Richard Amsel – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

I wouldn’t be surprised if these have been linked all over but I hadn’t come across this site before, Czech posters from the Cold War period when promotional material for Hollywood films was home-produced. This makes for some surprising results as with the psychedelic confection for Dumbo shown above. Elsewhere there’s a Piranesian collage for Raiders of the Lost Ark, a peculiar mangling of Richard Amsel’s poster for Hello Dolly, something for Death in Venice which seems to have nothing whatever to do with the film, and plenty of good solid design such as this piece for Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex.

In a similar vein there’s the extensive Polish Posters site which features some really great work from artists like Franciszek Starowieyski.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The poster art of Richard Amsel
• Bollywood posters
• Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia
• The poster art of Bob Peak
• A premonition of Premonition
• Perfume: the art of scent
• Metropolis posters
• Film noir posters
• Czech book covers

Hello Dolly (1969); The Sting (1973).
Murder on the Orient Express (1974); Barry Lyndon (1975).

Thanks are due for today’s post to Sebastiane who reminded me of the poster art that Richard Amsel produced through the Seventies up to the mid-Eighties. Together with Bob Peak, Amsel was a major exponent of the illustrated poster, a form that’s now completely vanished from cinema promotion in a sea of floating Photoshop heads and persistently lazy design. Amsel’s most famous piece in terms of success and visibility is probably his Raiders of the Lost Ark poster (and its variants) but I tend to prefer his work from the previous decade.

I collected film posters for a while and have one of Amsel’s Chinatown designs packed away somewhere. The Hello Dolly poster above was his first commission and must count as the first and only time a Spirograph was used (for the flowers) to create a design for a major Hollywood production. The Amsel page at American Art Archives notes that the poster for The Sting is a pastiche of the very popular (and gay) JC Leyendecker whose magazine and advertising art was contemporary with the film’s setting. This is exactly the kind of thing that can’t be done with ease today when the art is predominantly a product of digital techniques.

Amsel died in 1985, an early victim of the AIDS pandemic which possibly explains why there isn’t a site dedicated to his work as there is for Bob Peak. This page features a few examples of Amsel’s other work, however, including his instantly recognisable Divine Miss M album cover for Bette Midler. And there’s a small gallery of his posters at IMP.

Update: A retrospective article and marvellous gallery of Amsel’s work by Adam McDaniel

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Bollywood posters
• Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia
• The poster art of Bob Peak
• A premonition of Premonition
• Perfume: the art of scent
• Metropolis posters
• Film noir posters

Tag: Richard Amsel

Czech film posters

The poster art of Richard Amsel