When I was writing about the wonders of LabelMaker, I mentioned that before computers, artists did lousy type. Today’s little essay is all about the official typeface of the art world: Duro Stencil.
As long as I’ve looked at Contemporary Art, all through the pop era and into recent efforts today, there’s been a consistent feature in “fine art” culture (not to be confused with graphic design or pop culture). All of the lettering you see in all of those paintings by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and Jim Dine and Robert Indiana, etc. etc., they all use the same type. It was sort of the corporate graphic standard type of fine art everywhere. It was Duro Decal stencil lettering (usually the serif typeface design, because it looked the most familiar to the untrained eye).
The Duro Decal Stencil Kits were cheap sets of stenciled lettering punched through waxed cardboard sheets in various sized letterforms (different point sizes). They were available in any hardware store (or presumably art supply shop) for a couple of bucks. They came in different styles: Gothic, Western, Script, Old English, etc. and even had printed directions with nifty little demonstration drawings to show you how to do crisp lettering.
The painters of yore picked them up mostly to stencil their names onto their supply boxes and studio storage. The transition from industrial labeling to fine art corporate typeface was set into motion already.
Think of Jasper Johns. All those words he worked into his paintings. It was all cheapo Duro Stencils. It was the only typography he knew how to do. It’s as if he never even considered simply looking at the type and trying to draw it. Yet, he can look at an egg or a flower or a nude and draw that. It became commonplace to simply use stencil for type—I guess because otherwise you weren’t doing “real art.”
Where do you fit in with them graphic designers who are doing commercial art?
Many more “designers” actually began their careers as graphic designers, so their familiarity with the crafting of typography allowed them the freedom to step beyond the Duro Stencil Standard, but not that far. Warhol resorted to stencil lettering because it made his work look like other peoples’ Art Standards. Even Indiana’s “Love” piece used a typeface (Clarendon) that strongly resembles the Serif stencil in the Duro-packs.
The tipping point between the graphic design world and the fine art world has typically been hinged on typography. Fine Art never learned the simplest basics of lettering. Graphic Designers were deeply schooled in its principles. You can simply look at any painting and see the difference between backgrounds. Especially if it has typography in the image.
Whenever a fine artist is hired to do a poster (the closest thing a graphic designer does to fine art) they still trip over that little detail. Either they use the stencil lettering or they make an image and simply have somebody put typography below it like a caption on a gag panel cartoon. Pathetic, really.
When museums deign to actually include a poster in their permanent collections, they tend to mount the poster onto canvas before it enters the collection, thus making it look like a painting, sort of. How funny is that?
We really need to totally rethink this whole schism and set some new semantic standards for these different disciplines. If we don’t, we may see rock posters being sold as “fine art prints” and manufactured dross sold as “fine design.”
Here is what one of the individual sheets looked like. This is the Gothic typeface and not the Roman typeface (with serifs, those little “feet” on the letterforms). Roman lettering was the more popular design used by painters everywhere. Just the same, you may already recognize this less popular Gothic face from a bazillion bad paintings over the decades (and a lot of good ones, too).