Arnold Skolnick, who with just a few days to design what became one of the most famous pop culture images of his time, the poster for the original Woodstock Music Festival in 1969, passed away on June 15 in Amherst, Massa. He was 85.
His son Alexander Skolnick said the cause was respiratory failure.
Mr. Skolnick’s poster design was a model of simplicity that conveyed both information about the festival – when and where it was, who was performing – and captured the sensitivity of the moment. With a red background that attracts attention, it had as its dominant image the neck of a guitar with a white bird on it. “3 Days of Peace & Music,” read the great type.
Mr. Skolnick was 32 and did freelance work for advertising agencies and other clients – “more ‘Mad Men’ than ‘Easy Rider,'” as The Washington Post described him 50 years later – when he received a call from John Morris, the production , gain. coordinator for the festival. Mr. Skolnick told The Daily Hampshire Gazette of Northampton, Mass. In 2008 that an architect friend who was working on a hotel in the Virgin Islands that attracted many rock stars, Mr. Knew Morris and made the connection.
He received the assignment on a Thursday, he told The Stamford Advocate in 2010.
“And I brought it through them Monday afternoon,” he said. “It was just another job, but it became famous.”
The work originally went to David Edward Byrd, who created posters for rock shows at the Fillmore East in Manhattan. The poster that Mr. Byrd produced was, as Adweek described it for the 50th anniversary of the festival, “a pseudo-psychodelic tableau (many hearts and flowers) with a neoclassical centerpiece – specifically a naked woman posing with an urn. “
“I thought it was perfect because she’s Aquarius,” he said. Byrd told Adweek. “What could be wrong?”
To begin with, the fact that she was not wearing any clothes. The Woodstock Festival was at one point planned for Wallkill, NY (it was moved late in the game near the hamlet of White Lake in Bethel, NY), and traders there did not want a naked woman in their shop windows. . Also, the Byrd poster left no room to list the names of the artists.
And so Mr. Skolnick got the call for a hasty job. He recently saw some paper carvings by Henri Matisse at a Manhattan museum and tackled the assignment with a razor blade, cutting out shapes in colored paper and first placing it on a blue background. But then he switched to red and, as he told The Daily News of New York in 1976, “the whole thing came alive.”
But not without some adjustments.
“I first thought of bird and whistle,” he told The Daily News. “But the flute is really jazz, so I made it a guitar.”
About that bird: Mr. Skolnick said in interviews that although most people assumed it was a pigeon, it owed more of a debt to the cat birds he sketched that summer while spending time on Shelter Island, NY, Oh, and he said the bird included a bug.
“I forgot to tell the printer that the bill must be black,” he said, “and so it is a red bill.”
A writer friend, Ira Arnold, helped with the words, and, Mr. Skolnick told The Daily News the two of them shared the $ 12,000 fee.
The poster has become a very circulated and very imitated image, although Mr. Skolnick said he did not have the copyright and therefore did not collect royalties. In 2012, when the Museum at Bethel Woods in New York, which is at the festival grounds and dedicated to Woodstock, held an exhibit centered on the Byrd and Skolnick posters, it also included dozens of images by them inspired, especially the Skolnick version.
“Someone saw a poster in Memphis for a barbecue contest,” museum director Wade Lawrence told Hudson Valley Magazine at the time, explaining one of the inspirations for the exhibit. “It was a discount on Skolnick’s poster. In place of the guitar there was a fork, and instead of the pigeon there was a pig. ”
Neal Hitch, senior curator at the Bethel Museum, said Mr. Skolnick came up with the right poster for the moment.
“His work is so widespread because it replaces design and represents an ideal,” he said in an email. “Very few artists have succeeded in capturing the essence of a movement better on one sheet of paper than Arnold Skolnick.”
Mr. Skolnick was born on February 25, 1937 in Brooklyn. His father, Samuel, was a linotype operator, and his mother, Esther (Plotnik) Skolnick, was a secretary who ran a Comptometer, a predigital mechanical calculator, at an advertising agency.
Art, he said, was something born in him.
“You do not become an artist,” he told The Daily Hampshire Gazette in 2008. “Either you are or you are not.”
He attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and then studied under the artist Edwin Dickinson at the Art Students League in Manhattan. He was, his son said, in many ways an unlikely choice for the Woodstock poster.
“He did not like rock ‘n’ roll, he did not like the drug culture, and he hated psychedelic art,” Alexander Skolnick said in a telephone interview.
However, he attended Woodstock. I stayed for a day. But then he heard of the coming rain.
“I said ‘I need to get out of here,'” he recalls in a 2019 video interview with New England Public Media. “I got into the Volvo. I must have damaged 20 cars that came out of the parking lot. “
Michael Lang, one of the festival’s main promoters, who died in January, claimed in his 2009 book, “The Road to Woodstock,” that he came up with the wording and the images for the poster. But in an interview with Newsday that year, Mr. Skolnick said Mr. Lang had nothing to do with the poster and only saw it after it was finished; that account, the newspaper said, was supported by other festival organizers.
Mr Skolnick set the fee he received for working on a house in Chesterfield, Massachusetts and alternated for decades between that house and New York before moving to Northampton in 2015, where he lived until his death.
Although he had the most famous for one poster, Mr. Skolnick had a varied career, designing books and some film credit series and working in advertising. He also founded Imago Design, a design company specializing in art books, and Chameleon Books, a publishing house that published books such as “Paintings of the Southwest” (1994) and “The Artist and the American Landscape” (1998).
And he has painted and exhibited over the years at the Elizabeth Moss Galleries in Maine and the Pratt Gallery in Amherst, among others.
In the mid-1970s, he began painting flowers and plants. By the time of a 1982 screening of his works in Amherst, those images had become more cynical, with Mr. Skolnick depicting plants that apparently arm themselves against environmental threats.
“In my earlier paintings, I thought if I showed how beautiful nature is, then people would want to protect it,” he told The Daily Hampshire Gazette in 1982. “Now I’m showing it in the process of being destroyed, and I’m trying to get people to react before it’s too late.”
Mr. Skolnick’s marriages to Iris Jay in 1960 and Cynthia Meyer in 1990 ended in divorce. In addition to his son Alexander, from his first marriage, he is survived by another son from that marriage, Peter; a sister, Helene Rothschild; and two grandchildren.
Not long after he created the Woodstock poster, Mr. Skolnick came up with another image that was seen by many: the cover of “What to Do With Your Bad Car: An Action Manual for Lemon Owners” (1971), an early book by Ralph Nader’s consumer. watchdog team. He said his publisher once asked him to look at some cover ideas for the upcoming Nader book. I was not impressed.
“I looked, and I said, ‘Just put a lemon on wheels,'” he said. Skolnick said in a 2019 interview with The Daily Hampshire Gazette. “And no one moved. They said, “Get Ralph Nader over the phone!”
He was asked to translate the proposal into a photo.
“I have a lemon,” he said. “I got a Tonka toy truck. I put it on my kitchen table and shot it. ”