FW04542: Anthology of Central & South American Indian Music

Q: Can you give me a short description of yourself?

A: I am 43 years old. An educator, entrepreneur and collector.

 
How did you come to meet Ronald?

About 15 years ago I was a customer of a tribal art bookstore in NYC called OAN (Oceanie Afrique Noire). Ron was also a client and the young lady who ran the store thought I would enjoy visiting Ron and seeing his collection of Melanesian Art from New Guinea and Vanuatu. She passed along his phone number and I arranged to visit him at the first opportunity.

 
You have talked about him being a hugely influential figure in your life. Can you say why?

I met Ron at the beginning of my adult life and career. I was just discovering the world of art and design.

When I first visited him in Brooklyn I was blown away by his refined taste, style and drive for perfection in everything that surrounded him. What became quickly apparent was, despite a 40-year age gap, how much we had in common with regard to personal interests and passions beyond New Guinea art.

We were both hi-fi and music enthusiasts, Ron designed his living room to be acoustically excellent for music and appreciating the masterpieces of Melanesian art he had been lucky enough to collect.

We liked the same modern painters and furniture designers. I greatly admire the furniture design of Poul Kjaerholm and Ron and his wife owned several Kjaerholm pieces including stools, lounge chairs and a coffee table.

Ron changed my life by giving me the confidence to trust my decisions and direction in life. He encouraged me to examine all the books about New Guinea art as carefully as possible, and especially to study the photographic images. He also warned me not to put too much stock in the written texts, since many of the authors ‘don’t know what they’re talking about.’ The most important thing for Ron was to look for artistic merit in an individual piece, not the age or provenance. Ron’s passion for New Guinea art was driven by appreciation of artistic merit. He approached New Guinea art with the same perfectionist spirit that informed all his choices. As an intellectually curious man, he was interested in the culture of Melanesian peoples. The pieces he most appreciated were for aesthetic criteria that are universal.

 
We tend to think of him as ‘just a graphic designer’ – but of course he had a wide range of interests. Can you talk about some of these?

Ron was obsessed with hi-fi. He subscribed to all the magazines and read them religiously. He was particularly interested in loudspeaker design, because it is the biggest challenge in the audio chain. Unlike an ‘audiophile’ who is mainly interested in equipment, Ron was a music lover with expansive knowledge of many forms of music. He spent several hours a day in the living room listening to music and looking at books.

He liked going out to eat and to the movies with his wife, Hortense. Whenever I saw him or we spoke on the phone he always had a good movie recommendation.

He was a very intellectually curious person. He introduced me to incredible Baroque music, recorded by perfectionist European record labels like Astree and Alia Vox. I probably would not have discovered these on my own. Ron also loved Indian classical music (and food). For Ron, the great 20th century orchestral masterworks did not stand the test of time. He preferred music from the Renaissance and Baroque periods.

Ron was adamant that jazz never improved beyond King Oliver, this was one of his few opinions I could not embrace.

FW04581: Primitive Music of the World

Ronald has spoken about his joy at finding a client like Mo Asche at Folkways and the freedom he was given, did he talk much about his work with Folkways?

He told me the same things about working with Folkways that he mentioned in the Smithsonian video interviews. He felt Mo Asche found the perfect designer for his jackets because of Ron’s intellectual interest in world culture. He definitely appreciated the creative freedom he was given a great deal.

He shared humorous stories about going to Asche’s office to be paid. Apparently attorneys from the Internal Revenue Service routinely threatened to arrest Asche for non-payment of taxes. Ron said Asche would scream at the IRS people that he was performing a public service and therefore should not be obliged to pay taxes.

 
Within the graphic design world he is a rather shadowy figure. He doesn’t seem to have joined any of the graphic design ‘communities’ or sought to have his work seen in competitions or awards brochures. Was there a sense in which he saw himself as an outsider?

Ron was so confident in his taste and judgement I doubt it ever occurred to him to seek out the approval of a trade organization or his peers. He was proud of the awards and acknowledgment his work received, but he obviously did not need ovations or accolades to give him confidence. He had the album flat for FW36050 (featured in the Unit Editions publication) on the wall next to the bookcase and mentioned to me he had won a trade award for the design.

I know he was amused when the Folkways album cover exhibition was being organized in Canada, but he felt no need to see it himself. When a British fan contacted him with an invitation to a horror convention, (for some iconic book jacket designs early in his career) he declined. He mentioned this to me several times so I know he was gratified for the acknowledgement.

Ron knew exactly what he liked and was a perfectionist and individualist. He liked meaningful, genuine conversation and completely lacked pretension or superficiality. He was very intense and particular, unless you shared his passions there would probably not be much opportunity for dialogue.

He must have believed his work spoke for itself. He did not feel the need to add any further explanation. He was an outsider in the sense that he always sought perfection in his own world, and knew exactly what he liked. That goal put him at odds with an outside world overflowing with mediocrity.

FW09786: Stories & Poems of New Guinea

Can you tell me anything about the house he designed for himself and Hortense?

The house is a space for the art collection, his appreciation for design and hi-fi. Every element is carefully considered down to the smallest details, with nothing unnecessary. He even painted the nails holding his art pieces the same colour as the wall.

The house is located on a quiet street in Brooklyn Heights, a beautiful historic neighbourhood. When Ron bought the lot I think he was ahead of the curve realizing how great the location was. Essentially you have a beautiful, modern, minimalist residence set amongst surrounding brick colonial row houses.

Purity and minimalism were very important for Ron. And this is evident in his graphic design work, the furniture he designed for his home and his surroundings. He often said it is much more challenging to make something minimally, because if there are any errors they will be readily apparent.

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Steven Frost notes: the three album jackets shown above were selected by Ron. The latter two featuring pieces from his collection. The middle jacket is Ron’s Iatmul housepost, a masterpiece of monumental New Guinea art. It is illustrated in Oceanic Art (Kaeppler, Newton, Kaufman). The latter jacket is life size Asmat sculpture of a male ancestor, formerly in Ron’s collection

Steven Frost’s website

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You can order Design/Research 01 – Ronald Clyne at Folkways. Anthology of Folkways album cover art featuring the work of Ronald Clyne (1925—2006) here.

Form 03

In 2008, I was shown four copies of a magazine called Form, by the designer Mason Wells. I was intrigued, but I could find no mention of Form in any of the standard textbooks. I noted that the magazine had three editors and that one of the trio – Philip Steadman – was also the publisher. I also noticed that no designer was credited.
Today, Philip Steadman is Professor of Urban and Built Form Studies at University College London. He trained as an architect, and has taught at Cambridge and the Open University.

I emailed him and received a warm reply thanking me for taking an interest in Form. He said that he had been the magazine’s co-editor, publisher and designer.

I told him that I wanted to write about Form and he kindly agreed to be interviewed. The conversation below was conducted in his office shortly before Christmas 2009.

Form 10

Q: I’d like to start by asking you how you came to have an interest in graphic design?

A: I was a student in Cambridge. Well, perhaps I should go back even further because my interest in typography started at school. I was at Winchester and an old boy gave the school a printing press and some type and they didn’t know what to do with it. I decided, along with a good friend of mine called Alex Reid, to do something with this printing press. So we printed a book of prayers for the college.

 
What period are we talking about?

This was in the early 1960s. One of the magazines we were involved with [Cambridge Opinion] was about serious social issues. It was designed by Alex. I don’t know where we learnt about typography. Both of us worked for a time at a printers in Winchester when we were doing magazines, as well as our own press work. I suppose we learnt about graphic design informally, through the kind of architectural route, through architectural and design magazines. We never had any formal training.

Later I got involved in another magazine. It was called Image and it was originally a sort of photojournalism publication. It was our attempt to do a Picture Post, that sort of thing. The design was done by my friend Alex, and then I took over.

Cambridge Opinion

Image

Would you say that Image was a precursor of Form?

Yes. I suppose the other side of my involvement in the magazine was that I was interested in contemporary art, and I was particularly interested in Kinetic Art and Concrete Poetry which were two big movements back then. I got to know Stephen Bann and Mike Weaver, who were the two other editors of Form, in connection with an arts society we had in the University.

 
In addition to being the joint editor and the publisher – you were also the designer.

Yes, by that point I was quite far into my architecture studies, so I’d absorbed a bit about Swiss design. But I don’t remember anything conscious about it.

 
I am intrigued to see that you never took a design credit in Form. Was that deliberate?

No. In fact I remember looking through some correspondence and I found a letter from someone rather distinguished, and he said, I wondered who you got to design this?

 
Were you aware of Neue Grafik?

Yes, and there was another magazine, the Ulm bulletin, and if you know Ulm you’ll see that Form is pretty closely modeled on it. It used Helvetica and white space. But I had my own ideas; I wanted the magazine to be square for example. Our plan was to keep publishing it until we made a perfect cube when all the issues were stacked one on top of another.

Neue Grafik

When I first came across the magazine, I was struck by the design – and in many ways the content, too – which seemed to be the mirror opposite of what was going on in 1960s Britain at the time. Back then there was an obsession with American pop culture and later with psychedelic art. How did Form’s Modernist design avoid being diluted by what was happening back then?

The design of the magazine reflects the fact that I was trained as a modern architect at Cambridge School of Architecture and it was pretty straight stuff. You have to remember that it was the early 1960s, and at that point the major reaction against modernism had not set in. That was to come later. There was also right wing criticism of the perceived leftish tendencies of modern architecture, but that too came a bit later.

At that point, for us, Modernism was just the received wisdom. To give you a bit of a flavour of the period, we copied out quotations from Le Corbusier as though they were sacred texts. We lettered them up. At that point the world of pop culture was emerging. A group of us – architects and architectural students – went down to the old ICA on Dover Street and we heard Lawrence Alloway, Reyner Banham and Eduardo Paolozzi, the beginnings of that American appreciation. We sort of liked it in a way, but we weren’t doing it.

What I do remember is that we were very interested in certain people involved in product design – Braun and Olivetti. We weren’t doing product design, but we followed it and when you set up your student room you’d have your Braun heater and that sort of thing.

 
The magazine lasted for 10 issues, ending in October 1969.

Yes. We never did manage to make our cube. What happened was that it was an enormous work for me. It was for all three of us, but I did the design, I organized the printing and I did the distribution more or less single-handedly. I trekked round the bookshops. We had quite a big mail order side, mainly to University libraries and so on. That became quite onerous and also became quite difficult… I ran out of money basically. We had some university grants, we had Arts Council money, and we had a little bit of advertising. So I think a) we ran out of steam, b) we ran out of money, and c) the three of us had dispersed. And in a way, its moment had passed and we all went our own ways.

—
This is an edited version of a much longer interview published in U:D/R 02 – Space and structure. Looking at Form, a quarterly magazine of the arts (1966—1969). It is available here and from a few selected bookshops.

U:D/R 02 – Space and structure. Looking at Form, a quarterly magazine of the arts (1966—1969)

‘We thought of Form as a kind of neo-modernist publication, devoted to the early avant-garde as well as to the classic American avant-garde deriving from it.’ Philip Steadman, co-editor Form

Not much has escaped the archaeologists of graphic design: zealous bloggers, Flickr hoarders and design historians seem to have found everything there is to find.

Occasionally, however, something goes unnoticed. This is usually because it doesn’t come from the canon of recognised design greats – or because it doesn’t fit into the pattern of the times from which it sprang.

Form, a quarterly magazine published in Great Britain between 1966 and 1969, is one of those misfit artefacts. The co-editor, publisher and designer was Philip Steadman. Today, Philip Steadman is Professor of Urban and Built Form Studies at University College, London. He trained as an architect, and has taught at Cambridge and the Open University. He is the author of books on geometry in architecture, kinetic art and computer-aided design.

Although it only ran for ten issues, Form is an important component in the history of British graphic design: it is remarkable that it should have emerged at a time when Britain had been invaded by Pop Art and the Psychedelic style. But for the young Steadman, steeped in Modernist thinking, to design the magazine in the Swiss style was entirely natural. As an architecture student in the 1960s, Modernism was what he was taught – ‘it was just the received wisdom,’ he notes.

Form’s kinship with Neu Grafik and the Ulm bulletins are plain to see. ‘If you know Ulm you’ll see that Form is pretty closely modelled on it,’ says Professor Steadman. ‘It used Helvetica and white space. But I had my own ideas; I wanted the magazine to be square for example. Our plan was to keep publishing it until we made a perfect cube when all the issues were stacked one on top of another.’

Steadman acquired a love of printing and typography while at school, and apart from a spell working on the short-lived magazine Image, and a stint on the Sunday Times Colour Magazine in its 1960s pomp, he has not worked as a graphic designer.

In a long interview published in U:D/R 02, Professor Steadman discuses his early discovery of graphic design and his time as editor, publisher and designer of Form.

U:D/R 02 – Space and structure. Looking at Form, a quarterly magazine of the arts (1966—1969) is only available from this website and at a few selected shops.

Each paper costs £7.50 including postage. Buy it here.

FW06178

The influence of the record label Folkways on popular music is far reaching. The label was founded by Moses ‘Moe’ Asch (1905—1986) in New York in 1948, with the aim of documenting poetry, field recordings, natural sounds and all kinds of indigenous music. Yet perhaps Folkways’ greatest claim to immortality is that under Asch’s direction it was responsible for recording the artists – many for the first time – who provided the catalyst for the American folk music explosion of the 1950s and 60s.

We only need to look at Bob Dylan to see the impact of Asch’s visionary label. ‘I envisioned myself recording for Folkways Records,’ he wrote in his autobiography Chronicles, Volume One. ‘That was the label that put out all the great records.’

Dylan’s appropriation of dust bowl aesthetics and blues outsiderism – much of it learned from Folkways records – altered the course of popular music. But he wasn’t the only major figure to draw inspiration from the musical heritage curated and preserved by Asch: The Grateful Dead, The Byrds, Ry Cooder, Bruce Springsteen and countless others have ensured that the molecular structure of American folk song lives on in contemporary music.

Even Led Zeppelin came under the influence of Asch’s label: in an interview about the making of Led Zeppelin III, Jimmy Page discussed the inspiration behind the track Gallows Pole: ‘It was a traditional song which stems from Lead Belly,’ he said. Yet Page didn’t find the song on a Lead Belly album. He found it on a Folkways recoding made in 1962 called Twelve-String Guitar: Folk Songs and Blues Song and Played by Fred Gerlach. How many other great records from the 1960s and 70s have their feet buried in the fertile loam of Folkways?

The Folkways catalogue contains over 2000 albums comprising unaccompanied field recordings from the deep South, whaling songs, early country music, bluegrass, sea songs, blues, Zydeco, Native American music, poetry, electronic music, instructional records and, as Asch said, ‘Anything that is sound, from Indonesian folk music to James Joyce reading his own poetry.’

FW07562

FW33583

For many admirers of Folkways, the covers were as evocative as the music itself. They were mainly the work of the graphic designer and illustrator Ronald Clyne (1925—2006). Clyne occupies a unique place in the Folkways story. Between the 1950s and 80s he designed over 500 covers for the label and is largely responsible for its distinctive look.

In a film that can be seen on the Smithsonian website, Clyne emerges as a mild-mannered, self-possessed man. ‘I tried to avoid going to an office,’ he says. ‘My main income was book jackets. They gave me a living and prevented me from going to an advertising studio and doing ads for toothpaste.’ In Moe Asch, Clyne found a patron who enabled him to avoid advertising: ‘Mo Asch asked if I’d do a cover for him. He knew that I was doing record covers for other people. I said sure, I’d be glad to… and he continued giving me more assignments.’

But even more than the regularity of his Folkways assignments, Clyne valued the creative freedom Asch gave him. In a book about Folkways, the writer describes the briefing process: ‘Sometimes Asch provided Clyne with a photograph that he wished to have incorporated into the cover art, but otherwise he rarely interfered or suggested changes.’

This was the autonomy that Clyne craved and why he remained loyal to Asch for over three decades: ‘He never mentioned price,’ said Clyne. ‘He never mentioned how fast I should do them, or what I should do. Nothing like that. Of all the work I’ve done commercially, that’s the one I enjoyed the most because I had freedom.’

FW33437

FW04215

Despite his remarkable track record at Folkways, Clyne doesn’t appear in any of the major graphic design text books. The AIGA website has only a few of his early book jackets in their archive; Meggs doesn’t mention him; and apart from a 2007 exhibition in Australia, he is an ignored figure amongst design historians and commentators.

Why Clyne is neglected is a mystery. It’s impossible to look at his Folkways’ legacy and not see an intelligent and individualistic designer deserving of greater recognition. Anyone who is in any doubt about Clyne’s worth need only look at some of the Folkways sleeves he didn’t design. Few if any of them stand comparison with Clyne’s sensitive formulations of type, image and colour.

Clyne represents the graphic soul of Folkways. And a major factor in his success is that, like all great designers, he had a great client. In Moe Asch, Ronald Clyne discovered the ideal client; and in Clyne, Asch discovered the perfect artist to give form to his remarkable sonic vision.

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The full version of this essay can be found in Unit: Design/Research 01 – Ronald Clyne at Folkways. Anthology of Folkways album cover art featuring the work of Ronald Clyne (1925—2006). It is available here and from a few selected bookshops.

Unit: Design/Research 01–Ronald Clyne at Folkways.
An anthology of Folkways album cover art featuring the work of Ronald Clyne.

Ronald Clyne at Folkways is a 64 page ‘newspaper’ devoted to designer Ronald Clyne’s record covers for the Folkways label. Clyne is one of the undiscovered talents of 20th century graphic design. He doesn’t appear in the textbooks or literature of graphic design. He is a neglected figure. Until now, that is.

Ronald Clyne (1925 – 2006) designed over 500 album covers for Folkways and is largely responsible for the famous label’s striking visual appearance. His distinctive use of two-colour printing on matt paper and his deft use of modernist design strategies, created a body of work that gave the Folkways label its distinctive aroma of integrity and purity.

The influence of the Folkways label on popular music is incalculable. The label was founded in 1948 in New York by Moses ‘Moe’ Asch with the aim of documenting poetry, field recordings, natural sounds and all kinds of indigenous music. As Bob Dylan noted in his autobiography: ‘I envisioned myself recording for Folkways Records. That was the label that put out all the great records.’

Unit: Design/Research 01–Ronald Clyne at Folkways.
Contains over 200 examples of Ronald Clyne’s record covers. Also featured is an extensive essay by Adrian Shaughnessy charting the historical importance of the Folkways label, and offering an assessment of Ronald Clyne’s work. Design is by Spin.

Unit: Design/Research 01–Ronald Clyne at Folkways is only available from this website and a few selected bookshops.

Each paper costs £7.50, including postage. Buy it here.

Watch the random album cover generator and hear the music Ronald Clyne designed for.