Features

Acclaimed artist Paul Davis, who recently designed the College’s 75th-anniversary subway poster, is one of SVA’s own. He attended SVA on a scholarship from Scholastic magazine, where he studied with the greats who taught at the College in its early years: Robert Weaver, Phil Hays, Tom Allen, Burt Hasen, George Tscherny and Sal Jon Bue. Shortly after Davis’ graduation in 1959, it was Bue who referred Davis (1959 Illustration) to Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast’s paradigm-shifting Push Pin Studios. He was soon hired as an assistant and then promoted to an illustrator at the design studio. In 1963, Davis established his own practice. 

Through it all, Davis maintained his ties to SVA. After the nascent SVA Alumni Society launched in the early 1970s, Davis became president-elect in 1972 and president in 1973.

Once established as a major designer and artist, he returned to SVA to teach in the MFA Illustration and Continuing Education departments in 1992. As an MFA Illustration faculty member, he edited and designed Drawing SVA, a publication to honor the legacy of illustration at the College. Issue no. 1 (1997) was devoted to the work of the great Robert Weaver, with whom Davis studied, while Issue no. 2 highlighted Weaver’s legacy through the work of his students. Issue no. 3 featured the work of illustrator Robert Hagel. Davis had met Hagel in Phil Hays’ illustration class at SVA, and both were students in Weaver’s first class at the College.

Davis has also been the subject of three major retrospectives at SVA. The first, in 1979, included his portrait of Robert Kennedy, which appeared on the cover of Evergreen magazine and Joseph Papp, founder of New York’s Public Theater and Shakespeare in the Park. “Paul Davis: The Uses of Style,” was held in 1990. Finally, Davis was the recipient of SVA’s Masters Series Award and Exhibition in 1998. He also received an honorary doctorate of Fine Arts from SVA in 1990 and is a longtime member of the Visual Arts Foundation board.

With his new subway poster design, Davis has now created five subway posters for SVA. His first poster for the College was his 1978 iconic interpretation of Dee Ito’s copy “To be good is not enough, when you dream of being great.” Though most viewers would probably not recognize the inspiration for the image (a later-in-life photo of Toulouse-Lautrec muse Yvette Guilbert), they certainly could not resist the expression of sweet hopefulness on the face of the poster’s subject.

In 1992, Davis designed a poster for the “Great Ideas Never Happen Without Imagination” series. His multimedia collage is a reflection of his continued openness to new forms of expression.

His 1996 “Art is…” poster, part of SVA’s 50th-anniversary series, features famous faces, both real and fictional.

His 2000 poster is a bit cubist and definitely surreal.

Davis’ newest poster, celebrating SVA’s 75th anniversary, is both rooted in reality and dreamlike, with a painted yellow arrow pointing the way to the future. 

Beth Kleber is head of archives at the School of Visual Arts.