ART

THE ROCK POSTER AS GREAT ART

the unrecognized genius of 1960's rock poster

By Emily Villavicencio

Unrecognized, great art

This poster by Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley is called Skeleton and Roses, and even if you have no idea what’s it for, when it was made, who the Grateful Dead are, or even that there was a cultural revolution happening in the Bay Area and the U.S. in the 1960’s and 70’s, you would recognize it as iconic. The red, blue, and white illustration of a skeleton picking roses in order to complete his laurel wreath is a striking image of the age and now supersedes what it was originally intended to do, which is sell tickets to a concert. You can see the dates September 16 and 17, but what matters now is the vision, the new vision of the world that Mouse and Kelley were able to imagine and realize in such stark and concrete terms.

As the story goes, Mouse and Kelley went to the SF library to look for inspiration for their next poster for the Grateful Dead and came across the image of the skeleton and roses. Kelley took a pen knife and cut the image out of the book, although in earlier tellings of the story they said that they just xeroxed the image from the book. Of course, the problem with that claim is at the time xerox machines did not exist.

The book they took the image from was a collection of poems called The Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam, and the illustration was done by Edmund Sullivan, a British illustrator. Although Mouse and Kelley never hid the fact that they stole the image from Edmund Sullivan, it isn't the image so much as how they used that image that makes it iconic. That might not seem fair to Sullivan, but stealing is one of the major talents of all artists and knowing how to redeploy material is a key part of the story of the genius of these poster artists.

Stealing or Appropriation equals Genius

For me, this is the true nature of great art. It comes in the moment and represents a variety of ideas, beliefs, issues, and visions of the world. We might only see a fraction of what’s going at the time, but as it ages its real strengths come out. These psychedelic posters were inspired by Art Nouveau, Victoriana, Dada, and Pop Art and above everything else the idea of the “psychedelic trip.” All these elements were about making reality seem unreal, which is how many people think of the sixties and early seventies, a time of extreme cultural dislocation. What these artists were doing was catching glimpses of the times and the way people were living and thinking. They put onto paper what was happening around them and a lot of it felt unreal.

The elements and styles that are dominant were distortion, symmetrical composition, contrasting colors, and lettering that was non legible at first glance and said to be only legible to those under the influence. Of the graphic arts, drawing is the most common medium of psychedelic art. An ink drawing is important to a tight budget. The earliest handbills, all made by amateur artists, were simply black on white or colored stock paper. Beginning with the Fillmore series, the artist’s drawings were transformed into color at the printer’s shop.

For a long time, these masterpieces of graphic excellence have been overlooked by the mainstream art establishment, and by that, I mean museums, art journals, and critics. But we can make an argument that the artists of this particular moment are major and long overdue for critical reassessment.

How they saw music in the 60's

The poster above was made for a concert featuring Jefferson Airplane, Muddy Waters, and the Butterfield Blues Band for the Winterland/Fillmore Auditorium. It has an orange, green and purple ink variety, but there are also other color prints. The central image is a naked woman dancing with tight lettering encapsulating her figure. The euphoria that flowed from the “summer of love” and especially these concert events were central to the times and these posters caught that.

A majority of the people who attended these shows went to see and hear their favorite bands live, but also to escape the problems of society and with the help of drugs managed to do so for a while. The poster reflects the heightened experiences and the energy of the music. We still experience this today, maybe with different music and styles, but here is another moment when young people were starting to break stereotypes and gender roles. These concerts brought many different people together and allowed a safe space for people to forget and explore.

For many of the poster artists and rock bands at this time women played the role of larger-than-life muses. As Wilson reflects, “women are important in any rock-n-roll context because they dance and rock-n-roll is a beat, and when a beat is movement, everybody loves to see the movement of everybody dancing.” It is a good quote, but it does make one pause after about five different generations of feminism. This is what inspired Bill Graham to come up with the phrase “The Sound,” which referred to the San Francisco bands of the time. One night, Graham visited Wes Wilson to check on the progress of the poster and upon looking at it said, “Well, it’s nice, but I can’t read it.” In return, Wilson proclaimed “Yeah, and that’s why people are gonna stop and look at it.”

Interpretation below

The poster above was created for a series of concerts at the Fillmore West and included The Grateful Dead, Sons of Champlin, Steppenwolf, Santana, and The Preservation Hall of Jazz. It was drawn with ink pen and has a lion in the center made out of people. If you look at it closely, the lion’s eyes are two screaming women, and in the lion’s mouth are breasts that look like a tongue. On the muzzle, where the whiskers are protruding are two faces, and below the chin, a pair of legs.

Lee Conklin, who calls his art “New Age cheesecake” came up with this poster while looking at an animal kingdom book. Santana saw the poster and asked Conklin to redraw the lion poster for Santana’s first album cover, and since then it has become an iconic image connected to Santana, their fans, and art lovers alike. Now we look at Conklin’s art and see it as out of date with respect to women. Especially in today’s society, his use of women’s bodies to draw attention to a concert is a little cliched, but it's still a stunning piece of art. We don’t want to make the mistake of taking the values of one generation and replacing them with the values of another. At the time, the interests of these artists and everyone else were taken with notions of freedom, and, very specifically, male sexual freedom. So, yes, sexist, in our time and theirs, but the sexism had less value than the freedom.

Bonnie MacLean’s Eric Burdon and the Animals poster was created for a three-day concert series at the Fillmore, another one of Bill Graham’s extravaganzas. The poster depicts a young woman’s face looking mischievous, yet amused, as she looks slightly away from the viewer. She wears a crown of text with the names of the bands wrapped in her hair as if the time, date, and place of the concert were merging from her head. MacLean uses mostly purples and pinks as well as geometric shapes and wavy lines to create a feeling of movement and forward energy.

A woman's view of the era

In an art world dominated by male artists, MacLean stands out as the most famous, and only famous female poster artist of her time. MacLean painted the notice boards for the Bill Graham Auditorium in her psychedelic style and once Wes Wilson decided to quit making posters for Graham, Graham appointed MacLean as his successor.

During her time making posters for Graham, MacLean’s “style evolved into pointed arches and rose windows, but it was her faces that captured the most attention, young women with dazed looks, suggesting the disconnect between traditional religion and spirituality of the sixties.” (Art of the Dead). While most of the male poster artists depicted female subjects in their posters as sex symbols, MacLean’s portrayal of women in her art is more regal, amused, and focused on their faces rather than their bodies. She took women out of the context of being sexual objects, to giving women more powerful representations in art. Her posters make them feel alive to the moment and not just trophies for hip men.

A woman of and ahead of her era

If any of this has captured your attention, as it did mine, most of these artists are still around today and come together twice a year for an event called,  the Rock Poster Society. These artists sell their work, share stories with fans, and meet new artists. The event is important because it gives these under represented artists a platform to share their work with those who experienced the times in which these posters flourished, but also draws in younger fans with an appreciation of the art they created. This allows for not only the history of these artists to live on, but also the revolutionary movements that flourished in the Bay Area.

With more and more younger people taking an interest in these classic rock posters, and becoming poster artists themselves, it gives us hope for the future that these artist’s work and messages will withstand time, and inspire a whole new generation of poster artists to come. Now that we can look back with a more critical eye, some of these posters serve as examples of some of the more troubling beliefs of the so-called revolutionary generation. Still, these posters are important because they caught the changing times and were also quite beautiful.

©Emily Villavicencio and the CCA Arts Review