DEFINED LOOK OF PLAYBOY
CREATED ICONIC BUNNY LOGO
Art Paul was a graphic artist who helped Hugh Hefner define the look of Playboy magazine from its inception by drawing its rabbit logo and hiring great illustrators to lend worldliness to its pages.
He died on April 2 in Chicago. He was 93. Suzanne Seed, his wife, said the cause was complications of pneumonia.
Paul was a freelance graphic artist with a studio in Chicago when Hefner met him in 1953, several months before Playboy’s first issue. “He comes in and sees all the things on the wall — the commercial stuff I was doing as well as the more personal things — and he says, ‘Is that your work or work you like?’ And I said, ‘It’s both,’” Paul said in an interview with director Jennifer Hou Kwong for her coming documentary about him, Art of Playboy.
Paul quickly became the fledgling magazine’s art director as it shifted from its original name, Stag Party (dropped before its debut), to Playboy. He designed the inaugural cover, a photo of Marilyn Monroe set against a stark white background, and replaced the original logo (a stag in a smoking jacket) with a silhouetted rabbit wearing a tuxedo bow tie.
The rabbit later became the symbol of the Playboy empire. But Paul, who sketched it in an hour, intended it only as a stylized end point to articles. Soon after the magazine’s debut, the rabbit appeared on every cover overseen by Paul. To challenge readers, the rabbit head was sometimes embedded in the design of the covers.
Taking his cue from the subtitle of the magazine — Entertainment for Men — Paul focused on giving a distinctive, masculine character to its editorial content.
“The 'entertainment’ word is really the one that sparked me,” he said in an interview in 2009. He added: “The word 'playboy’ is not a serious one. The rabbit is not serious; it was basically a signal that we could make fun of ourselves.”
Paul had complete freedom to lay out Playboy’s pages, choose the typography, arrange the photographs and, critically, hire the artists. In pursuit of idea-driven illustrations, he commissioned work from Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Salvador Dalí, Brad Holland and many others.
“Paul understood that the balance between nude photography and sophisticated writing was the key to separating Playboy from a pulp girlie magazine,” Steven Heller, co-chairman of the design department at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, wrote in an email. “So he balanced the literary aesthetic of The New Yorker with the visual audacity of Esquire and created a format that evoked both seriousness and playfulness.”
Holland, who began illustrating 'Ribald Classics’ stories for Playboy in 1968, said Paul preferred artists who had something to say. “He wanted pictures to augment, rather than illustrate, articles,” he said by email, “and that opened the door to popular culture to many of us who might otherwise have gone into fine arts.”
Among Paul’s innovations were pop-ups, pull-outs and die-cut patterns that could engage readers more than standard pages.
Arthur Paul was born in Chicago on Jan. 18, 1925. His parents were Ukrainian immigrants. His father died before Art was a year old, and his older brother, Norman, became his artistic guide.
“He was a very talented artist himself,” Paul told The Chicago Tribune in 2015, “and he taught me how to look at the world around me.”
Paul filled the margins of books at home with drawings and painted murals at high school. An opportunity to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on scholarship was deferred while he served stateside in the Army Air Forces. When he returned he enrolled at the Institute of Design, known as the Chicago Bauhaus.
Paul was illustrating books and magazines and working for clients like Marshall Field when Hefner, at the suggestion of a mutual friend, called on him about Playboy. Paul stayed at the magazine for 29 years before retiring as a vice-president to pursue his own projects.