His hand could be discerned virtually everywhere – opening titles, epilogues, advertising, posters, trailers, the accompanying record sleeves, and as with his other work, he captured, summed up and expressed the essence of the picture in resonant images. In 1960 alone, Bass did the titles for Exodus, Psycho, Ocean's 11 and Spartacus.
Fortunately, directors such as Preminger (with whom Bass worked on 13 pictures), Wilder and Hitchcock were gaining personal power and saw new ways of enhancing their work. The earliest are from a time when the major studios, then in decline, had little interest in titles. Roughly half the book is devoted to cinema, the most interesting part concerning the film titles of which there are an astonishing 70 examples. This superbly designed book, with its 1,480 illustrations, is a work of filial piety on the part of their daughter Jennifer Bass, herself a graphic designer, in collaboration with the design historian Pat Kirkham.
She'd met Saul around the time he created Saul Bass & Associates in 1956, married him in 1961 and worked with him until his death in 1996. In this his collaborator was to become his second wife, Elaine, a fellow New Yorker seven years his junior who'd sung in an Andrews Sisters-style group with her older sisters before turning to commercial art and relocating to Hollywood. The answer proved to be film-making: imaginative documentaries, a single feature film (the rarely seen SF picture Phase IV, made in Britain in 1974), and pre-eminently title sequences for other directors' work on which he sometimes received the credit of "visual consultant".
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He was obviously looking for a more creative outlet for his talents than the lucrative commissions for trademarks, corporate logos, letterheads, TV commercials and packaging for which he was in constant demand. In photographs from the 1950s the cheerfully serious Bass, with his open moon-face and horn-rimmed spectacles, looks like his Bronx contemporary, the playwright Neil Simon. He became a regular participant in conferences on design, expounding his beliefs, originally inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement and the Bauhaus, about the way society could be transformed ethically by the aesthetic improvement of the environment. Soon he was doing chevrons for aircraft tails, posters for Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux, covers for Art & Architecture and LP sleeves such as the classic Tone Poems of Color for Sinatra. His career rapidly took off in a city that was emerging as a vital centre of modernism in architecture and design, awash with rich clients and sponsors. In 1946 Bass was invited to join a major advertising company in Los Angeles whose accounts included TWA and Paramount. And are, in a certain sense, thinking made visible." Trademarks are usually metaphors of one kind or another.
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Kepes focused Bass's ideas about modernism, psychology and the social responsibility of designers, and he was to become one of the most articulate members of his profession, a man who did pro bono work for organisations such as the Girl Scouts of America, Human Rights Watch and the Special Olympics, and was later to say: "The ideal trademark is one that is pushed to its utmost limits in terms of abstraction and ambiguity, yet is still readable. The decisive influence came in 1944 when the great Hungarian émigré designer, theorist and Bauhaus devotee György Kepes, then teaching in Brooklyn, became his mentor.
One of his early assignments was churning out posters for Warner Brothers movies 36 years later he designed the new worldwide logo for Warner Communications. Growing up in the Depression, he had to leave school at 16 to work in an advertising agency, attending art classes in the evening. Among the most notable of the latter is the fascinating subject of this sumptuous book, the prolific Saul Bass, who became famous, influential and a source of universal pleasure through what was virtually a sideline, his groundbreaking credit titles for Hollywood movies, starting in 1954 with Otto Preminger's Carmen Jones.īass was born in the largely Jewish New York borough of the Bronx in 1920 to working-class Russian-Jewish immigrants, who encouraged his early interest in and flair for the arts. In the visual arts the Modern Movement achieved serious popular acceptance, spreading out from the galleries into everyday life through the work of graphic designers. The books that fuelled the revolution of the 1960s – The Organization Man, The Power Elite, The Hidden Persuaders, The Affluent Society – appeared in this decade, as did Ginsberg's Howl and Kerouac's On the Road. In fact this was a period of considerable liveliness and innovation. T he 1950s in America are widely regarded as an era of dull conformity.
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