Poster Art Mirrors a Century of American Life

Norman Rockwell meets the Grateful Dead in “Posters American Style,” by Therese Thau Heyman (Harry N. Abrams, 192 pages, $35), a handsome survey of a century of vivid images that rallied support for such mainstays of civilization as war, peace, movies, psychedelic rock bands and Levy’s rye bread.

In the beginning, there was beauty and calm--and some surprising open-mindedness: The Century Co. advertised the August 1897 issue of its family magazine with a nude by the young Maxfield Parrish. Several of the World War I recruiting images have a painterly softness protectively evoking the loved ones at home.

Rockwell continues the tradition in his 1943 war bond poster, “Save Freedom of Speech.” The warm glow of integrity radiates from the face of a Jimmy Stewart type speaking out at a town meeting. A darker vision emerges in Karl Koehler and Victor Ancona’s caricature of a sinister Nazi with a hanging man reflected in his monocle.

Sixties psychedelia introduced fantastic new styles, many of them--like Stanley Mouse’s rose-toting Deadhead skeleton and Wes Wilson’s sinuous patterning--associated with Bill Graham’s rock productions. Protest posters from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s also rose to the occasion. Among the most powerful is R. L. Haeberle’s photograph of the My Lai slaughter, coupled with Peter Brandt’s superimposed text: “Q. And babies? A. And babies.”

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“You keep friends by loving them, and places by remembering them.” That morsel of wisdom comes from 9-year-old Rodrigo, one of 10 children whose thoughts and photographs of their homes illuminate “Picture Mexico City” (Getty Trust Publications, 128 pages $19.95). The idea was to compile a new generation’s images of landmarks and monuments close to their hearts.

Apolonio, a Huichol Indian who works at a beaded-jewelry stall, memorializes a deer in a patch of shadow at Chapultepec Zoo and a circle of treetops (“alive like us”). Natassja focuses on two people dancing in a small room on Virgin of Guadalupe Day and a broken pay phone someone has left off the hook. Diego considers his white-haired great-grandfather “history itself” and points out that a giant Corona beer sign has become a landmark because it doesn’t fall down in the wind.

The children’s surprisingly acute (and well-edited) commentary and their black-and-white photographs of sights as diverse as dangling pigs’ heads in a butcher’s shop and a rubble-strewn athletic field redefine one of the world’s most populous cities in achingly personal terms.

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Before TV or talkies, evening was the time to curl up with a pulp magazine. First published in the 1890s, these all-fiction monthlies were printed on cheap wood-pulp paper and sold for 10 to 25 cents at newsstands--where flashy covers increasingly competed with one another.

“Pulp Culture,” by Frank M. Robinson and Lawrence Davidson (Collectors Press, 204 pages, $39.95), gathers 440 magazine-cover paintings of old-time romance, derring-do and horror into a colorful guide for collectors and pop culture fans.

The early covers were gently anecdotal (Joseph Leyendecker’s chiseled-jaw football players) or romantic (N.C. Wyeth’s buccaneer in a canoe). But the magazines soon sorted themselves out into specialist genres, including mystery, western, heroes (the Shadow) and villains (Doctor Death), war (biplane dogfights), science fiction and such bizarrely narrow themes as “popular engineering”--adventures digging subway tunnels.

Wispy bits of clothing slide off voluptuous women on covers for the “love pulps,” while creepy misogynist scenes of torture were staples on the “shudder pulps” of the 1930s. Racial prejudice also had a field day, with routine depictions of sinister Asians. But as slices of Americana, warts and all, the magazines and their covers reflected the aspirations and fears of their era; too bad the authors don’t devote more space to analyzing these issues.

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A dog snoozing in a patch of shadow in Aswan, Egypt; a naked woman curled up on a platform in a Parisian shop window; a boy in Rio de Janeiro who dozes beneath the handle of his bicycle--the whole world seems to be taking a siesta in “To Sleep, Perchance to Dream,” a collection of serenely casual black-and-white photographs by Ferdinando Scianna (Phaidon, 124 pages, $29.95).

An Italian photojournalist obsessed with shooting slumberers, Scianna says in an afterword that sleep is a universal activity “to which we succumb almost secretly, usually in protected places, aware that we are delivering ourselves defenseless to the whim of others.”

Those who nap in public tend to be infants or poor people--the homeless, nomads, exhausted laborers. Hardly anyone rests in a proper bed in Scianna’s photographs, a fact that reinforces their vulnerable quality. But there are flashes of humor, like the marble bust of a woman with closed eyes toted on a workman’s shoulder.

A selection of brief quotes by poets and others offers a spectrum of viewpoints, from Charles Baudelaire (“I fear sleep like one fears a large hole/Full of vague horrors . . “) to John Keats (“. . . a sleep/Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing”).

* Cathy Curtis reviews art and photography books every four weeks.