OBIT: Samuel Antupit, editorial art director, 71
Hyfler/Rosner
By STEVEN HELLER NY Times
Samuel N. Antupit, art director for more than 100 magazines and newspapers
and the designer of books by artists like Roy Lichtenstein, Alex Katz and
Barbara Kruger, died on Saturday in Seattle. He was 71.
The cause was heart failure, said his wife, Rosalie Littman, who is known as
Rollie.
From the late 1960's to the 1980's Mr. Antupit was among the most
influential of editorial art directors, designing or consulting for many of
the most significant American magazines, including Esquire, The New York
Review of Books, Art in America, Foreign Policy, Harper's Magazine, Consumer
Reports and Scientific American. He developed vibrant typography that wed
classic typefaces to modern layout, illustration and photography.
His more visually exuberant magazines, like Esquire, were conceived as
interconnected streams of type and image, paced like cinematic storyboards,
while his text-heavy publications, like Harper's, were more calmly composed.
He never imposed a personal style on his magazines but gave each one a
distinctive persona.
Mr. Antupit was born in West Hartford, Conn., in 1932. He graduated from the
Yale School of Design and Architecture in 1954 and in 1956 attended the
graduate program, where he studied with the masters of Modernist graphic
design, including Paul Rand, Joseph Albers and Herbert Matter. He was
drafted into the Army that year and assigned to the training-aids division.
In 1958 he worked as assistant to Henry Wolf, the art director at Harper's
Bazaar, and then worked under Alexander Liberman to design pages for Vogue,
Glamour and House & Garden. In 1963, as a member of New York's Push Pin
Studios, he developed the prototype for The New York Review of Books, a
format that is still being used.
From 1964 to 1968, as the chief art director of Esquire, he developed a
distinctive approach to editorial illustration that relied more on allegory
and symbolism than on conventional narrative representation.
In 1968 he started the quirkily named design firm Hess and/or Antupit, with
Richard Hess, and in 1970 he opened Antupit & Others Inc.
In 1972, with his own publishing house, Subsistence Press, he published
Prison, a composite record of a typical prison's day, comprising interviews
with inmates, wardens and guards at prisons across the nation. From 1978 to
1981 he was executive art director for the Book-of-the-Month Club, and from
1981 to 1996 he was director of art and design at Harry N. Abrams Inc., the
publisher of fine art and illustrated books.
In 1994 he received an N.E.A. American Fellow grant to print small books
based on his transcriptions of American Indian storytellers. In 1996 he
established CommonPlace Publishing, to package books for other publishers of
fine illustrated books on the arts, sciences and American literature. He
also developed a series for young adults called the Turning Point Series,
telling of inventions that changed history, like the clock, camera, light
bulb and telephone.
Mr. Antupit taught classes at the Radcliffe Publishing Course and in the
graduate department of the Columbia University Graduate School of
Journalism, but perhaps his happiest role was as proprietor of his private
print shop, Cycling Frog Press, which was operated out of his basement. For
30 years he issued an annual booklet of witty prose or poetry by favored
writers, beautifully printed and humorously illustrated.
Besides his wife, he is survived by two daughters, Lisa Besen of North
Andover, Mass., and Jennifer Sharp of Bainbridge Island, Wash.; two sons,
Stephen, of Seattle, and Peter, of Lexington, Mass.; a sister, Frances
Antupit of Cambridge, Mass.; and eight grandchildren.