Drawing, Design for Saks Fifth Avenue Advertising Brochure

Pioneering designer Donald Deskey (1894-1989), celebrated for his Radio City Music Hall interiors and packaging designs including Crest toothpaste, also played a part in America’s retail transition during the late 1920s and 1930s. Fashionable department stores, led by those in New York City, made radical changes in window displays by rejecting traditional methods of unrelated product arrangements in favor of more unified, stylized spectacles. Sharp angles, jagged patterns, and cubist props rendered store windows as stages where the goods became the actors. Deskey’s Design for Saks Fifth Avenue Advertising Brochure (1927-1928) depicts transparent, shattering forms in near-monochromatic gray values that suggestthe influence of early Cubism and the popularized Francophiliac spirit. A framed picture of a woman holding a rose is overlaid by a combination of Parisian and American sources: two French books (“La Vie” and “La Jeunesse”) and a Picasso-esque guitar juxtapose with a tennis racket and sheet music entitled “Mammy” (probably citing the hit Jazz song performed by Al Jolson in the film The Jazz Singer” released in 1927). The designer would later impart that same enthusiasm to a wide range of domestic products, interiors, materials, and graphic design during his long career.

Drawing, Design for Saks Fifth Avenue Advertising Brochure; Designed by Donald Deskey (American, 1894–1989); Office of Donald Deskey Associates; USA; pen and black ink, brush and black, gray wash, graphite on cream illustration board; 35.7 x 27.4cm (14 1/16 x 10 13/16in.) Mat: 55.9 x 40.6 cm (22 x 16 in.); Gift of Donald Deskey; 1975-11-59