|
1992 AIGA MEDAL
If Modernism imposes coldness and
sterility, as some critics have argued, then Rudolph de Harak must
be doing something wrong. A devout Modernist, his work for public
and private institutions is uncompromisingly human. For proof, take
127 John Street, a typically Modern skyscraper in New York City's
financial district. Before de Harak designed its entrance-level
façade it exuded all the warmth of glass and steel on a winter's
day. But with the installation of his three-storey-high digital
clock (comprised of 72 square modules with numerals that light
according to date, hour, minute and second); the mysterious
neon-illuminated tunnel leading to the building's entrance; and the
bright, canvas-covered, permanent scaffolds that serve as both
protection and sundecks, 127 John Street was transformed form a
Modern edifice into a veritable playground.
De Harak's innovative addition to the John Street building
enlivened a faceless street, and likewise his inspired exhibition
designs for museums and expositions have transformed didactic
displays into engaging environments. Dedicated to the efficient
communication of information, de Harak uses detail the way a
composer scores musical notes, creating melodies of sensation to
underscore meaning. His exhibits are indeed symphonies that both
enlighten and entertain. His exploded diesel engine, the
centerpiece of the Cummins Engine Museum in Columbus, Indiana, in
which almost every nut and bolt is deconstructed in midair, is
evidence of the designer's keen ability for extracting accessible
information from even the most minute detail. And yet while his
exhibition design explores the rational world, his graphic design
uncovers the subconscious.
Although de Harak deliberately uses neutral typography to anchor
his design, the hundreds of book jackets, record covers, and
posters he has created since opening a design office in 1952, is
evidence that he also expresses emotion through type and
image. While not the raw expressionism of today's most fashionable
designers, de Harak employs abstract form ever so subtly to unlock
alternative levels of perception. He relates this practice to
Abstract Expressionism, which in the early Fifties he
wholeheartedly embraced; and while this may be difficult to see
amid his orthodox, systematic design, the nearly 350 covers he
designed for McGraw-Hill Paperbacks in the early Sixties brings
this relationship into sharp focus. De Harak's rigid grid is, in
fact, a tabula rasa on which rational and eccentric
imagery together evoke inner feelings. The conceptual themes of
these books—philosophy, anthropology, psychology and sociology,
among them—offered de Harak a proving ground to test the limits of
conceptual art and photography. At the same time, he experimented
with a variety of approaches inspired by Dada, Abstract
Expressionism, and ultimately Op-Art movements.
His on-the-job research helped push the design practice towards
an art-based theory. First as a teacher and later as the Frank
Stanton Professor of Design, for a quarter century at the Cooper
Union, and visiting professor at Yale, Alfred University, Parsons,
Pratt Institute and other schools, de Harak influenced scores of
young designers to build upon the Modernist canon. But attaining
his own eminence did not come easily. Waving the Modernist banner,
even in the early Fifties when the International Style was embraced
by key corporations, did not insure that he would receive lucrative
commissions. Consumed by Modern principles that were devised in
pre- and post-war Europe, de Harak became an iconoclast with an
uncompromising belief in both the rightness of form and his own
methodology, which did not earn him many clients in those early
days. In fact, the paucity of steady work during the formative
years caused him to switch from design to photography to earn a
living. The illustrious multi-disciplinary career that is
celebrated with this year's AIGA Medal developed painstakingly over
time.
Born in Culver City, California of April 10, 1924, Rudolph de
Harak had a peripatetic early childhood and adolescence. During his
pre-teens, his family moved to New York City where he later
attended the New York City School of Industrial Arts and learned
some basic commercial art practices. He attended this trade school
because he was interested in drawing and was less at ease with
academic studies. Graduation coincided with World War II, and he
was drafted into the infantry. But upon being discharged he
returned to Los Angeles, where, out of work and uncertain about his
future, he was encouraged by an employment counselor to take
advantage of his artistic leanings and accept an apprenticeship at
a small art service/advertising agency. There he began honing his
craft first as a mechanical artist, and then making layouts and
illustrations. One of his ads was entered into the Los Angeles Art
Directors Club competition and won an award. This was a defining
moment: De Harak was so amazed that he could get acclaim for
something that also earned him a living that he decided to
seriously pursue graphic design in a manner that would ultimately
consume his life.
De Harak's future course was also profoundly influenced by two
lectures at the Art Center School given in the late Forties by Will
Burtin, the German master of information and exhibition design, and
Gyorgy Kepes, the Hungarian designer and author of Language of
Vision. “These experiences had a profound effect on my life.
The first was a lecture by Will Burtin—”Integration: The New
Discipline in Design.“ Burtin not only spoke about design and
communications, but he presented an exhibition of his work, which
moved the viewer through a series of experiences which were
described as the four principal realities of visual
communication: The reality of man, as measure and measurer;
the reality of light, color, texture; the reality of space, motion,
time; the reality of science. He was the first person I had heard
use the term 'visual communications.' A short time later, I also
had the opportunity of hearing Gyorgy Kepes. At the time I didn't
fully understand everything he had to say; yet, I knew that his
words were very important to me, and I recall my excitement, as I
was able to draw parallels between what he was saying about the
plastic arts and what Will Burtin had said concerning
the realities of visual communications. ”
Shortly after Kepe's lecture, de Harak and six other designers,
including Saul Bass, Alvin Lusting and Lou Danziger, founded the
Los Angeles Society for Contemporary Designers. De Harak explained
that the reasons for forming it was a matter of survival: “We were
a young, very enthusiastic group trying to function in a desert,
which is what Los Angeles was at that times.” In fact, with the
notable exceptions of charter members Bass, who was making inroads
in motion picture advertising and Lustig, who was doing innovative
book and book jacket designs, Los Angeles was not known for its
progressivism. Since de Harak did not believe that the future would
be any brighter he moved back East in 1950.
His first job in New York was as promotion art director of
Seventeen magazine, then located at 11 West 42nd Street,
where coincidentally Will Burtin also had an office. “I didn't get
to meet him until 13 years later when we became good friends,” de
Harak says. Seventeen soon moved to 488 Madison Avenue—the
Look Building—which was a hotbed of publishing and advertising
activity. Not only were Look, where Alan Hurlburt was art
director, and Coronet headquartered in the modernistic,
step-backed structure, but so was the Weintraub Agency where Paul
Rand was art director, Esquire, where Henry Wolf was art
director, and Seventeen itself, where Art Kane was art
director. De Harak, Wolf and Kane were all friends and deeply
interested in photography. On weekends they would take photographs
and discuss design together.
De Harak's ideas about design were still being formulated, and
the uneven quality of his Seventeen promotions revealed
certain growing pains. And yet because he was intent of formulating
a direction, a personality was beginning to emerge. De Harak has a
vivid memory of this early stage: “Around 1950, I was particularly
influenced by Alvin Lustig and Saul Bass, who were poles apart.
Bass, who was a very content-conscious designer, would get a strong
idea and put together a beautiful design based on that idea.
Lustig, on the other hand, was a strong formalist, much less
concerned with content, but deeply interested in developing forms
and relating the type to them. I too went off in that direction and
[became] dedicated to the concept of form. I was always looking for
the hidden order, trying to somehow either develop new
forms or manipulate existing form. Therefore, I think my work was
more obscure, and certainly very abstract. Sometimes it was hard
for me to understand why [my solutions] fell short. But one thing I
did, was to sharpen my design sensibilities to the point that my
work generally fell into a purist category.”
Purism was not, however, an extremely marketable methodology in
the crassly commercial post-war culture. Frustrated by the
limitations that business had placed on him, de Harak stayed at
Seventeen for only 18 months, and then did a stint at an
advertising agency for about four months, the last full-time job he
would ever take. “I think it was too hard for me to work for
somebody. It's not that I didn't want to, but I was very strong in
my convictions and the way I wanted to work is antithetical to the
way most advertising agencies think. Actually, I didn't take
direction too well. Therefore, going out on my own was a choice of
necessity, not so much something I wanted to do.”
A few commissions came de Harak's way. Eventually, the most
long-term was a 20-year relationship with the Kurt Versen Lighting
Company designing the trademark, house style, packaging and
catalogs. Yet de Harak's most public work in the early 1950s were
the monthly illustrations that Henry Wolf assigned him to do for
Esquire. These little “design illustrations, a kind of
1950s Dada,” as de Harak refers to them, married conceptual and
formal thinking; they were collages comprised of photographs,
drawings and found materials which he juxtaposed in rebus-like
compositions and then rendered as composite photographs. These gems
of abstract illustration were like jazz improvisations. At the same
time de Harak was improvising with various photographic methods,
such as photograms and reticulating processes, that were ultimately
used, not coincidentally, in his work for Columbia, Oxford, Circle
and Westminster record covers, all of which were also his labs for
typographic experimentation.
With one eye on the International Style, the other was focused
on pushing the boundaries of letterform composition. Following in
the tradition of 1920s poetic typography, de Harak imposed his own
levels of legibility through experimentation with various forms of
letter and word spacing.
For all his efforts, de Harak was finding it increasingly hard
to make ends meet from design alone. In 1952 he began a long tenure
at Cooper Union teaching what in those days was called
“advertising” design. “I hadn't been a designer long, but what I
lacked in experience I made up for in enthusiasm and commitment,”
he says. And many former students agree that he brought
intelligence and excitement, free of dogma, to teaching both the
process and ethic of design. And yet by 1955 business was so bad
that he decided to put together a photographic portfolio which did
earn him more work shooting many fashion still lifes, and set-up
assignments for Esquire, Apparel Arts and various ad
agencies. But he was never really satisfied with the direction of
this interim career. So around 1958, throwing caution to the wind,
he moved into an office on Lexington Avenue, hired a couple of
students from Cooper Union, and began seriously selling design
under the name Rudolph de Harak Incorporated.
“This was a very exciting ad crucial point in my life,” de Harak
explains. “It was when I was introduced to specimens of Berthold's
Akzidenz Grotsk from Berlin.” This bold European typeface
effectively anchored de Harak's design approach and afforded him a
neutral element against which to play with a growing repertoire of
images. His early experiments, including 50 covers done for
Westminster Records, were the basis for the decidedly Modern book
jackets that he designed for Meridian Press, New Directions, Holt
Rhineheart and Winston, and Doubleday. And all the approaches that
he developed during the late Fifties led to his opus—the
McGraw-Hill paperback covers which became laboratories for his
experiments with color, type, optical illusion, photography and
other techniques. More important, these covers would define his
design for years to follow.
To understand de Harak's influence on graphic design during the
Sixties it is necessary to know that the McGraw-Hill paperbacks
were emblematic of that period. They were based on the most
contemporary design systems, and were unique compared to other
covers and jackets in the marketplace. At this time the
International Style and American Eclecticism were the two primary
design methodologies at play in the United States. The former
represented Bauhaus rationalism, the latter Sixties exuberance. De
Harak was profoundly influenced by the exquisite simplicity of the
great Swiss Modernist, Max Bill, but as an American he wanted to
find a vehicle for somehow reconciling these two conflicting
sensibilities. Although, just as he resisted the hard sell approach
in advertising, he also rejected the eclectic trend to make
typography too blatantly symbolic. “I never saw the need to put
snowcaps on a letterform to suggest the cold,” he offers as an
example of the extreme case. Instead he worked with a limited
number of typefaces, at first Franklin Gothic and News Gothic
(preferring it over Futura), and then Akzidenz Grotesk, and
ultimately Helvetica. De Harak still believes that the last gave
him all the color, weight and nuance he needed to express a variety
of themes and ideas.
The McGraw-Hill covers were paradigms of purist visual
communication. Each element was fundamental since de Harak did not
allow for the extraneous. Yet, as economical as they were, each was
also a marriage of expressionistic or illusionistic imagery and
systematic typography, the same repertoire of elements that he
would later use in other graphic work. De Harak became known for
simplifying the complex without lessening meaning.
In the mid-Sixties, as de Harak was building a solid reputation
as a teacher and practitioner, a new facet to his career,
exhibition design, began almost by accident. In 1965 a friend,
Nicholas Chaparos who taught at Canada's University of Waterloo,
recommended de Harak to design the “Man, His Planet, and Space”
pavilion at Montreal's Expo '67. At the times, de Harak notes,
there were simply not enough Canadian designers to handle the
volume of work that went into making this milestone exposition. He
spent two intensive years researching and developing information
modules comprised of light, sound and text that presented complex
information. It would become the cornerstone of his expanding
practice which eventually included signage, exposition and
exhibition design.
For the design of the U.S. Pavilion in Japan, Osaka's Expo '70,
de Harak teamed up with Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar creating a
tour de force of information communications. Subsequently, he
earned commissions from U.S. government agencies, among them the
Atomic Energy Commission, National Parks Service, National
Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Postal Service. He was also in
demand for large commercial assignments, such as the United Nations
Plaza Hotel, for which he created graphic programs and wayfinding
systems. Although pleased with these commissions, even more
satisfying than developing livable environments such as this,
presenting histories and stories became de Harak's prime talent and
greatest pleasure. The Cummins Engine Company museum is not only a
masterpiece of corporate culture, but of retelling—what de Harak
refers to as “real people's stories.” He interviewed scores of
Cummins workers to develop the museum's content. With its
1,000-plus-pieces exploded engine as a dynamic focal point, de
Harak created a living testament to the company's commitment to
progress through artful displays that pull in history and
contemporary practice without a hint of nostalgia. The combination
of de Harak's modernism and eclecticism are fully realized through
his museum designs.
The commission to participate in the design of the Egyptian Wing
of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art is another key
example. When the Met's architect, Kevin Roche, invited de Harak to
work on the new wing he wanted someone who would conform to the
modern scheme of the new wing and its master plan, and yet be
sympathetic to the Met's traditions. The project took 10 years to
complete—years that were devoted to exhaustive research of every
nuance of the magnificent collection before the design process
began. Deciding what and how to show the panorama of ancient
history with enough entry-points to engage event the casual viewer
was as difficult a challenge as de Harak had ever faced. How to
identify the invaluable materials required a variety of inventive
formats. Transparency was one of the keys. De Harak discretely
printed captions on glass, which gave the viewer the option to
learn about and/or see the treasured objects at the same time. A
photographic timeline, which was also available as an
accordion-fold booklet, provided another level of access for the
viewer. Over a decade after its opening, the Egyptian Wing is still
a popular attraction, perhaps as much for de Harak's design purity
as for the stunning artifacts in the collection itself. Despite his
passions for purism, de Harak has also embraced the virtues of
randomness. “I love the ambivalence,” he says about the essence of
art and design, “of what happens visually when you see something
that you're not sure of, then all of a sudden you get a handle on
it. What's really important is getting the viewer to participate.
If that person can look at an image and say 'Wow!' in some way,
that is a key function of design.” And so that is a nutshell is
what he has taught and how he has practiced.
As the 1980s came to a close, de Harak turned from the rigors of
multi-disciplinary, systematic design to abstract art. Then in his
sixties, the thought of stepping away from his business to pursue
other interests—once unthinkable to the veteran—became an appealing
prospect. It would allow him to pursue and investigate more fully
other passions he harbored since entering the field. Of course,
even in the work-a-day world he continued to seriously practice
painting, photography, and collage. But leaving New York with his
wife Carol to the home they designed and built in Maine allowed him
more freedom for his interests in the visual arts and music. Like
the other milestones of design that defined de Harak's long career,
his last “official” graphic design while still the head of his
design office was the jacket design for the AIGA Annual,
Graphic Design USA: 9. It is fitting since moving to
Maine, he has been elected into the Art Directors Hall of Fame,
received a Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts Degree from the Corcoran
Museum School of Art and now AIGA's highest award, the Gold Medal.
For decades de Harak used his art to fulfill clients' needs. He
stands poised to make art for himself. It is a meaningful
conclusion to one career and the beginning of a new life of a man
who has imbued graphic design with both a vocabulary and an
ethic.
Copyright 1993 by The American Institute of Graphic
Arts.
|