Artist of the day: Artist of the day, February 6: Cipe Pineles, Austrian/American graphic designer and art director

Cipe Pineles (1908 – 1991) was an Austrian-born graphic designer and art director who made her career in New York at such magazines as Seventeen, Charm and Mademoiselle. She had a nearly 60-year-long career in design. She started her career at the age of 23 at Contempora after struggling to enter the work force due to sexism in the industry. In 1932 (to 1936) she became an assistant to the art director of Condé Nast Publications. She soon became the art director for Glamour, publication directed at young women; this is where her style as a playful modernist developed through various uses of image and type. She worked for Vogue in New York and London and Overseas Woman in Paris. She continued to develop her distinct style throughout her career and in 1942, she became art director of Glamour. She went on to become the Art Director at Seventeen, then Charm and moved to become art director of Mademoiselle in New York. From 1961 to 1972 she worked as a graphic design consultant for the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York, supervising the creation of branding and marketing materials for this institution of the arts.

She was also credited with being the first person to bring fine art into mainstream, mass-produced media. She commissioned fine artists such as Ad Reinhardt and Andy Warhol to illustrate articles during her time at Seventeen.

“We tried to make the prosaic attractive without using the tired clichés of false glamour,” she said in an interview. “You might say we tried to convey the attractiveness of reality, as opposed to the glitter of a never-never land.” Her work contributed to the effort to redefine the style of women’s magazines. Her efforts also contributed to the feminist movement by helping to continue to change women's roles in society.

Pineles joined the faculty of Parsons School of Design in 1963 and was also its director of publication design. Positions as Andrew Mellon Professor at Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (in 1977) and on the visiting committee for Harvard Graduate School of Design followed.

In 1943, Pineles became the first female member of the Art Directors Club. She was later inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 1975. In 1955 she became the first and until 1968 only female member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI). In 1984 she was honored by the Society of Publication Designers with Herb Lubalin Award. Pineles received the AIGA Medal in 1996.

As a personal project, Pineles wrote and illustrated a sketchbook of Easter European Jewish recipes, completing a manuscript in 1945. According to Pineles, most of the recipes in the book were passed down by her mother. "I think it was a way of celebrating the background of the family ... bringing with them some of what they had had in Europe," said Carol Burtin Fripp, Pineles' daughter. The published version contains all of Pineles' hand-lettered and hand-painted recipes and includes essays of Pineles' life and career, with contributions from food critic Mimi Sheraton, design writer Steven Heller, graphic designer Paula Scher and Maria Kalman.

© 2018. All images are copyrighted © Cipe Pineles. The use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission from the artist/Estate is obtained.