Arthur Paul

As Playboy Magazine’s founding art director, Art Paul used his three decades there to revolutionize illustration. It’s said that no magazine art director has commissioned more illustrators, persuaded more artists to illustrate (Warhol, Dali, and Rosenquist among them) or won more honors in giving illustration the daring and integrity of fine art. Among artists and designers Art has mentored or worked with he’s an unusually beloved and revered father figure.

But Art is unique also in having been not just an art director and graphic designer (in particular of Playboy’s rabbit logo), but also an illustrator, fine artist, curator, writer, and composer.  And there’s been a surge of interest just now in both his past and present, with recent talks, books, and a documentary on him, exhibits of his art, and performances of his writing and music.  At 91, he’s now putting his drawings and writings into book form, with projects focused on race, aging, animals, and graphic whimsy.

Logo Wrangler

"Because I'd done the original logo, I was asked to do sketches for each new use of it, and new logos for spinoff magazines, special projects and events. And I even found myself just doodling the logo in fanciful ways to represent its meanings in my own mind, just as was being done in the culture at large.

“In the first, hectic days of our creating Playboy, Hefner, having been a cartoonist, asked a cartoonist to create a mascot for us. He wanted a full-length avatar-type mascot like Esquire's 'Esky,' or the New Yorker's Eustace Tilly. This mascot was done mostly as a collage, paper-doll-style, with fake fur and changeable gear. As Hef had meant to call the magazine "Stag Party" the cartoon figure was a stag, which we then changed to a rabbit when Hef settled on 'Playboy' as the magazine's name.

"Meanwhile, I'd created a simpler rabbit symbol - just a head profile with a bowtie - using it in the first issue to end articles, and from then on as a logo. Instead of arguing for one or the other, mascot or symbol, we used both, for the mascot had a certain college-humor-magazine and 1920's charm - and our point was entertainment. But logos being inherently more flexible, the logo persisted. Both had the virtue of being not just trademarks that merely identify a company but symbols - which explain the nature of that identity.

"Later, we commissioned artists to interpret Playboy's logo... and of course used it on products. Finally, the logo began to detach itself from the magazine and the company itself to become a kind of free-floating semiotic toy, a 'folk' image. People made it, and it's meaning, their own. I'm astonished at where I come across it now. Granted, what the company represented had something to do with this, but it also seemed that its simplicity, and my playing with the logo on our covers, and the spirit of playfulness that we had meant it to represent, had been taken to heart." –Art Paul