7 Modern Artists Who Worked in Advertising

Did you know that Kazimir Malevich designed perfume bottles? Here’s everything you need to know about artists who do advertising.

Dec 6, 2023By Anastasiia S. Kirpalov, MA Art History, Modern & Contemporary Art

modern artists who worked on advertising, dali, malevich

 

Collaborations between artists and brands hardly surprise anyone nowadays, yet this idea is a relatively new concept. The development of advertising was provoked by the Industrial Revolution and the growing market. While some artists believed that working for commerce meant selling out, others eagerly applied their ideas to promote different products and services. Below are 7 famous modern artists who engaged in product design and advertising.

 

1. J.C. Leyendecker and the Arrow Collar Man Advertising

advertising leyendecker photo
J.C. Leyendecker in his studio, via Video Librarian

 

J.C. Leyendecker was an artist whose work defined the idealized aesthetic of America prior to the Great Depression. He worked with a number of brands and magazines, but his most famous work was the series of advertisements for men’s shirts with detachable collars. These were created for the brand called Arrow, so the main character soon was dubbed the Arrow Collar Man.

 

leyendecker arrow collar ad
The Arrow Collar Man advertisement by J.C. Leyendecker, via Vogue

 

Leyendecker’s Arrow Collar Man presented the new ideal of masculinity: the intelligent, well-mannered, physically fit young man with broad shoulders and a prominent jawline. Men were buying products to look like him, while women desperately fell in love with the imaginary figure, trying to find its equivalent in real life. Little did the public know that the original Arrow Collar Man existed, but hardly could react to the romantic aspirations of his fans. His name was Charles Beach, and he was not only Leyendecker’s favorite model but his manager and romantic partner of almost fifty years. Although Leyendecker worked with other models as well, Beach’s presence was a permanent one. His face can be seen on dozens of artworks created during the artist’s long career.

 

2. Salvador Dali and Chupa-Chups

salvador dali photo
Salvador Dali, 1939, via Wikimedia Commons

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Salvador Dali was famous for doing many things. He even designed the logo for the Chupa-Chups brand. In 1969, during a lunch with an owner of a confectionary factory Enric Bernat, Salvador Dali doodled several options for the new logo. At the time, Bernat had already hired a design team to create the new logo for Chupa-Chups, but he dismissed them immediately after meeting with Dali.

 

left: The original logo for Chupa-Chups by Salvador Dali, 1969, via BBC, right: present logo. 
left: The original logo for Chupa-Chups by Salvador Dali, 1969, via BBC, right: present logo.

 

Working with advertisements was not unusual for Surrealists. Many Surrealist photographers, including Dora Maar, produced work for brands and fashion magazines. Even today, advertising campaigns often rely on the Surrealist legacy, recreating the paintings of artists like Rene Magritte when presenting their products. Dali, however, took this idea further, appearing in TV commercials, printed ads, and designing products for fashion brands. Other artists often accused him of greed and they even believed that Dali destroyed his talent for money. Another Surrealist Andre Breton gave him the nickname Avida Dollars (an anagram of Dali’s name) which translates as hungry for dollars.

 

3. Alphonse Mucha and Cookies

alphonso mucha photo
Alphonse Mucha, 1906, via Owlcation

 

Czech-born Alphonse Mucha is perhaps the first artist that comes when we think of the fascinating mix of art and advertising. The icon of Art Nouveau art created designs for a long list of popular middle-class products: from chocolates and tobacco to posters for theater plays. Many historians believe that Mucha was the pioneer of celebrity-indorsed advertising.

 

mucha cookies poster
A poster for Lefevre-Utile cookies with Sarah Bernhardt by Alphonse Mucha, 1904, via Biron

 

Famous for his association with the legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt, he frequently designed posters for her shows. On the poster for the Lefevre-Utile cookies (now known as LU), Sarah Bernhardt appeared clutching her scarf in a stylized portrait. In the bottom left corner, there was a handwritten inscription stating that the only thing better than a LU cookie was two LU cookies, followed by Bernhardt’s signature. Putting a famous name under a certain product was a new thing a celebrity could do and it would soon become widely spread.

 

4. Andy Warhol and Shoes

warhol self portrait photo
Self-Portrait by Andy Warhol, 1986, via Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris

 

Brand logos and consumer aesthetics were pivotal for the work of Andy Warhol. In a way, Pop Art represented a new kind of urban landscape, filled with neon lights and catchy ads instead of natural scenes. Warhol created dozens of advertisements in his life, yet his artistic success started with a series of shoe drawings.

 

advertising warhol shoes drawing
Shoe advertisement for the brand I. Miller by Andy Warhol, 1955, via Creative Review

 

Andy Warhol’s first job in the media was to design illustrations for Glamour magazine in the 1950s. Impressed by the quality of his drawings, the magazine editors allowed him to publish his work on six additional pages. Yet the real breakthrough happened five years later, in 1955, when Warhol signed a contract with the shoe designer I. Miller. Warhol agreed to draw weekly advertisements for the shoes for the New York Times. Warhol’s designs were less about showing the actual shoe and more about sharing the spirit of the brand. Instead of precise illustration, he drew imaginary footwear and added quirky captions.

 

5. Norman Rockwell and Food

norman rockwell photo
Norman Rockwell, via Norman Rockwell website

 

Norman Rockwell’s advertisements represented the quintessential American white culture. His career lasted for more than six decades, from 1914 to 1976. Rockwell lived through many stages of American political and social life. He was interested in selling pretty much everything, from stockings to life insurance, but became best known for the food advertisements he created for Jell-O, cornflakes, and different canned products. While some accused him of sentimentality, others noted that Rockwell’s works barely had any trace of the ongoing political struggles. His goal was to sell products, not to comment on social issues.

 

rockwell peaches ad
Canned peaches advertising featuring Bing Crosby by Norman Rockwell, 1949 via The Spokesman-Review

 

While studying at the Art Students League of New York in 1911, Rockwell and his classmates made a promise to never work with advertisements. Ironically, ad design would bring enormous fame and recognition to the artist several years later and would include collaborations with other celebrities of his time. The 1949 canned peaches advert featured singer and actor Bing Crosby, supposedly praising a peach pie made with the canned product. Rockwell copied Crosby’s image from the promotional photo made for his 1949 film Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

 

6. Kazimir Malevich and Perfume

kazimir malevich photo
Kazimir Malevich next to his paintings, 1924, via Wikimedia Commons

 

Known for his radical theories on art and prominent geometry, Ukrainian-born Kazimir Malevich was an artist who designed numerous products as well. Apart from his series of patriotic propaganda posters created during World War I, he worked on less serious and more playful projects too. For example, in the late 1900s, a Russian perfume company Brocard asked Malevich to design a bottle for their new perfume Severnyi.

 

malevich perfume bottle
The 1920s version of the Severnyi perfume bottle by Kazimir Malevich, via eBay

 

Malevich’s idea was to create an iceberg-shaped bottle of clear craquelure glass with a polar bear sitting on top. The perfume was sold for almost a century. The production stopped in the early 2000s. However, the history of its design was surprising even to experts. At the time of Kazimir Malevich, collaborations between brands and artists were not as prestigious as they are today. Wasting your artistic creativity to work on utilitarian designs for companies was a shameful practice for most artists. Malevich was in desperate need of money but he valued his reputation enough to never tell anyone except his closest relatives about the perfume bottle he made for Brocard.

 

7. Artistic Advertising Project: Chateau Mouton Rothschild Wine Bottles

chateau rothschild wine
Chateau Mouton Rothschild wine bottles, via Robb Report Singapore

 

In 1945 Baron Philippe de Rothschild, the owner of Mouton Rothschild winery established a tradition of designing every year’s wine label in collaboration with a famous artist. The long list of names included Leonor Fini, Marie Laurencin, Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Robert Motherwell, and Pablo Picasso. The latest editions include the 2019 harvest with a design made by Olafur Eliasson, while the 2020 one was created by Peter Doig.

 

Despite drastically different artistic styles, the label design still looks balanced and unanimous. The artist’s job is not to design the entire label but a strip on top of it, with the rest remaining intact, copying the original Chateau Mouton Rothschild label. Curiously, the idea for such a collaboration first came to Philippe de Rothschild’s mind in 1924, yet it took more than two decades to finally establish the project. Today, Chateau Mouton Rothschild bottles serve as collectible items not only for wine enthusiasts but for art lovers as well.

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By Anastasiia S. KirpalovMA Art History, Modern & Contemporary Art Anastasiia holds a MA degree in Art history from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Previously she worked as a museum assistant, caring for the collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. She specializes in topics of early abstract art, nineteenth-century gender, spiritualism and occultism. Outside of her work, she is interested in cult studies, criminology, and fashion history.