With stars in her eyes, armed with golden covers, indestructible typefaces around her name and the ability to design any book, Princess Bea Feitler, an Amazon from Brazil, knew how to revolutionise the art direction of magazines from Harper’s Bazaar to Vanity Fair, like a superhero, with sincerity and elegance and without denying her roots: the old continent.
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Bea Feitler: Amazing Amazon of Design
From Rio de Janeiro to New York, in her short forty-four-year life, Brazilian designer and art director Bea Feitler was everything and did everything. She created books, albums, posters and iconic covers, working for the most important American magazines of her time, while leaving her mark of creative and visionary talent on all of them: Harper’s Bazaar, Ms. Magazine, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair. She worked closely or collaborated with personalities such as Richard Avedon, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Marvin Israel, Andy Warhol, Ruth Ansel and Annie Leibovitz. She had the Midas touch: everything she touched turned into visual gold. This key figure in the history of graphic design is portrayed here by Serge Ricco, who, alongside other activities in the field of visual arts, was art director of the prestigious French magazine L'Obs.
Double page spread designed by Bea Feitler for Harper’s Bazaar: ‘The Non-Stop Polka Dot editorial’, based on photographs by Alberto Rizzo, 1971 © Harper’s BAZAAR, Hearst Magazine Media, Inc / Bruno Feitler / Visions in Motion Production, Inc, New York
the decisive moment
Bea Feitler, c. 1970. © Bruno Feitler / The New School Archives and Special Collection, New York. © Photo: The New School Archive, New York
May 1968, the year of the revolution: a car crosses France, heading to Brussels. Inside sit Bea Feitler and Richard Avedon, while in the trunk lies a suitcase filled with ‘family portraits’. They are going to fly to NYC with a French national treasure but only they know it. They are not burglars or thieves but the best artistic director and the best photographer in the USA. They have just spent a few days in the Parisian apartment of the famous 74-year-old photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue, in the 16th arrondissement, to work on a book which is to be published with the enticing title Diary of a Century. Lartigue was relieved to be able to save his archives from the revolt of the Parisian youth marching past his door.
Richard Avedon, with his invincible courage of a jaguar pursuing its game, wants to see everything: all my albums, all the photos not yet laid out, all the negatives of the photos not yet developed. More than 10,000 photos to choose from, maybe 200, maybe 150 for the book he’s planning. All my photographs that he imagined he would be able to see during his last stay in Paris, from ten in the morning until night, in my studio.
Two years later, in 1970, Diary of a Century would join the Pantheon of photography book masterpieces with Observations (1959) by Richard Avedon, designed by Alexey Brodovitch at Harper’s Bazaar, and Moments Preserved (1960) by Irving Penn, designed by Alex Liberman at Vogue. Bea Feitler, who was thirty at the time, recalled:
When I designed my first book, Diary of a Century, which Richard Avedon edited, there was very little money for the project. I dedicated, oh, about two years to it, 1,000 pages. It was a labor of love and what I wanted was the credit. From then on, I have insisted that every book I design must have a credit on the title page. I also get a royalty which is unique among book designers.
think pink!
Bea Feitler was the co-art director, with Ruth Ansel, of the famous fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar. In 1961, she had been hired by her teacher at the Parsons School of Design, Marvin Israel. Nancy White, her then editor-in-chief, said: ‘Bea was a restless creature, she kept learning, learning, learning all the time. And she brought whatever she was doing to the magazine.’
Her series of many dots and coloured shoes, photographed by Alberto Rizzo, will remain a pop art monument, just like Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans. In her way of framing and organising the spreads, we feel the love of dance and rhythm guiding her eyes and her brain.
Double spread designed by Bea Feitler for Ms., 1972–73. © Ms. Magazine / Bruno Feitler
The article will tell me, I want to be designed this way, so I try and express what it is about visually, by an interesting title which will stop the reader or a basic illustration or bunch of photographs. I believe that since there are so many magazines around, I don’t think the well-designed magazine is a luxury but a necessity.
"Avedon, Feitler and Ansel fought for and won the right to use a black model, Donyale Luna, for the first time in the spreads of a major fashion magazine. The reaction from subscribers threatening to cancel and advertisers withdrawing their advertising was unexpected and frightened the management of Harper’s Bazaar."
But the cover of the April 1965 issue, featuring the English model Jean Shrimpton immortalised by Avedon, will also go down in history. This 3D-printed wink surrounded by a pink circle is the quintessence of the modern fashion magazine cover which was about to leave ‘Haute-Couture’ to fly towards ready-to-wear. Avedon remembers this moment of pure creation:
Ruth started to explain that we could cut the shape of the space helmet out of Day-Glo paper, but she never finished because Bea was already cutting the shape. Rubber cement, color swatches. An eighth of an inch between the pink helmet and the grey background. No, a sixteenth. I was in the room and I don’t know how it happened. And it all happened in minutes – the moment was absolute magic, to watch Bea, the classicist, and Ruth, the modern, work as if they were one person.
That same year, Avedon, Feitler and Ansel fought for and won the right to use a black model, Donyale Luna, for the first time in the spreads of a major fashion magazine. The reaction from subscribers threatening to cancel and advertisers withdrawing their advertising was unexpected and frightened the management of Harper’s Bazaar, which would not use black models again for a long time. At the same time, the editor-in-chief of Vogue Paris, Edmonde Charles-Roux, was suddenly fired for wanting to put the same model on its cover. Black models in the fashion business did not matter in those days. It took half a century for things to change!
Also in 1965, Avedon, discovered by Brodovitch at the classes of Design Laboratory, in Philadelphia in the 1950s, left Harper’s to join Liberman at the rival magazine Vogue, and especially to join his former editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland whose slogan was: ‘The eye has to travel’.
Bea Feitler never stopped travelling to the old continent for fashion shows: ‘I need to go to Europe, also, to have a bath of culture, vital to any artistic work. I love France so much and its history, especially about the Kings.’
Then, in 1971, a new editor came in to make Bazaar more of a news magazine and both Bea and Ruth were fired – almost simultaneously. Bea wasn’t fooled, however:
I think it’s a classic example. I mean, if something doesn’t work or sell, it’s always blamed on the visual level. My feeling has always been if the content is no good, you may still save it by visual means… but that doesn’t make it good. I believe people buy a magazine because they are interested in that magazine, and if you serve your reader interesting content, make it good-looking, you have your reader forever.
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