{"id":2546,"date":"2007-11-09T01:28:30","date_gmt":"2007-11-09T01:28:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=2546"},"modified":"2011-12-29T12:26:08","modified_gmt":"2011-12-29T12:26:08","slug":"the-poster-art-of-richard-amsel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2007\/11\/09\/the-poster-art-of-richard-amsel\/","title":{"rendered":"The poster art of Richard Amsel"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"amsel.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Hello Dolly (1969); The Sting (1973).<\/em>
\nMurder on the Orient Express (1974); Barry Lyndon (1975).<\/em><\/p>\n

Thanks are due for today’s post to Sebastiane<\/a> who reminded me of the poster art that Richard Amsel produced through the Seventies up to the mid-Eighties. Together with Bob Peak<\/a>, 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<\/a>. Amsel’s most famous piece in terms of success and visibility is probably his Raiders of the Lost Ark<\/em><\/a> poster (and its variants) but I tend to prefer his work from the previous decade.<\/p>\n

I collected film posters for a while and have one of Amsel’s Chinatown<\/em><\/a> designs packed away somewhere. The Hello Dolly<\/em> poster above was his first commission and must count as the first and only time a Spirograph<\/a> was used (for the flowers) to create a design for a major Hollywood production. The Amsel page<\/a> at American Art Archives notes that the poster for The Sting<\/em> is a pastiche of the very popular (and gay<\/a>) JC Leyendecker<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. This page<\/a> features a few examples of Amsel’s other work, however, including his instantly recognisable Divine Miss M<\/em> album cover for Bette Midler. And there’s a small gallery of his posters at IMP<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/strong> A retrospective article and marvellous gallery of Amsel’s work by Adam McDaniel<\/a><\/p>\n

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 The illustrators archive<\/a><\/p>\n

Previously on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 Bollywood posters<\/a>
\n\u2022 Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia<\/a>
\n\u2022 The poster art of Bob Peak<\/a>
\n\u2022 A premonition of Premonition<\/a>
\n\u2022 Perfume: the art of scent<\/a>
\n\u2022 Metropolis posters<\/a>
\n\u2022 Film noir posters<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “The poster art of Richard Amsel”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,4,7,5,48,25,3],"tags":[1320,1404,1321,6333],"class_list":["post-2546","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-design","category-film","category-gay","category-illustrators","category-kubrick","category-music","tag-bob-peak","tag-jc-leyendecker","tag-richard-amsel","tag-sebastiane"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-F4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2546\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}