Cipe Pineles: A Life of Design (Norton Book for Architects and Designers

by Cipé Pineles, Martha Scotford

The life and work of the first woman art director of a mass-market publication, an early role model for women in design. One of the unsung pioneers of American graphic design, Cipe Pineles was art director of Glamour , Seventeen , Charm , and Mademoiselle magazines between 1930 and 1960, helped to create the institutional identity for Lincoln Center in the 1960s, and taught generations of students at Parsons School of Design. Tracing Pineles's career from young immigrant to "ranking" female in the design world, Martha Scotford chronicles her professional life at a time when few women were involved in design and assesses her contributions to graphic design and magazine design in particular.

Genres: Design, Biography

190 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1998

About the author

Cipé Pineles attended high school in Brooklyn, and went to Pratt Institute, where she won a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Scholarship. After graduation, and what she calls an "adventurous" year in the still-life painting business, she became assistant in 1932 to M.F. Agha, then art director of Conde Nast publications. She stayed at Conde Nast long enough to become a 10-year-test-case of The Art Directors Club's admission policy toward women, and did in fact become its first woman member.

In 1947, she moved to Seventeen as art director, introducing there the commissioning of leading painters to do fiction illustration (on the theory that young readers would have few barriers in accepting fine art).

In 1950, Miss Pineles was named art director of Street & Smith's Charm, where she and editor Helen Valentine redirected the publication to a then new consumer audience—women who work. She moved to another Street & Smith publication, Mademoiselle, leaving in 1961 to work as an independent designer and illustrator. Cipé Pineles became design consultant to Lincoln Center in 1967, with the entire graphics program of the Center, from stationery to annual reports, under her supervision. Her communication assignments there also included the corporate symbol design and the monthly Journal and Calendar of Events.

In 1970 she joined the faculty of the Parsons School of Design, becoming as well director of publication design. The Parsons Bread Book, produced as a class project, was republished by Harper & Row in 1974, and the original student version, Bread, was included in the 1974 American Institute of Graphic Arts' prestigious "50 Books Of The Year" show.

She was married to William Golden for 20 years. Several years after his death, in 1959, she married Will Burtin.

Reviews

[CarolineFromConcord · Rating 3 out of 5]

Martha Scotford has written a biography of a pathbreaking woman in graphic design, Cipe (pronounced C.P.) Pineles, who got her first design job in 1930 and continued as a major influence in America until her death in 1991. Over those decades, Pineles won prestigious awards -- often as the first woman -- for art direction in both her magazine career (e.g. *Seventeen* and *Charm*) and her academic career at New York's Parsons School of Design.

You never heard of her. Such is often the fate of pathbreaking women.

I wanted to read this book partly because I had been researching an artist friend of hers, another pathbreaking woman you don't know, Lucille Corcas, for a potential Wikipedia post. I knew both women slightly when I was a child, although it was their children who were more my contemporaries. Pineles attended my wedding, and much of Scotford's material is from or about people I knew and aspects of the county where I grew up, including the school my siblings attended.

Cipe Pineles was born in 1908 in Vienna and arrived in the US with her family in 1923. She made a mark almost immediately, learning English and winning first prize in the *Atlantic Monthly* Contest for High Schools with her surprisingly charming essay called "Bolsheviki," about a home invasion when her family was living in Poland. You can read it in the Appendix. She later brought her appreciation of writing to her artistic work, ensuring the art worked with the content. At the same time, she gave free rein to artists, providing part-time work to many who had begun to be famous (Jacob Lawrence, Ben Shahn) or became famous later.

This is a book either for people interested in how one woman handled being the only female in a male-dominated world or for people interested in the history of graphic design. It may help if the reader is not turned off by a lot of discussion of font, column width, and point size. I enjoy that stuff.

The one problem for me was that because the author wanted to include as much of Pineles's work as possible but also wanted to design a book with lots of white space, the illustrations were often minuscule. I literally needed my magnifying glass to inspect the small ones.

There's a decent entry for Cipe Pineles on Wikipedia. Now to get one for Lucille Corcos!