Selected Contents from Portfolio No. 1 — Winter 1950

One day in 1787, in his printing shop in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin received a specimen sheet of typefaces from Giambattista Bodoni of Parma, Italy. This was the first time that Franklin had seen the work of the man considered Europe's foremost type designer and printer, and he was greatly impressed.

"I have had the great pleasure of receiving and perusing your excellent "Essai des Characteres de L'Imprimere," he wrote Bodoni. It is one of the most beautiful that Art has hitherto produced. As the first American to go on record in appreciation of the Bodoni typeface, sage old Ben Franklin pioneered a trend in U. S. typography, which was to have far-reaching effect on the design of printed matter in our time.

Portfolio was not conceived as a magazine in the conventional sense, but as a radical editorial experiment. Published between 1950 and 1951, it functioned as an open laboratory in which photography, typography, illustration, and sequencing were treated as a single expressive system rather than as separate disciplines.

Under the direction of Alexey Brodovitch, each issue rejected fixed layouts, recurring formats, and commercial constraints. Pages were assembled through contrast, rhythm, and interruption, allowing images and text to interact dynamically across spreads. White space, scale shifts, and abrupt visual transitions became active elements of meaning rather than neutral containers.

Produced without advertising and printed in limited numbers, Portfolio was financially unsustainable but intellectually decisive. Only three issues were released, yet their influence proved disproportionate: the magazine established a new model of editorial authorship, redefining the role of the art director as both editor and composer of visual narratives.

Seen today as a continuous sequence rather than a set of iconic pages, Portfolio remains a foundational document of modern editorial design.

In his never-ending search for new ways of presenting the too-familiar, the experimental graphic artist has been given a new tool from an unexpected quarter—the electronics laboratory.

Recently, the Battelle Memorial Institute of Columbus, Ohio, an organization dealing in basic scientific research, began inviting selected representatives of the photographic world to a series of demonstrations of a new reproduction medium of their development, which they called Xerography, the first revolutionary development in rendering a photographic image since Daguerre coated his first plate 110 years earlier. It substitutes an electrically charged plate for the film now in use.
The Battelle demonstrator placed an ordinary plate holder into the back of a view camera. He made his exposure and disappeared with his holder into the darkroom. The onlookers settled down for a thirty-minute wait, but after one minute, the demonstrator returned, waving a dry, finished print.

Saul Steinberg, a Rumanian-born ex-architect, is one of the few U.S. cartoonists who also happens to be an artist at his work. When the Museum of Modern Art hung an exhibit of his drawings, one newspaper reviewer questioned the show with an article entitled "It's Funny—But Is It Art"?

But Steinberg's admirers seem to include most persons who have seen his drawings in The New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar, Town and Country, and other magazines; this was like asking if Charlie Chaplin could be taken seriously as a social critic because he wears baggy pants and crooked shoes.
Steinberg is compared with Chaplin because although the mediums they operate are two different things—their comic technique springs from the same source. Steinberg eschews the written word as Chaplin eschews the spoken word and speaks only through the pantomime of his pen.

His strange, silent world is peopled with chinless, blank-faced men, beady-eyed women with monstrous headdresses, precocious animals, and weird architectural fantasies, all drawn in a thin, wiry line that often wanders into an embellishment of scrolls and flourishes as Steinberg pauses to extract the Freudian implications of a cluttered interior, the curl of a beard, or just a plain doodle. At other times, the economy of his line is amazing, as in his drawing of the little man walking against a rain of empty clefs on a music sheet.

Reproduced here are eight pages of Steinberg drawings from his unpublished private sketchbooks.

Saul Steinberg, a Rumanian-born ex-architect, is one of the few U.S. cartoonists who also happens to be an artist at his work. When the Museum of Modern Art hung an exhibit of his drawings, one newspaper reviewer questioned the show with an article entitled "It's Funny—But Is It Art"?