Reviews for Learning to See: Historical Perspectives on Modern Popular/Commercial Arts

The average rating for Learning to See: Historical Perspectives on Modern Popular/Commercial Arts based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-02-22 00:00:00 Mary Gore Martha Scotford has written a biography of a pathbreaking woman in graphic design, Cipe (pronounced C.P.) Pineles, who got her first design job in 1930 and continued as a major influence in America until her death in 1991. Over those decades, Pineles won prestigious awards -- often as the first woman -- for art direction in both her magazine career (e.g. *Seventeen* and *Charm*) and her academic career at New York's Parsons School of Design. You never heard of her. Such is often the fate of pathbreaking women. I wanted to read this book partly because I had been researching an artist friend of hers, another pathbreaking woman you don't know, Lucille Corcas, for a potential Wikipedia post. I knew both women slightly when I was a child, although it was their children who were more my contemporaries. Pineles attended my wedding, and much of Scotford's material is from or about people I knew and aspects of the county where I grew up, including the school my siblings attended. Cipe Pineles was born in 1908 in Vienna and arrived in the US with her family in 1923. She made a mark almost immediately, learning English and winning first prize in the *Atlantic Monthly* Contest for High Schools with her surprisingly charming essay called "Bolsheviki," about a home invasion when her family was living in Poland. You can read it in the Appendix. She later brought her appreciation of writing to her artistic work, ensuring the art worked with the content. At the same time, she gave free rein to artists, providing part-time work to many who had begun to be famous (Jacob Lawrence, Ben Shahn) or became famous later. This is a book either for people interested in how one woman handled being the only female in a male-dominated world or for people interested in the history of graphic design. It may help if the reader is not turned off by a lot of discussion of font, column width, and point size. I enjoy that stuff. The one problem for me was that because the author wanted to include as much of Pineles's work as possible but also wanted to design a book with lots of white space, the illustrations were often minuscule. I literally needed my magnifying glass to inspect the small ones. There's a decent entry for Cipe Pineles on Wikipedia. Now to get one for Lucille Corcos!

Review # 2 was written on 2013-08-08 00:00:00 Maurice Honore Interesting lady. She was a skilled layout editor, and she illustrated for work and fun. Best remembered for her work with Seventeen magazine in it's earliest years, and her hair worn in a bun.