On Art

...It is composed of seven horizontal black bands on a white ground, each curving progressively upward until a climactic blister is attained at the top...

...Squarish in proportions, it displays the singer's profile, microphone in hand, topped by "elvis" in lower case art deco-style print...

...It shows an island carved into the words "Primitive Art" being circled by a mysterious array of shark fins...

...Milton Glaser notes in his essay that the "common denominator" of the '60s and '70s protest art he thinks good "seems to be that the creators believed in the issue...

...the aforementioned examples show the influence, respectively, of George Grosz and Charles Sheeler...

...In fact, their apparently representative selection is weighted to the ideologically and esthetically pretentious...

...All the same, artistry need not detract from a poster's effectiveness, as Ben Shahn's voter registration ads of the '40s so ably demonstrate...

...And I liked, too, Arnold Saks' ad for a Jewish Museum show of inflatable sculpture...

...As a practicing commercial artist, he claims "it is difficult to simulate passion...

...None make the viewer feel a deep and personal sense of wrong??as does Goya's frightening etching of mutilated prisoners impaled on trees...

...While less socially conscious, also striking is the sense of mystery in Anthony Dubrovsky's sepia lithograph announcing an art lecture...

...Even when confronted by a wide choice, Cogswell and Carrigan played it artistically safe...

...Curiously, the exhibition does include a satire of the style, a poster for the Vietnam war as a "film.' The word "Vietnam," as if carved out of stone, dominates the design...

...Like many other humble forms, it has been elevated to the status of object-in-its-own-right, to be studied, justified and explained...

...Yet it is not the viewer's awareness of esthetic tradition that creates the impact: Far more important is simply getting the message across...

...In one, a human figure hangs from a gibbet reflected in the monocle of a German officer's caricatured head...

...In an ideal relationship a designer believes in the information he conveys" (much, one supposes, as a lawyer believes in the innocence of his client...

...A rich display, fasoinating and irritating by turns, these Images should not be missed...

...Among the best stimuli is a national emergency, as the World War II examples (confined, unfortunately, to a slide representation) confirm...

...But if the writers' acceptance (not always uncritical) of placard design as art makes the poster a more intriguing subject to read about, it also creates a resistance to the very idea...

...soldiers, blindfolded Vietnamese, a smiling LBJ, Adolf Hitler??and messages such as "GRIPPING MOVING A FILM THE WHOLE FAMILY IS SURE TO ENJOY...

...They could have used one of the best (and most scoundrelly) ??the Gauguin self-portrait set behind the bars of a cashier's cage, with a legend implying that a course at the school could free the genius lurking in any bank clerk's chest...

...Above all it explained itself on sight, using words and pictures, or it was not a poster...

...This seems at the very least the wrong question to ask: It could mean either that it is not killing that matters so much as what is being killed, or that some kind of hunter's code has been violated, whereby the young should be left to provide sport for another day...

...They picked the blandest and most refined of the School of Visual Arts poster series, one with a grainy photograph and an Emerson quotation...

...A first-rate example of a purely commercial poster is David Edward Byrd's 1973 monochromatic design for an Elvis Presley concert...

...Unfortunately, most did, notably James Brooks with an Abstract Expressionist composition and Roy Lichtenstein with one of his neo-Leger designs...

...Equally effective, although concerned with wholesomeness, is Otis Shepard's stylized portrait of a smiling man about to chew Wrigley's gum...

...At Images of an Era (Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, New York University, through July 8), where the over 250 examples on display reveal the ups and downs the genre has sustained during the last 30 years, there are moments when the point of a poster can barely be seen for the creativeness of its means...

...Accompanying the exhibition-now at its last stop here before heading for Europe-is a substantial full-color catalog, bound in the Andy Warhol theater ticket design that first served as a poster for the Fifth New York Film Festival...

...and the word "fascismo," with its overtones of collegiate sophistication, could not have been more unfortunate, especially if the motive of the work was to make known an injustice that concerned everyone...

...The day when machines do all the work may not yet have arrived, but its long-prophesied bonus, a society top-heavy with restless, probing minds, is here already, and the search for material grows daily more anxious...

...The show's organizers are caught up in this mad pursuit...

...their pseudo-posters, besides being mainly personal advertisements, require the interpretations of teams of scholars...

...Corny, of course, but it doubtless kept the pot boiling in its time...

...Absent, for example, are, the movie ads that by their very robust technique speak directly to an audience: enticing the people who relish Airport-style star-studded blockbusters, and just as swiftly warning off those who don't...

...As unfortunate in its own way is Tomi Ungerer's black, brown and white lithograph of two of his goblin figures each nibbling on the other's foot, an expression of what seems to be sexual ecstasy on their faces...

...Readers may remember that the question "And Babies...

...Allan d'Arcangelo's picture of the American Great Seal canceled by lines remains obscure, despite the 30-line caption that perfectly exemplifies the trend toward intelleotualization of art...

...Mannered and dated as they seem today, they did the job with artistic integrity, and Shahn was in no way compromised...

...Images of an Era demonstrates that fine artists have been only too happy to collaborate in this process...

...Today, while still needed as a means of mass communication, it stands in danger of becoming yet another vehicle for personal expression and mystification...

...The two qualities are uniquely combined in the photograph of a pig, painted by Warhol to look like a piggy bank in order to sell RCA Color Scanners...

...In general, though, the '60s and early '70s were a time of obscurantism and vulgarity...

...There were, however, two successful sallies into the future: Costantino Nivola's amusing drawing of a congested New York and Christo's "Texas Mastaba," a sinister red and blue slab of a building made of oil drums and set on a sandy plain...

...In and around the block letters, couched in the rosy colors typical of this technique, are "the cast...

...Haeberle's color photograph of My Lai corpses for, inexplicably, the Artist Benefit Fund for Attica Defense...

...This signaling is not 100 per cent reliable: On at least one occasion it was used to publicize a very unrobust film, the Western Will Penny, with Charlton Heston...

...Since the late 19th century in France, posters have derived inspiration from high art, if sometimes belatedly...

...Although it is called "Black Power, White Power," one can only guess at its exact purpose, and hope it isn't a plea for desegregation through homoeroticism...

...Save Our Air," a picture of many woolly clouds as seen from a high-flying jet...

...The whole situation promotes a splendid swirl of inquiry, to which reviewers must contribute, any Luddite misgivings they might have notwithstanding...

...If this is true, why then do so few of the political posters come off...

...especially the pieces by Ashton and Gowans, the Morgan Professor of Architectural History at the University of Louisvilie...

...Some of the protest posters are merely ingenious, like the anonymous design of an American flag with its stripes converted into rifles, its stars into guns...

...The best performance of this period is Georgia O'Keeffe's "Save Our Planet...

...His social conscience reemerged during the '60s upheaval, but the antiwar graphics he put out then reflected not so much gut convictions as the querulousness of the artistic bourgeosie...

...Easily the worst in this group is the 1970 poster made from R.L...

...is overprinted in red along the top, with the answer, "And Babies," at the bottom...

...For the elevation of mass-produced objects into art, one outcome of the Dada-Surrealist revolution, has had the effect of depriving the poster of its original function...

...They do indeed tell us, as Cogswell writes, "where we have been," but if they also "furnish clues as to where we are going," I hope something turns up along the way to detain us...

...For the series, "America: the Third Century," which accompanies Images of an Era, Mobil Oil, the sponsor of both shows, commissioned 13 artists to do their own thing...

...They provide very interesting reading...

...Commercial designers, on the other hand, have developed delusions of creativity to compensate for their subjugation to the dollar sign...

...Rupert Garcia's "Attica is Fascismo," for instance, is beautiful and quite radical-looking: The yellow sans-serif lettering is set on a black ground in perfect tension with the white skull below...

...But it is almost too tasteful...

...The posters on view here, the good as well as the bad, arc proof that a placard's success depends partly on its subject matter and partly, too, on the designers willingness to subordinate his personality to its needs...

...There arc essays by Margaret Cogswell and John Garrigan (who selected the works for the show), as well as by Milton Glaser, Dore Ashton, and Alan Gowans...