If you were a groovy musician from the West Coast of America in the late 1960s and ’70s, chances are you called in the services of Victor Moscoso. The Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, and The Doors all collaborated with the revolutionary Spanish-born artist, whose innovations in typography and graphics captured the psychedelic zeitgeist and would inspire generations of subsequent poster and album art practitioners.
Moscoso moved to Brooklyn in 1940 when he was four years old, but it is the “San Francisco look” with which he is most associated. Formal academic training in painting included a period of study under the modernist Josef Albers at Yale University in the late 1950s. His schooling prompted early forays into comics, with delineated layouts featuring surreal perspective and characters. Moscoso moved out west and became involved with the psychedelic rock music scene in the ’60s, producing posters for San Francisco gigs which, by 1967, used a unique and recognisable “vibrating” style using chromatically opposite colours and heavily stylised, hand-drawn typography emphasising negative space; the artist’s posters were also remarkable for their early use of collage and found imagery.
Robert Crumb invited Moscoso to join Zap Comix in ’67, beginning another hugely influential chapter in the artist’s professional life which would endure until the publication’s last hurrah in 2014. The exhibition Psychedelic Drawings 1967-1982 includes examples from both Moscoso’s great oeuvres, and is on show at Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York, until 25 April.
Victor Moscoso
Incredible Poetry, (set of 10), 1969
Mixed media
8.5 x 12.5 inches (21.6 x 31.8 cm)
Victor Moscoso
Blues Project (Neon Rose no. 6) [set of 4], 1967
Ink and photostat on paper
18.25 x 13 inches (46.4 x 33 cm)
Victor Moscoso
Eyes and Ears Billboard Comics [study], 1977
Graphite, colored pencil on paper
14 x 27 inches (35.6 x 68.6 cm)
Victor Moscoso
Duck (Zap Comix no. 2), c. 1967-68
Ink on paper
14 x 12 inches (35.6 x 30.5 cm)
Victor Moscoso
The Blushing Peony, [set of 2], 1967
Ink on Ozalid board
26 x 20 inches (66 x 50.8 cm)
Victor Moscoso
Clean-In (Neon Rose no. 15), 1967
Ink on paper
19 x 24.5 inches (48.3 x 62.2 cm)
Victor Moscoso
Blues Project (Neon Rose no. 6), 1967
Offset lithography
20 x 14.75 inches (50.8 x 37.5 cm)
Victor Moscoso
Untitled [Kiwi Star], 1968
Ink on paper
7 x 5 inches (17.8 x 12.7 cm)
Victor Moscoso
Camel [set of 6], Zap Comix no. 2, 1968
Ink on paper
14 x 11 inches (35.6 x 27.9 cm)
