:: Slice of Life Media ::

George Lois: Life and Work

Everything begins with the word, especially with George Lois, an art director by craft, an advertising man by profession. He has stretched the limits of his craft and challenged the ways of his profession by using pictures as words, words as pictures, and pictures with words as no creative personality before him. He has pushed the role of art director from artisan of design to the shaper of ideas. He is probably America's most resourceful art director and surely its most prolific

His 1963 Esquire cover of Sonny Liston as Santa Claus (note the prehistoric year) has been called "one of the greatest social statements of the plastic arts since Picasso's Guernica."

His 1969 campaign for Braniff gave to the language, for better or worse, "When you got it, flaunt it!"

His passionate, volunteer 1975 battle for Rubin Hurricane Carter made Lois a lightning rod that drew down bolts of criticism from friends and colleagues and clients. Disarming, disturbing work that keeps piercing the curtain of communications overkill.

An exhibition of George Lois' Esquire covers is online at the New York Museum of Modern Art. http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/72

(Biographical detail extracted from the Art Directors Hall of Fame)