Get Clean for Gene

Posted on June 23, 2010 9:06 am

I’ve wanted an original of the poster Ben Shahn created for the Eugene McCarthy campaign for many years. In the summer of ‘68 I was a skinny kid volunteer, mostly licking envelopes and going door to door. (I did have the opportunity to heckle George Wallace in front of the Rice Hotel in downtown Houston, but that’s a little off subject.) The poster is informal, hopeful, and direct. Forty two years later Carla has given me an original she found in a gallery in Virginia. Looks great in our dining room.

The Robert Kennedy campaign identity (‘68) is also very striking, clean white with red/blue Helvetica split name. Great blue, a little more French than American. The Hubert Humphrey poster, with its’ Franklin Gothic, has a George Lois directness to it. (Anybody know who designed these campaigns?) The three together are a nice suite of late ‘60s graphics.

The Nixon-Agnew campaign materials are forgettable, in more ways than one, and not worth the pixels to display here.

Back to Ben Shahn. The Paris Review poster was also created in 1968 for the literary magazine. Note the shared font with the McCarthy poster.