For Bjarne Martin Pedersen, everything in life matters, whether it’s sweeping a floor or designing a magazine. In fact, one of the most important lessons he learned about design was while sweeping sawdust off the floor as an apprenticing laborer for an old-world Norwegian carpenter in the 1950s. “I learned a work ethic,” he recalls.…

Even as a teenager, Art Paul had rebellious notions about what an illustrator should paint and what a painter should illustrate. He could not accept the distinction between “high art” and “low art” and admiredNorman Rockwelland Michelangelo equally. So frequently did he argue with his high school art teacher that he was amazed when she…

Art Spiegelman has, according to theLA Weekly, almost single-handedly brought comic books out of the toy closet and onto the literature shelves. In 1992 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his masterful Holocaust narrativeMaus, which portrayed Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. The twoMausbooks have been translated into over 25 languages, and the work…

Art Kane was fascinated by snakes and fairy tale illustrations. He was the first Boy Scout in the Bronx to get a Reptile Study merit badge (he owned 32 snakes) and he wanted to be aNorman Rockwellor N.C. Wyeth when he grew up. Drafted after his first semester at Cooper Union, he volunteered for a…

Arnold Varga approached advertising as a personal art form. In spite of the fact that he had almost no serious art training and conducted almost all of his professional life within a few miles of his hometown, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, Varga gained international recognition and was honored with eleven gold medals from the Art Directors Club…

Arnold Bank, 77, of Oakland, Pennsylvania, died of a stroke in Montefiore Hospital (Pittsburgh PA) on Sunday, February 16, 1983. Mr. Bank was a retired Carnegie-Mellon University design professor and an internationally renowned calligrapher. He achieved prominence as a calligrapher by lettering the inscription of a memorial to John D. Rockefeller Jr. at New York…

Annie Leibovitzs witty, powerful portraits have been appearing on magazine covers for more than twenty-five years. In that time she has become one of the worlds most celebrated photographers. Beginning with her legendary work forRolling Stone, and continuing through her long affiliation withVanity FairandVogue, she has established herself as an astute observer of American popular…

Andy Warhol painted a series of Coca-Cola paintings in 1960. He worked in a succession of approaches, starting with Abstract Expressionist and ending with a clean, graphic style that looked more like an illustration than a painting. He showed the series to four friends from the art world. They all preferred the final approach. The…

A graphic arts master whose protean career forms a bridge from the beginnings of modern graphic design to the present, Andr Franois was born November 9, 1915 in Timisoara, a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that shortly afterwards became Romania. He briefly attended the Beaux-Arts school in Budapest before moving to Paris to study with…

I was born during the Great Depression, on June 4, 1932. And, if that wasn’t enough, it had to happen in Detroit. Both my parents emigrated from small towns in central Italy (about sixty miles apart in the province of Abruzzi) and found each other in the City of Wheels. To my great joy, they…