A Recollection by Chris Pullman In the summer of 1991, in a rented cottage on a rocky headland North of Boston, separated from the mainland by the Annisquam river, our first dog, PICA produced three puppies, two boys and a girl, all about the size of baked potatoes. Pica was a wonderful mother, feeding them, cleaning them up and proudly showing them off. Soon they were alternately running around the place and falling asleep in a ball. After about 6 weeks we set the table for their first real meal. That summer, like many other summers, one of our visitors was Dan Firedman. He had planned his visit carefully to correspond with the moment of maximum puppy cuteness. His timing was perfect and he arrived laden with pastel dog toys. He was a regular visitor through the 80’s and 90’s, an escapee from Gotham, happy with the simple pleasures or this place, doing what we did: digging clams on the sand bar, picking raspberries for a picnic or taking a swim in the cold water. Two years later, in 1993, he came with his friend Laurie Mallet, and hung out for several days. He was in great spirits, about to start teaching again, after a long lapse. During this visit he showed us the sketches for the book he was preparing on his work and philosophy. We poured over the pages, fussing over the wording, debating the sequence. The following year it was published; a beautiful compilation of his work and writing over a period of 30 years. That fall he unveiled a cleverly designed traveling exhibition that he began to tour. Four months later he was in the hospital. He died on July 8, 1995, after an illness he had concealed for almost a decade, 12 days short of his 50th birthday. For over half of his life my wife Esther and I watched his curious and influential career unfold. Our close and comfortable relationship at the end of his life wasn't always that way. What follows is a personal view, an attempt to fill out the picture so vividly presented in his book and exhibit.

In March 1967 Esther and I got married and decided to take our honeymoon in Switzerland, the Mecca of modern graphic design. The preceeding year, on another trip to Switzerland, I had met students from Ulm, a German design school which had inherited the mantle of modernism from the Bauhaus, and we decided to visit the school on our way to go skiing. Ulm was austere and serious, focused on semiotics and what we would now call information theory. It felt like a monastery filled with designers turned political activists. What we didn’t know at the time was that Dan was there too. In his last year at Carnegie Mellon a new faculty member, Ken Hiebert, fresh from the Swiss Algemeine Gewerbeschule at Basle, revealed a side of design that was very different from the prevailing “commercial art” training that characterized Carnegie Mellon, and most US schools at that time. After graduation, Dan applied for and won a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in Europe and chose to go to Ulm. But when Ulm collapsed in political strife a year later, Dan transferred to Basle. Again, by chance, Esther and I would also wind up at Basle that same summer of 1968. As a new teacher at Yale I had been given a fellowship to study the Basle program and see what it offered for our own curriculum. Oddly, while Dan was there, we don't actually remember meeting him. Basle presented a very different kind of environment from Yale: long quiet classes focused on drawing, color and formal exercises. It was all about process. Key among the school's many gifted teachers was Armin Hofmann. He had been a periodic visitor to Yale since the 50’s and welcomed us for a six-week stint to experience his school. That summer we also met a young typography teacher in his first year at Basle. His name was Wolfgang Weingart, a classically trained German typographer in a white lab coat who had come to study under revered modernist Emil Ruder. Weingart was steeped in the rigorous underpinnings of contemporary Swiss/German typography but suspicious of it’s impersonal, reductive bias. In his personal work he was searching for a more expressive, less dogmatic approach, and he found a like-minded and talented student in Dan Friedman.

And so it came to be that in the fall of 1969, on Armin’s recommendation, fresh from two rigorous years of postgraduate study in Europe, Dan arrived at Yale to teach: a strange, shy character in a tight blue suit, grey shirt and black tie with a shock of fuzzy hair and a peculiar, halting speech pattern. He came loaded with these two different design influences: the austere, reductive, elegant restraint typical of his experiences with Ulm, Ruder and Hofmann juxtaposed with the playful, intuitive, troublemaker side encouraged by Weingart and Dan's own persona. This dichotomy would fascinate him throughout his career as a teacher and a practitioner and fuel a continuous process of reconciliation between his deep faith in the progressive aspirations of modernism and his sense that this philosophy had to evolve in order to somehow account for the chaotic, unpredictable, dangerous and ridiculous reality of the world he was inhabiting. At Yale Dan encountered an impressive home team that included design legends Paul Rand, Herbert Matter, Bradbury Thompson and Walker Evans. As Armin’s protégée, Dan had some credibility with this crowd but his age and certainty about his own ideas of how and what to teach didn’t sit well with some of the old guard. I was the junior faculty member at the school and while I sort of liked Dan, his sense of superiority, no matter how well founded, irked me. I would listen to his well-founded notions of how to run a school, feeling the underlying condemnation of my own training, which, measured against the rigorous, highly refined philosophy of Basle, appeared haphazard and defective. His certainty about my professional deficiencies undermined my own confidence as a teacher and made me wary of his friendship. Dan arrived at a chaotic time for Yale and the country in general. Remember: this was 1969: a year after Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were gunned down. Berkeley, Columbia, and Harvard had all been shut down by student strikes protesting Vietnam and civil rights abuses. Yale was in the middle of it’s own version of the crisis, with national guard troops staked out across the street from the art school. In his book, Dan writes that while the country was in turmoil, “it was also a time of liberation, idealism and experimentation--a time considered by many to be a cultural turning point.”

And indeed it was. Architect Robert Venturi had thrown down the gauntlet challenging the core tenants of Modernism with his pronouncement that “Less is a Bore.” Venturi himself was invited to Yale. He put together a ground breaking multidisciplinary studio called Learning From Las Vegas, which saw the crass, bizarre structures of the Vegas strip as an exhilarating and legitimate architectural response to place. All this was part of the larger intellectual and formal phenomena coined Postmodernism that would spread from literature and architecture to many other fields. In his book Dan reflected on how all these influences affected him: “I found an analogue to these issues in my own field of visual communications. I was attracted to the spareness, abstraction and Zen-like purity characteristic of orthodox modernism. But I was also intrigued by more hidden complexities; by the more vernacular; by working against the rigidity, boredom, and exclusiveness that were increasingly associated with modernism. Most important I was not prepared to see these points of view as inherently contradictory.” "I began to think about a re-conceptualized modernism,” he continued, “more radical in that it would not only accommodate order along with chaos but would embrace a variety of other conditions no longer paired as dichotomies.” These ideas were reflected in the projects Dan brought into the program: problems that typically involved the collision of two overlapping systems-- the structured and the free; the conceptual and the intuitive; the modernist and the radical.

Dan was a good teacher, exotic and demanding, but liked by his students. In one case he introduced a classic Basle formula involving progressive formal operations on a fixed grid. In another he started with a bland (or to use his tem: "non-propagandistic") message--in this case, the weather report. He asked his students to experiment with gradually making the message dysfunctional, an odd idea in the modernist mind-set. But it had to do with his notion that typography (and other kinds of visual messages as well) had two dimensions: legibility (can I read it?), and readability (am I interested in reading it?) The weather report problem asked the student to explore that fine balance between between “can I read it” and “do I want to read it” and encouraged them to embrace the entire spectrum from legibility to illegibility rather than take sides on one end or the other. Dan described these problems for graduate students as “advanced fundamentals” (simple but deep). He felt students needed a methodology for understanding contemporary typography and he set about to codify one. While critics of the Basle system often carped that its students emerged as clones knowing only one formal language, Dan was determined to create a methodology that would be seen as a foundation of, not a replacement for, personal expression. Typical of his intense, directed process of working, within a few years he had published his thoughts and examples of his problems in Visible Language, one of the few critical design journals in the US at the time. Meanwhile, Wolfgang Weingart, Dan’s former teacher in Basle, had also been perfecting his own experiments with a “new typography” that provided a new and invigorating set of formal an emotional options to the strict tenants of Swiss modernism.

Dan’s encouraged his former teacher to tour the US. Lecturing at scores of schools, including Yale, where Weingart offered a carefully thought-out alternative to the cannons of high European modernist typography, amusingly titled “How One Makes Swiss Typography.” This trip suddenly turned Weingart into a cult figure and kick-started student interest in his typographic experiments. Coincidentally, for this story, anaother of Wolfgang’s star students, April Greiman arrived at Philadelphia College of Art, now the University of the Arts, to take the place of a departing visiting faculty member. Ironically, that departing person was Dan. They met, hit it off and not very long after, April turned up in New Haven. Esther and I would visit them in their Branford Connecticut bungalow filled with stuffed cloth boulders and painted rocks, the first inklings of his later domestic decor. Dan and April were alike in many ways: incredibly gifted, taught by the same teachers, and ambitious missionaries of the new typography. But while Dan was intellectual, methodical and focused, April was intuitive, impulsive and spiritual. Dan taught April about method and meaning; April taught Dan about designing from the heart. Sure enough, a short time later they got married and began a string of collaborative projects. It’s fair to say that Dan and April, inspired by Weingart’s pioneering work and with assists from other Basle graduates like Ken Hiebert and Willi Kuntz, led the way for a generation of what came to be called “new wave” typographers and designers, less steeped in the traditions of classical modernism and inspired by the changing culture in the 70’s and 80’s to employ a more playful, surface-oriented formal language. For a complex of reasons, Dan and April's marriage didn’t stick. April split for the new-age hot house of southern California where she quickly became a star and began to teach at Cal Arts. By the mid 80’s she and Dan were in peak form on different coasts, widely published and their influence could be felt in the ground-breaking work of other designers following a similar path, like Catherine and Michael McCoy and their students at Cranbrook.

A new chapter in my relationship with Dan began in 1974. That was when Esther and I moved from New Haven to take new jobs in Boston and, simultaneously, Dan left for New York. Distance, the break-up with April and the pressures of professional commitments put a damper on our relationship and we fell largely out of touch. Dan’s move to New York was partly a rebound from his split with April, but also for another reason, I think. Unlike Basle where figures like Armin Hofmann and Kurt Hauert proudly devoted the bulk of their professional life to mastering the art of teaching, Yale’s long-time bias for it’s graduate teachers was for practicing professionals like Rand and Matter. People like Dan, and his Basle trained colleagues Inge Druckrey and Philip Burton felt the ironic pressure to make it in the big time design world in order to be fully respected as a teacher. So Dan went to the big apple, and joined the respected firm of Anspach Grossman and Portugal to prove his mettle. And he did. He took on one of the huge, archetypal corporate image programs of the 70's for Citicorp with scant experience with a project of this scope and political complexity. It was a monster. His meticulous vision for the global bank was codified in elegant posters and a thick document creating templates for every imaginable application so talent-less lackeys around the world could apply the modernist veneer of Citicorp flawlessly. Next was an invitation to join the new Manhattan office of Pentagram, the classy London based studio. While Dan turned out a number of elegant projects for Pentagram, it wasn't a perfect fit. Instead of bringing in the big Citicorp-style clients to Pentagram, he gravitated towards smaller, unprofitable but enjoyable freelance jobs for his friends in the fashion industry. This eventually put him at odds with Pentagram’s commercial studio model. He began to be much more inspired by the late night club circuit than his day job as a designer and in a few years he left Pentagram for good.

Then everything changed. He shaved his head, purged his body with a macrobiotic diet, openly embraced a homosexual lifestyle and joined the downtown art scene. In his essay in Dan's book Steven Holt had this observation: “As Friedman began to pursue projects of personal meaning rather than professional interest at the end of the 1970’s, his life increasingly took on the dimensions of an experiment rather than a career.” Nowhere was this more obvious than in his apartment, a nondescript, one-bedroom on the 15th floor of Two Fifth Avenue. For over a decade, beginning in the late 70’s, he transformed, almost daily, this domestic space into a laboratory for experimentation with color, form, materials and meaning. One Sunday morning in 1978 I picked up the NY Times Magazine and there he was. In the article Dan explained it this way: “I have for many years used my home to push modernist principles of structure and coherency to their wildest extreme. I create elegant mutations, radiating with intense color and complexity, in a world that is deconstructed into a goofy ritualistic playground for daily life.” For me, these incredible environments are among his most remarkable work, spawning ideas for screens, furniture and assemblages. His inspirations were the trash structures encountered on his trips with his buddies to the Caribbean and the deep memory of Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau environments from the 20’s. These influences seemed to tap into the deeper cultural shift being felt at the beginning of the 80's from neat to messy, from newness and originality to appropriation and transmutation. Mining the detritus of New York streets, he made old stuff new, and like Duchamp before him he endowed dumb objects with new meanings and turned trash in to tribal objects of domestic utility. Like Picasso and Braque, he employed the art of assemblage, a trusty Modernist device for managing visual diversity and altering meaning through bizarre juxtaposition.

By the early 80’s Dan had begun to fill galleries with these post-nuclear evocations. After a long stretch with little contact, at his 1984 opening at the Fun Gallery, I encountered the new Dan, fluorescent in his striped, day-glow suit and pork-pie hat, smiling amid a sea of big hair and aggressive personas. In just a few years Dan had made good on his personal vow to experience a whole new side of culture, one which he found full of energy, fantasy and optimism. Dan's transition out of design and into the world of art was facilitated by his friendship with Keith Haring, a young, brash kid from rural Pennsylvania who took New York by storm in the beginning of the 80’s. Like Andy Worhol a generation earlier, Haring drew around him a circle of like-minded eccentrics. Within this circle were talents of all persuasions: musicians, fashion designers, poets, performance artists, DJ’s, film makers and photographers. “An eccentric”, Dan wrote, “is one who devotes his or her entire persona to willfully, creatively, and positively expanding our view of the world.” This was a definition that Dan obviously also employed to help explain himself. As Dan miraculously transformed himself, our relationship was gradually transformed as well. As his repertoire increased, he seemed to become ever more tolerant and inclusive. It’s not that he changed his standards, just that more things became ok. Including us. Paradoxically, as he became outwardly more and more different from us, our connection grew more and more familiar. This is when he began to visit us in Annisquam with regularity. He was an exotic presence in this staid, old-fashioned place, decked out in his pink high tops and Playboy hat. He seemed to love it there, hanging out on the porch, watching the sun set. Lots of things change, he once said, but you and Esther seem to stay the same: still married, still conventional. And he seemed reassured by that. Largely, I think, because his own great adventure into the art scene, while exhilarating and productive, was also exhausting and dangerous.

Dan never quite achieved for himself that household name status that Keith Haring did, despite a remarkable outpouring of witty objects, ground breaking visual essays and unique domestic landscapes. It is even possible that he was more widely know as an artist and designer in France and Italy than in his own country. In the end, as a student, a teacher, a designer and an artist, what set Dan apart, and accounts for his amazingly diverse but coherent body of work, is that Dan pursed an approach not a style. "An approach,” wrote Steven Holt, “is a series of investigative questions one asks during the design process, whereas a style is a series of similar-looking answers to whatever question is being asked. "Dan's approach was based on a conviction about the bedrock values of Modernism and its appropriateness to today's world. Near the end of Dan’s book is the key chapter called What is wrong with Modernism? In it he answers his own question and lays out his vision of a new kind of modernism that combined the best of the humane, pro-social aspirations of the early 20th century with the exhilarating, ridiculous, diverse, unpredictable and dangerous reality of the life that he had led near the end of the century. He starts by saying that many people today think that modernism is a style that began at the Bauhaus and fell in to disrepute in the 70’s and 80’s. But modernism was not a style, it was an approach. It was a movement that began in the mid 19th Century and believed in progress and the improvement of life and culture through the egalitarian application of design and technology. This philosophy emerged most visibly at the Bauhaus in Germany in the 20's where an amazing collection of practitioners, artists and teachers developed an approach to form and function that produced such a coherent body of work and experimentation that in fact it did become recognized as a style characterized by purity of form, simplicity of purpose and efficiency of manufacture.

But equally as important, Dan points out, the Bauhas produced a methodology of teaching. This feature of the Bauhaus facilitated the spread of its philosophy and practice around the world, to among other places, Ulm, Basle and (in a diluted form) Yale. But what Dan saw when he emerged from these schools was that designers were obsessed with modernist form for it’s own sake, detached from its original social engagement or philosophical underpinnings. The visual trappings of modernism so perfectly fit the self-image of global business that by then industry had co-opted the style as it’s own, dished out to eager corporations by serious and profitable studios. Modernism, he lamented, sacrificed its claim to moral authority when designers began to sell it as corporate style. So Dan, whose experiments had taken him from student to teacher to corporate designer to hip-hop groupie to artist, struggled through this period to reconcile his own personal experiences with the original pro-social, positivistic tenants of modernism that were so crucial to his world view. “Many of us,” he wrote, “attempted to reevaluate traditional modernist ideas while introducing, within their framework, diverse culture, history and fantasy.” The result of this reevaluation was what he termed Radical Modernism, an improved and updated version of Modernism in which the structural and philosophical heritage of Modernism still provided the foundation but which accommodated a wider scope of expression and a more humanistic purpose. In Radical Modernism he formulated a kind of unified field theory of design that on the one hand helped explain--or perhaps even justify--his amazing life, and on the other hand offered a new, practical and optimistic future for design and for culture. Near the end of his book he offers a 12-point manifesto, as wise and optimistic today as it was 10 years ago: Live and work with passion and responsibility; have a sense of humor and fantasy. Try to express personal, spiritual, and domestic values even if our culture continues to be dominated by corporate, marketing and institutional values.

Choose to be progressive: don’t be regressive. Find comfort in the past only if it expands insight into the future and not just for the sake of nostalgia. Embrace the richness of all cultures; be inclusive instead of exclusive. Think of your work as a significant element in the context of a more important, transcendental purpose. Use your work to become advocates of project for the public good. Attempt to become a cultural provocateur; be a leader rather than a follower. Engage in self-restraint; accept the challenge of working with reduced expectations and diminished resources. Avoid getting stuck in corners, such as being a servant to increased overhead, careerism, or narrow points of view. Bridge the boundaries that separate us from other creative professions and unexpected possibilities. Use the new technologies, but don’t be seduced into thinking that they provide answers to fundamental questions. Be radical. Chris Pullman Vice President for Design, WGBH, Boston Friend of Dan Friedman