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1990 AIGA MEDAL
Alvin Eisenman combined serendipity, curiosity and
tenacity to move from a boyhood love of a printing plant to the
helm of the first graduate school in graphic design in the United
States, at Yale University. For forty years he assembled diverse
and brilliant classes to be taught by the legends of design
history, and left the imprint of his interests on several
generations of designers. Recently he retired amid much fanfare at
a gala party. When pressed on current plans, he said, “All I know
is I won't make a firm appointment if it's a nice day to go to a
museum.” Yet, his calendar is dotted with trips to Silicon Valley
to see new products unveiled, with meetings at the Morgan Guaranty
Trust—where he is a design consultant—and sessions at his computer
to finish his account of how graphic design came to be and his
speculation on where it is going.
A review of Eisenman's career reveals the beginning of his
lifelong romance with typography and its use to communicate ideas.
In rural DuBois, Pennsylvania, his family lived across Scribner
Avenue from Harold Gray, the childless owner of the DuBois
Morning Courier, with its monotype printing plant. By the age
of five, Alvin was delivering papers and soon became part of the
coterie of neighborhood children with whom Gray shared his love of
printing in hopes of developing their interest in presses and
publishing. In grade school Alvin designed his first book and saw
it to press at age eleven. By high school, Eisenman was
collaborating with sweetheart Hope Greer on the school yearbook and
newspaper. The paper won awards for its design, which included
neatly justified columns Alvin cleverly created by disengaging the
typewriter carriage to manually space each line. This willingness
to challenge technology to serve typography would become a
recurrent theme in Eisenman's design work, and in his pursuit of
design hardware and software for Yale.
Tracing a great educator's pedigree of influence is always
revealing. Ray Nash at Dartmouth was another important model for
Eisenman. Nash had been influenced by John Dewey and the
extraordinary staff of the New School to develop the workshop
concept of education and the apprenticeship model of experience.
Imprinted with this successful approach, Eisenman facilitated
apprenticeships and collaborated with students throughout his
leadership of the graphic design program at Yale.
Nash was a man of caring, depth and character—adjectives
students later used to describe Eisenman as well. They both lived
on farms, worked with the university presses at their institutions,
read broadly and nurtured their students. Nash the mentor was
reflected in Eisenman the protegé.
After World War II, a uniform-clad Eisenman arrived on the
McGraw-Hill Book Company's doorstep, armed with a portfolio of army
manuals, Dartmouth work and six months of experience as production
manager at Tri-Arts Press. Appointed head of the design department,
Eisenman was responsible for assembling a staff responsible for the
design of hundreds of books.
In an historic McGraw-Hill collaboration with author Paul
Samuelson, Eisenman designed the first edition of Samuelson's
Economics. Notable in its preparation was Eisenman's
design of several versions of the material, which were tested on
Samuelson's MIT students. It was found that a combination of
graphs, numeric tables and descriptive narrative could more
effectively communicate Samuelson's economic principles than any
single design approach.
Eisenmman respected books. He said, “A book is a container to
save things permanently; better than a picture frame or filing
cabinet.” He shied away from bleeds in a design, or margins that
were too small, because he knew books were trimmed when they were
rebound by library binders. He respected the content of a book and
took seriously the designer's charge to make it clear as well as
beautiful.
The first of his three major design commitments began at
McGraw-Hill. Next, Eisenman would divide his time between design
for the Yale Press and administration of Yale's graduate program.
It was during this period in New Haven that Eisenman also began a
20-year relationship with the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company as its
design consultant. Clearly Eisenman was an
educator/practitioner.
At the Yale Press, Eisenman often saw design projects as
opportunities to explore new technologies. Eero Saarinen on his
Work was the first book set by photocomposition and the first
300-line book at the Yale Press. It was also the first
perfect-bound book produced with an acid-free polyvinyl chloride
glue on a machine imported from Germany by Polly Lada-Mocarski. For
A Pictorial History of Yale, Eisenman specified a custom
Mohawk paper that later became Mohawk Superfine Softwhite, an
industry standard.
For Morgan, Eisenman's most challenging and enduring work has
been the The World Holiday and Time Guide, which
calculates the business day around the world and notes significant
national holidays. Won Chung '75, Morgan's current Design Director,
tells how Omnitek operators tore their hair out as Eisenman
insisted they program hairline rules, charts and graphs that pushed
past the limits of their computer system and expertise. The
teenager who tinkered with a typewriter became the typographer who
challenged the computer.
Eisenman's greatest accomplishment, however, was the formation
and development of the first graduate program in graphic design in
the United States. Eisenman got his opportunity to teach at Yale by
chance. In New Haven in 1950 to research a book about James Boswell
for McGraw-Hill, he bumped into Carl Rollins, the Yale Press
printer and longtime friend of Ray Nash. Rollins persuaded the Yale
Press Director to offer the design position there to Eisenman,
sweetening the meager salary available with an extra thousand
dollars to teach in the Art School. When he found a farm in nearby
Bethany which sparked memories of his rural roots, Eisenman sealed
the deal.
Charles Sawyer, Dean of the Yale School of Art and Architecture,
had listened to the rumblings of post-war students decrying the
school's beaux arts focus. He initiated the idea of using
practicing artists and designers for major responsibilities in the
graduate programs, and so accepted the proposed joint Yale
Press-Art School appointment for Eisenman. Under Dean Sawyer, the
school emphasized greater professionalism in the graduate programs
while philosophically supporting the liberal education of Yale
College for undergraduates. Eisenman's McGraw-Hill experience and
Dartmouth education made him a good fit.
Eisenman's new program was called “graphic arts” in its 1950s
infancy, after the American Institute of Graphic Arts. However,
Yale soon followed the lead of the Royal College of Art in London
and changed the name of the department to “graphic design.” The
Royal College had a long connection with Yale, and faculty
exchanges occurred between the two schools throughout the 1950s and
1960s.
For 40 years there were never more than one or two full-time
faculty members in graphic design at Yale, but an amazing group of
visiting faculty influenced the students. Students learned from
exposure to these great talents and from each other. Diversity is a
hallmark of the program. Eisenman feels that if people are good at
different things, that reduces competition. One learns to respect
when someone does something very well. He claims that, “The idea of
the university, or the idea of being universal is to have all
things represented—everything from Marxism to the bloody right. You
should listen to everybody, talk to everybody and look at
everything.”
Eisenman sought out students with intellectual depth, not merely
skillful artists. Most classes included foreign students—from
India, Iraq, England, Switzerland, Germany, China and Iran—who
enriched the mix and turned the sights of their classmates to
international vistas. Classes were drawn almost equally from
liberal arts and art schools, notably Yale, Harvard, and the Rhode
Island School of Design. When the program began, there were so few
undergraduate programs in design that Yale provided both the
introductory and advanced training the students needed. “Baby
graphics” became an additional year of work which prepared students
for the two-year graduate program.
Eisenman talks of assembling his diverse faculty and reminisces,
“I'm paternal and Herbert (Matter) was supportive. We needed a New
York tough guy. (Alvin) Lustig wasn't from New York, but filled
that role. He asked for a wastebasket up in front of his classroom
and threw in student work if it was the wrong size.” Rob Roy Kelly
'55, remembers Lustig demanding, “What is the organizing principle?
Everything begins with an organizing principle.”
By contrast, Herbert Matter, famous for his reticence, taught by
example and demonstration, cigarette ash dangling dangerously from
his lip. Bradbury Thompson taught typography and publication design
from a series of timeless principles. Paul Rand's acerbic critiques
established high standards of performance. Rand demanded that
solutions grow from problem objectives. He encouraged intuitive
processes and playful solutions. Eisenman himself contributed an
historic and global context for design investigations, digressing
with students into discussions about the development of the Korean
alphabet or the theory that one of Shakespeare's typesetters was a
woman. (Tom Geismar '55, once joked, “Alvin knows everything about
the history of Walbaum and thousands of other arcane things.”)
The program was a collage of important design ideas laid down by
the faculty. Josef Albers (who had known Alvin's wife Hope at Black
Mountain College) taught basic perceptual studies in huge classes
of 150 students. Alexey Brodovitch challenged the students to
experiment. Following Diter Rot's visits to the school, students
experimented with die-cuts. Marcel Duchamp, Buckminster Fuller and
Louis Kahn wandered into the design studios. Later, Luce Marinetti
took up residence in New Haven and sparked the study of Futurism
and its effect on modern typography. Jan Tschichold arrived to
lecture in a limousine, proved by the mayor of New Haven. As
current Yale Dean David Pease reflects, “Alvin Eisenman was a great
man in an era of great men? He was an enabler.”
Faculty were sometimes chosen simply because the uncanny
Eisenman eye found their work intriguing and important, as in the
case of Matter, Rand and Thompson (though Thompson had also become
a friend during Eisenman's 1960–1963 AIGA presidency.) Armin Hofman's
serendipitous invitation to Yale began decades of interaction
between Yale and the Basel School of Design in Switzerland.
The story of Hofman's link to Yale began when Herbert Matter
suggested Eisenman invite his cousin Dorothea and her husband Armin
to New Haven because their appointment was not working out at the
Philadelphia Museum School (later the Philadelphia College of Art
and recently renamed the University of the Arts). It is ironic that
UA's program today is so influenced by the pedagogy Armin Hofman
developed in Basel, because in the 1950s Dorothea Hofman recalls,
“Armin's definite ideas about education” were an uneasy fit with
the school.
At Yale, Hoffman was influential in treating design as a slow
and evolving process dependent of highly developed hand skills.
Like Herbert Matter, he emphasized the simple and symbolic image
which could create a bold and impactful statement. Eisenman said,
“The great thing about the Basel School is the looking at the
little details so closely and looking for a long time and
questioning what you see.”
Hoffman came from Switzerland to teach at Yale for over 30
years. Basel faculty including Wolfgang Weingart, Peter von Arx,
and Andre Gürtler were invited to give lectures and lead seminars
at Yale. In addition, Basel graduates Phillip Burton, Inge
Druckery, Dan Friedman, and Lorraine Ferguson taught at Yale,
reinforcing what Eisenman calls the “International Style of
design.” Burton helped administer another legacy of the Eisenman
years, the Yale-Brissago summer program. Hoffman, and often
Eisenman, taught in Brissago in what became for many students a
first step toward graduate work in New Haven. In the mountains of
Switzerland, students were immersed in studies enlivened by the
glorious landscape.
Although there were many faculty voices and influences, the main
themes that characterized the Yale curriculum were invariably
Alvin's own. Eisenman is a “fussy” typographer. Norman Ives and
Bradbury Thompson shared this reverence for type and communicated
their fascination to the students. Students in turn collected
display types and experimented with the large wood type from
Deverny and Peignot that Eisenman had brought from a 1953 trip to
Europe. Contemplation of type had its lighter moments.
Art history also heavily influenced the work of Bradbury
Thompson and Paul Rand and was an important component of the
graduate education at Yale. Virtually all the students took classes
with Vincent Scully and Robert L. Herbert or savored electives with
teachers such as George Kubler.
In Eisenman's view, competent drawing was a basic design skill,
so an emphasis on drawing distinguished the program. Students
studied drawing with luminaries such as Bernard Chaet, Andrew
Forge, Dorothea Hofman, Lester Johnson and Philip Pearlstein. With
delight, Eisenman points to the many drawings by students used to
illustrate Chaet's Drawing text.
Eisenman also made photography an important part of the graphic
design curriculum. Students were introduced to large-format
cameras, studio lighting and photomechanical processes. One
Eisenman legacy to the School of Art is the photography program
which grew from the courses and visitors in photography facilitated
by him. Jerry Thompson, '73, remembers that with inimitable
tenacity Alvin tried 13 times before successfully wooing Walker
Evans to a Yale appointment. On his retirement from Yale, Evans
selected Diane Arbus to succeed him. Tragically, she committed
suicide before Eisenman could convey Walker Evans' offer. Her death
was felt keenly by the Eisenmans, who had known Diane as a young
bride learning photography over her husband's shoulder at Fort
Monmouth.
Part of Eisenman's enthusiasm for new technology stemmed from
its potential to make the merger of word and image more manageable
in one machine. Eisenman saw the potential for service to graphic
designers in emerging technologies long before they provided real
service. The vision and curiosity made Yale a testing ground for
hardware and software.
Computers found Alvin in 1955. More precisely, a chain printer
from IBM had been installed at the Medical Center, and he was
tapped as a consultant for a project to computerize the card
catalogue.
Handsetting the type was laborious for students. When told by
their teachers to make the type smaller or use a different face,
students might find that their classmates had the type they needed
locked up in their own galleys. A way to generate type quickly and
cheaply so that students could focus their energies on design
variations was a priority. Arthur Penn had told Alvin that film
students needed to “push lots of film through the camera” and Alvin
dreamed of a day when design students could push lots of type
through the computer.
In 1970, the Linotype Company donated the Linofilm SuperQuick to
the department. It was set up without a computer, and run by
unreadable paper tapes. The files were unsaveable. No digital
record existed, so correcting keystroke errors was impossible.
Still, at Alvin's urging, graduate students attempted the
impossible to learn the rudiments of machine-driven typesetting.
This Linofilm SuperQuick fronted by PDP11 computers. These were
located in the Computer Science building on Hillhouse Avenue where
the female graduate students in graphic design became the first
women to frequent the computer rooms. Format codes were entered on
the PDP11 with the text, and turned into paper tapes, which in turn
drove the Linofilm machine. The advantage of the film fonts was
that every size font was made separately and type remained sharp
when enlarged. It was an exciting time for Eisenman, who foresaw
the revolution in type generation that would occur when the
hyphenations program and exception dictionary the computer
scientists were researching was completed.
The next machine to make an appearance in the service of
typography for the graphic design program was a Linoterm, featuring
film strips wrapped around a cylinder and exposed with a strobe. It
had only 3 ranges, with 8-, 12-, and 18-point masters. The
subsequent teaching machine, the laser-driven, digital Omnitek,
used a coated instead of a photo paper and a dry baking process. It
was a model for how the Laserprinter would later work. Early in
1984, a Mac arrived with an Imagewriter. Later that year the
Laserwriter was brought on line. At last, students were pushing
lots of type through the Laserprinter.
Talking about the other potential benefits of computer
technology, Eisenman relates a favorite story. Lenin had proposed
that there be one alphabet and one center for printing in Moscow.
Stalin rescinded that notion, which would have wiped out the
Georgian language and presses in his mother tongue. Eisenman calls
the preservation of regional presses “the only good thing Stalin
ever did.” Perhaps because of that, there is more poetry published
per capita in the Soviet Union than anywhere else in the world.
At Yale, this complex man provided an eclectic education that
prepared graduates to move into an expanding profession no longer
confined to advertising and illustration. Armed with Yale degrees,
the graduates moved into corporate communications at places like
Container Corporation, Olivetti, CIBA, DBS and IBM. They joined
museums, public television, publishing houses, government agencies
and architectural offices. They became influential members of the
design community like Condé Nast Paris head Jocelyn Kargère '62,
and Clarence Lee '58, one of Hawaii's leading designers.
For one group of students, work that began as a thesis project
became a life-long pursuit. The seeds sown at Yale changed them as
individuals and helped to diversify what design would become.
Norman Ives's '52, thesis investigated found letterforms. Together
with Si Sillman, Ives formed Ives-Stillman and produced limited
edition formal investigations for people like Josef Albers and
Diter Rot. Mike Parker '56, worked on the Garamond typeface at
Yale, later to collaborate with Matthew Carter on Galliard. And
Bryce Ambo '87, with a Fontographer-loader Mac at his desk in the
Yale studios, drew Ambo Bembo. Garry Trudeau '73, created a
mythical Nazi for his Yale thesis at the same time he was refining
the cast of his newly syndicated Doonesbury characters.
Of course there were the gadget lovers—the students who embraced
the computer technology that fascinated Eisenman and frustrated
many of their classmates. Aaron Marcus '68, Larry Yang '79, and
Hugh Dubberly '83 are off in computer fields undreamed of by the
young Yale chairman who started with etching and lithography
presses in 1950.
Classmate partnerships were another school legacy. New York's
212 Associates was formed by three friends from the class of '80
who named their New York firm for the address of the graphic design
department in New Haven. More recently, '87 classmates Burns,
Connacher & Waldron and partners Peter Laundy '75 and Susan
Rogers '73 have hung out Yale shingles in the Big Apple.
Members of many classes chose, like Eisenman, to combine design
practice with teaching, translating Yale pedagogy for a national
audience. Some graduates were tapped to teach at Yale: John
McCrillis '52, Norman Ives '52, Sheldon Brody '56, John Hill '60,
Chris Pullman '66, and Doug Scott '74. Those who left for education
established design schools that were Yale's progeny: Rob Roy Kelly
'55, at the Kansas City Art Institute, Sheila de Bretteville '64,
at Otis Parsons, Gordon Salchow '65, at the University of
Cincinnati, Tom Ockerse '65, at the Rhode Island School of Design,
Doug Wadden, '70, at the University of Washington, and Lorraine
Wild '82 at the California Institute of the Arts all left their
mark on a new generation of programs. Yale graduates are heading
programs, teaching and lecturing in Texas, Kansas, North Carolina,
West Virginia—from Boston to Los Angeles.
During the 1950s and 1960s Yale graduates had a tremendous
impact on the emerging “graphic design” profession. They were
teaching subsequent generations of designers and producing
definitive design work. By 1970, Montreal's Expo was a Yale
showcase. Benoy Sarkar '66, had a room in the Indian pavilion.
Classmate partners Ivan Chermayeff '55, and Tom Geismar '55,
designed the U.S. pavilion. Alan Fletcher '58, designed the upper
areas of the British pavilion. Israel Charney '66, designed kiosks
and street furniture in La Road.
Truly, the first graduate design program in the country made a
name for design quality that endures. But people who recall their
education at Yale remember Alvin's personal touch more than the
design landmarks they studied. Picnics at Eisenman's farm, replete
with homemade rolls and cider pressed from his Macintosh apples,
were memorable events each year for generations of students.
Nathan Garland '70, once tried to list Eisenman's admonitions:
“See connections; have ideas; read, listen, learn, teach: yourself,
classmates, clients, students; be a good student in school and
beyond; work hard; care about other people and their work; learn ,
share and pass it on.” Alvin's generosity of spirit, humanity and
concern for others permeates his interactions and secures his place
in the affections of his students. Eisenman is a model of the
multidimensional designer. He knows history and embraces diversity.
Through the leadership of the eclectic seer, many have found paths
to an information society too complex and rapidly evolving for any
single design approach to encompass.
Copyright 1991 by The American Institute of Graphic
Arts.
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