The art director who shook up Madison Avenue

George Lois 1931–2022

George Lois married advertising with wit to become the best-known art director of the 20th century. His iconic 1960 commercial for Xerox showed a chimpanzee operating a copy machine with ease. Decades later, another of his commercials featured rock stars rallying young viewers to tell their cable company “I want my MTV.” In between, he designed daring magazine covers for Esquire in the 1960s and ’70s, depicting Muhammad Ali as an arrow-strafed St. Sebastian and Andy Warhol drowning in the contents of a Campbell’s soup can. He melded highbrow and lowbrow, counterculture and corporate America. And he had little patience for conventional wisdom. When he learned that Esquire had been designing its covers by committee, he scoffed at the idea. “You need to get one guy who understands the culture,” he said, “who likes comic strips, goes to the ballet, visits the Metropolitan Museum.”

Raised in New York as the youngest of three children of Greek immigrants, said The New York Times, Lois could “talk a blue streak with a Bronx accent.” After serving in Korea, he joined CBS in 1954 as a promotional designer and then held positions at a variety of ad agencies before co-founding his own in 1960. Buoyed by its success with the Xerox ad, which became a nationwide sensation, the agency quickly grew. At the same time, Lois’ covers for Esquire were “acid-rain critiques on society, race, politics, and war”—including one that featured the lieutenant who ordered the My Lai massacre embracing Vietnamese children with a creepy grin. Lois’ creative risks earned him induction into “several advertising and visual arts halls of fame,” said WFTV.com. In 2008, 32 of his magazine covers were added to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

Though “his legacy was vast,” said the Associated Press, some colleagues characterized him as an egotist who “exaggerated his role at the expense of other contributors.” But Lois was more annoyed with his admirers, particularly those who nicknamed him the Original Mad Man. Those “male-chauvinist, no-talent, WASP, white-shirted, racist, anti-Semitic, Republican SOBs” who populated the AMC show Mad Men, he said in 2012, bore little resemblance to “the audacious movers and shakers of those times.” Besides, he added, “when I was in my 30s, I was better looking than Don Draper.”