ACID BAUHAUS: Moscoso’s “psychedelic” use of color turns up the volume on the lessons of Josef Albers — his instructor at Yale. |
Victor Moscoso’s ’60s rock posters can get you all choked up about the shows. Something so cool happened and you missed it and you’re forever doomed to be squarer as a result.Moscoso was born in Spain in 1936, raised in Brooklyn, and ended up in San Francisco at just the right time. Around 1965, ’66, bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company (featuring Janis Joplin) were pioneering an improvisational, blues-inspired rock that became known as the San Francisco sound. And local clubs commissioned Moscoso, Wes Wilson, and Bonnie MacLean to make posters that would pack audiences in to see them.
The three designers are featured in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts’ fabulous show “Light My Fire: Rock Posters from the Summer of Love,” which is up through August 13. The 25 posters, all from ’66 and ’67, are a reminder of how suddenly the psychedelic look appeared and how briefly it flourished.
In Wilson’s poster for the Association and friends, the red lettering becomes flames on a green background. That’s it, but, wow! It promises a thrilling and dangerous night of music, not quite what I think of when I think of the Association’s earnest 1966 hit “Cherish.” You could gripe that this is false advertising, but it’s effective. And so much of rock is in the aura — the band’s look, their style, their sexy swagger. These posters made bands cooler.
The MFA show and a book published by Fantagraphics — Sex, Rock & Optical Illusions: Victor Moscoso, Master of Psychedelic Posters & Comix — make clear the pre-eminence of Moscoso’s designs. At the MFA, Junior Wells’s name echoes down a Moscoso poster for shows Wells performed with His Chicago Blues Band. There he is crooning into the mic, the hottest thing you’ve ever seen.
Moscoso knew sexy. A Chambers Brothers poster is a close-up of the face of a girl peering over her sunglasses to check you out. A Miller Blues Band poster centers on a photo of a topless turn-of-the-century dancing girl. Blue and magenta stripes wrap around her curves and pulse as if she were radiating electricity.
Moscoso’s chief aim is sensation, not information — but he gets his message across because he grabs you, magnetizing your eyes, as you try to decode his “psychedelic illegible lettering.” His formal magic is easy to decode (though difficult to match): wild patterns, nostalgic old photos, and, most important, contrasting colors or colors in close harmonies. The secret of getting colors to vibrate is selecting hues of the same wattage. This trick comes right out of perceptual studies by the painter and Bauhaus instructor Josef Albers — Moscoso’s teacher at Yale.
At the neo-classical MFA, it feels as if the posters had stumbled into the wrong party — but it’s great to see them here. The wall text plays straight man. Next to Moscoso’s poster for Big Brother and the Holding Company, its Indian with a giant, uh, cigarette dangling from his lips, you read: “Native Americans, with their long hair, outsider status, and life lived close to the land, were held in high regard by West Coast hippies.” I’d add that the Indian’s eyes, trippy red and blue pinwheels (a motif also repeated across the background), show admiration for the way Native Americans used plants for medicinal purposes.
