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Cip Pineles: A Life of Design By Martha Scotford W W Norton & Co., New York 190 pages; illustrated; $60
The New York milieu of magazine design and art direction percolating at mid-century was a potent one, and Cipe Pineles was the most successful and influential woman to emerge from it. But until now it was difficult to find more than token traces of her work in the burgeoning library of design literature. Pineles has been a reassuring add-on to the canon of design heroes, but concrete evidence of her achievements has been in scant supply. Was she just a lucky wife and a well-placed employee-or a gifted designer whose acumen and originality generated a significant body of work?
Cipe Pineles: A Life of Design, Martha Scotford's intensely researched, densely documented biography, argues fiercely for the latter. Scotford gives us a vivid portrait of Pineles and rich access to her lifelong development as a graphic designer.
Cipe Pineles arrived in New York with her family in 1923 after Russia's invasion of eastern Poland. She came of age in Brooklyn and studied at the Pratt Institute. Although she sought jobs with ad agencies after graduating in 1929, positions in the rowdy "bullpens" were closed to women. Her first job in graphic design was with the firm Contempora, whose modernist bias and European orientation toward architecture, product design, and graphics provided a receptive atmosphere for Pineles until she joined the publisher Conde Nast in 1932.
As assistant for six years to Dr. M. F. Agha, the legendary art director of Vogue and Vanity Fair, Pineles learned the techniques of magazine design just as the field was reinventing itself. Deploying ideas from European design within the capricious world of New York publishing, Agha was forging new attitudes toward photography, typography, and layout, and Pineles was at his side throughout...