By Joyce Wieland

Cover of True Patriot Love/ Véritable amour patriotique

Joyce Wieland created True Patriot Love/ Véritable amour patriotique to accompany her 1971 landmark show of the same name at the National Gallery of Canada, but the book is far more than an exhibition catalogue. A complete departure from traditional gallery publications, True Patriot Love/ Véritable amour patriotique is an artwork in itself and a manifesto for national unity.

Created only months after Canada’s FLQ crisis, Wieland set out to produce an object whose pages give a feel for her exhibition’s environment. As well, it incites readers to understand the need for a new Canadian vocabulary rooted in art.

Wieland wanted True Patriot Love/ Véritable amour patriotique to resemble an official publication so she had Pierre Théberge, the exhibition’s curator (later he would become the director of the National Gallery), take her to a printer of government documents, where she found the book Illustrated Flora of the Arctic Archipelago. Then, in an act of reinterpretation, Wieland augmented the contents of Illustrated Flora by layering onto its pages both images of her own art—many of which were on show in her National Gallery exhibition—as well as iconic Canadian scenes created by others.

These elements include photographs of the Canadian landscape, the artist Tom Thompson, the Parliament buildings in winter, and Wieland herself re-enacting Laura Secord’s heroic walk during the War of 1812. Also included are reproductions of Group of Seven paintings, the artist’s handwritten poems and songs, and manuscript pages for The Far Shore, Wieland’s first feature film. On some pages, Wieland left intact the original text and illustrations for Illustrated Flora of the Arctic Archipelago; on others pages she inserted handwritten marginalia in both French and English.

A silk Canadian flag was sewn into every copy of True Patriot Love/ Véritable amour patriotique. They can be found in the front of the book, opposite its title page. At the back of True Patriot Love/ Véritable amour patriotique is an interview printed on a poster-sized piece of stock that is folded and neatly tucked into a pocket on inside of the book’s rear cover. Printed on the sheet is a conversation between Wieland, her husband Michael Snow, and Théberge.

The dialogue, which takes place in French and English, is a three-way discussion on nationalism and art. In it Wieland is emphatic that about the goal of her book and exhibition: art must be used to unify the nation’s citizens. Then, as she puts it, “the energy in people coming together would release the country from its fate.”

Joyce Wieland

Spread from True Patriot Love/ Véritable amour patriotique

Spread from True Patriot Love/ Véritable amour patriotique

Spread from True Patriot Love/ Véritable amour patriotique

By Brassaï, with an introduction by Paul Morand, 1933

Cover of the first edition of Paris by Night, published in 1933 by Art et Metiers Graphiques. The book is 250 x 190 mm and spiral-bound. Copies of the first edition sell for approximately $5000 dollars.

Before the publication of Paris by Night no one had heard of the concept of night photography. That is until Gyula Halász (1899-1984), a child of Hungarian Transylvania, who went by the pseudonym “Brassaï,” (meaning “from Brassó,” after the city of his birth,) set out at dusk with his camera.

In the early 1920s, Brassaï, who studied painting and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, lived and worked as a journalist in Paris. Captivated by the beauty of his adopted city’s streets and gardens in rain and mist, and in particular after sunset, he started making photographs of its nearly emptied avenues. Influenced by the photographers Eugène Atget and fellow Hungarian André Kertész, Brassaï was inspired to become a photographer because he had a desire “to translate all things that enchanted me in the nocturnal Paris I was experiencing,” as he later wrote.

But as Paul Morand explains in his introduction to Paris by Night, for Brassai, “La nuit n’est pas le négatif du jour.” In other words, the night is not the negative of the day, a viewpoint that makes the photographer’s first book so extraordinary. For Brassaï, the Parisian night revealed a very different world: one of outsiders existing on the exterior of convention. Paris by Night begins and ends with images of the cobble stones that pave the boulevards and alleys of France’s capital and takes the reader through a provocative array of characters, including gangsters, courtesans, and exotic entertainers. To record his scenes Brassaï visited his sitters on several occasions until his face became familiar to them. To prove to those who disbelieved that photography in the dark was possible, he carried a number of prints in his pocket.

Paris by Night is also remarkable for the ethereal quality that Brassaï gave his photographs. Working on a folding 6 × 9 cm Voigtländer Bergheil plate camera, Brassaï experimented with extended-time exposures and unusual vantage points to create dream-like scenes of his city’s geography and monuments, including the Seine River and views from Notre Dame Cathedral. Upon its publication, Paris by Night created a sensation because of its beauty and risqué content. Yet the book was much admired and when the writer Henry Miller called Brassaï “the eye of Paris,” the description stuck. Brassaï remains the most celebrated photographer of France’s capital, while no artist has made more iconic images of the city than those found in Paris by Night.

Brassaï scoured the avenues and alleys of Paris, capturing its geography and its inhabitants in his moody, gritty photographs.

By Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, 1968

The front cover of The Medium Is the Massage

When The Medium Is the Massage was published in 1968 it was derided for having too few words per page and no table of contents. Yet it wasn’t long before the edition became a landmark of contemporary book design.

Unlike other illustrated books of its time, which followed the convention of having a designer create a visual layout based on a writer’s manuscript, The Medium Is the Massage not only had no manuscript, its concept was initiated by a designer. The book is a visual interpretation of the words of Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) by Quentin Fiore (b. 1920), a self-taught designer who had attended the New Bauhaus in Chicago. Using aphoristic passages of McLuhan’s writings from previous publications, Fiore presented the communication theorist’s prose on individual spreads with accompanying artwork. Influenced by the work of Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, English painter and author Wyndham Lewis, and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, Fiore imbued the pages of The Medium Is the Massage with the energy of magazine spreads and storyboards, while radically altering traditional hierarchies of images and captions, texts and illustrations.

Fiore felt that such a treatment was critical to convey McLuhan’s ideas, explaining that the book “had to convey the spirit, the populist outcry of the time, in an appropriate form.” As the designer explained, “The ‘linearity’ of the average book wouldn’t work. The medium, after all, was the message!” Fiore’s instincts paid off. The Medium Is the Massage was first published by Bantam, which issued an initial printing in paperback. (Random House released a larger hardbound version of the book.) International editions quickly followed and The Medium Is the Massage became McLuhan’s best-selling publication. McLuhan acknowledged Fiore’s immense role in the creation of The Medium Is the Massage, permitting the designer’s name to appear alongside his on the book’s front cover as a co-author.

P

For more reading see:
“McLuhan/Fiore: Massaging the Message,” in Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller, Design Writing Research: Writing on Graphic Design

Links:
The official site of Marshall McLuhan: www.marshallmcluhan.com
Marshall McLuhan on YouTube

Three spreads from The Medium Is the Massage, which was conceived as a visual interpretation of Marshall McLuhan’s theories.

By Diana Vreeland with Christopher Hemphill, 1980

The front cover of Allure, first published by Doubleday & Company in 1980. Underneath the book’s dust jacket, the book boasts red linen cloth boards embossed with Diana Vreeland’s initials. The book is 11” x 15” and 208 pages.

“A good photograph was never what I was looking for. I like to have a point.” –Diana Vreeland

Allure is the book that explains why Diana Vreeland (1903-1989) was a style-icon for most of the twentieth century. While working as a fashion editor for Harper’s Bazaar, where she started in 1936, and then as Editor-in-Chief of Vogue from 1963-1971 Vreeland set about reinventing the job of publishing fashion photography. Before her, as the legendary taste-maker explained, “the fashion editor was a society lady putting hats on other society ladies.”

In other words, before Vreeland, fashion layouts were more like catalogue pages where conventional beauties wore the latest styles. But Vreeland, an original (to whom designers offered their clothing and accessories in exchange for only her visibility in them) knew elegance has nothing to do with being well dressed. As she stated, elegance is innate and “Elegance is refusal.”

So instead of filling her magazines’ pages with what she described as “démodé so-called society,” Vreeland made her mark by demonstrating the allure of ravishing personalities and the indescribable essence of what makes someone chic. For Vreeland allure was a quality that exists and holds us… “Whether it’s a gaze or a glance in the street or a face in a crowd or someone sitting opposite you at lunch…,” she explained. “Like a perfume or…a memory…it pervades…you are held.”

In Vreeland’s hands, the fashion layout became all about popularizing an attitude. She created a two-page spread of a nude female lying face down in the sand, her behind covered by a large black straw hat. Its caption read, “Spend the summer under a big black sailor.” As the photographer Richard Avedon explains it, Vreeland’s approach to fashion started, “a totally new profession.”

To create captivating fashion images, the most spectacular of which are featured in Allure, Vreeland hired the century’s greatest photographers­­–among them Horst, Adolf de Meyer, Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Irving Penn, and Edward Steichen. Their pictures of such celebrated personalities as Greta Garbo, Rudolf Nureyev, Marilyn Monroe, Maria Callas, the Duchess of Windsor, and Josephine Baker define Vreeland’s concept of the glamorous and elusive quality of allure and reveal how one woman revolutionized fashion.

For more on Vreeland, see “The Devine Mrs V” by Eleanor Dwight, published October 28, 2002 in New York Magazine

For an interview with Vreeland from 1980 go here

Diana Vreeland

Spread from Allure

Spread from Allure