concept of Tony Palladino's Universe, The

Graphis, Mar/Apr 2002 by Reynolds, Jamie

When viewing the poster that announces Tony Palladino's induction to the Masters Series at the School of Visual Arts in New York, one could be forgiven for mistaking the central image for any number of things. The abstract presentation lends itself to a guessing game; many people think it's a high-fashion frock A la Issey Miyake; some suspect a painting, a riot of orange, vertical strokes on a canvas; still others feel it must be a crazed triangular collage.

To learn that it is in fact a crushed traffic cone that Palladino found in the gutter is more than a little ironic. It would seem that he had chosen a found object to act as an emblem for a 50-year long career that focuses on the mastery of the found object's antithesis, and the very nexus around which all of Palladino's witty work swirls: The Concept.

If you retraced the history of the creative concept in advertising and design, the '60s and '70s were its heyday-marked by a visual adlib style popularized not only by Palladino but by contemporaries such as Robert Brownjohn and Bob Gill, the latter a founder of Fletcher, Forbes, Gill, the firm that would eventually morph into Pentagram. "We're both interested in the idea rather than design; it always came apart from the design," says Gill of Palladino. Today, he adds: "We're still a minority." Palladino's ability to operate in this realm was what collaborator Ivan Chermayeff describes as an ability to "see a connection to something very ordinary and making it his very specialty." It's a methodology that started out of pure necessity.

Growing up in East Harlem in the '30s, Palladino understood the importance of clearly relaying ideas long before he felt the lure of print advertising or the playful tug to explore sculpture and painting. Neither of Palladino's parents spoke the English that young Tony knew from the streets and from school and conversely he spoke no Italian, the language his elders navigated. So Palladino used hand-drawn images to communicate. It was at the High School of Music and Art that he came into contact with some of the companions that would influence not only him, but the world of graphic design and advertising at large: R.O. Blechman, George Lois, Milton Glaser and Bob Gill. This nebula of buddies, soon to include Chermayeff and Geismar, would challenge the conventional notions of what an advertising art director could do. In a few short years, Gill's notion of "bringing a concept to a job" was taking hold. "We already knew that if something had a unique concept to it and made sense, it was beautiful," says Palladino. It was soon to become the glory days of the "Big Idea" movement in graphic design.

Despite this practical theorizing and these influential friends, it was the neighborhood that gave Palladino his gritty straightforwardness and his relentless drive. Even today, you catch a bit of the old swagger. There were incidents, scrapes. There's a glinty-eyed panache there, a love of hats. And a lingering contradiction; Palladino will start a sentence one minute with "Crazy as I am for the street..." but before hanging up the phone will gently admonish the person on the other line, "Stay nice." The street became a source of ideas, both for his graphic work and, later, his fine art. "We had a thing of going around the city looking for typography done by ordinary people," Chermayeff remembers. Palladino and his pals would trek out to Coney Island or to the Lower East side, drawing influence as easily from Madison Avenue as from Mermaid Avenue. Palladino's poster for Psycho, using broken lettering to mirror Norman Bates' disintegrating hold on reality, was an idea that he had picked up gazing at a shattered sign in a shop window.

Palladino partnered with Blechman in the early '60s, and besides launching four new cigarette brands for Imperial Tobacco Company, he also designed a standing lamp that is in the permanent furniture collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He returned to New York, took up with Van Brunt Co., and worked on memorable ad campaigns for Air India and the Japan Trade Center. "People don't want to look at advertising, people want to get entertained intellectually," says Palladino of his approach. He became acquainted with Alan Siegal, a lawyer who worked to "translate" heavy legal jargon into language everyday people could understand, and it fuelled Palladino's desire to further sharpen his graphic execution. Palladino knew when he had a winning idea: it was "so good that you could get it over the phone," he says.

At the height of Palladino's advertising success-the period he describes as "when I was getting fat"-he had the luxury to turn to three-dimensional work. The paintings and sculptures represented any concept that tickled his fancy, not just one within the confines of a job. Despite their frivolity, Palladino still held fast to the centrality of the concept in his work, even as it became play.

"Although his fine art work is absolutely legit as art and his design work is legit as design, the relationship is very close," says Gill, "That's unusual." All the more so because Palladino's playful art remains largely undiscovered (aside from the Master's Series Show at S.VA. and handful of other small exhibits, Palladino's sculpture and painting are known to only a small group).