Arnold Scornick designed one of the most familiar images of pop culture at the time. The original Woodstock Music Festival poster in 1969 died on June 15th in Amherst, Massachusetts. He was 85 years old. ..
His son Alexander Scornick said the cause was respiratory failure.
Scornick’s poster design was a model of simplicity that conveys information about the festival (when, where, who was playing) and captures the sensibilities of the moment. With a remarkable red background, it had a guitar neck with a white bird sitting on it as its dominant image. “3 Days of Peace & Music”, read by the big type.
At the age of 32, Scornick worked as a freelancer for advertising agencies and other clients. As the Washington Post explained him 50 years later, “Mad Men” are more than “Easy Riders.” Festival coordinator. Scornick told The Daily Hampshire Gazette in Northampton, Massachusetts in 2008 that a friend of an architect who worked at a hotel in the Virgin Islands that fascinated many rock stars knew Morris and made a connection.
He was assigned on Thursday, he Told to Stanford supporters In 2010.
“And I brought it to them on Monday afternoon,” he said. “It was just another job, but it became famous.”
My job originally went to David Edward Bird, who was making posters for rock shows in Fillmore East, Manhattan. The poster created by Mr. Bird, as Adweek explained in commemoration of the festival’s 50th anniversary, is “a pseudo-psychedelic with a neoclassical centerpiece, specifically a naked woman posing in a jar. It was “Tableau”.
“I thought this was perfect because she’s Aquarius,” Bird told Adweek. “What’s wrong?”
For starters, the fact that she wasn’t dressed. The Woodstock Festival was planned in Wallkill, NY ( moved Later in the game, about 31 miles northwest of the White Lake settlement in Bethel, NY), Wallkill merchants were said not to want a naked woman in the store window. Also, there was no room for the performers’ names on the Bird poster.
And Mr. Scornick was called on to work in a hurry. He recently saw some Henri Matisse paper clippings at the Manhattan Museum, tackled the task with a razor blade, cut the shape into colored paper and initially placed it on a blue background. But then he turned red and, as he told The Daily News in 1976, “everything came back to life.”
But not without some tweaks.
“At first I thought about birds and flutes,” he told Daily News. “But the flute is really jazz, so I chose the guitar.”
About the bird: In an interview, Scornick most people thought it was a pigeon, but more to the cat bird he sketched that summer while spending time on Shelter Island, New York. Said he was in debt, and he included the mistake of saying poultry.
“I forgot to tell the printer that my beak should be black, so it’s a red beak,” he said.
The writer’s friend, Ira Arnold, helped with the words and the two split a decent amount of money. (According to Daily News, it was $ 12,000.)
Skolnick said he didn’t hold the copyright and therefore didn’t collect the royalties, but the posters are very distributed and imitated images. year 2012, Bethel Woods Museum An exhibition centered around bird and scornic posters was held in New York, dedicated to Woodstock at the festival venue, including dozens of images inspired by them, especially the scornic version.
“Someone has seen a poster for a barbecue tournament in Memphis,” said Wade Lawrence, the director of the museum. Hudson Valley Magazine At that time, I explained one of the inspirations for the exhibition. “It was a copy of Skolnick’s poster. There was a fork instead of a guitar and a pig instead of a pigeon.”
Neil Hitch, senior curator at the Bethel Museum, said Scornick had come up with a suitable poster for now.
“His work is very widespread because it replaces design and represents an ideal,” Hitch said in an email. “Few artists have been able to capture the essence of the movement on a single piece of paper that is better than Arnold Skolnick.”
Arnold Skolnick was born on February 25, 1937 in Brooklyn. His father, Samuel, was a Rhino-type operator, and his mother, Esther (Protonic) Scornick, was an advertising agency secretary who operated a pre-digital mechanical calculator, the comptometer.
He said art was born to him.
“You can’t be an artist,” he told The Daily Hampshire Gazette in 2008.
He attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and then studied under artist Edwin Dickinson in the Art Student League in Manhattan. He was an unlikely choice for Woodstock posters in some respects, his son said.
“He didn’t like rock and roll, he didn’t like drug culture, he didn’t like psychedelic art,” Alexander Scornick said in a telephone interview.
But he attended Woodstock. He stayed for a day. But then he heard about the coming rain.
“I said,’I have to get out of here,'” he recalled in 2019. Video interview With New England Public Media. “I entered Volvo. I must have hurt 20 cars coming out of the parking lot.”
Michael Lang, one of the festival’s leading promoters who died in January, claimed to have come up with the wording and images of the poster in his 2009 book The Road to Woodstock. However, in an interview with Newsday that year, Scornick said Lang had nothing to do with the poster and saw it only after the poster was completed. According to the newspaper, the account was supported by other festival organizers.
Scornick paid the fees he received for work to his home in Chesterfield, Massachusetts, and alternated between the home and New York for decades before moving to Northern Pton in 2015 and living to death. ..
Best known for one poster, Skolnick has a variety of backgrounds, designing credit sequences for books and several movies, and being involved in advertising. He is also a design company specializing in art books, Imago Design, and a publisher of books such as “Paintings of the Southwest” (1994) and “The Artist and the American Landscape” (1998). Founded Chameleon Books.
He then exhibited and painted for years at the Elisabeth Moss Gallery in Maine and the Pratt Gallery in Amherst.
In the mid-1970s he began painting flowers and plants. By the time of the show of his work at Amherst in 1982, those images had become more cynical, and Mr. Scornick had depicted plants that appeared to be armed against environmental threats.
“In previous paintings, once we showed how beautiful nature was, people wanted to protect it,” he told The Daily Hampshire Gazette in 1982. I’m trying to get people to react before it’s too late. “
His marriage between Iris Jay in 1960 and Cynthia Meyer in 1990 ended with a divorce. In addition to his son Alexander, from his first marriage he survived by another son from that marriage, Peter. My sister Helen Rothschild. And two grandchildren.
Shortly after creating the Woodstock poster, Scornick came up with another image that many would see. “What to do with your bad car: Action Manual for Lemon Owners “(1971), an early book from Ralph Nader’s Consumer Watchdog Team. He said his publisher one day asked him to look up ideas for the cover of the next Nader book. He wasn’t impressed.
“I saw and said,’Just put the lemon on the wheel,'” Scornick said in a 2019 interview with the Daily Hampshire Gazette. “And no one worked. They said,” Get Ralph Nader over the phone! “
He was asked to translate the proposal into a photo.
“I got a lemon,” he said. “I got a Tonka toy truck. I put it on the kitchen table and shot it.”
