The rollicking, risque night life of Paris at the turn of the past century centered on the Moulin Rouge, with the cabaret’s Grandes Revues boasting a melange of entertainers, including its celebrated can-can dancers.
Inspired by these extravagant spectacles, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec helped shape popular perceptions of the Moulin Rouge and captured the spirit of this libertine time with his still-iconic posters and related paintings and drawings.
More than half a century later, a similar symbiotic relationship developed between eight artists and two now-famous San Francisco nightclubs, which were ground zero for a burgeoning underground music scene that reached its zenith from 1965 to ’71.
These artists, who remain little known by the general public, and 300 of their experimental, often eye-popping posters are showcased in an exhibition that opens Saturday at the Denver Art Museum and runs through July 31.
The show is titled “The Psychedelic Experience,” reflecting the posters’ vivid colors, trippy patterns and curvy typography and the music-saturated counterculture that inspired them.
The display was spurred in part by the museum’s much-publicized acquisition in January 2008 of 875 psychedelic posters and handbills from Boulder collector David Tippit and offers the first in-depth overview of that holding.
“David says that there are probably two, three, maybe four collections of this scale in private hands,” said Darrin Alfred, AIGA assistant curator of graphic design. “This is the only one of its kind in a public institution.”
Accompanying groups of posters by each of the pivotal designers, including Lee Conklin, Bonnie MacLean, Victor Moscoso and Wes Wilson, are selected album covers, tickets and comics, as well as scene-setting music, photographs and films.
This look back at this transformative, often tumultuous time in the late 20th century could hardly be more timely. As evidenced by the renewed fad for bell-bottoms and hip-huggers, and the period’s resurgent influence across art and design, the 1960s are back in vogue.
In 2007, the Columbus (Ohio) Museum of Art presented an exhibition of 1960s Op Art, which had significant impact on psychedelic design. And last year, the Tate Liverpool in England presented a show titled “Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era.”
But this poster exhibition is undoubtedly the largest-ever look at the graphic design from 1960s San Francisco. As much as that distinction is the show’s calling card, it is also likely to be a source of controversy.
It is not unusual for museums to undertake design exhibitions of this kind, but such surveys are typically smaller in size and lower in profile, especially ones that are so highly focused.
Some cynics are inevitably going to question whether this show is more about big attendance than art-historical significance. Given that the museum has made this a ticketed exhibition and set the top admission price at $15, it is clearly expecting a sizable turnout. (It no longer releases attendance projections.)
Some of these questions seem justified, considering that this will be the only major exhibition on view at the museum during its four-month run.
That said, it is impossible to deny the impact of this startlingly new aesthetic four decades ago and its continuing influence on graphic design.
Also sure to be controversial is an adjacent gallery, in which the museum has fastidiously re-created the look and feel of a 1960s apartment, complete with a series of interactive activities, including impressively high-tech listening stations.
Some experts in the museum world and others will no doubt praise the museum for going well beyond a traditional exhibition and developing this unusual immersive environment.
But others — count me among them — will see this as just another step in the Disneyfication of American art museums. While no one is arguing against reasonable historical context and educational aids, museums seem to have less and less faith in the innate visual and expressive power of the art they present.
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com
