Henry Wolf; fantastic NY Sun obit
Hyfler/Rosner
BY STEPHEN MILLER - Staff Reporter of the Sun
February 16, 2005
great photo:
Henry Wolf, who died Monday at his Manhattan carriage house
at age 79, was one of the seminal magazine designers of the
1950s and 1960s, with his bold and often humorous art
direction for Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, and Show.
He later moved into advertising as a photographer and
eventually owner of an agency, where he produced arresting
campaigns for such clients as Xerox, Saks, and Van Cleef &
Arpels, and helped invent the magazine-style product
catalog.
For a typically droll Esquire cover from July 1958, pegged
to an article titled "The Americanization of Paris," Wolf
portrayed a packet of powder marked "Instant Vin Rouge"
being poured into a wine glass. "I combined France's passion
for red wine with the U.S.A.'s predilection for fast (or
'instant') food," Wolf wrote in his book "Visual Thinking."
"Esquire got hundreds of letters asking where this
fictitious product could be purchased." Another magazine
cover depicted Esquire's trademark - an ogling playboy -
constructed of wire backing in a chair that supported a
shapely female posterior.
Wolf replaced the legendary Alexey Brodovitch as art
director at Bazaar in 1958, and while the covers he produced
were necessarily less louche, they were no less creative,
often combining typography as a design element in novel
ways. A Richard Avedon photograph on the December 1959 cover
shows a pink caped model precariously balanced on a ladder,
hoisting the penultimate 'A' into the Bazaar masthead.
Wolf's own artistic inspirations were less about couture
than the Expressionist and Surrealist art of his native
Austria. Bazaar's editor, Diane Vreeland, "tried to
incorporate me into the fashion world, but to this day I
don't understand it too well," Wolf wrote in 1988. "Mrs.
Vreeland considered that shortcoming an asset."
Born in Vienna, Wolf was raised in a prosperous secular
Jewish family that owned several carpet factories. Just 13
at the Anschluss, he fled with his family through France and
detention camps in Morocco, where Wolf contracted malaria.
They finally made it to New York in 1941. His father found
work as a furrier, but the family fortune had vanished with
the war.
Wolf attended the School of Industrial Arts before being
drafted into the Army in 1943. After being stationed in
Leyte and Luzon, he became part of the Japanese occupation
just weeks after Hiroshima. "The four months I spent there
were some of the happiest of my life," he wrote. "There was
a strange country to be explored, and the wonderful
expectation of returning to New York."
When he finally did return, Wolf found work at an
advertising agency and then, in 1952, at Esquire, where he
started as a designer and quickly became art director. At
Esquire, Wolf instituted a thoroughgoing redesign,
integrating article content with page layout in a
sophisticated and playful way. In a valedictory when Wolf
left for Bazaar, Esquire's founder and editor, Arnold
Gingrich, wrote: "I don't say that nobody else could have
done this. I simply say that, in the twenty-five years of
this magazine, which began when Henry Wolf was an
eight-year-old in Vienna, nobody else has."
At Esquire, Bazaar, and Show, Wolf discovered or worked with
any number of young rising talents. Robert Benton - Wolf's
first assistant at Esquire and much later a screenwriter and
director on "Bonnie and Clyde" and "Kramer vs. Kramer" -
told The New York Sun that Wolf was "the most opinionated
person I have ever seen, but with great judgment."
Wolf more or less discovered the photographer Melvin
Sokolsky, whom he set to shooting Bazaar covers at age
21.Wolf was an early supporter of Saul Leiter and Milton
Glaser, and taught Jill Krementz, then a writer for Show,
how to load a camera. He was less fond of Diane Arbus and
told the New York Times, "Once I ran into her on a beautiful
Saturday morning all decked out in her cameras. 'What are
you doing on such a gorgeous day?' I asked. 'Trying to find
some unhappy people,' she answered. Well, I couldn't relate
to that!" Despite Arbus's repeated entreaties, Wolf refused
to publish her photo of the human pincushion.
In 1965, "having run out of magazines," he wrote, Wolf
partnered with Jane Trahey to form an advertising agency.
Celebrity campaigns were among their specialties, often shot
with Wolf behind the camera. One series for the typewriter
company Olivetti depicted "Duke Ellington at the Keyboard."
As payment, Ellington requested 100 typewriters be sent to
his boyhood school. The agency also began the long-running
(still-running) "What Becomes a Legend Most" campaign, in
which female celebrities are photographed wearing Blackglama
minks.
He founded Henry Wolf Productions in 1971 and was soon
producing magazine-like catalogs for Saks. Among his more
memorable images from this period is an ad featuring a Roman
numeral clock perfectly superimposed on a model's face, the
implication being that Revlon can ameliorate the aging
process. He did design and photography work for many large
corporations, including IBM, GTE, and Westvaco. He also
created the credits for most of Mr. Benton's films.
In 1988, Wolf published "Visual Thinking," a lavishly
produced volume that lays out in images - and mercifully
little text - his design principles under chapter titles
such as "Unexpected Combinations," "Repitition," "Humor,"
and "Improbable Settings." As an example of the latter, he
included a fashion ad for a woman seemingly walking on
water. She was, he disclosed, actually being supported from
below by a frogman.
Ever the man-about-town and bon vivant, Wolf indulged his
tastes for women and fine automobiles. He stored his Rolls
and his Alfa Romeo in the garage of his East Side carriage
house and maintained a country estate in North Salem. He was
linked to a succession of beautiful women, not least his two
wives and the actress Ali McGraw, whom he met when she was
Alice McGraw and an assistant to Vreeland.
He liked to tell friends he hadn't read a book since World
War II, and often told a joke he said originated at Sunday
dinner in Vienna: "Your date is beautiful, but dumb," his
father told Wolf's uncle. "No, she is beautiful, and dumb,"
the uncle countered. Of his own preferences, Wolf wrote,
"Renata," his first wife, "was beautiful - which I
understood; and intellectual - which I understood less."
His privately published memoir was titled "Hopeless But Not
Serious," a favorite saying that hinted, perhaps, at the
melancholy friends detected as he approached old age.
In 1954, Cooper Union hired Wolf as an instructor, having
previously rejected him for lacking the proper credentials.
Later, he taught at the School of Visual Arts and at
Parsons, which he generously supported and which granted him
an honorary degree.
In 2003, Sotheby's presented an exhibit of Wolf's designs,
as well as the Surrealism-influenced painting he took up in
his later years.
He was modest about his own originality. "You swipe from
many sources and the combination of the sources evolves a
style for yourself," he once told Print magazine. "Paul Rand
swiped from Paul Klee and I swipe from Paul Rand and yet
Rand doesn't look like Klee and I hope, sometimes, I don't
look like Rand, because I also swipe from others."
Henry Wolf
Born May 23, 1925, at Vienna, Austria; died February 14 of
natural causes at his Manhattan home; survived by a sister,
Joan Slawson.
Bill Schenley
> BY STEPHEN MILLER - Staff Reporter of the Sun
> February 16, 2005
Yeah, it was fantastic. Pretty cool obit, Steve.
> Born in Vienna, Wolf was raised in a prosperous
> secular Jewish family that owned several carpet
> factories. Just 13 at the Anschluss, he fled with his
> family through France and detention camps in
> Morocco, where Wolf contracted malaria. They
> finally made it to New York in 1941. His father found
> work as a furrier, but the family fortune had vanished
> with the war.
When I read the following paragraph in the New York Times obit ... I
thought ... "String information together much, Steve Heller?"
"Mr. Wolf was born in Vienna
on May 23, 1925, and moved to
Paris as a teenager to study art.
In 1941 he immigrated to the
United States and took classes
at New York City's School of
Industrial Arts ..."
- Steven Heller (New York Times) -
Henry Wolf covers:
http://www.altosdechavon.com/chavon_seminar/p_eng_henry_wolf.html
More (click 1 through 9):
http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm?ContentAlias=henrywolf