Ilonka Karasz New Yorker Covers

How is it possible that someone with 186 published New Yorker covers* is not a household name?

lonka Karasz (1896-1981) was an insanely talented artist/designer/illustrator who, in addition to magazine and book covers designed pottery, textiles, furniture, silver and decorative maps. Earlier this year, at the Bard Graduate Center, Karasz scholar Ashley Callahan presented the work of Ilonka and her equally talented sister Mariska. The creative siblings came to the U.S. from Hungary in the 1910s. They settled in Greenwich Village where they became active participants in the avant garde of fashion, art and design.

Thanks to Callahan’s extensive research, each sister has had her own exhibit at the Georgia Museum of Art and there is a book to accompany each; Enchanting Modern: Ilonka Karasz and Modern Threads: Fashion and Art by Mariska Karasz. You can see 106 Karasz covers at condenaststore.com

Whichever cover you find yourself on this weekend, picnicking in the park, sunning on tar beach, or stuck in traffic, I hope you have a wonderful holiday weekend.

*Next most-published-New-Yorker-cover woman is Gretchen Dow Simpson with 58 covers, followed by Edna Eicke with 51, and Mary Petty with 38. 

The Arts Covers of Paris Vogue

Alfred Hitchcock

December 1974-January 1975

During the 1970s, 80s and 90s Paris Vogue used to publish an issue for December/January and devote the cover to the arts--film, music, dance, painting. I'm struck by how distinctive any non-fashion cover is for Vogue.

Salvador Dali

December 1971-December 1972

Fellini

December 1972-December 1973

Joan Miro

December 1979-December 1980

Andy Warhol

December 1983-January 1984

Franco Zefferelli

December 1984-January 1985

David Hockney

December 1985-January 1986

Baryshnikov

December 1986-January 1987

Kurosawa

December 1988-January 1989

Martin Scorsese

December 1990-January 1991

Tapies

December 1991-January 1992

Note to subscribers: If you subscribe to ALL MY EYES via email, then the other day you received five posts at once. That was not intentional. In the last few months, it seems that when I paste text from Microsoft Word into Blogger, some very nasty code comes along with it and disables recognition by FeedBurner, which updates feeds and emails new posts. All subsequent posts are also disabled. Removing the code and updating the post doesn't fix the glitch. So I reposted all the offensive entries and dated them with when they were originally posted. I did not realize that they would all get sent at once. Sorry to overwhelm you all at the start of the new year.

The Afterlife of a Magazine

Sean Miller's National Geographic bookshelf was a finalist in 

an inhabitat green design contest.

Congrats to all the National Magazine Award winners announced last week. Especially to Time which won magazine of the year. But let’s face it. No matter how many awards a magazine wins, there are really very few you actually (or even should) keep.

So what happens to magazines after they’ve been “consumed?” For the most part, used magazines are tossed, and though fully recyclable, 80% are thrown out as trash. Taken together, magazines and newspapers account for about one quarter of our landfills.

So while 20% of magazines are being recycled, there is a teensy tiny fraction of magazines that are actually being upcycled and repurposed, mostly by eco-friendly/unemployed crafters. It’s not at all unusual to find bowls, beads, bags, and notebooks all fashioned from discarded magazines using techniques ranging from bookbinding to Victorian bead-making. Though glossy fashion magazines, of course, are favored for all the colorful pictures and ads, when it comes to individual titles, there’s only one magazine that “owns the category,” as they say. There’s National Geographic and then there’s everyone else. Take a quick look on Etsy and you’ll find envelopes, stickers, notebooks, and yards of garlands, all repurposed from Nat Geos of both yesteryear and today.

It’s hard to say exactly what it is about the brand (I’m sure it’s been case studied) that always made National Geographic the magazine you never threw out. Perhaps it was color photography at a time when the world was black and white--or the incredible maps, or the yellow spines. Or even the authoritative title, which no focus group would ever rate as catchy or memorable. One physical quality that probably contributed to its staying power could be, literally, its physical staying power. Unlike many other early-mid 20^th Century magazines that simply crumbled with age, National Geographic didn’t fall apart, or disintegrate in quite the same way. And in groups, the enduring tablet-like form factor has always lent itself to such satisfying stacks.

Over the years National Geographic has won a National Magazine Award in probably every award category for which it is eligible, including Magazine of the Year, which it won last year. So even though it has absolutely no need for nonawards of my own conjuring, it will always remain the top spot-holder of the non-category, “Most Repurposed.”

Spiral notebook

Map-covered school chair/desk

Stickers

Beads

Earrings

Envelopes

Garland

Garlands

Hang tags

Woven coasters

Picture frame

Wallet

Collaged handmade sketchbook

Pine cone ornament

Gift wrapping

The iconic yellow magazines as decor

Elle Decor via Interior and Architecture Ideas

Frank McMahon: Visual Journalist

Talk about witnessing history! The journalistic career of Franklin McMahon, took him everywhere from Mission Control to watch the first moon landing, to the Chicago Eight trial, to the Watergate hearings, the Vatican, and the inner workings of the European Common Market. McMahon, who died Saturday at age 90, recorded it all with a pencil and sketchpad.

In 1955, Life magazine hired McMahon to cover the Emmett Till trial in Mississippi. Till was the black teenager visiting from Chicago who, after whistling at a white woman, was taken from his uncle’s home in the middle of the night and brutally murdered. McMahon recorded visual snippets of testimony and he captured the truly historic moment of Till’s uncle being the first black person to testify against a white person in Mississippi. (The white male defendants, who were acquitted by the white, male jury, later admitted to the killing for a paid magazine story.)

Read about McMahon’s life and the global reach of his journalistic pursuits in his Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame bio.

At the end of the New York Times obit, there is an attempt to define exactly who this man, with no definable job category, was. First there’s a paragraph describing what he was not, and then McMahon gives us what I think, is a perfect definition of a visual journalist.

Mr. McMahon insisted he was not a courtroom artist, although he was widely praised for his coverage of the Chicago Eight … He also said he was not an illustrator, although he was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame. He was definitely not a portraitist, he said, because he never met his subjects. “I sit in the corner and make drawings of them,” he said.

And he even rejected the label of artist, though his work has been shown at many museums, including the Smithsonian. What he was, he said, was simply a reporter, who used art to tell stories.

Slideshow of Franklin McMahon's work at Chicago Reader