Walter Allner, 97, Noted Art Director of Fortune Magazine
Hyfler/Rosner
July 24, 2006
Steven Heller
Walter Allner, 97, Noted Art Director of Fortune Magazine, Is Dead
Fortune cover:
http://www.101010.it/storiagrafica/1956.html
Walter Allner, the Bauhaus-trained graphic designer and art director of
Fortune magazine from 1962 to 1974 who introduced a European Modernist
typographic sensibility to American magazine design, died Friday at his
apartment in Manhattan. He was 97.
His death was announced by his wife, Jane Allner.
During his 12 years at Fortune, in addition to maintaining the
magazine's Bauhaus-inspired contemporary typography and elegant
overall design scheme, he personally created 79 covers, which ran the
gamut from minimalist graphic abstraction to complex photographic
collage.
In 1965, after taking a course at M.I.T., he experimented with the
first computer-designed cover on a national magazine for the annual
Fortune 500 issue. A company press release at the time proudly noted
that the image, consisting of arrows in upward flight behind large
illuminated numerals, was generated on a computer's oscilloscope and
then photographed.
Long before the personal computer revolutionized the methods used to
produce graphic design, Mr. Allner predicted the integration of
aesthetics and advanced technology, and so worked directly with
computer engineers whenever he could.
"Allner's interest in science, coupled with a venturesome spirit,
has led him into exciting new design fields," wrote John Lahr in a
1966 article in Print magazine.
This spirit was evident with other comparably ambitious Fortune covers,
notably one in which he arranged for dozens of windows on 20 floors of
the Time & Life building in New York to be illuminated at night to
spell out 500. To create this huge temporary electric sign he had to
persuade everyone in the offices - many not employed by Time Inc. -
to cooperate. After a rainstorm thwarted his initial attempt, the
project was eventually photographed from a nearby hotel.
He also experimented with ways of dealing with light and pioneered a
form of kinetic light painting.
Born in Dessau, Germany, on Jan. 2, 1909, Walter Heinz Allner enrolled
at the Bauhaus, the legendary German design school, in 1927, two years
after it moved from Weimar to his hometown and six years before the
Nazis closed it. He studied typography, poster design and painting for
three years, at various times under leaders of the Modern movement,
including Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee.
While on a short leave from the Bauhaus he worked at the Gesellschafts-
und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Vienna with Otto Neurath, the creator of
universal sign symbols known as isotypes.
Mr. Allner was decidedly restless, and so after graduating he worked in
the Netherlands under Piet Zwart, an influential Dutch typographer, and
in Paris with the poster artists Jean Carlu and A. M. Cassandre. Yet it
was Albers's precisionist abstract geometric graphics that had the
most influence on Mr. Allner's later art and design work.
Two years after founding his own design firm, Omnium Graphique in
Paris, Mr. Allner left it in 1936 to devote himself exclusively, if
temporarily, to painting abstract works and exhibited at the Salon des
Surindépendants in Paris. He eventually returned to graphic design,
first as editor of the Swiss design journal Graphis. In 1948 he founded
the International Poster Annual, earning a place as one of the
world's leading experts on poster history.
Upon immigrating to the United States in 1949, he was a freelance
design consultant for R.C.A., Johnson & Johnson, the American Cancer
Society, I.T.T. and I.B.M. The Outdoor Advertising Association of
America commissioned him to design all of its billboards for a national
traffic-safety campaign. In 1951 he designed a startling poster for
Life magazine, "Enjoy LIFE Every Week."
After leaving Fortune in 1974, he taught and lectured. His motto for
students and professionals was "Raise the aesthetic standard - the
public is more perceptive than you think." He also continued to
design posters based on principles he learned at the Bauhaus: shunning
any superfluous ornamentation and conveying messages with brevity and
simplicity.
Mr. Allner's first marriage, to Colette Vaseelon, ended in divorce.
In addition to his wife of 52 years, he is survived by his sons,
Michel, of Joinville-le-Pont, France, and Peter, of Truro, Mass.; two
grandsons; and a great-granddaughter.