Rudolph de Harak: Style as System

Rudolph de Harak's Work

In today’s age of microtrend-driven materialism, it is easy to forget that trends once lasted not for days but for decades. Movements were monumental, progressing slowly and by cultural consensus, with virtually the entire world marching in a given direction with its choices in music, art, writing and design. A cultural moment could be felt everywhere, by anyone.

So it was with modernism. It would be difficult to find anyone from the world of art and design who does not have a take on this movement. The term differs slightly in the different fields to which it applies, but it generally emerged around the turn of the twentieth century and advocated for a new system around which to arrange life, based on reason and efficiency.

Into this cultural moment emerged Rudolph de Harak. Born in California and raised in New York, de Harak was first drawn to graphic design of a modernist tilt after attending lectures by prominent designers Will Burtin and György Kepes. His first major commission was for Esquire magazine, designing a monthly collage image related to articles in each issue. This brought him into the fold of Westminster Records, a label with a focus on classical and jazz music and a committed following of audiophiles. It was with this work that de Harak was first able to flex his design muscles, beginning with the abstracted meaning he found in non-vocal music and translating it into punchy and sellable visuals. Highlights from this period include his covers for Hermann Scherchen Conducts Trumpet Concerti, featuring a rotationally symmetrical arrangement of circles resembling both a group of trumpets and a flower; and Ivor Novello’s Music Hall Songs, an asymmetrical composition of orange, pink, purple and blue dots that brings to mind the clustering of patrons at a bustling drinking hall.

Perhaps de Harak’s most lasting designs, and certainly the ones that are most posted on social media today, are his paperback covers. At the time paperbacks were generally inexpensive, almost to the point of being disposable, and their covers were typically only printed in two to four colors. And their fidelity was virtually nonexistent. De Harak worked masterfully within these constraints, utilizing abstract geometric shapes, charts or motifs based on the subject matter and distorted images of authors whose portraits were well-recognized.

Books with de Harak covers concerned subjects as diverse as Lawrence of Arabia, Control of the Mind, The Meaning of Dreams  and The Sociology of Organizations. Whatever works they published, no matter how dry or obscure, it seemed de Harak had a witty and evocative design to contribute.

Given the scale of his output (he produced over 400 covers for McGraw-Hill alone), he naturally returned to certain visuals from time to time. Distorted heads seemed to be a favorite, generally being used for texts involving the interactions between human and society. Another common symbol was the arrow, which could be used to denote a dizzying array of meanings, from effective leadership to diverging cultural norms to applied physics.

Rudolph de Harak did not limit himself to printed graphics. In 1968 he was approached by the developers of 127 John Street, an office high-rise in Lower Manhattan. The developers had a problem: while the building was modern and new and office space was much needed, the building was almost indistinguishable from the countless other modern towers in the area. Why should a prospective client rent space there and not somewhere else? De Harak got to work. To the building’s adjacent plaza he added a massive digital clock, made up of a grid with a square representing each number from one to sixty which would light up to show the hour and minute. This referenced, or perhaps poked fun at, the monotony of the area’s gridded architecture and the lives of those who inhabited it. The entry to the building’s lobby consisted of a sheet metal tunnel with bright blue lighting, creating a portal between the city outside and the office environment within. Building off of his success at 127 John Street De Harak was approached to design the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new Egyptian wing. He designed all the exhibition signage, as well as the display cases and the general layout. While the aesthetic style was more referential than was customary for him, the layout followed modernist principles by being strictly chronological, without certain artifacts being treated with more reverence than others.

While his design sensibilities certainly evolved along with his practice into the 1980s and 90s, Rudolph de Harak’s devotion to the core principles of modernism remained the same. He was committed to the use of the grid as an organizing element, finding that it made the subject pop more than a less regular arrangement could. His typography varied, from the block letters of his record covers to the Helvetica of his paperbacks to the restrained serifs of his Met graphics and later advertisements, but was always in service of plainly and beautifully displaying information while not distracting from the visuals which accompanied it.

De Harak’s prodigious output can be understood as an apotheosis of modernism, the creation and thorough application of a logical yet humanistic system, in this case of graphics, to every conceivable avenue of study. No subject was too broad or obscure, too sacred or profane. Everything could be summarized, printed on cheap paper, and bound with a glossy cover with a simple image and a Helvetica title for the reading pleasure of the average American.

Henry Christensen