Bass Notes: The film posters of Saul Bass

Design is thought made visual.

Saul Bass

Saul Bass was one of the greatest American graphic designers of the mid-20th century, who had a significant impact on the film industry. Breaking the convention of plain and unimaginative film titles, he reinvented them to become integral part of the movie. He is best known for his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger and Martin Scorsese.

 

As well as the film titles Saul Bass designed and created number of groundbreaking movie posters. Some of them were on show in the Kemistry Gallery in Shoreditch for the past month. Since I am very interested in poster art it was a great pleasure to see his work. I admire the distinctive style, but also the simplicity of the design. Most of his posters are created using two colours only (often red and black), the uncomplicated drawings seem almost effortless, but the final effect is eye-catching, direct and very recognizable.

 

In a period when graphic imagery can be so easily manipulated electronically, Bass reminds us that a strong idea is always at the heart of a great design. His work, as reflected in this exhibition, is as refreshing today as ever. [from a note accompanying the exhibition]

Grenade: Short Story

This was done for Illustration Project: Short Narrative. We were supposed to base the characters of the story on the fellow students..

John Stezaker @ Whitechapel Gallery

Untitled, 1977

‘I am dedicated to fascination – to image fascination, a fascination for the point at which the image becomes self-enclosed and autonomous. It does so through a series of processes of disjunction.’

John Stezaker

John Stezaker is a British conceptual artist working mostly in the field of collage. The excellent exhibition in Whitechapel Gallery is his first major solo retrospective, yet he has been manipulating photographs for the past four decades. Stezaker works mostly using classic movie stills, vintage postcards and illustrations.

Negotiable Space I, 1978

His collages at first glance seem effortless (very often it's a postcard pasted onto an old photograph), but closer look reveals an incredible precision with which he chooses two pictures to fit perfectly together (the collages are made manually without digital manipulation). Also carefully selected titles intensify the poetic meaning of the artworks.

Marriage I, 2006

My favourite works are the Marriage and the Film Portrait series, in which the artist creates the Frankenstein-like impressions simply by fusion of two halfs of different portraits together (usually male and female). Stezaker acts here as some mad plastic surgeon, who with a single cut of the blade constructs these often creepy, yet somehow beautiful hybrids. The hand of the same 'maniac' could also be seen in the Love and the Blind series, where the artist enhances the eyes of his female subjects by giving them the hypnotic 'double vision', while taking away the visual perception from the males.

The artist is represented by the Approach Gallery. 

Love XI, 2006

Blind II, 2006

Mask X, 1982

Film Portrait (She) VIII, 2005

Back in Printroom..

Nude by the Sea

Linocut

three variations