John Alcorn | Style
Una mostra virtuale dedicata all'artista grafico e illustratore americano John Alcorn, realizzata per il Centro Apice dell'Università degli Studi di Milano
style, work, creation, methods, advertising, illustration, psychedelia, Sixties, alcorn
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Alcorn was an artist versatile by nature and prodigiously prolific and his influence extended to every aspect of print media. A steady stream of book covers, award-winning children’s books, editorial illustrations, posters, logos, and even billboards advertising icons of pop consumer culture flowed from his multifaceted hand.

Although his work followed the prevailing fashions and modes of his time, these were then processed with a fresh and witty touch and the result was never repetitive. A fear of lapsing into mannerism ensured that he thought of style not as an end to itself, but rather as a means to an end. This, coupled with his commitment to accord each assignment a form adapted to its particular needs, pushed him to expand his visual vocabulary.

Looking back on the evolution of his work, one is struck not just by the variety of mediums and styles he employed, but by the range of sensibilities he expressed. He was right when he claimed not to possess a style in the conventional sense of the word. Every single project was created having in mind the needs of its commercial purpose and the client’s guidelines, all combined with the aesthetic sense of the artist himself.

By the late 1960s, Alcorn had come to be identified with the psychedelic style, that he helped invent and make popular during his years at Push Pin Studios. Its colorful design celebrated the advent of “flower power” with the brilliant marriage of angular and curvilinear elements.

It is fascinating to see how the trademark ingredients of this style emerge in the artist’s production over the course of the decade. As the forms in his imagery became increasingly fluid and elastic, one can see the spirit of the work becoming more and more ethereal. Forms and colors conspire to achieve a transcendent beauty that is heavenly in nature, yet at the same time sensuously corporeal.

His art was so popular that its trajectory echoes the evolution of the popular music of his age, most notably that of The Beatles. The animated feature film Yellow Submarine owes a debt of gratitude to the cultural phenomenon that was Push Pin Studios, a phenomenon with which Alcorn’s own personal vision came to be associated. In the late 1960s the artist utilized this style to great effect in a series of large-format advertisements for some of the most iconic brand names in American consumer culture at the time, most notably Campbell’s Soup, Pepsi, and 7Up.

Within a few years, however this amorphous and popular style lost its freshness, but Alcorn abandoned it before it reached its decline and began to renew his production by changing his source of inspiration.

From 1963 onwards Alcorn created a yearly calendar for Morgan Press in poster-format, which he used as a means to showcase the stylistic breakthrough that had given him the most satisfaction in the course of a given year. The range of styles and techniques Alcorn employed in the nine calendars spanning from 1963 to 1971 provides a mirror image of his evolution as an artist, from the exacting pen drawings of his early work to the later silhouettes, stylized in various ways. In the calendars for 1967 and 1968, Alcorn reached an initial stylistic maturity, especially in his use of formal distortion, which he employed in ways which were taken to “psychedelic” extremes as early as the following year.