Art Form : Shopping Bags You Can Hang

Tony Bennett has left his art in Mission Viejo--and 53 other cities across America.

The singer, whose oils and watercolors sell for thousands of dollars, was commissioned recently by a mall developer to paint a wintry scene--not to hang in a gallery but to appear on holiday shopping bags. Proceeds from the glossy $4 bags, being sold in Mission Viejo Mall and other shopping centers throughout the country, benefit St. Jude Children’s Hospital in Memphis, Tenn.

“Art comes in many different forms,” said Bennett, who received $5,000 for the “White Christmas” watercolor. “Now it’s going to the masses, and I like that.”

Bennett thus joins a growing list of well-known artists and cartoonists--including David Hockney, Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, B. Kliban, Edward Koren, Erte and Al Hirschfeld--whose works in recent years have enlivened a once mundane article of life.

Portable Billboards

Thanks to vivid graphics, improved technology and whimsical or elegant designs, the lowly shopping bag is no longer just for hawking. Bags have become portable billboards--providing abundant free advertising for merchants and a status symbol for the well-heeled bag ladies and gents who carry them. And many, particularly the holiday bags, are downright collectible.

Although shopping bags have been around for decades, they have evolved into a ubiquitous form of expression that nearly everyone can appreciate and that even renowned artists don’t disdain.

“The shopping bag has really become an art form,” said Michael L. Closen, co-author of “The Shopping Bag: Portable Art,” a lavishly illustrated 1986 book. “Graphics and technology have developed so that they’re really high caliber. Artists of international renown are willing to put their works on the sides of shopping bags.”

Just ask the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York, which once sponsored a shopping bag exhibition that the Smithsonian Institution later took on the road.

More Than Just a Bag

“Here was something (people) usually were taking for granted as a convenient vessel to carry things in, but in fact a lot of money and effort was being put into making them more than just a bag,” said Dorothy Globus, curator of exhibitions. “Bags are an opportunity to have some fun. They’re beautiful.” The museum’s interest grew out of its collection of decorated bandboxes, the 19th-Century precursors of shopping bags that were used to carry accessories and linens.

For years, Bloomingdale’s, Neiman-Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Dayton’s, I. Magnin, Nordstrom, Marshall Field, the Broadway and other stores have stocked shopping bags for customers. And, just as the day after Thanksgiving is the start of the Christmas shopping season, so is it the day when promotion-minded stores unveil with a flourish the year’s holiday shopping bag offering.

The Christmas bag, in particular, brings out what Globus calls the “latent collectors” whose vast stacks of bags accumulate dust in linen closets and on doorknobs. An occasional bag, suitable for framing, even finds its way onto a wall now and then.

One such collector recently came to the rescue of Neiman-Marcus, an upscale specialty store based in Dallas. For an exhibit of memorabilia from 80 years of Christmas at Neiman’s, the retailer borrowed an extensive array of bags, advertising and catalogues.

“I have an old loyalty to the store,” said Dale Smith, a Dallas florist. Among his favorites is a 1968 “NOEL” bag done by artist Robert Indiana as a parody of his “LOVE” artwork, with the skewed “O.”

Neiman’s, which each year uses the same theme on both its bags and catalogue covers, has also featured Wile E. Coyote and Mickey Mouse, a beribboned cat by Paul Davis (1977) and rainbow-toting camels by B. Kliban (1981). In 1961, Ronald Searle did a humorous illustration that Neiman’s dubbed “The Reluctant Reindeer.” It showed a reindeer tucked in bed with four red socks hanging over the edge. Nearby stood Santa, trying to coax the reindeer into the snowy scene outside.

A Close Call

One year the retailer had a close call, as Stanley Marcus recalls in his book “His and Hers: The Fantasy World of the Neiman-Marcus Catalogue.” In 1972, the store commissioned a “well-known artist,” but when the artwork arrived Marcus found it so “dull and unexciting” that Neiman’s rejected it. At the last moment, the store reproduced the design of a Vasarely scarf that had been in the catalogue a couple of years earlier.

Widely regarded as having the splashiest bags around, trend-setting Bloomingdale’s did something a little out of the ordinary this Christmas. Despite the huge advertising potential of a store’s name appearing on a bag, this retailer in the past has conspicuously left its name off the five bags it designs each year to promote seasonal and special events. It has preferred to let the bold graphics speak for themselves, figuring that savvy shoppers would know whence the bags came.

But this year, Robert Valentine, executive art director for special projects, decided to use a variation on a design by New York artist Jose Ortega featuring a stylized “B” made up of two human figures that appear to be flying.

Come January, Bloomie’s annual New Year’s bag will have a much different look, with a black-and-white design on brown paper. “Our rule is to be intelligently inconsistent,” said John Jay, senior vice president/creative director at Bloomingdale’s. “We always keep them guessing.”

Museum Pieces

At Bloomie’s, it’s not only illustrators and artists who get a crack at designing. Fashion designers Sonia Rykiel and Missoni and architect Michael Graves have also done bags. Some of the results are in permanent collections in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper-Hewitt, the Victoria & Albert in London and the Pompidou in Paris--”and maybe some other places we’re not aware of,” Jay said.

Bloomingdale’s traces to the 1950s its first graphically designed shopping bag, done for a promotion of French products. Perhaps the store’s most legendary tote is its enduring everyday bag, inscribed with--what else?--Big Brown Bag. Created in the early 1970s, it is still in use and standard equipment for New York pedestrians.

In a 1982 poster, New York artist Hudson Talbott depicted the Statue of Liberty collapsing in the back of a cab, her loaded Big Brown Bag and other purchases about her. “It’s that universal feeling, at least here in New York, of collapsing in a cab after a hard day of shopping,” Talbott said. “The Big Brown Bag is very universal, classic. It represents Bloomingdale’s in particular but is also a sign of Uptown shopping.”

Creating an elegant shopping bag can cause problems, as Marshall Field & Co. found out in 1984. The Chicago merchant planned a bag with a gold finish and a fancy white bow but discovered just before production that the gold material foiled anti-shoplifting alarms. A red background was substituted, achieving the look that the store now uses each year.

Boldest of the Bold

When it comes to bold bags, few merchants go as far as the Dayton Hudson department stores, based in Minneapolis. The chain, known for strong support of cultural institutions, usually ties its bag design in with a benefit of some sort.

For a 1981 promotion with the Minnesota Zoo, the retailer flew Winston, a snowy owl, to New York to pose with a blonde Danish model named Biten.

Two years ago, Dayton Hudson hired the quirky Annie Leibovitz to photograph Willard Scott, “Today Show” bon vivant and weatherman, in an ermine-trimmed, Renaissance-style Santa Claus costume designed by Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theater. “Annie had spent a whole week setting up the set at her studio,” said Cyndi Schlosser, a Dayton Hudson spokeswoman. “It looked like a Christmas card.”

Through the years, the merchant has done several projects with the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which has persuaded such noted artists as Frank Stella, David Hockney and Roy Lichtenstein to put brush to canvas for the sake of the shopping bag.

Challenge for Artists

“They took it on as a challenge,” said Martin Friedman, the center’s director. “They realized that they were doing something that’s sort of a moving poster and would change its form as various things were stuffed into it.”

John Pellegrene, senior vice president of marketing for Dayton Hudson, said artists respond to a cause. “I can’t imagine (them) doing a bag unless it was in conjunction with a great museum,” he said, noting that many of the artists waive a fee.

Dayton Hudson first realized the potential of shopping bags as attention-getters when it did a Picasso-esque bag for a spring, 1979, promotion. The store ran an ad in Vogue offering the bag for $2. Over several weeks, Dayton’s went through 10,000 bags.

“We got thousands of requests from all over the world,” Schlosser said. Eventually, the Picasso estate got wind of the promotion and asked that it be stopped, but meantime requested “10 bags because . . . they were super,” Schlosser recalled. After the Picasso bag, “it just started snowballing,” she said. “We saw what kind of visibility these bags could attain. Each year we try to top ourselves.”

Hit in Gift Shops

And with today’s improved technology, museums have jumped on the shopping bag bandwagon by creating bags featuring works from their permanent collections or traveling exhibits to sell in their gift shops.

For a 1985-86 Renoir exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, a detail from the artist’s 1883 “Le Bal a Bougival” was reproduced in all its Impressionist glory on a sturdy, laminated bag with a fold-down cardboard base and delicate rope handles secured by eyelets.

The bags, which had a more collectible flavor than the familiar bags with twisted paper handles, caused a revolution. By selling the bags for $2, the museum made about $1 per bag on the 120,000 sold, according to Elaine G. Schipper, executive vice president of SPS Co., a Los Angeles packaging consultant that designed the bag.

“All of a sudden, the concept of selling bags for a profit instead of giving them away as an overhead expense” caught on, said Ben Schipper, president of SPS and a 43-year veteran of the industry.

Big and Small

Since 1985, other museums--not to mention cosmetics makers, politicians, doctors, wine stores and shopping malls--have designed laminated totes large enough to carry coats and tiny enough to accommodate a pair of earrings.

When the Impressionist exhibit from the Soviet Union stopped at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art last year, a Paul Gauguin painting was reproduced on a bag to commemorate the event. On the bottom were printed details about the artist and a list of exhibit sponsors.

(Long before technology made such quality reproduction possible, artist Andy Warhol put his stamp on a shopping bag, slapping his classic “Campbell’s Tomato Soup” graphic onto a brown paper bag; it is in the collection of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.)

Another trend is the use of laminated bags as gift wrap. Hallmark sells bags in several sizes and colors. And for this holiday season SPS designed a laminated bag that 12 of the 43 Broadway department stores are selling as an alternative to the $4 paper-and-ribbon wrap.

“We’re calling it an express wrap” for people who don’t want to wait for custom wrapping, said Jane Crocker, the Broadway’s purchasing manager. So far, the three sizes, which sell for $2, $2.50 and $3, “seem to be going quite well. And the bags really can take a beating, so I’m sure the customer’s going to be reusing them.”

High Production Cost

High labor costs have prohibited the three major U.S. bag manufacturers from making the glossy, laminated-paper bags, which cost as much as 80 cents to produce even in South Korea and other countries with plentiful cheap labor.

“They can cost twice as much as a domestic bag,” said Bob Costa, general sales manager for Champion International’s Walden, N.Y., plant, which makes about a third of the estimated 500 million paper shopping bags produced domestically each year. Although this secretive industry does not toss statistics around, one estimate puts its annual sales at $100 million.

As paper prices have climbed in recent years, so have shopping bag prices. When department stores years ago started selling them for 25 cents, they made a few cents profit on each bag. Now, with bags costing 40 cents or more to produce, they lose money--unless, of course, they raise prices. (Some stores, including Nordstrom, ask customers for a donation to be contributed to local charities.)

South Coast Plaza, the big Costa Mesa mall, doubled the price of its laminated-paper Christmas bags this year, to $1. “We barely break even on these bags,” said Maura K. Eggan, the mall’s marketing director. “They’re an amenity for our shoppers.”

Like the $5 Apple

The price tag, however, rankles some customers. “It’s like paying $5 for an apple in Japan,” said Geneva Quarve of Laguna Niguel. “It doesn’t mean that much to me (to have one).” Still, Eggan feels that sales are in the bag. “We sell 40,000 every year.”

Edward J. DeBartolo Corp., the Youngstown, Ohio, developer that commissioned Tony Bennett’s work, sees a tradition in the making despite its bag’s hefty $4 price tag. “We are hoping . . . to make it an annual event,” said Mary Rutkoski, director of shopping center marketing for the firm. And on the bottom of the bag is the notation “First in a Series.”

Some purists fear that paper bags will go the way of bandboxes because of the push for plastic, which is cheaper and stronger. But Stephen C. Wagner, co-author of “The Shopping Bag: Portable Art,” expects better stores to maintain the paper bag tradition “as long as the price is affordable.”

Staff writer Mary Ann Galante in Orange County contributed to this story.