Product Details
The Art of the Fillmore: The Poster Series 1966-1971

The Art of the Fillmore: The Poster Series 1966-1971
By Gayle Lemke

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Product Description

Legendary impresario Bill Graham began in January 1966 to commission posters to promote the concerts he was putting on at San Francisco's Fillmore auditorium. The poster artists followed the revolutionary mandate of the sixties consciousness, creating vivid, irreverent banners that reflected their own sense of poetics, style, and wit. What resulted were signature juxtapositions of design, lettering, and color that spawned a brand new art form. Their muse was the cosmic synergy that then abounded, fueled in part by LSD. These posters have since come to occupy a place in art history while surviving priceless artifacts of rock archeology. Published in cooperation with Bill Graham Presents, this is an intoxicating compendium of the funkiest posters of the century. Highlighted in this unique, lavishly printed full-color volume are the original numbered and unnumbered series created exclusively for the San Francisco and New York Fillmore dance concerts. The more than 400 hand-drawn posters, handbills, tickets, and photographs feature art by Wes Wilson, Bonnie MacLean, Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley, Rick Griffin, Lee Conklin, Greg Irons, Randy Tuten, David Byrd, David Singer, and Norman Orr.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #149672 in Books
  • Published on: 2005-06-22
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 240 pages

Editorial Reviews

San Francisco Chronicle, Regan McMahon
...a comprehensive, gorgeously reproduced and chronologically arranged collection...

Customer Reviews

High on the colors5
This is the most comprehensive collection of psychedelic art I could find. Remember a time when commercial design came from the heart to the pen. No computer enhanced 3-D images. Just wavy brush strokes and colors bold enough to get you high. Pick it up, and trip out.

Useful Resource4
The main positives: this is complete, showing the first and most modest flyer, up through the closing of the Fillmore; almost all the flyers are at least partly in color, and they do indeed show the tenor of the era (which I well remember).

The main negative: most of these are shown as a small part of each page; few are relatively large, and I don't recall any being full-page size. So, don't buy this book in the expectation that you're getting a collection of full-page reproductions (even reduced in size from the originals, as they would be).

Important historical document found!5
This zeros in on what the sixties meant to me. A period of artistic creativity without bounds and limits. One giant leap for mankind...I used to sit in art class and try to copy the lettering in some of these psychedelic posters and it was hard. And to think these San Francisco artist were so prolific as to produce a new one or two every week. I was in awe of this period and love to look back on that scene. Thanks to the Bill Graham estate for compiling this tomb from the ancient ones that came before us.