ABOUT CIPE PINELES
In the days when American graphic design seemed the province of European immigrants, the men were joined by a young woman born in Austria. The graphic design career of Cipe Pineles (pronounced SEE-pee pi-NELL-iss) began when she was installed by Condé Nast himself in the office of M.F. Agha, art director for Condé Nast publications Vogue, Vanity Fair, and House and Garden. Through the 1930s and early 1940s, Pineles learned editorial art direction from one of the masters of the era, and became (at Glamour) the first autonomous woman art director of a mass-market American publication. She is credited with other “firsts” as well: being the first art director to hire fine artists to illustrate mass-market publications; the first woman to be asked to join the all-male New York Art Directors Club and later their Hall of Fame. After experimenting on Glamour, she later art directed and put her distinctive mark on Seventeen and Charm magazines as well. Until her death in 1991, Cipe Pineles continued a design career of almost sixty years through work for Lincoln Center and others, and teaching at the Parsons School of Art and Design.
Pineles had piqued Nast's interest with some shoebox-sized models for store window fabric displays she had developed for Contempora, a design collaborative willing to tackle projects ranging in scale from a coffeepot to a World's Fair. The Contempora job was Pineles's first since graduating from Pratt Institute in 1929. It had taken her a year of portfolio reviews to land the position: the too-frequent pattern had been a positive reaction to the work followed by dismay when a woman showed up for the interview.
Working with Agha on the design of Vogue and Vanity Fair, she learned how to be an editorial designer. “Agha was the most fabulous boss to work for,” Pineles reported later. “Nothing you did satisfied him. He was always sending you back to outdo yourself, to go deeper into the subject.” He told his staff to visit galleries and museums and bring back new ideas. During the early 1930s, Condé Nast publications were innovative in their use of European Modernism in magazine design. Typography was simplified and typefaces such as Futura became common. Headlines and text could be anywhere on the page. Photography took precedence over fashion illustration and was reproduced large on the page, bleeding off to create “landscapes” or transgressing across the gutter. Space expanded as purely decorative elements disappeared and margins were opened.
Watching and listening to Agha, Pineles also learned how to be an art director: “He spent a lot of time talking with his creative people?about problems related to type. Pictures and the selection of pictures as satisfying an editorial concept or not.” Creative people doing one thing were urged to take on another medium to gain new perspective. Pineles, in addition to handling design and spot illustration, was one of his talent scouts for new illustrators and photographers.
Rising to the position Agha had been preparing her for, Pineles was named art director of Glamour in 1942. Ignoring her publisher, who turned out to have little respect for this middle-market fashion audience, Pineles used the best talent of the day, among them photographers Andre Kertesz, Herbert Matter, Cornell Capa, Toni Frissell, and Trude Fleischmann; designer Ladislav Sutnar; and artists S.E. and Richard Lindner and Lucille Corcos.
After a short hiatus during World War II when she worked in Paris on a magazine for servicewomen, Pineles became the art director of the three-year-old Seventeen magazine, a radical invention directed toward a hitherto undefined audience: teenage girls. The founder and editor, Helen Valentine, addressed her readers as serious and intelligent young adults, rather than as the silly, only-marriage-minded girls other publishers saw. In support of Valentine's mission to educated teenage girls, Pineles moved Seventeen out of the common idealized and sentimental school of illustration to use the best contemporary artists working in America. The reader's visual education would begin with the best artists' work.
Pineles is credited with the innovation of using fine artists to illustrate mass-market publications. Important because it brought fine art and modern art to the attention of the young mainstream public, it also allowed fine artists access to the commercial world. Pineles commissioned such artists as Ben Shahn and his wife, Berarda Bryson, Richard Lindner, Jacob Lawrence, Reginald Marsh, John Sloan, and Dong Kingman. Some young artists “discovered” by the magazine became well known: Richard Anuskiewicz and Seymour Chwast. An artist and illustrator herself, Pineles was the perfect art director: she left the artists alone. She asked them to read the whole story and choose what they wanted to illustrate. Her only direction was that the commissioned work be good enough to hang with their other work in a gallery.
READ MORE AT THE SOURCE: https://www.aiga.org/medalist-cipepineles
QUOTE BY CIPE PINELES
“We tried to make the prosaic attractive without using the tired clichés of false glamour. You might say we tried to convey the attractiveness of reality, as opposed to the glitter of a never-never land. —Cipe Pineles”
WHAT I WISH FOR YOU TODAY
I wish you an authentically beautiful day; anything but banal!