by Jesse Marinoff Reyes:
The Endless Summer
Monterey Media, 1966
Directed by Bruce Brown (b. 1937)
Poster design by John Van Hamersveld (b. 1941)
Countdown to Summer Vacation: Two Days.
—I’m not entirely certain how definitive this one is actually (there are a number of variations including just a black-and-orange half-sheet). As long as JVH did it, then it’s legit.—JMR
Not that I’ll be doing any surfing (sorry, I missed that wave years ago), but can you think of any image MORE iconic as regards summertime than John Van Hamersveld’s poster designs for Bruce Brown’s pioneering surfing documentary? I can’t.
Beyond the association with the film, the poster graphic has an identity on its own which is remarkable in itself. It’s been homaged by countless “gigposter” artists and illustrators or designers rendering magazine articles or covers for years and years and years. Hell, I’m actually surprised I haven’t ripped this off for something by now, but as much as I love a cliché (and in terms of Endless Summer I mean that in a good way), I would need a special project to even attempt to reference something this important by a designer whose work has been so influential, and so much a part of the fabric of our pop culture for so many years.
It seems somehow incomplete, or not quite adequate merely to say Van Hamersveld has been a part of “the fabric of our popular culture” (and how many of us can you say that about?). Van Hamersveld’s work is like a laundry list of some of the most memorable graphics of the past half-century. He straddled eras with record LP sleeves (from an age when that form was THE elite forum for graphic design) for The Beatles (Magical Mystery Tour), The Rolling Stones (Exile on Main Street), and The Grateful Dead (Skeletons in the Closet) to Jimmy McGriff (Black Pearl), Kiss (Hotter Than Hell) and Blondie (Eat to the Beat), and something like 300 more; Poster designs for the Shrine Exposition Hall for Jimi Hendrix/Electric Flag/Blue Cheer (yet another image emulated by countless other artists and designers, including Shepard Fairey), Jefferson Airplane/Charlie Musselwhite, The Grateful Dead, and Pink Floyd, through his pop-influenced movie poster for Get Carter, and the Royal Albert Hall reunion of Cream—and those are the “greatest hits” images that most of you have seen or heard of. He was the art director of Surfer magazine (thusly it made sense to seek him out for Endless Summer), illustrated covers for Rolling Stone and worked at Capitol Records, and tons of other stuff over the past nigh-50 years.
Van Hamersveld was a polished designer working in a pop cultural milieu where the youth culture spawned enlightened amateurs or drawing-based artists whose work grew into something more sophisticated (Stanley Mouse was doing tee-shirt graphics and selling them at car shows and doing gag cartoons for magazines before developing the psychedelic poster style that he has been celebrated for). In the same way that Art Chantry was not a “true” punk (as Chantry has documented himself, his work was not naive or the creation of someone—like a band member—making a poster out of necessity and mostly accidentally, he knew what he was doing), Van Hamersveld was not a “true” hippie, y’know, just “doing it,” man. Yet he was not a mainstream poseur either, “pretending” to dig on the youth scene. No, he was an educated designer of the same age group whose head was firmly and intellectually part of what was happening and could look at his times and translate that into indelible images. And that ain’t just whistlin’ dixie.
It’s something that I can relate to in my own humble way having cut my own eye teeth in pop culture, and really not straying too far from it for better or worse, and seeing people like Chantry and Van Hamersveld as heroes.
Gingko Press will be producing a coffee table monograph on Van Hamersveld later this summer, appropriately enough (a long time coming, though on the heels of the St. Augustine Press’s autobiography published a couple of years back, My Art/My Life), and I’m hoping to read more in depth on many of the pieces I’ve mentioned here in passing.
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