The legacy of Grove Press is well known within literary circles – how Barney Rosset bought a fledgling but failing publishing company in the early 1950s and changed the world of letters in America, and perhaps the very culture as well; Grove Press brought to national prominence the writers, art, and artists of the avant-garde. Such groundbreaking works as Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby and Naked Lunch by William Burroughs represented a literary vanguard. Equally innovative, and ultimately as influential, Grove Press book covers reflected not only the work inside, but also the prevailing zeitgeist. The iconoclastic writing was echoed in the packaging, a marriage of imagery and the written word that had not been seen before, or, perhaps, since. The covers, the work of a young artist named Roy Kuhlman, who arrived on Grove’s doorstep in 1951, contributed invaluably to the company’s image as a distinguished and innovative publishing house. Before long, the inventive, two-and-three color covers featuring Kuhlman’s abstract expressionist approach to design, set the tone for the next two decades, imitated but never equaled. His jazz-like improvisational paintings and graphics for Grove Press books in the ‘50s and ’60s introduced an Abstract Expressionist style to graphic design. Work from all of Kuhlman’s oeuvre is included in this handsome volume, over 300 in all, with an emphasis on the Grove covers. To date, the public has seen little of Kuhlmans’s total creative output. It is all assembled here for the first time, displaying depth, variety, and innovation. It is at once illustrative, abstract, conceptual, comical, serious and revolutionary. ROY KUHLMAN: Reluctant Modernist is a celebration of and a tribute to this important designer’s creative métier. It is the very definition of avant-garde.
