Leonardo Digital Reviews

Paul Rand: Modernist Design

by Franc Nunoo-Quarcoo
Distributed Art Publishers (DAP), 2003, New York
200 pp. Paper, $45.00
ISBN 1-8907-6103-6.

Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens
Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa

ballast@netins.net

David Garrick, the Restoration-era British actor, once jokingly said of his colleague Oliver Goldsmith (the Irish-born playwright and poet whose nickname was Noll) that he "wrote like an angel, and talk'd like poor Poll." In our own time, it has occasionally been said of Paul Rand, the American graphic designer, that he "wrote like a poet and talked like a plumber." Rand's writings included four important books on his work process and his philosophy of design, beginning as early as 1946 with Thoughts on Design. Enormously influential, that book was a hard act to follow, and almost forty years elapsed before he came out with three equally interesting sequels: A Designer's Art (1985), Design, Form and Chaos (1993), and (in the year that he died of cancer) From Lascaux to Brooklyn (1996). In part because Rand truly was a resourceful designer, but also because he was equally skilled at self-advertising, he was very nearly worshipped as "the greatest living graphic designer." As a creator of corporate logos since mid-century, he made a fruitful living by shaping the public identities of powerful corporations (IBM, ABC, Westinghouse, UPS³and Enron), and he was no less in command of his own public identity, beginning with his change of name (at age 21) from Peretz Rosenbaum (his Orthodox Jewish birth name) to the nebulous, well-designed Paul Rand, a "brand" that he invented. Since Rand's death, numerous articles have appeared, and at least two books have been published, Steven Heller's Paul Rand (1998) and Jessica Helfand's Paul Rand: American Modernist (1998). When I received this anthology nearly eight years after Rand's demise, I was initially doubtful of what it could offer that has not already been published, repeatedly, in the designer's own books and in works about him. To be critical, one answer might be that it offers a plentiful share of minor mistakes. For example, in an otherwise wonderful timeline of Rand's life in an historical context, we are told that Josef Albers was the head of the Bauhaus (not true); that, at the time of its closing, the Bauhaus was in Dessau (not true); and that Frank Lloyd Wright's design for the Kaufmann Bear Run residence was falling water. There are other problems with the book's colophon, so many and of sufficient gravity that they were recently discussed in Print, the New York-based graphic design magazine. On a more positive note, both the text and the illustrations in this book do provide a substantial amount of unfamiliar material. In particular, there are brief and unusually candid memoirs by Rand's admiring former students and others, which offer (perhaps inadvertently) a glimpse at his darker, more odious side (for example, his apparent chauvinism toward feminine and/or effeminate styles, which he denounced as "raised pinky" design). In addition, in no other source that I know of is there such a revealing collection of views of the interior of the Rand House in Weston, Connecticut, the Constructivist-influenced residence that Rand and his first wife, Ann, designed in 1951-52. On pages 354-355, for example, there is a two-page full-color photograph of his design studio that is of such detail that, in and of itself, it is nearly as informative about his work habits as would be a full-length essay.

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review.)