Header photo of Hugh Hefner (left) and Art Paul (right) from “Art Paul Of Playboy” (above)
A few years before Art Paul died in 2018 at 93 years old, I hosted an AIGA conversation with him at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Rumors had circulated that there could be a protest over his long relationship with Playboy, the magazine that so vividly represented the postwar male gaze. I was worried that Paul—who was inducted into the Art Directors Hall of Fame in 1986, and who I held in high regard as an innovative American art director—would be disrespected. As it turned out, other than a few informative exchanges and questions about the magazine’s more controversial content, Paul was eloquent in talking about Playboy‘s origins and his personal evolution as a Bauhaus-influenced artist and self-taught art director.
It was a historic biographical event of which there does not seem to be a recording. With design history in the throes of a long-discussed canonical revision, it is worth revisiting the 2018 film ART PAUL OF PLAYBOY: The Man Behind the Bunny, a documentary produced by Jamie Ceasar and directed by Jian Ping that addresses the impact of an influential force on magazine art direction, photography, page layout and illustration, coincident with the postwar golden age of magazine and, by extension, social, artistic and cultural upheavals.
The essay below is adapted from my 2017 book Graphic Design Rants and Raves (Allworth Press).
When Playboy premiered in 1953 it attacked an ossified culture. It may not be politically correct today, but back then it enabled men to experience sexuality free from prudish mores and pre-emptive censorship. It said sex was not unsavory or taboo. Hugh Hefner, who had briefly worked in the promotion department of Esquire (a tamer but no less controversial American men’s magazine), invented a publication that would seismically alter the form and content of all magazines, and in the bargain incite something of a cultural revolution.
Hefner believed that men had the right to fantasize about being libidinous rogues who listened to cool jazz, drank dry martinis, drove imported sports cars, maintained hip bachelor pads. Through the magazine he contrived a culture that encouraged hedonistic and narcissistic behavior on the one hand, and social and political awareness on the other. But Hef, as he was known, did not accomplish this alone. His message would not have been so broadly accepted if not for Playboy’s innovative graphic approach developed by art director Arthur Paul, a former Chicago Bauhaus (Institute of Design) student. In the calculus of success, much was riding on Playboy’s premiere (Hefner invested his last dime and used his furniture as collateral to raise the initial $8,000). If it looked the least bit tawdry—like nudist magazines —the project would be doomed.
If Hefner had not enticed Paul to become the magazine’s founding art director, it is possible that Playboy could have languished in a netherworld between pulp and porn. At the time that Hef was introduced to Paul, the magazine was titled Stag Party (after a 1930s book of ribald cartoons titled Stag at Eve) and the initial dummy (designed by cartoonist R. Miller) looked like a movie star/screen magazine with cheesecake photos and puerile cartoons (a few of them drawn by Hef himself).
“I was looking for a magazine that was as innovative in its illustration and design as it was in its concept,” Hefner recalled in an interview. “We came out of a period where magazine illustration was inspired by Norman Rockwell and variations on realism and I was much more influenced by abstract art of the early 1950s and by Picasso. I was looking for something that combined less realistic and more innovative art with magazine illustration.”
Paul studied with Moholy Nagy at the Institute of Design from 1946–1950. He was a serious designer/illustrator, and initially reluctant to join the fledgling magazine. He had a child on the way and needed security that he did not believe was possible with anything as speculative as this. But Hefner seduced him with promises.
The original inspiration for the magazine, says Hefner, came from The New Yorker of the 1920s and Esquire of the 1930s. Since Hefner was raised in a Midwestern Methodist home with puritan parents, “I believe that my life and the magazine were a response to that, and a direct reaction to the fact that after World War II, I expected the period to be a reprise of the roaring twenties. But It wasn’t. It was a very politically and socially repressive time. Even the skirt lengths went down instead of up, which I saw as a sign. So, the magazine was an attempt to recapture the fantasy of my adolescence.”
Paul embraced Hefner’s concept, but he was not pleased by the Stag title. “We made up a list of names that suggested the bachelor life,” Hefner explained. “Playboy [originally the title of a ’20s literary magazine] was in disuse at that point and reflected back on an earlier era, particularly back on the ’20s—I liked that connection.” Paul proceeded to develop a format that reconciled nude photography with the sophisticated fiction and nonfiction that became hallmarks of the Playboy formula. For Hefner, Playboy was a mission to influence the mores and lifestyle of men; for Paul it was a laboratory that turned into a model of contemporary magazine design and illustration.
Anticipating the first issue “I took on the challenge in broad strokes,” Paul recalled. “I said to myself, ‘this is a men’s magazine; I want it to look masculine. I want it to be as strong as I can make it.’ But I had tremendous limitations with the printing—the printers were doing us a favor by fitting us in. I was very limited in the number of typefaces and ended up using Stymie.” The slab serif Egyptian was a perfect fit being quirky yet bold. It worked well as a logo. For the interior of the magazine Paul employed white space to counterbalance the limited color availability of the first few issues.
The cover of the premier issue was critical. Only two colors were available. But conceptually, nothing could be more seductive than the photograph of Marilyn Monroe (a press photo of her in a parade waving to the crowd, which Paul silhouetted) next to the headline:
“First Time in any magazine
FULL COLOR
the famous
MARILYN MONROE
NUDE.”
For a couple of hundred dollars Hefner obtained the centerfold photograph of Marilyn Monroe before she became a sex goddess from the John Baumgart calendar company. As for the absence of multiple colors on the cover, Paul noted that it was a problem that turned into an asset: “I looked at magazines in a way I never had looked before. I found out how ours would be displayed, and I saw the other magazines it would have to compete with. Most used big heads and a lot of color and type. I felt that ours would have to be simple, and so using the black-and-white photo with a little red on the logo was a plus, because it stood out no matter where it was displayed.”
Paul initially wanted the logo on the cover to be small and in a variable rather than a fixed position, which meant he could move it around. Years later, however, it was locked in at the top. “Some of the more innovative covers happened in the early years,” Paul admits, when he could freely use the logo as a conceptual element—and when he had more conceptual license to manipulate the models. Paul’s Playboy covers were driven not by licentious half-nude women, but by witty ideas and visual puns, which included its trademark bunny. Paul based all his cover concepts around different ways to inject the bunny into the design. Covers became games that challenged the reader to find the trademark wherever it was hiding, whether it was placed on a tie clasp, or fashioned from the legs and torso of a cover model.
Nobody could have predicted how world-famous the Playboy rabbit would become. Hefner wanted a mascot from the outset; Paul’s then-wife made a nascent bunny out of fabric for a cover. By the third issue, Paul’s original drawing of the bunny in profile is what became the “empire’s logo.”
Despite the predictable moral outrage in certain quarters, a large number of men (and an untold number of adolescent boys) flocked to the sign of the bunny. Yet Paul argues that while sex was a significant part of the entire package, it was not a sex magazine, per se. He saw Playboy more as a lifestyle magazine, or as the subtitle said, “Entertainment for Men.” Hefner wanted to present sex as a common occurrence, not a prurient taboo. By the end of the first year Hef began to take his own photographs. “The first centerfold was in the December 1954 issue, but it was early in the following year when we got what I was looking for, a natural setting that looked less like a calendar and more moody.” The important breakthrough came in shots of Janet Pilgrim, Playboy’s subscription manager, who Hefner was dating at the time. In the picture Hef is in the background in a tuxedo with his back turned, while Pilgrim prepares herself at the vanity, powdering her nose for a date. “I was trying to personalize it,” says Hefner about the notion that nudity had to be connected to “art” or be considered obscene.
Paul’s photographic contribution was to inject simple male-oriented objects, like a pipe or slippers, in order to underscore a human element—or to give the girls “a smell,” as the painter Richard Lindner once said about Playboy’s photography. But Paul was less interested in nudes than the other aspects of the magazine, where he made a more meaningful impact as an art director. This included feature page design and illustration.
His first love was illustration. Paul admired both Norman Rockwell and Michelangelo but admits a preference for the former, reasoning that “fine artists like Michelangelo were in dusty art history books, but the commercial illustrators like Norman Rockwell were on the shiny new covers of The Saturday Evening Post.” As Paul became more professionally attuned he was increasingly perturbed by the distinctions made by critics between fine and applied art, which reduced illustration to uninspired formulas. Playboy art was resolutely eclectic, drawing from surrealist, pop art and post-pop schools. The fine art alumni included such known painters and sculptors as Salvador Dali, Larry Rivers, George Segal, Tom Wesselman, Ed Paschke, James Rosenquist, Roger Brown, Alfred Leslie and Karl Wirsum. And Paul frequently published (and boosted the careers of) many top commercial illustrators, including Paul Davis, Brad Holland, Cliff Condak, Robert Weaver, Don Ivan Punchatz and Tomi Ungerer.
Despite Playboy’s substantive contribution to art and design, it must nonetheless be credited with promoting negative stereotypes, including false notions of beauty. Some have argued that Paul was complicit as art director. Yet such criticism must be balanced. For in the ’50s and ’60s sexuality was a new frontier—and bucking taboos was a political statement. Moreover, Playboy’s imitators, including Rogue, Swank and Cavalier, offered unprecedented opportunities to designers and illustrators (some of them women) that were not available in other media. Playboy’s legacy is not just rabid (or rabbit) sexploitation; it was an entity that aggressively attacked a repressive culture while it settled into a new status quo.
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