Victor Moscoso: Cosmos, the career-defining exhibition and catalog curated by David Carballal in Coruña, Spain, opened on March 15 at Instituto Cervantes Chicago, where it will stay until June 15. This is a great opportunity to see the landmark designs from the graphic maestro of ’60s rock poster art.
Moscoso was chief among the tribe of graphic linguists and principle form-givers of the sex, drugs and rock n’ roll epoch. He lived through the ’60s and is still able to remember it. The Spanish-born, Brooklyn-raised, Yale-educated artist stumbled into the counterculture and arose to become its genius of a distinct American music-inspired graphic language.
Psychedelic aptly underscored the hypnotic letterforms and vibrating color combinations and retrofitted antique illustrations. Artists of the era used their visual language as a code to vividly communicate to those visionary—or stoned—enough to see the messages through the chromatic haze. While many of the artists who were making cheaply printed flyers promoting ballroom concerts were ostensibly self-taught, their respective work unwittingly redefined a large swath of commercial art, graphic design and fine arts, too (even today).
Moscoso was unique in ways that gave him anomaly status among his peers. He was the only formally trained artist in this otherwise grassroots poster movement. He really knew how to draw in a classical sense and understood design theory. He had studied Bauhaus history and early and Midcentury Modernism. In short, Moscoso had bona fides as a Modernist. But his tenure at New York’s Cooper Union, and later Yale—where he was taught by none other than the renowned color master and Bauhausler Josef Albers—was not so much an advantage as a handicap; to work in his newfound counterculture genre, he had to reverse everything he’d learned.
This exhibition shows his masterworks in comics, posters, lettering and design.
