John Vassos (1898-1985)
RCA 50 D Transmitter and Control Desk
12 x 29 1/2 (sight)
Mixed media on board
Signed lower right by Vassos and Lynn Brodton
inscribed RCA Eng. Styling Dept., Ben Grim 2-7-39

BIO
John Vassos was an original. It’s hard to say that about too many artists as one can usually trace a stylistic path back to an earlier influence. I’m not sure he had one. The only source I can imagine is the technique of display cards that were ubiquitous during his youth and to which he applied his skills soon after he reached New York.

Born in Greece in 1898, he spent his youth in Constantinople where he was artistically active from an early age. He was the editorial cartoonist for a liberal newspaper in his early teens and when one of these cartoons featured a less-than-flattering view of the Turkish senate (he was Greek after all), he was forced to flee (supposedly for his life) on a British ship. He was 16.

World War I had just begun. Vassos saw action in the North Sea, at Gallipoli and on a mine sweeper. He ended up in America in 1919 in Boston. He soon was lettering placards and price tags and going to Fenway Art School at night. One of his instructors was John Singer Sargent. He spent some time as an assistant to Joseph Urban, the man who designed the famous Ziegfeld Follies. Vassos assisted on stage designs for the Boston Opera Company and designed promotional material for Columbia Records in the early Twenties.

He moved to New York in 1924 and opened his own studio, accepting any and all assignments. In his free time he attended the Art Students League and studied under George Bridgman, John Sloan and others. His modern and unique style was put to use on window displays for Macy’s and murals for two large movie palaces. This led to advertising work for New York firms like Cammeyer shoes and Bonwit Teller specialties. A preliminary study for a 1924 General Tires ad is at right. A restrained palette and a strong sense of design made his work stand out from the other commercial artists who were trying to synthesize a new, modern style to replace the staid Victorian approach of the previous 25 years. This was, after all, the nineteen twenties!

It was in designs for the theatre that Vassos’ style was finalized. The typical overly-ornate, rococo elements of the turn-of-the-century stage and theatre were overlaid with the modern, Art Deco sensibilities of the Twenties. (Art Deco is an abbreviation of Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes, the 1925 French exposition in Paris that celebrated the new, bold, streamlined style in art and appliances.) The shape was important! Whether it was the tall, rectilinear silhouette of a skyscraper or the simple arc from an artist’s French curve, the details were muted and the outline carried the pertinent information to the viewer. An unused Vassos design for a theatre curtain (above right) for a 1926 Billy Rose musical is a perfect example. Vassos took the b&w opaque watercolors that he’d used for price placards a few years earlier and developed his startling and powerful approach that was unlike anything being done. It was an immediate (to use another modern word) hit.

More advertising work followed – this time for national firms like Packard Automobiles and French Line cruise ships. The next step for this most “modern” of artists was simple – Industrial Design. After all, the concept of Art Deco was an offshoot of the William Morris notion of a marriage of art with industry. If wallpaper and drapes and windows could be art, why not cars and radios? And, since these were the most modern of times, why not juke boxes and fountain pens? He designed a face-lotion bottle that had one of the very first screwtop caps, just in time for Prohibition. Sales jumped. As the nation grew more crowded, he designed the ubiquitous turnstile to keep some semblance of order in our public lives.

In 1926, he was asked to create a cover illustration for a stage production of Oscar Wilde’s Salome. It was seen by an editor at the publishing house of E.P. Dutton and he commissioned a book from Vassos utilizing his distinct style. Salome was published in 1927 using a special printing technique called the Knudson Process. [I won’t go into detail about it as there is an excellent contemporary article from a 1928 Penrose Annual available from Peter D. Verheyen on his Vassos site – see References below.] The difference between modern reproductive capabilities and this earlier patented technique are demonstrated below in a portion of an image (at left) from the first limited edition of Salome and the same portion from the 1976 Dover book, Contempo, Phobia and other Graphic Interpretations. This latter book (from which most of the images and information in this page are taken) reproduced Vassos’ original paintings using photo-offset printing. You decide which is the most apropos.

Additional images and details are available from hello@HeliclineFineArt.com