on focus
from 09.11.2018 to 12.05.2019

Learning from Albers

Psychedelic posters by Victor Moscoso

Garish colours that catapult the viewer back to the San Francisco of the years 1966 to 1968, the time of the hippies and their bastion in Haight-Ashbury, the time of the anti Vietnam War movement, LSD and sexual revolution. In aesthetic terms, too, these were years of new beginnings, as seen in the psychedelic posters advertising concerts by major bands at the Fillmore Auditorium or the Avalon Ballroom.

Victor Moscoso (born 1936), who came to San Francisco in 1959, had studied, among others, at Yale University under Josef Albers. He applied his teacher’s colour theory, choosing contrasting colours with similar lightness values for adjacent areas, giving the posters a shimmering effect.

With a selection of Moscoso’s posters from the collection of Lutz Hieber and Gisela Theising, Neues Museum recalls the youthful uprising that is associated in Europe with the year 1968, whereas in the United States it had already reached a high point in 1967 with the “Summer of Love”.