Arnold Skolnick, who with just a few days to work designed what grew to become some of the acquainted pop-culture photos of its time, the poster for the unique Woodstock music pageant in 1969, died on June 15 in Amherst, Mass. He was 85.
His son Alexander Skolnick stated the trigger was respiratory failure.
Mr. Skolnick’s poster design was a mannequin of simplicity that each conveyed details about the pageant — when and the place it was, who was performing — and caught the sensibility of the second. With an attention-getting pink background, it had as its dominant picture the neck of a guitar with a white chicken perched on it. “3 Days of Peace & Music,” the massive sort learn.
Mr. Skolnick was 32 and doing freelance work for promoting businesses and different shoppers — “extra ‘Mad Males’ than ‘Simple Rider,’” as The Washington Put up described him 50 years later — when he obtained a name from John Morris, the manufacturing coordinator for the pageant. Mr. Skolnick instructed The Every day Hampshire Gazette of Northampton, Mass., in 2008 that an architect good friend who was doing work on a resort within the Virgin Islands that attracted quite a lot of rock stars knew Mr. Morris and made the connection.
He obtained the task on a Thursday, he told The Stamford Advocate in 2010.
“And I introduced it by to them on Monday afternoon,” he stated. “It was simply one other job, however it grew to become well-known.”
The job had initially gone to David Edward Byrd, who had been creating posters for rock exhibits on the Fillmore East in Manhattan. The poster Mr. Byrd produced was, as Adweek described it for the fiftieth anniversary of the pageant, “a pseudo-psychedelic tableau (a lot of hearts and flowers) with a neoclassical centerpiece — particularly, a nude lady posing with an urn.”
“I believed this was excellent as a result of she is Aquarius,” Mr. Byrd instructed Adweek. “What may very well be improper?”
For starters, the truth that she wore no garments. The Woodstock pageant was at one level deliberate for Wallkill, N.Y. (it was moved to close the hamlet of White Lake in Bethel, N.Y., late within the sport), and retailers there have been stated to haven’t wished a unadorned lady of their store home windows. Additionally, the Byrd poster left no room to record the names of the performers.
And so Mr. Skolnick obtained the decision for a rush job. He had lately seen some paper cutout works by Henri Matisse at a Manhattan museum and took to the task with a razor blade, reducing out shapes in coloured paper and placing them, at first, on a blue background. However then he switched to pink and, as he instructed The Every day Information of New York in 1976, “the entire thing got here alive.”
However not with out some tweaking.
“At first I considered chicken and flute,” he instructed The Every day Information. “However the flute is actually jazz, so I made it a guitar.”
About that chicken: Mr. Skolnick stated in interviews that although most individuals assumed it was a dove, it owed extra of a debt to the catbirds he had been sketching that summer time whereas spending time on Shelter Island, N.Y. Oh, and he stated the fowl features a mistake.
“I forgot to inform the printer that the beak ought to be black,” he stated, “and so it’s a pink beak.”
A author good friend, Ira Arnold, helped with the phrases, and, Mr. Skolnick instructed The Every day Information, the 2 of them break up the $12,000 charge.
The poster has turn out to be a much-circulated and much-imitated picture, though Mr. Skolnick stated that he didn’t maintain the copyright and thus didn’t rake in royalties. In 2012, when the Museum at Bethel Woods in New York, which is on the pageant web site and dedicated to Woodstock, held an exhibition centered on the Byrd and Skolnick posters, it additionally included dozens of photos impressed by them, particularly the Skolnick model.
“Somebody had seen a poster in Memphis for a barbecue competitors,” Wade Lawrence, the museum’s director, instructed Hudson Valley Magazine on the time, explaining one of many inspirations for the exhibition. “It was a knockoff of Skolnick’s poster. Instead of the guitar there was a fork, and as a substitute of the dove there was a pig.”
Neal Hitch, senior curator on the Bethel museum, stated that Mr. Skolnick got here up with the proper poster for the second.
“His work is so widespread as a result of it supersedes design and represents a perfect,” he stated by e mail. “Only a few artists have managed to seize the essence of a motion on one sheet of paper higher than Arnold Skolnick.”
Mr. Skolnick was born on Feb. 25, 1937, in Brooklyn. His father, Samuel, was a linotype operator, and his mom, Esther (Plotnik) Skolnick, was a secretary who operated a Comptometer, a predigital mechanical calculator, at an advert company.
Artwork, he stated, was one thing born into him.
“You don’t turn out to be an artist,” he instructed The Every day Hampshire Gazette in 2008. “You both are otherwise you’re not.”
He attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, then studied underneath the artist Edwin Dickinson on the Artwork College students League in Manhattan. He was, his son stated, in a number of methods an unlikely alternative for the Woodstock poster.
“He didn’t like rock ’n’ roll, he didn’t just like the drug tradition, and he hated psychedelic artwork,” Alexander Skolnick stated in a telephone interview.
He did, nonetheless, attend Woodstock. He stayed for a day. However then he heard concerning the coming rain.
“I stated ‘I’ve obtained to get out of right here,’” he recalled in a 2019 video interview with New England Public Media. “I obtained into the Volvo. I will need to have broken 20 automobiles getting out of the car parking zone.”
Michael Lang, one of many important promoters of the pageant, who died in January, claimed in his 2009 e book, “The Highway to Woodstock,” that he got here up with the wording and the imagery for the poster. However in an interview that 12 months with Newsday, Mr. Skolnick stated Mr. Lang had nothing to do with the poster and noticed it solely after it was completed; that account, the newspaper stated, was supported by different pageant organizers.
Mr. Skolnick put the charge he obtained for the work towards a home in Chesterfield, Mass., and alternated between that dwelling and New York for many years earlier than transferring in 2015 to Northampton, the place he lived till his dying.
Although finest identified for one poster, Mr. Skolnick had a various profession, designing books and some movie credit score sequences in addition to working in promoting. He additionally based Imago Design, a design firm that specialised in artwork books, and Chameleon Books, a publishing firm that introduced out books like “Work of the Southwest” (1994) and “The Artist and the American Panorama” (1998).
And he painted, exhibiting through the years on the Elizabeth Moss Galleries in Maine and the Pratt Gallery in Amherst, amongst different locations.
Within the mid-Seventies he began portray flowers and vegetation. By the point of a 1982 present of his works in Amherst, these photos had turned extra cynical, with Mr. Skolnick depicting vegetation that appeared to be arming themselves in opposition to environmental threats.
“In my earlier work I believed if I confirmed how lovely nature is, then folks would need to defend it,” he instructed The Every day Hampshire Gazette in 1982. “Now I’m displaying it within the means of being destroyed, and I’m making an attempt to get folks to react earlier than it’s too late.”
Mr. Skolnick’s marriages to Iris Jay in 1960 and Cynthia Meyer in 1990 led to divorce. Along with his son Alexander, from his first marriage, he’s survived by one other son from that marriage, Peter; a sister, Helene Rothschild; and two grandchildren.
Not lengthy after creating the Woodstock poster, Mr. Skolnick got here up with one other picture seen by many: the duvet for “What to Do With Your Bad Car: An Motion Handbook for Lemon Homeowners” (1971), an early e book from Ralph Nader’s shopper watchdog workforce. He stated his writer requested him in the future to look over some cowl concepts for the forthcoming Nader e book. He wasn’t impressed.
“I appeared, and I stated, ‘Simply put a lemon on wheels,’” Mr. Skolnick stated in a 2019 interview with The Every day Hampshire Gazette. “And no person moved. They stated, ‘Get Ralph Nader on the telephone!’”
He was requested to translate the suggestion into {a photograph}.
“I obtained a lemon,” he stated. “I obtained a Tonka toy truck. I put it on my kitchen desk and I shot it.”
