashing the Atom
Horsepower
H.L. Mencken
Cambridge Treasury
Philco
IBM
Rydal
House
Matthew Leibowitz in
Rydal House studio
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Matthew Leibowitz: Philadelphia Modernist
The graphic designer Matthew Leibowitz was a master of the Late Modernist
period. Yet ironically, this is his first local exhibition as an artist.
Designers are often anonymous in our culture; the individuality of their
products transparent in order to convey their sponsor’s substance
meaning. This is perhaps especially true of those graphic designers
who worked in the International Style of Late Modernism.
Born in Philadelphia on August 21, 1918, Leibowitz grew up at Fifth
and Lehigh. Leibowitz’s family had emigrated from Eastern Europe;
his father was a roofer and a tinsmith who crafted beautiful objects
with his hands. Matthew Leibowitz attended North East High School where
he was a cross-country runner. He studied at night in the certificate
program at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art (now The
University of the Arts). His studio was on the top floor of his parent’s
home. He was intelligent, a fastidious dresser, an aficionado of puns,
yet prolific and hardworking. At the time he was studying for his degree,
he was already working at Gray and Rogers, a design firm during the
day.
During Leibowitz’s college educational (1936 – 1939), design
pedagogy at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art radically
changed. This can be primarily credited to the arrival of Alexey Brodovitch
in 1930, one of the most important designers in the twentieth century.
Commercial Art (as it was then termed) came under the purview of Brodovitch.
The old guard trained in the illustrative lineage of the Brandywine
school was partially supplanted in commercial art classes by Brodovitch’s
modernist and photographic based aesthetic. NOTE Reportedly when Brodovich
started teaching design there was a mass exodus from more conservative
classes. At this time the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art
was nationally ranked in the top three schools in design.
Leibowitz’s teacher, Raymond Ballinger had received his certificate
at the school in 1931, after Brodovich’s arrival. Ballinger taught
Advertising Design, History of Advertising and Graphic Design. Although
alumni transcript records do not go back that far, we may infer that
Leibowitz studied a similar curriculum.
After college, Leibowitz took a brief trip to Paris. Leibowitz’s
sojourn was cut short by the war. Leibowitz was not the only artist
forced to leave Europe in the 1930s. A majority of the professors from
the Bauhaus, Surrealists, Cubists, the New School sociologists, composers
and filmmakers came to the United States to escape the Nazis.[1]
In this process, America became the center of western culture (a position
it held until the late 1970s, when global post modernism decentralized
the primacy of cultural capitals). Direct interactions with European
masters catalyzed and fostered a hotbed situation. As the Surrealists
influenced Abstract Expressionism, interaction with the Bauhaus masters
fostered an awakening of new potential of design in America.
The designers of Leibowitz’s generation (Saul Bass, Lester Beall,
Will Burtin, Louis Dorfman, Leo Lionni, Herbert Lubalin, Alvin Lustig,
and Paul Rand, for example) created a new International Style. They
absorbed the radical design movements of the early part of the century
into an eclectic amalgam. The flatness of modernist space affected backgrounds,
the primary colors of Neo Plasticism, the acute angles of Constructivism,
and the free floating of images in oneiric Surrealist space could all
be seen in various examples. You can see influences of El Lissitsky,
Piet Zwart, and Herbert Bayer.
Intense also was the interactions between colleagues. Leibowitz met
Lester Beall in New York and Beall became a kind of mentor helping Leibowitz
get commissions. Leibowitz knew Herbert Matter, Carlu, Cassandre and
later Man Ray, all in varying ways.
There was a direct connection between the forms he used and the content
he wanted to convey, a praxis shared by most of his generation. In 1959
he summed up his philosophy succinctly:
The
complete integration of Typography with the graphic image is indicative
of the maturity attained by the contemporary designer. The role of designer
is that of visual translator. The translation can communicate well only
if expressed in clear, concise terminology to the audience for whom
it is intended. Ideas and content are expressed with the designer's
imagination and awareness. Synchronized these qualities are his tools
of creativity.
Returning to America during the Great Depression must have been difficult
(as it created a precipitous drop in advertising) but Leibowitz, already
at the top of his profession, seems not to have been drastically affected
financially. Philadelphia at mid twentieth century had a central impact
on print culture. Washington Square had been a core of American print
since the early 19th century; it continued into the Twentieth Century
with Lippencott and Curtis Publishing and N.W. Ayer, the oldest advertising
firm in the United States. N.W. Ayer had with major contracts including
The Container Corporation of America and local pharmaceutical companies.
In 1936, Charles Coiner, the art director at NW Ayer, signed up A.M.
Cassandre [3]
right off the boat to produce designs for Great Ideas of Western Man,
an artist’s series devised by the Container Corporation. Starting
in 1942, Leibowitz established a freelance practice in visual communications.
He designed advertisements, packaging, brochures, logos, annual reports
and identity campaigns for major American and European corporations
and advertising firms. These included AT&T, N. W. Ayer and Son,
American Oil, Caltex, Ciba, Container Corporation of America, E.I. du
Pont de Nemours & Co., Inc., General Dynamics, General Electric,
General Motors, Gulf & Western, IBM, ITT, Merck, Olivetti, Otis
Elevator Company, Paramount Pictures, Philco, Philip Morris, RCA Victor,
The International Red Cross, Inc., Reichhold Chemicals, Inc., Sharp
and Dohme, Spalding, Tastycake, J. Walter Thompson, Time Life, TWA,
Webster Cigars, and others.
During his career he received 326 gold medals and other awards for his
work. He participated in Alliance Graphique International exhibitions
in Paris (1955), Milan (1961), and Germany (1964, 1966). Leibowitz had
one-person exhibitions in Asia, Europe, North and South America, and
Australia and is represented in the collection of MoMA, the Library
of Congress, the Denver Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art (Washington),
and the Musee d’art Moderne in Paris.
Leibowitz’s designs displayed an acute visual intelligence. They
read almost like metaphysical rebuses. They are, they present with objects
and images, they do not (re) present. A design might utilize a photograph,
modern typography [4],
and a collaged appropriated image from an old wood engraving or wood
type - all against a flat modernist plane. Leonardo’s Vitruvian
man appears in several designs such as the cover of Graphis 16.
Not only were the designs powerful they were consummately made. Leibowitz’s
typography was all hand done [5].
His was an eclectic aesthetic mix: the engravings hark back to Dada
and Surrealism, the photography probably a Brodovich or Beall influence,
the cantilevering of lines and planes from Constructivism. On one occasion
he had designer Herbert Matter’s hand photographed for a project.
Yet Leibowitz’s designs are not random nor are they merely pastiches.
Of his practice Leibowitz said “whether precise as geometry or
sculptural as stone, it must declare a clear, direct, and strong visual
statement, complete as such.”[6]
Not only were his works objects of beauty but also they involved an
intense search for new visual meanings that would speak of their time.
For example, his ad for IBM’s 2420 magnetic tape transport (circa
1969) literally revolves around the IBM product itself but also similar
to Peter Sedgeley and Kenneth Noland’s targets of the same decade.
The blur of the circles speak of the speed of the tape transport, which
could read the equivalent of 53,000-word book in one second, an enormous
breakthrough at the time [7].
Currency and stock certificates were collaged to denote money. The Smashing
the Atom speaks of power and destruction while looking like Jack
Youngerman’s work of the same period. Horsepower hides a rainbow-colored
profile of a horse in the center of intersection planes that remind
one of Victor Vasarely’s patterning but also his friend Man Ray
[8].
Leibowitz’s record cover H.L. Mencken Speaking (1958)
for Caedmon uses a photograph of the author against a striking yellow
background, framed by blue quotation marks, red suspenders and exclamation
mark. Mencken was a libertarian freethinker and satirist and Leibowitz’s
use of the exclamation point visually conveys this point. Perhaps he
is comparing Mencken’s sensationalist reporting to “yellow
journalism.” He often used engravings to indicate age or period
of production. For example, his album design for the Cambridge Treasure
of English Prose; 1485 – 1640 Malary to Donne uses an engraving
of a knight, Volume 3 in the same series Defoe to Burke; 1722 –
1790 shows a man in colonial garb peering into a fair maiden’s
eye [9].
Philco’s brochures resemble geodesic domes or global communication
systems (one must remember that this local Philadelphia company was
used for Project Mercury’s tracking systems in the early 1960s.)
His ad for IBM representing the Dead Sea scrolls resembles Wallace Berman’s
Semina work of the early 1960s. And his gridded use of dots in the 1960s
perhaps nods towards Lichtenstein’s Ben Day dots
[10].
The work reflected clearly the progress and hope of America in the post-
war period.
His was the era of aerodynamics, the atomic bomb, the first computers,
satellite communications and space travel, long playing records, electric
typewriters and big business. He worked eclectically. He was not adverse
to combining photographs, blind embossing, crisp silk-screened overlays,
airbrushed atmospheres and nineteenth century engravings.
Leibowitz lived in an environment as aesthetic as his print work. Leibowitz
designed his own home in Rydal. It is a perfect example of modernist
aesthetic put into action; flat-roofed, planar, clean lined, functional
and light. Nothing was out of place, his studio was immaculate and the
passage to it lined with efficient storage space. His marriage to Selma
Adams was successful; she ran his office and kept his financials, leaving
Leibowitz the time to produce the work. They had two daughters and a
loving family.
Leibowitz also created fine art in his “spare” time. His
biographical sketch notes the paintings as being show in corporate spaces.
However they are more than corporate decorations, they present serious
hard edge Constructivist work. In them he attained a purity that was
universal and beyond the commercial function of his design work. He
worked with a hard-edged Neo Plastic palette. There are at least two
series of completed paintings extant; Geoma and Spectra. Their closest
painting affinities would be with the concrete art of his near contemporaries
Max Bill, Richard Paul Lohse, and Ilya Bolotowsky [11].
Leibowitz had lined up a one-person exhibition at French and Company
[12] in NY of the
paintings but unfortunately did not live to see the project through
fruition. On November 1, 1974, Leibowitz died of leukemia. He was only
57 years old [13].
Sid Sachs
Director of Galleries
The University of the Arts
Philadelphia, PA
1
For an extensive view of this cultural exodus see Stephanie Barron,
Exiles + Émigrés: The Flight of European Artists from
Hitler, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997.
2
New York: Typography –USA, Type Directors Club, August
18, 1959, p. 24
3
Leibowitz apprenticed under A. M. Cassandre.
4
The influential Jan Tshichold wrote an admiring letter to Leibowitz
on September 3, 1957. Collection of the family.
5
Conversation with Albert Lewis, November 2006
6
Industrial Design, January 1957, no. 1, p. 63.
7
In 1969, Robert Rauschenberg built two kinetic assemblages with huge
transparent discs that literally moved and the Beatles produced their
euphoniously titled album Revolver.
8
Leibowitz met Man Ray through a friendship with his niece, the photographer
Naomi Savage.
9
These engravings were photostated from the print department at the Free
Library of Philadelphia.
10
Even though this seems antithetical to the main thrust of his work,
Leibowitz’s library contained a copy of John Rublowsky’s
Pop Art, New York: Basic Books, 1965, one of the first monographs
on the subject.
11
In Philadelphia they were very advanced; the only other well-known hardedge
painter is Edna Andrade (who also studied design and was married for
a time to an architect). Andrade’s works were considered Op art
for a brief period, whereas Leibowitz’s stay very much rooted
to the mathematics of the picture plane.
12
Mitchell Samuels in New York founded the firm of French & Company
in 1907. His gallery was the chief purchasing agent for William Randolph
Hearst and J. Paul Getty and the Huntingtons, Fricks, Mellons, and Astors,
among other prominent collectors. In a consultant capacity for the gallery,
Clement Greenberg organized a series of one-man shows of Barnett Newman,
David Smith, Jules Olitski, and Friedel Dzubas -- primarily Color Field
painters. By the early 1960s Andre Emmerich picked up many of these
artists for his gallery. French & Company continued later under
Spencer A. Samuels & Co. until 1999.
13
Leibowitz’s nephew and also a noted alumnus of UArts, the designer
Albert Lewis, speculated that his use of air guns and aerosols of aniline
dye contributed to his early death. I would like to thank him and also
Lynn Leibowitz, the artist’s daughter for their generous help
with this brief essay.
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