Fortune magazine -part 5

Fortune is an American multinational business magazine headquartered in New York City. The publication was founded by Henry Luce in 1929. The magazine competes with Forbes and Bloomberg Businessweek in the national business magazine category and distinguishes itself with long, in-depth feature articles.

The magazine regularly publishes ranked lists, including the Fortune 500, a ranking of companies by revenue that it has published annually since 1955. The magazine is also known for its annual Fortune Investor’s Guide. 

At a time when business publications were little more than numbers and statistics printed in black and white, Fortune was an oversized 11”×14" using creamy heavy paper, and art on a cover printed by a special process. Fortune was also noted for its photography, featuring the work of Margaret Bourke-White, Ansel Adams, and others.

During the Great Depression, the magazine developed a reputation for its social conscience. From its launch in 1930 to 1978, Fortune was published monthly. In January 1978, it began publishing biweekly. In October 2009, citing declining advertising revenue and circulation, Fortune began publishing every three weeks. As of 2018, Fortune is published 14 times a year.

For earlier Fortune covers, see parts 1 - 4 also.

This is part 5 of 6-part series on Fortune magazine:

1950 January, cover by Witold Gordon
"Canada's Oil Frontier"

Witold Gordon (1885 - 1968) The painter and muralist, Witold Gordon, was born in Warsaw, Poland. He moved to Paris as a young man and studied there at the Ecole de Beaux Arts before moving to the United States. He had a distinguished career including the production of two major murals at Radio City Music Hall in 1932. These were coordinated by the prominent American designer, Donald Deskey, and included Witold Gordon among the period's foremost avant-garde artists along with Stuart Davis and William Zorach, among others. Gordon was later commissioned to conceive a 6,000 square foot mural for a building at the New York World's Fair in 1939. In the mid-40s he was commissioned by The New Yorker magazine to create a series of covers illustrating the New York City of a bygone era.

1950 February cover by William Zorach
"20th Anniversary Issue"

William Zorach (1889 - 1966) was born in Lithuania and brought to Ohio in 1891, moved to New York City in 1912. An artist who ceased oil painting in 1922, having discovered that sculpture suited him better; he tried to let the stone or wood take its own shape, whether in large public monuments or in smaller works. Zorach took art classes at the Educational Alliance as a child and quit school at the end of the seventh grade to become an apprentice at a lithography firm. From 1905 to 1908 he studied drawing and painting at the Cleveland School of Art, then spent two years at the National Academy of Design in New York. In 1922 he gave up painting for sculpture. Zorach’s stone and wood carvings and his work in plaster and terra cotta are stylistically rooted in Egyptian, Greek, and, to some degree, in primitive art. Highly successful throughout much of his life, Zorach received many commissions, including Spirit of Dance for Radio City Music Hall.

1950 March, cover by Arthur Osver
"The Chemical Century"

Arthur Osver (1912 - 2006) was born in Chicago. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago between 1931 and 1936 with Boris Anisfeld. In 1940, Arthur Osver settled in New York's Greenwich Village and went on to teach at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and then Columbia University. He was awarded the Prix de Rome in 1952, and he visited Italy and France a number of times. Osver also taught at Yale University and Cooper Union in New York in the late 1950s. Over the decades, his paintings evolved from urban realism, focusing on the smoke-stacks, to a more abstract style, emphasising the wisps of smoke. He was associated with the Abstract Expressionist during the 1950s. Osver moved to St. Louis, Missouri, in 1960 and became a Professor of Art at Washington University until his retirement in 1981. Osver's paintings have been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago.

1950 April, cover by Bernard Perlin
"The Brewers"

Bernard Perlin (1918 - 2014) was born in Richmond, VA. After high school Perlin moved to New York City to study art. During World War II, he travelled the world as a newspaper sketch artist. Although Perlin studied at the New York School of Design and at the National Academy of Design, he said that William Palmer at the Art Students League was the first teacher who made any sense to him. During the war Perlin worked for the graphics division of the Office of War Information along with Ben Shahn, who became a major influence on the young Perlin. He then became an artist-correspondent for Life and later worked for Fortune. In 1946, still under Shahn’s influence, Perlin began to paint seriously. Social comment was often implicit in his work at this time, and he was especially concerned with depicting the plight of minority groups and the poor. From 1948 until 1954 he lived in Italy, supported partially by Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships. His return to the United States marked a change in Perlin’s technique and subject matter. Colour replaced line as his primary expressive device, and the isolation of the individual became a predominant thematic concern.

1950 May, cover by John Piper
"Britain's Road Back"

John Piper (1903 - 1992) was born in Epsom, UK. Piper enrolled in the Richmond School of Art and a year later the Royal College of Art, graduating in 1929. In the early 1930's Piper exhibited with the London Group and became secretary of the Seven and Fife Society which included Henry Moore, Ivon Hitchens, Ben Nicholson and Paul Nash. He also made a number of trips to Paris where he befriended Alexander Calder and visited the studios of Arp, Brancusi and Jean Hélion. Surrounded by these avant-garde artists, Piper's work of this period reflected the trend for abstraction but by the late 1930's he had returned to a more naturalistic style. Piper also worked on stage designs and costumes for theatre and ballet as well as the designs for six operas by Benjamin Britten. A versatile artist, Piper also wrote articles on art and architecture and designed stained glass windows for a number of buildings including the new Coventry Cathedral. 

Note: A series on the works of John Piper can be found in the index of this blog.

1950 July, cover by Anton Refregier
"New Coal-Mining Tools"

Anton Refregier (1905 - 1979) was born in Moscow. He moved to Paris and then to New York in 1920. He worked in a factory before earning a scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied until 1925. He returned to New York and worked commercially, producing inexpensive copies of famous paintings for interior decorators until 1927. He then returned briefly to Europe to study in Munich. Back in New York, Refregier lived in the Mount Airy artists’ colony on Croton-on-Hudson. He wanted to paint murals, and in 1936, the Federal Art Project of the Works Project Administration (WPA) hired him. For the WPA, he created murals at Greenpoint Hospital in Brooklyn, New York and at the Rincon Post Office in San Diego, CA. The latter, a 27-panel work entitled “History of San Francisco,” took eight years (1940-1948) and cost $26,000 to complete. The mural was controversial because of its depiction of tragic historical moments. Some wanted it destroyed; it was added to the National Registry of Historic Places in 1979. In 1937, Refregier’s work was included in exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He subsequently took part in exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the National Academy of Design. From 1937-1938, he taught at and chaired the board of the short-lived American Artists School in New York. He was also a professor of painting at Bard College from 1962-1964.

1950 August, cover by Antonio Frasconi

Antonio Frasconi (1919 - 2013) was born in Montevideo, Uruguay and grew up in Uruguay. In 1945 he was awarded a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York. He also attended the New School for Social Research and later taught there. An internationally known woodcut artist, Frasconi has published hundreds of prints and illustrated many books. Although much of his work has registered political protest, his subjects range from urban scenes to literature to landscapes. The artist conducted classes at Pratt Institute, the Brooklyn Museum School, and the Atlanta Art Institute, and was on the faculty of the State University of New York at Purchase. Frasconi's prints are in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art.

1950 August, cover by Antonio Frasconi

1950 September, cover by Kenneth Davies

Kenneth Davies (1925 - 2017) was born in New Bedford, MA. He attended Yale University, where he painted his first important oil painting, "Lighthouses in the Alps". The work captured the attention of New York City cultural figure Lincoln Kirstein, who helped Davies attain showings of his early works in 1950 at the Hewitt Gallery. He also received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation fellowship that year. His first solo show was at the Hewitt Gallery in 1951, and every painting sold. He taught at the Paier School of Art in Hamden, Connecticut. During his forty years there, he taught such notable artists as Joseph Reboli; and eventually became the Dean. In 1962, he decided to refocus on his still-life painting, and enjoyed further success, with gallery representation from Hirschl & Adler Galleries. His first solo show there was in 1978. Davies' labour-intensive technique involves sable brushes, resulting in paintings that appear almost like photographs, but with trompe-l'œil and  Surrealist effects.

1950 October, cover by Erberto Carboni

Erberto Carboni (1899 - 1984) was born in Parma, Italy. In 1921, immediately after graduating from the Paolo Toschi Institute of Fine Arts in Parma he made his debut as a caricaturist in the local humorous periodical La puntura, under the pseudonym of Lince. Then he dealt with advertising graphics and began his activity as an illustrator, working for various magazines. In 1932 he moved to Milan, where he collaborated as an external consultant with Studio Boggeri, of Antonio Boggeri, one of the first masters of communication in Italy, which was the springboard for him. In 1952 he won the ‘Golden Palm of Advertising’ for the Barilla campaign “Con pasta Barilla è sempre Domenica” (It’s always Sunday with Barilla pasta). In the early 1950s he carried out numerous prestigious projects for other important companies such as Bertolli, Pavesi, Crodo, Bourbon and Montecatini. In his later years his passion for ‘pure’ painting led him to intensify the artistic pictorial production that he had always continued. He exhibited his work Totem 36, a 6 meters high steel sculpture for the Venice Biennial International Exhibition, and held several personal exhibits at the Naviglio in Milan (1973) and the Cavallino in Venice (1972). In 1982 the City of Parma staged an important anthology exhibition of his work.

1950 December, cover by Georgio Prestopino

Gregorio Prestopino (1907 - 1984) was born in New York City. At the age of 14 he was awarded a scholarship to the National Academy of Design. Early in his career he came under the influence of the French Impressionists, but was soon drawn to the American realists of the Ashcan School painters, whose work led him directly to the study of urban life. He won the 1972 Rome Prize. During the 1950s he received high recognition along with Ben Shahn and Philip Evergood, well-known social realist painters. In 1958 Prestopino's landscape paintings were showing abstract tendencies.

1951 January, cover by Ben Shahn
"Products of Clay"

1951 March, cover by Laurence Sisson

Laurence Sisson (1928 - 2015) was born in Boston, MA. He became a landscape painter and illustrator. He studied at Yale Summer School and was artist-in-residence at Publick House in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, and in 1955 became Director of the Portland, Maine School of Fine and Applied Art.

He is known for his paintings of the Maine coast and landscapes of the southwest. His style ranges from plein-air watercolours to large oil landscapes with abstract and surrealist elements. Sisson has spent the last forty years living in both areas of the United States yet he notes the most influential place for his artistic development was the time he spent in Japan as a young man.

A talented painter from childhood, he attended art classes at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. He painted professionally while in his early twenties although he had not yet decided to devote his life to art. While serving in the military during the United States occupation of Japan after War World II, he was assigned to decorate the general's residence in Yokohama. This assignment forced him to learn all he could about the land and culture of Japan. His work appears to be a response to traditional Asian landscape painting, his Yankee sensibility and western art training at Yale summer school. His landscapes of both Maine and the southwest are inspired by real locations, but are in fact imaginary landscapes.

1951 April, cover by Lamarr Dodd

Lamar Dodd (1909 - 1996) was born in Fairburn, Georgia. After one year at the School of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a year teaching high school art in Alabama, Dodd moved to New York in 1928 and enrolled in the Art Students League. He gradually rose to prominence during the 1930s by winning several awards in national competitive exhibitions. This increased recognition led to his appointment as artist-in-residence at the University of Georgia in 1937; he became chair of the department the following year. In 1954 he was elected to the first of two terms as president of the College Art Association, becoming the first painter to hold that office. In 1962 he was named chairman of the National Council of the Arts in Education. Dodd continued to paint and exhibited regularly at the Grand Central Moderns gallery in New York, the National Arts Club, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

1951 May, cover by Robert Gwathmey

Robert Gwathmey (1803 - 1988) was an American social realist painter. After initially studying in business, he later studied a year at the Maryland Institute of Design in Baltimore, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Throughout his studies Gwathmey was influenced by many artists including Picasso, Matisse, and Vincent van Gogh, french satirist Honoré Daumier, Millet, and Degas. Gwathmey is known for simplifying compositions and using symbolic abstraction to create his messages. His style is recognised by the colour, shapes, and figures he uses in his artwork.

1951 June, cover by Virginia Cuthbert
"The Politics of Aluminum"

Virginia Cuthbert (1908 - 2001) was born in West Newton, Pennsylvania. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University in 1926 along with a fellowship to study abroad. From 1930 to 1931 she studied in Europe, where she met her future husband, Philip C. Elliott, in Paris. She continued her studies in New York with painter George Luks in 1932. In 1941 Cuthbert and Elliott moved from Pittsburgh to Buffalo, where Cuthbert became a painting instructor at the Albright Art School, the University of Buffalo, and later at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The couple founded the Art Department the University at Buffalo and established the Philip C. and Virginia Cuthbert Elliott Painting Scholarship, awarded annually to a junior painting major. Her work initially was stylistically aligned with the Ashcan School; however, she is best known for her interpretation of a style referred to as magic realism. The Frank K. M. Rehn Gallery represented Cuthbert in its New York Gallery, along with Charles E. Burchfield, Edward Hopper, and Reginald Marsh. Her work received widespread attention during the 1940s and 1950s in solo and group exhibitions and in such national publications as Fortune and ARTnews. In 1954 she was honoured by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

1951 July, cover by Frederick Franck
"Made in Buffalo"

Frederick Franck (1909 - 2006) was born in Maastricht, the Netherlands. He was a painter, sculptor, and author of more than thirty books on Buddhism  and other subjects who was known for his interest in human spirituality. He was a native of The Netherlands and became a United States citizen in 1945. He was a dental surgeon by trade, and worked with Dr. Albert Schweitzer in Africa from 1958-1961. His sculptures are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Fogg Art Museum, the Tokyo National Museum, and the Cathedral of St, John the Divine. His major creation, however, was a sculpture garden and park adjacent to his home in Warwick, New York, which he called Pacem in Terris, or "Peace on Earth."

1951 August, cover by Edmund Lewandowski

Edmund Lewandowski (1914 - 1998) was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He attended the Layton School of Art from 1931 to 1934. He assumed a public school teaching position to make a living while he pursued painting on his own and sought commissions in advertising and magazine illustration. In 1936, he was invited by prominent modern art dealer Edith Halpert art dealer to join her Downtown Gallery. That same year, he began painting murals commissioned by the Treasury Section of Fine Arts of the Federal Art Project and during 1939 and 1940 executed murals for the post office in Caledonia, MN. From 1942 to 1946, Lewandowski made maps and camouflage for the United States Army Air Forces and United States Air Force. In 1947, he was appointed to the faculty of the Layton School of Art. The otherworldly clarity of Lewandowski's work won him inclusion in a show themed around Magic Realism at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943.

1951 September, cover by Walter Allner

Walter Allner (1909-2006) Designer, typographer and painter Walter Allner was trained at the Bauhaus where he studied with masters Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Joost Schmidt. He was the Paris editor of Graphis magazine from 1945-1948 and in 1949 emigrated to the US. Allner was an influential art director at Fortune magazine from 1963-1974.

During his 12 years at Fortune, in addition to maintaining the magazine’s Bauhaus-inspired contemporary typography and elegant overall design scheme, he personally created 79 covers, which ran the gamut from minimalist graphic abstraction to complex photographic collage.

1951 November. cover by Jerome Snyder

Jerome Snyder (1916 - 1976) was born in New York City. He is best known as the first art director of the magazine Sports Illustrated and as the co-author of the popular New York City restaurant guidebook The Underground Gourmet written with designer Milton Glaser. Snyder graduated from Stuyvesant High School before embarking on his art career. During World War II he served with the Infantry as a Captain in Europe in the United States Army. He also taught art at such places as Yale University, the Pratt Institute, and the Parsons School of Design. Solovioff was a prolific illustrator, having done covers for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Sports Iluustrated, Horizon, Readers Digest, and the Smithsonian Institution. He also illustrated articles in Fortune and illustrated some of the Time-Life books.

1951 December, cover by George Giusti

1952 February 
"The Government of the U.S.A."

1952 March, cover by Leo Lionni
"Trouble in Frozen Orange Juice"

Leo Lionni (1910 - 1999) was born in Amsterdam. Lionni was born in Amsterdam but spent two years in Philadelphia before moving to Italy during his teens. From 1931 to 1939 he was a well-known and respected painter in Italy, where he worked in the Futurism and avant-garde styles. In 1935 he received a degree in economics from the University of Genoa. During the later part of this period, Lionni devoted himself more and more to advertising design. In 1939 he moved to Philadelphia and began full-time work in advertising. In 1948 he accepted a position as art director for Fortune, which he held until 1960. In 1960 he moved back to Italy, and began his career as a children's book author and illustrator.

1952 April, cover by Walter Allner
"Selling"

1952 May, cover by James (Jim) Flora
"24 Paintings of U.S. Merchant Ships"

James (Jim) Flora (1914 – 1998) was born in in Bellefontaine, Ohio. Best known for his distinctive and idiosyncratic album cover art for RCA Victor and Columbia Records during the 1940s and 1950s, was also a prolific commercial illustrator from the 1940s to the 1970s and the author/illustrator of 17 popular children's books. Less well known is that he was a fine artist with a diabolical bent, who created hundreds of paintings, drawings, etchings and sketches over his 84-year lifespan.

Note: A series on the works of Jim Flora can be found in the index of this blog.

1952 June, cover by Walter Allner
"Rebuilding Pittsburgh"

1952 July, cover by Jerome Snyder
"Three articles on Retail Selling"

1952 August, cover by Brian Connelly
"Canada, the Businessman's Country"

Brian Connelly (1926 - 1962) was a trompe l’oeil painter, studied at the University of Oregon before moving to New York City. Although he is considered self-taught, he studied briefly at the Art Students League of New York. He had his first show at the American-British Art Gallery in 1950. In 1952, Connelly won the Popular Prize of the Carnegie International Exhibition. In the late 1940s or early 1950s, he became involved with Associated American Artists (AAA), through which De Beers Diamonds commissioned him to paint for their advertisements. He also sold textile designs through AAA. Connelly later settled in Wilton, Connecticut. The exotic plants he cultivated there feature in some of his later work. He died at age 37 of Bright’s disease.

1952 September, cover by Alvin Lustig
"The Language of Advertising"

Alvin Lustig (1915 - 1955) was born in Denver, Colorado. He was a book designer, graphic designer, and typeface designer. Lustig has been honoured by the American Institute of GRaphic Arts and the `Art Directors club Hall of Fame for his significant contributions to American design. He studied design at Los Angeles City College, Art Centre College of Design, and independently with architect Frank Lloyd Wright at his Taliesin studio, and French painter Jean Charlot. He began his career designing book jackets in 1937 in Los Angeles, California. In 1944 he became Director of Visual Research for Look Magazine. He also designed for Fortune, and Girl Scouts of the United States.

1952 October, cover by Walter Allner
"The Race for the Senate"

1952 November
 "The Swing to Night Shopping"

1952 December, cover by Walter Allner
"Year 195X; End of the Boom?"

1953 January, cover by George Giusti
"A New Age of Science in Industry"

1953 February, cover by Walter Allner
 "How Much Strength behind the Curtain?"

1953 March, cover by Giovanni Pintori
 "Trade - Not Aid Campaign"

Giovanni Pintori (1912 - 1999) was born in Tresnuraghes, Sardinia. Upon graduation in 1936 Pintori went to work for Olivetti, an Italian typewriter company founded in 1908. He worked in the advertising department before he became the art director in 1950. In addition to designing Olivetti's advertisements and posters, Pintori was also responsible for designing the Olivetti calendars from 1951 to 1969. After leaving Olivetti, Pintori began working as a freelance designer out of Milan, opening his own studio. Pintori's style is most commonly recognised for its use of colour and geometric shapes, along with minimalistic style.

1953 April, cover by S. Neil Fujita
 "Jet Airliners: The Race for Leadership"

1953 May, cover by Harold Yale Silverman

1953 June, cover by George Giusti
"The Junior Executive LIfe"

1953 July, cover by Walter Allner

1953 September, cover by Walter Allner  
"Wonder-Drug Trouble at Parke, Davis"

1953 November cover by Walter Allner
 "Air Defense: The Cruel Choice"

1953 December, cover by Hans Moller

Hans Moller (1905 - 2000) was born on Wuppertal, Germany. From 1919 until 1927 Moller was an instructor at the Kunstgewerbeschule Wuppertal-Barmen an arts and crafts learning institution in the town. Next he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin. In 1936 he emigrated to the united States from Germany to protect his Jewish wife from the Nazi regime. The first solo exhibition of his paintings was held in 1942 at the Bonestell Gallery in New York City. In the following twenty years or so he had some twenty-five solo exhibitions at various galleries.

1954 January, cover by Lewitt-Him
 "Crown Zellerbach's Second Growth"

Lewitt-Him was a partnership between Jan Le Witt (1907 Poland - 1991 UK) and George Him (1900 Poland - 1982 UK). As a design company, Lewitt-Him brought an innovative use of colour, abstraction and symbolism to commercial design. They established a reputation for fine poster work during World War Two and for exhibition displays, most notably with the Guinness clock for the Festival of Britain. The partnership dissolved in 1955 when Le Witt decided to concentrate upon his own, often abstract, art.

1954 February, cover by Erik Nitsche
 "The Insatiable Market for Houses"

1954 March, cover by Walter Allner
 "How Are We Fixed for Water?"

1954 April, cover by Nathan Gluck
"The Clothing Market: Broader and Brighter"

Nathan Gluck (1918 - 2018) was born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. He  attended the Art Students League, the Cooper Union in Manhattan, and the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. During World War II he served in Europe and the South Pacific and upon his return began a successful career as an illustrator, designer and art director, beginning with the L. Bamberger department store in New Jersey, which included designing a poster that is now in the Museum of Modern Art Poster Collection. He worked as art director and illustrator for the George N. Kahn Agency, New York, and briefly at the Rockmore Company, an ad agency where Andy Warhol freelanced, beginning a professional relationship with the artist. During his life, Gluck came to know many artists and art world luminaries whom he admired, including Joan Miro, Marcel Duchamp, Pierre Matisse, George Wittenborn, Ray Johnson, and Philip Johnson, as well as Paul Rand and numerous other greats from the design world.  After Warhol died, the Warhol Foundation turned to Gluck, with his first-hand knowledge and expertise, to help authenticate Warhol’s pre-Pop works, which he continued to do until shortly before he passed away.

1954 May, cover by George Giusti
 "The New York Central"

1954 June, cover by Helen Federico

Helen Federico (1921 - 2012) Helen Federico (Lesser) had a long career as a graphic designer, painter and illustrator. She was a talented and directed young artist who studied at Parsons School of Design. She worked for the Abbott Kimball Advertising Co., where she met her future husband, art director Gene Federico (1918–1999). Helen worked at I. Miller shoes, assisting Alexey Brodovich, known for introducing modern graphic design to the US. Helen was Associate Art Director under Paul Rand at William H. Weintraub Co. She moved to Pound Ridge in 1951, where Helen worked as an independent illustrator, painter, and graphic designer. Her clients included MOMA, IBM, Doubleday, Glamour, and Fortune.

1954 August, cover by Walter Allner
"The Changing American Market; 1954-59"

1954 September, cover by George Giusti

1954 October, cover by S. Neil Fujita

S. Neil Fujita (1921 - 2010) was born in Waimea, Hawaii. He attended a boarding school in Honolulu, where he adopted the name Neil. He enrolled in Chouinard Art Institute, but his studies were interrupted by WWII and his forced relocation in 1942, first to the Pomona Assembly Centre outside Los Angeles and later to the Heart Mountain Relocation Centre in Wyoming. During his confinement, he worked as the art director of the camp newspaper, the Heart Mountain Sentinel.He enlisted in the United States Army in 1943. Fujita joined a prominent Philadelphia ad agency after completing his studies. He worked for Ayer for three years and during his tenure was awarded an Art Directors gold medal. Columbia Records hired him in 1954 to build a design department to build on the work of Alex Steinweiss who established the concept cover art. In 1957, Fujita left Columbia in order to broaden his portfolio. He taught design at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art, the Pratt Institute, and Parsons School of Design.

1954 November, cover by Walter Allner
 "The New Age of Mergers"

1954 December, cover by Jerome Snyder
(Christmas theme)

1955 January
Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Year

1955 March, cover by Walter Allner
 "The Future Market for Stocks"