Date of Birth: May 8, 1920
Date of Death: April 25, 1996
Place of Birth: Bronx, New York, USA
Alma Mater: Art Students League, New York City. Followed by Brooklyn College
Saul Bass was an American graphic designer and Oscar-winning filmmaker, best known for his design of motion-picture title sequences, film posters, and corporate logos.
During his 40-year career, Saul worked for some of Hollywood’s most prominent filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese.
Saul was born to Eastern European Jewish immigrant parents. In 1938, Saul married Ruth Cooper and they had two children, Robert in 1942 and Andrea in 1946. They divorced in 1960. In the following year he married Elaine Makatura, who soon became Saul’s creative partner. Saul had two more children with Elaine. Jennifer in 1964 and Jeffrey in 1967. Their marriage continued until Saul’s death of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1996.
Bass’s career in Hollywood began sometime during the 1940s. He designed print advertisements for films including Champion (1949), Death of a Salesman (1951) and Otto Preminger’s The Moon Is Blue (1953). His next collaboration with Preminger was to design a film poster for his 1954 film Carmen Jones. Preminger was so impressed with the poster that he asked Bass to produce the title sequence as well. Soon Bass became one of the first to realize the creative potential of the opening and closing credits of a movie.
His last commissioned film poster was created for Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), but it was never distributed. Bass’s film posters are characterized by a distinctive typography and minimalistic style.
Sometime in the late 1950s, Bass was asked by Kirk Douglas to produce not only the title sequence, but also to visualize and storyboard key scenes within a movie Douglas was due to produce and star in. The film in question was Spartacus (1960), which went on to be the highest grossing film of that year. Bass’s work on Spartacus led to him receiving the unusual credit of “design consultant,” a trend that continued for 3 more films:
- Psycho – Credited as “pictorial consultant” (1960)
- West Side Story – Credited as “visual consultant” (1961)
- Grand Prix – Credited as “visual consultant” (1966)
In 1964, Saul and Elaine directed the short film The Searching Eye. It was shown during the 1964 New York World’s Fair and was co-produced with Sy Wexler. The Basses also directed a short documentary film called Why Man Creates which won the Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject in 1968. An abbreviated version of Why Man Creates was broadcast on the first episode of the television news magazine 60 Minutes. Saul and Elaine directed several other short films, two of which were nominated for Academy Awards: Notes on the Popular Arts, in 1977 and The Solar Film in 1979. In 1974, Saul Bass made his only feature-length film as a director. The little-known but highly praised science fiction film Phase IV.
“I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares.”
-Saul Bass
In addition to his work in film, Bass was responsible for some of the most iconic logos in North America, including both the Bell Telephone logo (1969) and successor AT&T globe (1983). Other well-known logo designs were Continental Airlines (1968), Dixie (1969) and United Airlines (1974).
An analysis of a sample of Bass’s corporate logos in 2011 found them to have an unusual longevity. The most common cause of the end of a Bass corporate logo (in the selection analyzed) was the demise or merger of the company rather than a corporate logo redesign. As a result, the average lifespan of a Bass logo is more than 34 years. For example, in 2014 Frontier Airlines resurrected the stylized F logo originally designed for Frontier by Bass in 1978. The logo had been discontinued in 1984 when the airline went bankrupt.
“The Hardest Button to Button”
Image by Amazon Music
In 2002, Why Man Creates was selected for the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. The same movie was added to a moving image collection dedicated to Saul Bass in 2011. This collection is based at the Academy Film Archive and contains around 2700 items, including Notes on the Popular Arts which was added in 2012. The moving image collection is complemented by the Saul Bass papers at the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library.
On May 8, 2013, Bass’s 93rd birthday was celebrated by a Google Doodle, which featured the tune Unsquare Dance by Dave Brubeck.
The cover art for The White Stripes’ single The Hardest Button to Button is clearly inspired by the Bass poster for The Man with the Golden Arm. The comic book artist J. H. Williams III’s designs for the Batman story The Black Glove pay homage to Bass’s designs as well.