RICHARD AMSEL AND THE ABSTRACTIONS

Here are two items courtesy of good friend Larry Aydlette, who these days can be found having fun at the movies and in the record shop, for those who still revere and perhaps obsess over the increasingly lost art of the theatrical one-sheet.

First of all, if you’re on the East Coast, particularly if you’re a Philadelphia citizen, you’ll want to know about a very special exhibit which opens today honoring the sketches and illustrations of Richard Amsel, a 1969 graduate of the school who created some of the most memorable poster art imagery of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as portrait covers for TV Guide and countless other magazines. For the next month, through May 14, Amsel’s work will be celebrated in a retrospective exhibit that will highlight Amsel’s work and call attention to his many influences, which included the art nouveau movement, Klimt, Mucha and, perhaps surprisingly, Walt Disney. According to JoAnn Loviglio, reporting for the Associated Press, “The portraits pay homage to the nostalgia of old Hollywood, often through the groovy lens of the Age of Aquarius, while still managing to look contemporary by today's standards.” Amsel’s designs, which emphasis a style of approach to movie poster art that has been largely sidelined in favor of simple photographic portraits, are instantly recognizable—he was responsible for the designs for standout one-sheets like The Sting, which referenced Saturday Evening Post illustrator J.C. Leyendecker, Murder on the Orient Express, Flash Gordon and, perhaps, most famously, the playful, evocative design of the original Raiders of the Lost Ark. Amsel’s last poster was the one he created for Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, finished just weeks before his death of AIDS-related complications at the age of 37. Thinking back on the work of Richard Amsel, as well as contemporaries like Bob Peak, is to remember a time when movie one-sheets and poster art, when placed in the hands of men and women like these artists, were more often considered artistic opportunities of their own apart from, but always in graceful support of, the movies themselves. The University of the Arts at Philadelphia’s Richard Amsel collection will provide those who appreciate Amsel’s work that chance to see, through his sketches and illustrations, how the artist’s ideas develop, where he intends to take them, and the process of exploration that occurs in each drawing. If you’re reading this on the East Coast this month, you may not want to miss it.






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And here’s another bit of fun in which you don’t have to be an Easterner to take part: there’s a keen site that Larry has pointed me to this morning called Film the Blanks. Put simply (or perhaps mysteriously), the blog’s anonymous proprietor looks at the site as “An ongoing experiment to abstract and/or reduce film posters, some famous, some not so famous but all cool in their own way.” Put competitively, the site is a basically a year-long game in which contestants make guesses as to the identity of famous (and not-so-famous) one-sheets, which are initially presented as abstract versions of themselves, with new clues that bring the posters into more familiar focus as time goes by. Winners of individual poster guesses are tallied and aggregated on the sidebar (the first five correct guesses for every poster are given one point each) toward a year-end prize of some magnitude, the exact nature of which has yet to be revealed. There’s a tough one up for today (the 72nd post), and it may already have five correct guesses. But you should take a gander at the abstract archives for a clue as to the cleverness quotient at play here, and get ready for tomorrow’s new post, which will be available at “15:30 GMT” (figure it out!), with a subsequent clue added to the blank poster one hour later. That’s how it happens every day. And even if you don’t want to play the game, it’s still an excellent diversion to keep production down in your office while you’re gazing at the day’s featured puzzler. Do I smell an addiction brewing? Thanks a lot, Larry!

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