“Art Nouveau on Acid”: Revisiting Sixties Psychedelic Concert Posters
Words by Maya Bewley
What comes to mind when you think of the Sixties? Detached from the political events of the Space Race and Vietnam War, contemporary pop culture seems to dream of the period in a technicolour haze of peace, love, and flower crowns. In fashion trends particularly, we’ve seen a barrage of vivid floral prints and twisting patterned tops. And on a recent trip to Urban Outfitters, I noticed a whole host of painfully expensive t-shirts with iconic phrases like ‘free love club’ and ‘stay groovy baby’.
Psychedelic Poster inspired fashion
What was most striking, however, were the shop’s graphic tees plastered with psychedelic prints of Jefferson Airplane and Pink Floyd. Nowhere else is the Sixties’ intense visual affair with bright colours and swirly letters encapsulated more than in the gaudy concert posters that these t-shirts took inspiration from. Why is it that we’re seeing a resurgence in the psychedelic aesthetic associated with these music posters? And where did the style originate from in the first place?
In 1968, American writer Herbert Gold penned an article titled ‘Pop Goes The Poster,’ discussing the popularity of the format in the late Sixties. In which, he spoke to poster artists and producers who had made a fortune from the ‘poster craze’ sweeping the nation at the time. Thousands of copies were being sold across America, racking up thousands of dollars in profit.
Poster for Otis Rush by Wes Wilson, 1967
But what drew people to these posters wasn’t the need to buy what was essentially just an advertisement. It was the electric, swirling graphic designs that they depicted. Simple sans serif fonts were replaced by bubbling, bursting, hardly-legible letters. And bright, clashing colours were played out against each other on paper. It was clear that the poster had evolved a long way from simply trying to sell a product. It was now both a business and an art, something that could be used as decoration for your bedroom wall.
The epicentre of this new potent style was the thriving late Sixties music scene of San Francisco. The Californian metropolis was crowded by concerts booming with the new sounds of psychedelic rock, famous for the eventual 1967 ‘summer of love’ that would see thousands of hippies descend on the city in search of arts, music, and a good time. It was within this bohemian culture that poster artists in San Francisco began experimenting with new forms of advertising, attempting to put in visual terms the LSD inspired ethos at the centre of the music’s popularity.
At the forefront of this experimentation was Wes Wilson, who began working at a print shop in the city in 1965. After a music festival (and LSD) the artist was inspired by the experience and started making posters with trippy, free-flowing designs. He began to develop his own typeface to capture this, borrowing heavily from Austrian painter Alfred Roller’s work. When Wilson started work with music promoter Bill Graham around 1966, his style ballooned into the vibrant concert posters that are iconic today.
Poster for Grateful Dead by Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse, 1966
Other artists in San Francisco also started making trippy posters around this time. Hired by the legendary music promoter Chet Helms, the duo Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley worked together to create posters for concerts happening around town - spinning simple iconography into blazing masterpieces. One of their most famous pieces is that of a 1966 poster for The Grateful Dead, in which a skeleton crowned by roses is framed by shocking blue and red. Underneath, the barely legible font shrieks ‘September 16th, Avalon Ballroom’.
In addition to the duo, Chet Helms hooked up with San Francisco Art Institute instructor Victor Moscoso, whose work was renowned for its explosive use of colour and composition that made it seem as though the images were vibrating.
Poster for The Miller Blues Band, Victor Moscoso, 1967
If the hardly readable text and clashing colours seem counterintuitive, it actually served an important commercial purpose. Like a bumblebee’s stripes, the chaotic energy drew viewers in and forced them to engage in what was being advertised. In Moscoso’s words, “The musicians were turning up their amplifiers to the point where they were blowing out your eardrums. I did the equivalent with the eyeballs…”
As a whole, the group of artists were heavily influenced by comic books, eastern mysticism, and perhaps most notably, Art Nouveau. The Art Nouveau movement was an international style of art that came to prominence from around 1890 to 1910, often seen as a desire to break free from rigid classical forms. The curved fonts, winding lines, and fluid shapes that characterised this style were all borrowed by the San Francisco poster makers in the late Sixties. Their tendency to take these motifs and then crank up the colour to the extreme earned them the title “Art Nouveau on Acid”.
Alphonse Mucha, Zodiac, 1896
Of particular interest from the Art Nouveau period were the ethereal women of Alphonse Mucha (a fellow poster maker), gracefully posed with sprawling hair. Another inspiration was Aubrey Beardsley, who used black ink to create high contrast, swooping, patterned illustrations. Parallels between these artists can be spotted throughout the group’s work.
Aubrey Beardsley, The Climax, 1893
The psychedelic posters were infectious, capturing the globe in the heyday of sun-drenched rock and roll. They eventually began to wane around the first half of the Seventies, but their influence can be traced throughout the course of the past few decades. Today, the micro-resurgence of the aesthetic speaks to a desire for escapism, freedom, and a good time - perhaps what we need most as a (hopefully) brighter summer approaches.
