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A few years ago a publisher asked Lou Danziger to
give advice to art students. He offered these words—“Work. Think.
Feel.”—and elaborated thus: Work: “No matter how
brilliant, talented, exceptional, and wonderful the student may be,
without work there is nothing but potential and talk.”
Think: “Design is a problem-solving activity. Thinking is
the application of intelligence to arrive at the appropriate
solution to the problem.” Feel: “Work without feeling,
intuition, and spontaneity is devoid of humanity.”
These sentiments are not, however, applicable only to students.
Rather, they underscore Danziger's own half-century career as a
graphic designer, design consultant, educator, and one of the most
prolific of America's late Modern practitioners—the generation that
came immediately after Paul Rand, Alvin Lustig, Will Burtin and
others.
Born into the generation for whom design was a mission to give
order, beauty, and utility (often cut with wit) to a crassly
commercial world, Danziger stood on the shoulders of pioneer
Modernists, yet extended the reach of Modernism through his own
achievements. Although Danziger is reluctant to be tied to any
dogma, insisting, “No matter what I do, I want to do it well,” his
design exemplifies the diversity of Modernism and his teaching
promotes the diversity of design. Danziger is a “designer's
designer and an educator's educator,” states Katherine McCoy,
former co-chair of Cranbrook Academy, about the man for whom
designing and teaching are two distinct but decidedly unified
disciplines. Indeed, he has significantly affected many design
genres—including advertising, corporate work, and the design of
books, periodicals, museum catalogues, and exhibitions—and
influenced the hundreds of students who attended his classes at
Chouinard, CalArts, Harvard University, and the Art Center College
of Design, where he currently teaches.
Twenty years ago Danziger “retired” from designing per se
(although he continues to consult for Microsoft and others) and
devoted himself almost entirely to teaching. Yet his print work
from the '50s, '60s, and '70s is not Modernist nostalgia. Certainly
the advertisements, brochures, catalogs and posters that fill his
extensive oeuvre reveal certain formal, architectonic, and
conceptual characteristics of their times, but they also stand as
testaments to his individuality. In Danziger's hands, Modernism was
not simply the cold, formulaic template developed to unify
corporate messages; rather, each of his problems demanded and
received appropriate, unique, and often inspired solutions. His
common sense approach to the needs of business demanded that at all
times he see the elegant solution, which he defines as “taking a
minimal amount of material and a minimal amount of effort—nothing
wasted—to achieve maximum impact.” Although his work promoted a
time-sensitive product or idea, Danziger used a timeless design
intelligence—a true universality that defies the parameters of the
period—when he ensured that the page or pages he designed were
structurally sound, piqued the audience's interest, imparted a
message, and left a mark. Danziger's work challenges the notion
that all graphic design is ephemeral. Though the message may
eventually be obsolete, like a classic painting or sculpture, the
formal essence of his work is as fresh as the day it was
composed.
Louis Danziger was born in 1923 and raised in the Bronx, New
York. At eleven, he was interested in letterforms and was an avid
browser of the German language design magazine
Gebrauchsgraphik, which he found in the public library. “I
discovered that the Germans were doing the most interesting things
with book jackets and posters,” he says about these early
inspirations, which led him to become an art major at Evander
Childs High School. “Although most Americans at the time were
either hostile to or ignorant of modern art,” he says, “in my high
school? all the art majors were given student memberships to the
Museum of Modern Art.” Commercial art was offered as a viable
profession for the artistically inclined and, although his parents
were less than sanguine about his becoming a commercial artist,
Danziger decided to follow this path. After high school, he served
in the Army in the South Pacific (New Guinea, the Admiralties, the
Philippines, and Japan) from 1943 through 1945 and designed the
occasional poster. After being discharged, he moved to
California—escaping New York's cold weather—and attended the Art
Center School on the G.I. Bill.
Postwar California did not have the media industries that
supported modern graphic design in the same way that New York did,
but it was a burgeoning hotbed of contemporary design thinking.
Other East Coast designers had already trekked to the City of
Angels, none having a greater effect on Danziger's life than Alvin
Lustig (posthumous recipient of the AIGA Lifetime Achievement
Award), who was teaching graphic and industrial design classes at
Art Center. Danziger remembers his first encounter with Lustig in
1947 as accidental: “I didn't like school at all, because it was
very rigid at that time. But one day I heard this voice coming out
of a classroom talking about social structure, religion, and the
broadest implications of design. So I stuck my nose in the door and
saw that it was Lustig. From then on I sat in on every class.”
Lustig connected design to the worlds of art, music, and literature
and instilled in students a belief that design was socially and
culturally important.
Danziger became part of the Design Group, like-minded designers
who had been students of Lustig and were “opposed to mindless,
sentimental, nostalgic, commercial design.” In turn, he and his
peers aspired to promote attitudes about design that were loftier
than the profession itself. He became friends with Saul Bass,
Rudolph de Harak, and Charles Eames (who introduced him to
Buckminster Fuller's book Nine Chains to the Moon) and
recalls the palpable excitement among them that they were
missionaries of progressive design. “But I don't think we talked
about our work in the philosophical or theoretical terms that are
discussed today,” he says. “We were talking about very practical
matters.”
Danziger and his colleagues vied for what little work was
available at that time. “This was the problem,” he explains. “Any
client that had any money went to an advertising agency. Annual
reports in those days were designed by printing firms. So the only
clients that were really interested in modern work were essentially
furniture and lighting manufacturers that advertised in
architectural magazines.” Although Danziger did some striking early
identity and advertising for Flax Artist's Materials (including a
trademark that is used today), General Lighting, Steelbuilt, Inc.,
and Fraymart Gallery, he was disenchanted with the provincialism of
Los Angeles and referred to it as a “hick town.” He returned to New
York, working briefly with Alexander Ross, a graphic designer who
specialized in pharmaceutical products, and then taking a job at
Esquire magazine, where he sat in the art department next
to Helmut Krone (later chief art director for Doyle Dane Bernbach).
At the time, Krone so admired Paul Rand that his work area, covered
with Rand's tearsheets, was like a shrine. Danziger used top hang
reproductions of Egyptian and Chinese artifacts at his desk and
recalls saying to Krone, “If you want to be as good as Rand, don't
look at Rand; look at what Rand looks at.”
Since the Esquire job offered him little chance to do
good work, Danziger took refuge in Alexey Brodovitch's legendary
“Graphic Journalism” night class at the New School. On the very
first evening when the students were asked to bring in their
portfolios, Danziger recalls that Brodovitch, who was not given to
parceling out praise, “spent much of the evening favorably
discussing my work.” Brodovitch taught Danziger to believe in his
own uniqueness. “He instilled the idea that you cannot do good work
unless you have guts to do something you have not seen before,”
Danziger says. He also learned to have “a proper disrespect for
design.” Unlike Lustig, Brodovitch did not need to attach
world-shaping significance to design. “I always felt that it was
the contradictions between my two masters that allowed me to form
my own point of view,” Danziger adds.
After finishing the course with Brodovitch, the peripatetic
Danziger went west again, this time to study architecture, which he
thought was more socially meaningful. At the newly founded and
short-lived California School of the Arts, he resumed his studies
with Lustig, as well as with architect Raphael Soriano and engineer
Edgardo Contini. It was here that he embraced Buckminster Fuller's
principle of “de-selfing.” “Most young designers are very much
concerned about being present in their work,” Danziger explains.
“And Bucky Fuller's idea was that you are invisible—everything is
objective. And a very important thing was the idea of doing a great
deal with very little—maximum performance with minimal means.”
Danziger was also influenced by Paul Rand's book Thoughts on
Design because it clarified issues that had been running
through his mind, “particularly where he talked about symbols and
metaphors,” he says. “Finding something that stands for something
else. Being able to encapsulate ideas in a single image.” For
Danziger, it was equally important to be astutely analytical enough
to understand the essence of what needed to be communicated. “You
can always find the appropriate symbol for the wrong message,” he
cautions.
Copyright 1999 by The American Institute of Graphic
Arts.
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