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1989 AIGA MEDAL
A vivacious young woman
from Rio de Janeiro moves to New York to study design and is later
appointed co-art director of the world-renowned Harper's
Bazaar magazine at age 25. After 10 years at
Bazaar, she becomes the first art director of
Ms., the magazine of the women's liberation movement. Other
accomplishments include designing award-winning books, working for
Rolling Stone, and being chosen to art direct the revival
of the 1930s classic, Vanity Fair. She is at the zenith of
her career and celebrated for her work when cancer takes her life
at age 44.
This chronicle is not fiction. It is the story of Bea Feitler,
described by friends and admirers as a “risk-taker,” a “whirlwind
persona,” and “an unstoppable creative force.”
Feitler's parents provided a European education offering broad
learning and stressing excellence. She showed talent and enthusiasm
for art in her teens. Her parents encouraged Feitler's interest,
made a global search for the right art school, and chose Parsons
School of Design, in Manhattan. Her uncle, Edward Newman, lived in
the New York area and provided her with a transitional home.
Feitler was exotic and full of nervous energy. She thrived on
the life of the city and her design-school experiences. Music,
literature, and the ballet fascinated her. She would wait in line
for hours to get standing room at the Met. Her initial interest in
illustration yielded to a growing fascination with design. The
fashion magazines, especially Harper's Bazaar—art directed
by the legendary Alexey Brodovitch until his retirement in 1958,
the year before her graduation from Parson's—held a special
fascination for her. After graduation she made the rounds in New
York, including a visit to Bazaar, where she was told to
come back after she had more experience. She decided to return to
Brazil and launch her career there. In partnership with two other
graphic designers, she started Estudio G specializing in poster,
record album, and book design. She also collaborated on the design
of the Brazilian magazine Senhor, which was revolutionary
among Brazilian cultural and political magazines in its commitment
to graphic concepts and progressive design. Senhor
provided a wonderful opportunity for Feitler to experiment, to
innovate, to succeed, and to fail.
Henry Wolf followed Brodovitch as art director of
Bazaar in 1958. When Wolf left to become art director of
Show in 1961, Marvin Israel, one of Feitler's teachers from
Parsons became art director of Bazaar. Two issues later
the names Beatriz Feitler and Ruth Ansel appeared on
Bazaar's masthead as art assistants. Israel had contacted
Feitler in Rio de Janeiro and invited her to return to Manhattan
and join him at Bazaar. It was a fabulous opportunity for
the 23-year-old designer.
From their first meeting in the offices of Bazaar,
Feitler and Ansel felt the mandate of Brodovitch's legacy and hoped
to meet him. Though the opportunity never came, they absorbed his
influence form Marvin Israel until he left Bazaar in 1963.
In a move that received national press comment and surprised the
media world, Bazaar promoted Feitler and Ansel, then in
their mid-twenties, from art assistants to co art-directors.
Pundits in the press who expressed open skepticism about their
ability to manage the graphic destiny of one of the world's most
sophisticated publications soon ate crow for the synergy and energy
of Feitler and Ansel occurred at a time when high fashion was
colliding with pop fashion from the streets, rock music and
experimental film were extending sensory experience, women and
minorities were taking to the streets, and the new art movements,
notably Pop and Op, were changing the face of aesthetic experience.
Moon rockets, assassinations and the Vietnam War stunned the
national psyche. Feitler and Ansel remained true to the best
Brodovitch tradition of designing magazines as a harmonious and
cinematic whole, while responding to events in the streets of the
time, in a collaboration that was organic and mutually supportive.
They were open to accidents, material around the studio and events
surrounding them. In their office an inspirational wall collage
would grow and change, providing an unending source for invention.
Feitler once summed up her editorial design philosophy: “A magazine
should flow. It should have rhythm. You can't look at one page
alone, you have to visualize what comes before and after. Good
editorial design is all about creating a harmonic flow.”
Friends remember Feitler's energy as inexhaustible, and her zest
for life as exuberant and extravagant. A stunning contradiction was
at the center of her being. She was a traditionalist with a deep
devotion to her family and a sense of her cultural history. Yet she
was filled with the spirit of the sixties. Close associates recall
that she handled the dichotomy well. Her present was undaunted by
any struggle between her past and her future.
In a 1968 Graphics article, photographer Richard Avedon
recalled working with Feitler and Ansel on the April 1965
Bazaar cover. The deadline was past, it was after 11 p.m.,
and the photographs of Jean Shrimpton in a “space helmet” designed
by one of New York's most famous milliners did not work.
“Ruth started to explain that we could cut the shape of the
space helmet out of Day-Glo paper,” Avedon wrote, “but she never
finished because Bea was already cutting the shape. Rubber cement,
color swatches. An eighth of an inch between the pink helmet and
the grey background. No, a sixteenth. I was in the room and I don't
know how it happened. And it all happened in minutes—the moment
was absolute magic, to watch Bea, the classicist, and Ruth, the
modern, work as if they were one person.”
The final cover with Avedon's photograph of Jean Shrimpton—now
peering from behind a bright pink Day-Glo space helmet with the
logo vibrating against it in acid green—won the New York Art
Director's Club medal and has been often reproduced as an emblem of
the sixties.
Bazaar of the 1960s was a dynamic statement of its
time. Rollicking sequence photography, cinematic pacing, incredible
scale changes, Pop art, and Op art often filled its uninhibited
pages. It walked away with award after award in major designing
exhibitions. Breaking precedent in 1965, Avedon, Feitler, and Ansel
fought for and won the right to use a black model in the pages of a
major fashion magazine. The reaction—subscriptions canceled and
advertisers withdrawing their advertising—was unexpected and
frightened management, which did not use black models again for a
long time.
Feitler worked well with photographers, who trusted her judgment
and ability to select and design effectively with their images. In
addition to close collaboration with photographers having
long-standing relationships with Bazaar, such as Avedon
and Hiro, Feitler and Ansel brought Bill Silano, Duane Michals,
Bill King, and Bob Richardson to the pages of Bazaar.
While working on a shoe portfolio with Sinlano, Feitler took him to
see the French film A Man and A Woman six times. The
lyrical romanticism and elegant cinematography from this landmark
movie found its graphic equal in the pages of Bazaar.
Today a two-year tenure by an art director at a major consumer
magazine is considered lengthy: the Feitler/Ansel ten-year
occupancy of the office made famous by Brodovitch seems remarkable
in retrospect. In the early 1970s, a new editor arrived and seemed
somewhat unnerved upon inheriting two dynamic young art directors
who carried considerable clout. It became apparent that the
situation was not feasible. Feitler's final issue was May 1972. She
left to join Gloria Steinem in launching the new Ms.
Magazine. Ansel art directed Bazaar solo for five months,
then departed after the October 1972 issue.
“In one sense, Feitler was always the original feminist,”
recalls her longtime associate Carl Barile, who worked with her at
Bazaar, Ms., Rolling Stone and on the premiere issue of
Vanity Fair, “but her decision to go to Ms. was
made because she saw it as an opportunity to be creative and do
innovative work.” Her feminism was of the “treat everyone equally”
school rather than the militant. And innovate, she did, with
editorial designs as startling for the time as the articles
appearing in Ms. Feitler used Day-Glo inks, established
unique signature formats for various sections of Ms. and
mixed photography with illustration. Her typography would be
expressionistic and uninhibited. She was willing to cross the line
separating the tried and true from the risky and unproved. Many art
directors are unwilling to cross this line until fad and fashion
certify its acceptability, but Bea Feitler would reach across and
return with a novelty face, a decorated letter or a hopelessly
eccentric form which happened to be just right for the message at
hand. Conventional wisdom decrees that all-type magazine covers are
newsstand disaster, but Feitler rattled marketing and outraged some
with revisionist scripture on the all-type Ms. cover
declaring “Peace on earth, good will to people” in pink and green
Day-Glo. It sold out on the newsstands in December 1972.
Ms. followed up with a neon-sign version in December
1973.
Her South American heritage influenced her design sensibility
about color. She told assistant, “Trust me, listen to me, I know,”
while replacing their color selections with vibrant contrasting
hues.
At Ms. Feitler made an indelible mark upon the face of
American graphic design. Her deep interest in all of the arts was
catalytic in expanding the magazine's scope to include cultural
coverage. Perhaps she sensed that she was making history by
graphically defining a movement and a cultural revolution. But she
did not see Ms. and her graphics as the parochial product
of strident feminism, she saw them as an all-people movement. Not
disenfranchising males who traditionally dominated the culture, but
enfranchising those who had been left out. Not only did she
commission art and photography from image makers of reputation and
renown, she also commissioned art from fine artists, housewives
from Brooklyn who made art or crafts and took the subway over to
show her their work, and yes from men. She made time for those who
showed her their work, and pondered whether their unique and even
modest gifts might somehow make a point or provide a
counterpoint.
Feitler's assistants were inspired but never governed by her
approach to design. She was generous in allowing them to design
their assignments and develop their own approaches. She had good
judgment and intuition about people. Once a photographer or
assistant gained her trust, she would let them fly, helping them to
recognize their great potential. Many young designers who worked
with her went on to become prominent art directors in their own
right, including: Carl Barile and Avenue; Charles
Churchward at Vanity Fair; Paula Grief at
Mademoiselle; and Barbara Richner at Ms. Her
charming personality touched everyone who knew her, but she could
also be very demanding. Her standards of design excellence were not
negotiable.
Even while art directing major magazines, Feitler had book
jacket, album cover and book design projects under way. In 1974
Feitler left Ms. and worked on a variety of projects;
Alvin Ailey's City Center dance posters and even costumes; record
jackets including Black and Blue for the Rolling Stones;
books; magazine designs and redesigns; and ad campaigns for
Christian Dior, Diane von Furstenberg, Bill Haire, and Calvin
Klein. Her book designs are superb examples of the genre, including
The Beatles, Cole, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russe, Lartigue's
Diary of a Century, Vogue Book of Fashion Photography
1919-1979 and Helmut Newton's White Women. In this
area of design notorious for its flat-as-a-pancake fees, Bea
Feitler asked for and received cover credit with the author and/or
photographer and negotiated a royalty from the books she designed.
The book designer, she reasoned, gives life and joy and form as
surely as the author or picture-maker does and should share in the
rewards if the book attracted readers. She believed, “Modern books
should be 50-50 in terms of visuals and words. People have to be
hit over the head and drawn into the book. There is so much visual
material in today's world that people can't judge what is good and
what is bad. It's up to the graphic designer to set standards.
From 1974 until 1980, Feitler taught advanced students the
School of Visual Arts where program head Richard Wilde remembers
her as ”one of the very best“ teachers. Students fought to get into
her class and she rarely denied entry, once commenting in an
interview, ”What really turns me on is the 55 students in my
Editorial Design course at the School of Visual Arts.“ After
declining to teach one semester due to an overwhelming workload,
she called Wilde and asked if she could be assigned a class for the
next term. He asked if her workload had lightened. She replied that
on the contrary, it had increased, but she needed the inspiration
and contact with students which only teaching could provide. As an
instructor she was uninhibited, and nothing rattled her. Her
interest was in encouraging each student's personal direction. As
one example, Wilde recalls that student Keith Haring's
graffiti-inspired work had detractors, but Feitler was enthusiastic
about its vigor and potential. She encouraged him to further
develop his direction. She was a wonderful role model for female
students studying design.
A six-year association with Rolling Stone began in
1975. Feitler redesigned its format twice: in 1977 for its
tenth-anniversary issue featuring the stunning photographs of Annie
Leibovitz; and again in 1981 when it shifted from a tabloid to the
current magazine format. In 1978, Feitler signed on as a consulting
art director for Condé Nast Publications and created the graphic
image for a new publication, Self. Editor-in-Chief Phyllis
Wilson credited much of Self's distinctiveness to
Feitler's experimental design approach and perceptive ability to
work with photographs, ”seeing them and cropping them and moving
them [until] you got something that would suddenly turn
exciting.“
Her final project was the premiere issue of the revived
Vanity Fair, which appeared after her death in 1982. She
underwent surgery twice for a rare form of cancer. Her spirits were
undaunted and many close associates at Condé Nast did not know she
had been undergoing chemotherapy for several months. They thought
her stylish turbans were a fashion statement. An associate took the
mechanicals for the premiere issue of Vanity Fair to her
apartment for her approval. After completing the issue, she went
home to Brazil and did not live to see it published.
Bea Feitler only lived 44 years, but filled them with energy,
enthusiasm and a passion for life and design. Hundreds of people
attended her memorial service, and as a living tribute her friends
and family established the Bea Feitler Foundation, which funds a
full one-year scholarship for a junior graphic-design student at
the School of Visual Arts. She believed a graphic designer's work
matters because the culture is expanded and enriched by those who
shape and form information. She is missed for the vision, passion,
and vitality she brought to each day's life and work and remembered
for her profound contribution.
Copyright 1990 by The American Institute of Graphic
Arts.
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