Nouveau Frisco

In the decade since the turn-of-the-century's sinuous art-nouveau style first began to stage a comeback, its tendrils have crept into every phase of graphic design, from TV logos to caftan prints. Of late, its variations have grown increasingly bizarre. Like a butterfly bombarded by gamma rays, art nouveau is mutating, intermarrying with the eye-jarring color schemes of op and the gaudy commercialism of pop.

A naked woman, body-painted like a Tiffany lamp shade, decorates the latest ads for Casino Royale; dust jackets for Madame Sarah and Louis Auchincloss' Tales of Manhattan look like so much leftover Alfons Mucha. From coast to coast, be-ins, folk-rock festivals, art galleries and department-store sales are now advertised in posters and layouts done in a style that is beginning to be called Nouveau Frisco. Unmistakably a vapor from the seething psychedelic dreamland of The Haight-Ashbury district (TIME, March 17), Nouveau Frisco currently has as its foremost practitioner Robert Wesley Wilson, 29.

Space Expanding. Wes Wilson's posters, virtually all done for Promoter Bill Graham's folk-rock citadel, the Fillmore Auditorium, are lettered in what Ramparts Editor Warren Hinckle III has called "36-point illegible." At first glance, the calligraphy is totally unreadable, so people stop for a second glance. The theory is that by the time they have finally deciphered the message (see color page), they are hooked.

Wilson's designs are equally and intentionally psychedelic. Expanding like the mind to fill every conceivable bit of space, they are intended to capture the visual experiences of an LSD tripper when, as one hippie puts it, "you look at your hand, and it goes in all directions. Its outline is lost, but the colors are beautiful."

Wilson is a Leonardo-haired philosophy dropout from San Francisco State with only two night-school courses in drawing; he is willing to admit that he has taken at least six trips, "before it was illegal, of course." His first foray into bizarre design was his own wedding invitation, worked out in a print shop of which he was co-owner. He followed this with a protest poster against the war in Viet Nam. Both were great hits with the local hippies ("They blew their minds," Wilson recalls), and soon he was being commissioned by rock-'n'-roll bands to do dance-concert posters. The first one, for "The Jefferson Airplane" and "Big Brother and the Holding Company" concert at Fillmore, was printed in 300 copies. As fast as they went up on telephone poles, they were taken down as collector's items. An original today brings $35.

Fast & Symbolic. In the past year, Wilson has turned out some 70 posters, and so popular has his work become that Graham now sells his output as well as posts it, disposing of 59,000 in December, 81,000 in January, 112,000 in February. Price: $1 in San Francisco, $1.25 elsewhere.

Wilson admits that he has been influenced by Mucha, Van Gogh, Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, and "the expressionist idea of really putting it out there."

"It's gotta be fast," he says. "It's gotta be symbolic."

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