Fortune magazine -part 6

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 - 5 also.

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

1955 April, cover by Walter Allner 
"How Much Is an Executive Worth?"

1955 May, cover by Walter Murch
"Greatest Year for Glass"

1955 July
"How Top Executives Live"

1955 August, cover by Ben Shahn
"Washington's Worst-Run Agency"

1955 September, cover by Antonio Frasconi

1956 January, cover by Virginia Cuthbert
"A New Look at Eisenhower"

1956 March, cover by Walter Allner
"New Building Techniques"

1956 June, cover by Walter Allner
"Motivation Research"

1956 September, cover by Walter Allner
"A New Slant on the Stock Market"

1957 March, cover by Robert Weaver
"Quandary at the Crane. Co."

Robert Weaver (1924 - 1994) was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. After WWII he attended classes at the Art Students League in New York. An illustrator who was considered a pioneer of a contemporary approach to the field that began in the 1950s. Weaver appreciated the accessibility of the printed page, and from the 1950s through the 1970s, produced powerful illustrations for such prominent publications and corporations as Esquire, Life, Look, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, Playboy, The New York Times, and Columbia Records. By the late 1960s, his influence was clearly reflected in the magazines, books and advertisements of the period. His collage-like approach to painting was never before seen in illustration, but has since been widely imitated. He was elected to the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 1985.

1957 April cover by Edmund Lewandowski 
"The Housing Situation"

1957 July cover by Leo Lionni
"Will H-Power obsolete A-Power?"

1957 August, cover by Robert Andrew Parker

Robert Andrew Parker (1927 - ) was born in Norfolk, Virginia. He attended the Art Institute of Chicago from 1948 until 1952 and worked during the following months at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 in New York. Since his first solo show in 1954, Parker has exhibited extensively, and his credits include set designs for opera and film as well as book illustrations. In his watercolours Parker combines areas of pure colour with design conceived in terms of silhouette and shape. He takes his subject matter mostly from the natural world—dogs, trees, mountains, people, birds—and condenses and simplifies imagery with a swift, expressionistic technique. During his career Parker has worked in such distinctive locales as Arles and Saint-Remy in France and the Himalayas, where a 1981 walking tour provided the subjects for a series on landscapes and fellow trekkers.

1957 November, cover by Antonio Frasconi

1958 January, cover by Alan Fletcher

Alan Fletcher (1931 - 2006) was born in Nairobi, Kenya. He was a British graphic designer. In his obituary, he was described by The Daily Telegraph newspaper as "the most highly regarded graphic designer of his generation, and probably one of the most prolific”. He studied at four art schools: Hammersmith School of Art, Central School of Art, Royal College of Art, and Yale School of Art and Architecture. He founded a design firm called 'Fletcher/Forbes/Gill' with Colin Forbes and Bob Gill in 1962. Two new partners joined, and the partnership evolved into Pentagram. He won the 1993 Prince Philip Designers Prize given by the Design Council, was President of the D&AD (Designers and Art Directors Association) in 1973 and International President of the Alliance Graphique Internationale from 1982 to 1985. He was elected to the Hall of Fame of the New York Art Directors Club in 1994, was a senior fellow of the Royal College of Art in 1989 and became an honorary fellow of the London Institute in 2000.

1958 April, cover by Vin Giuliani

Vin Giuliani (1930 - 1975) was born in New York and grew up grew up in Greenwich, CT. He studied art at the Pratt Institute in New York. He continued to live in Greenwich and worked as a graphic designer while developing his signature style of assemblage art. Giuliani’s early artworks demonstrate a minimalist, one-dimensional quality. His later two-dimensional geometric works featured a grid pattern fashioned from hundreds of raised nails. In the latter part of Giuliani’s short but productive life, he developed the three dimensionality of his assemblages with the construction of cabinets called “games for the eye.” Giuliani gained national fame in the mid-1960s as a participant in the travelling exhibition Great Ideas of Western Man. The Container Corporation of America commissioned noted artists to interpret the specific ideas of leaders of Western thought, from Plato to Einstein. The artists included Giuliani, René Magritte, Sister Mary Corita, Ben Shahn, A.M. Cassandre, and Antonio Frasconi. The media attention led to corporate commissions for annual report artwork, and a number of his assemblages were created specifically for magazine covers.

1958 May, cover by Walter Allner

1958 June, cover by Gregorio Prestopino
"International Airlines: Ready for Jets?"

1958 September, cover by Barry Geller
"The Great Highway Program"

1958 November, cover by Peter Vardo

1959 January, cover by Walter Allner
"The Markets of the 1960's"

1959 February, cover by Alan Fletcher

1959 April, cover by Robert W. Wilvers
"Growth Stocks"

Robert W. Wilvers (1932 - 1997) was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was the art director for the Carl Ally agency in the early 1960’s. In 1964, he became a founding partner and co-creative director at Jack Tinker & Partners, with a client roster that included Coca-Cola, Gillette and Alka-Seltzer Plus. He was an accomplished watercolour painter and illustrator whose work was featured in several galleries and museums.

1959 May, cover by Walter Allner
"An Astonishing Theory of Color"

1959 September, cover by Emanuele Luzzati

Emanuele Luzzati (1921 - 2007) was born in Genoa, Italy. He studied and graduated at the Losanna Ecole des Beaux Arts. A painter, production designer, illustrator. Film director and animator. He was nominated for Academy Awards for two of his short films, La gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie) (1965) and Pulcinella (1973). He provided designs for the London Festival Ballet, the Chicago Opera House, the Vienna Staatsoper and the Glyndebourne Festival.

1960 January, cover by Walter Allner

1960 February, cover by Leo Lionni
"New York"

1960 April, cover by Fischer
"Growth": A New Mask for Big Government

1960 June, cover by John Gundelfinger

John Gundelfinger (1937 - 1991) was born in St. Die, France. He emigrated to the United States at age two. He studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and at New York University, and in 1963 he returned to the School of Visual Arts as an instructor of painting and drawing. From 1971 he taught at the Parsons School of design. Known primarily as a painter of misty landscapes, Gundelfinger is less concerned with the geography of his scenes than with mood, atmosphere, and the changing perception of time created by subtly altering light and colour. An admitted heir of both J. M. W. Turner and Willem de Kooning, Gundelfinger was fascinated with the implicit position of the viewer within the landscape and with the changing relationships among landscape elements afforded by very small adjustments of viewpoint. At the core of his art is the re-creation of experience: from visible and objective to invisible and subjective.

1960 October, cover by Robert Andrew Parker

1960 November, cover by Jerome Snyder
" Montgomery Ward's Catalogue of Troubles and Hopes"

1961 July, cover by Walter Allner
"The 500 Biggest Industrials"

1961 October, cover by André François

André François (1915 - 2005) was born in Temesvár, Austria-Hungary (now Timisoara, Romania. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest (1932–33). He moved to Paris in 1934 and entered to the atelier of the famous poster artist Adolphe Cassandre (1935–36). He became a French citizen in 1939. He worked as a painter, sculptor and graphic designer, but is best remembered for his cartoons, whose subtle humour and wide influence bear comparison to those of Saul Steinberg.

1961 December, cover by Bernard Perlin

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.

1962 April, cover by Robert Andrew Parker
"The Private Strategy of Bethlehem Steel"

1962 May, cover by Nicholas Solovioff
"The Upswing in Corporate Profits"

Nicholas Solovioff (1924 -1994) He was educated at Harvard University, where he began studying astronomy, physics and maths, but he eventually switched to art history. He taught art history, drawing, painting and sculpture at the Fogg Museum of Art while working towards a Ph.D. He also taught at the Parsons School of Design. 

1962 June, cover by Walter Allner

1963 February, cover by Paul Hogarth

Paul Hogarth (1917 - 2001) was born in Kendal, Cumbria, UK. He attended the Manchester School Of Art from 1934 to 1936, where he became involved in the Artists' International Association and the Communist Party of Great Britain. After 1936 he attended St Martins College in London, and fought in the Spanish Civil War in the International Brigade. Hogarth was one of the most prolific and successful commercial artists of his day, a painter in watercolours, an illustrator and printmaker, he is probably best known for his images of the faraway and exotic, with a sensitivity to architecture. From 1959 to 1962 he was Senior Tutor at the Cambridge School of Art and from 1964 to 1971 at the Royal College of Art, London. In 1968-1969 he was associate professor of illustration at the Philadelphia College of Art, USA. Hogarth was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 1974 and to full membership in 1984. He became honorary president of the Association of Illustrators in 1982 and he received an O.B.E. in 1989. In 1999 he was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Arts by Manchester Metropolitan University. (Footnote: Paul Hogarth also taught me at Art School).

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

1963 July, cover by Walter Allner
"Fortune's Directory of the Biggest Industrials"

1963 September
Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. "My Years with General Motors"

1963 November
"The New Fight over the Moon Race"

1964 January, cover by Nicholas Solovioff
"The U.S. under President Johnson"

1964 August, cover by Walter Allner?
"Capitalism's Huge New Plus"

1964 September, cover by Feliks Topolski
"New York: A City Destroying Itself"

Feliks Topolski (1907 - 1989) was born in Warsaw, Poland. He studied in the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, and trained as an artillery officer. Later he studied and worked in Italy and France, and eventually he moved to Britain in 1935 after being commissioned to record King George V’s silver jubilee. He opened a studio near Waterloo Station in London. During WWII he was an official war artist. After the war he made a celebrated painting about the first meeting of the United Nations. In 1947 he gained British citizenship. His experiences were initially captured in pencil and ink drawings. These were the first stage of his prolific Chronicles, which appeared fortnightly from 1953 to 1979, interrupted only to accommodate his exploratory investigations across the globe.

The Chronicles contain 3,000 drawings, and were exhibited in New York City, Moscow, Cologne, Hamburg, Hawaii, Tel Aviv and were serialised in the United States, Poland, Italy, Denmark and Switzerland. In 1989 he was elected a senior Royal Academician as a draughtsman.

1964 October, cover by John Russell Clift

John Russell Clift (1925 - 1999) was born in Taunton, Massachusetts. He was an illustrator, painter, teacher, graphic artist, commercial artist.

1964 11 November (artist not found)
"Mitsubishi: Giant of Japan"

1965 January (artist not found)
"U.S. Steel Decides to Fight"

1965 May, cover by Nicholas Solovioff
"Vannevar Bush on Faith and Science"

1966 March, cover by Jim Flora
"Anti-Trust Cououts"

1966 July (artist not found)

1968 January, cover by Romare Bearden
"A Special Issue on Business and the Urban Crisis"

Romare Bearden (1911 - 1988) was born in Charlotte North Carolina. He was American artist, author, and songwriter. He worked with many types of media including cartoons, oils, and collages. He studied under German artist  George Grosz at the Art Students League in 1936 and 1937. During this period Bearden supported himself by working as a political cartoonist for African-American newspapers, including the Baltimore Afro-American, where he published a weekly cartoon from 1935 until 1937. Bearden's early work focused on unity and cooperation within the African-American community. After a period during the 1950s when he painted more abstractly, this theme reemerged in his collage works of the 1960s. The New York Times described Bearden as "the nation's foremost collagist" in his 1988 obituary. He became a founding member of the Harlem-based art group known as The Spiral, formed to discuss the responsibility of the African-American artist in the civil rights movement. He supported young, emerging artists, and he and his wife established the Bearden Foundation to continue this work, as well as to support young scholars. In 1987, Bearden was awarded the National Medal of Arts. 

Note: After this time Fortune covers were mainly given over to photography.