Illustrations by https://www.flickr.com/photos/10688882@N00/15442283554 ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ )
Acid Tripping on Company Time: The Psychedelic Art Movement in Today’s Advertising
When considering the term ‘psychedelic art,’ the first images conjured often include flashy visuals, against the grain stylization, and likely the word ‘trippy’ somewhere in the mix. In truth, psychedelic art has a richer history than that, dating back to the countercultural movements and hippie groups of the 60s. I became fascinated with psychedelic art a few months ago when examining genuine pieces of artwork from the era at my university’s library, and it got me thinking about how I had seen this type of artwork in modern media before. We can all recall seeing one piece or another with bright colors, exuberant shapes, and fanciful images at some point in our lives, often on the television associated with some product. Author Steven Heller claims that the psychedelic art movement acted as a “cultural bridge between the abstract and surreal” for a short time in its original form, before being swept up by major corporations for product sales (15). This raises the question: How have the ideas of the psychedelic art movement been adopted by corporations and persisted into modern advertising? This paper aims to answer this question through an examination of the psychedelic art movement’s origins, followed by a stylistic analysis of a few modern advertisements to identify common themes.
The psychedelic art movement originated in San Francisco, California, in the early-to-mid 1960s. Pinpointing the exact impetus of the movement is nearly impossible, but a poster known as The Seed designed by Mike Ferguson and George Hunter of the Charlatans band is recognized by many as the first psychedelic poster (Golding 21). This is exactly how the style began to get its footing, with poster art. During a period of time which saw a number of non-conformist movements in environmentalism, anti-war, and particularly psychedelic drug usage, the atmosphere of the era quickly spread to the art disciplines. Music and practical visual arts were the two most affected, and as a result, poster artworks designed to promote bands in the underground scene housed the vast majority of early psychedelic art pieces. San Francisco generally being an epicenter of psychedelic drug usage made it a perfect launch point for the movement. The neighborhood Haight-Ashbury was home not only to numerous music artists of the era such as Janis Joplin and The Grateful Dead, but also to artists Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley. These two artists formed a close artistic bond soon after meeting one another in 1965, and began to truly flesh out the stylistic motifs of “psychedelic art” by pulling from resources at the San Francisco Public Library – ranging from old photographs to art books of Art Deco and Art Nouveau style pieces (Golding 24). While Mouse and Kelley wove elements of these past art techniques into the style, overall the style began to be defined by its characteristic traits resembling the visual hallucinations caused by LSD and other psychedelics. This tie to psychedelic drugs garnered a conference on LSD in 1966 to officially coin the term “psychedelic style,” referring to both the artwork and the movement associated with it (Grunenberg 17). This form of stylization almost immediately became the norm for poster art, and music clubs throughout San Francisco began frequently requesting artworks from a growing number of artists in the area. Five artists in particular – Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley, Wes Wilson, Victor Moscoso, and Rick Griffin – even came to be called the San Francisco Five, and these five would go on to have arguably the most impact on the style of the entire movement (Golding 28). The movement’s impact reached beyond California, with The Family Dog Denver music club forming in 1967, bringing the psychedelic art and music scene over to Colorado (Obarski). With hundreds of artworks, a fresh group of talented artists, and thousands of fans flocking to the scene, the movement of psychedelic artwork had very quickly established itself as one to behold.
In order to establish the characteristic visual elements of psychedelic art, an important distinction must first be made: psychedelic art is not a mere result of psychedelic drug usage in the 60s. As museum director Cristoph Grunenberg asserts, “While there are obvious parallels between psychedelic art and the LSD experience, the one was by no means impossible without the other” (17). The style techniques of psychedelic art may often reflect the experience of LSD, but act more as an approximation than a true one-to-one account of what it’s like to trip on acid. With that said, there are four aspects of most psychedelic art pieces that have uniquely identifiable traits. These four elements are color, shapework, lettering, and subjects, which can be seen in Victor Moscoso’s Pink Panther and a poster for Pink Floyd’s CIA v UFO.
Fig. 1. Victor Moscoso’s Pink Panther.
Fig. 2. CIA v UFO Pink Floyd poster.
The first and arguably most apparent visual element of psychedelic artwork is its unique usage of color. Writer James Gaddy accurately describes psychedelic art as being overtaken by “dominant ‘hot’ colors,” something that never would have been considered for promotional artworks like poster art in previous decades (64). This is the first of many experimental decisions spurred by the association with visual hallucinations from psychedelic drugs. In the example of Pink Panther, the bright, blinding colors of pink, green, and blue immediately seize the viewer’s attention as being out of the ordinary, and wildly unexpected. This theme continues into the next important visual aspect: the unconventional shapework. Psychedelic art is typically defined as containing many “curvilinear” shapes, meaning that the pieces are often dominated by rounded and swirling forms (Gaddy 64). Yet again, these forms echo the experiences of LSD and other psychedelics, a bit more deliberately this time, as the swirling forms often make even the most sober viewer feel like they can see the acid trip through the artwork. CIA v UFO is honestly a tame example of this, but the principle can still be seen primarily in the curvy framing that wraps the top of the piece, as well as the wavy hair and wind floating across the page.
The third aspect, lettering, is more individualized than the other three elements, and cannot be easily defined by a single example. The overall shift was that the lettering of text on psychedelic poster art quickly transitioned from being easily readable for the purpose of conveying information to often being barely decipherable, focusing more on the experience than the actual information contained in the poster (Grunenberg 123). In order to best understand the mentality behind the style, there is no better source than one of the San Francisco Five who pioneered the usage of eccentric lettering, Victor Moscoso:
‘Wes freed us!’ Moscoso enthuses. ‘It clicked: Reverse everything I have ever learned! A poster should transmit its message quickly and simply? No! Our posters were taking as long as they could to be read, and were hanging up the viewer!’ (Golding 28).
As he states, the lettering in Moscoso’s artwork seen in Pink Panther makes it difficult to discern what information it is attempting to communicate, which was precisely the point of this rebellious choice in lettering. Moscoso’s font here is an example of a commonly used font in psychedelic artwork, defined by its thick bases and thin vertical line work, but was only one of many different styles of flamboyant lettering seen during the psychedelic era. The fourth, but not necessarily final, major visual element of psychedelic design is the subjects of the artwork, which is usually characterized by surrealism and trippy imagery. This likely resulted from a combination of the crazed visual hallucinations brought about by psychedelic trips and the already surrealist trends in artwork at the time, culminating in a unified sense of chaos in most psychedelic art pieces. The visuals of CIA v UFO highlight this concept clearly, showcasing a spectacle with a castle on a floating island, a naked flying lady, and UFOs circling the whole composition. Pink Floyd’s poster is only one example within hundreds of seemingly nonsensical amalgamations of ideas, and while many had deeper meanings behind them, they sometimes held no subtext at all. As a result of these four defining characteristics, as well as many other more unpredictable and subtle style choices, psychedelic art maintains a stark and unique identity.
Psychedelia’s rise to popularity was received with open arms by many across the country, and frowned upon by many others, but what’s certain is that it turned heads. A movement founded upon ideals of challenging the status quo had managed to rear its head, but unfortunately this meant it was only a matter of time before they were noticed by the exact group of people they were trying to protest, corporations and advertisers. Advertising pioneer Earnest Elmo Calkins believed experimental art as an advertising medium is incredibly scrutinized, but is almost always taken at some point by those who scrutinized it and copied until it loses its ‘radical’ flare (Diederichsen 71). It can be argued that this is exactly what happened to psychedelic art in the late 1960s. As the psychedelic art sphere had reached its peak, numerous corporations began marketing to their more hip and new-age audiences with the same stylistic techniques seen in psychedelic posters, but without the soul and purpose of the movement behind them. In fact, many would claim that these works were directly antithetical to the whole point of the movement, taking their work and using it to further the capitalist status quo the counterculture had fought so hard against. The ad below is a clear example of this phenomenon.
Fig. 3. John Alcorn’s The Campbell Hang-Up.
Surrounding this can of Campbell’s Soup are abundant indicators of the psychedelic style. Bright, contrasting colors are flashing in every direction, the shapes that make up each object in the image are bubbly and nonsensical, and the whole composition seems far-out. However, there is one distinction with this art piece that separates it significantly from psychedelic poster art and its origins, and that is the company logo. The Campbell’s logo in the very center of the image is kept in its exact original font and made very easy to see, which is completely opposite to the goal of most psychedelic artwork. In this advertisement Campbell’s Soup is not using the stylistic choices of the movement to convey an experience, they’re using it to grab attention in an attempt to sell a product. This pivotal difference is what proceeded to characterize the majority of ad campaigns that were released during the next decade using the same techniques, until the term “psychedelic art” seemingly faded into obscurity and fad culture.
This isn’t the end of this story, however. In recent decades, some have claimed that psychedelic art is in a resurgence, while others claim that its spontaneous comebacks throughout the years have just fallen back into irrelevance (Grunenberg 7). Looking to modern advertisements can yield insight into the nature of the lasting impact of psychedelic artwork.
Fig. 4. One of three advertisements from Old Spice’s Komodo, Fiji, Matterhorn campaign.
This is seen in an Old Spice advertisement, which uses a series of edited photographs to market the Old Spice deodorant brand. The first element of this work that jumps out to the viewer is the surrealist imagery. A komodo dragon slinking around the man’s neck, fireworks shooting off of his shoulder, a tiny man playing tennis with a tiger on his right, and a river running all through his upper body and down his torso. These are all clear examples of the impact that psychedelic surrealism has had on this ad campaign. The colors may also seem to be echoing the bold and dominant color usage of the psychedelic era, but upon closer inspection, these colors actually fit much closer together with one another given the context of what’s happening in the picture. In the previous example of Figure 2, the surrealist imagery was also surrounded by colors that had no rhyme or reason, but in this picture, the grass is green, the sunlight orange, and the river blue. In addition, there is no instance of trippy shapework, and the lettering is very straightforward. As a result, Old Spice’s advertisement is shown to have clearly been influenced by the psychedelic era, but does not truly fit the bill of what it means to be “psychedelic,” moreso aligning with general surrealism.
Fig. 5. Stills from Laundry’s Drink Break ad campaign for Coca Cola x Twitch.
This advertisement, made for a Coca-Cola x Twitch collaboration, more directly pulls from many elements of psychedelic artwork. Firstly, the color usage in these images is undeniably psychedelic, as the bright yellows, greens, reds, and purples all clash against one another and create a sense of chaos throughout the composition. Additionally, although the lettering on the words “Drink Break” is still relatively easy to discern, the stylization of the font and linework on each letter is reminiscent of that found in psychedelic art posters, especially in the case of the stretched letters in the bottom right quadrant. The box of shapework is also checked easily, as the forms of waves, circles, lines, and objects all flow with their characteristic curvilinear shapes across the page. It is clear that this artwork draws heavily from the style of the psychedelic movement, however the jarring product placement in the center of the image makes it feel less in-tune with the style than other psychedelic works.. Of course, the point of advertising is to promote a product, but psychedelic artwork has employed a very unique design philosophy throughout the years where readability comes second, and conveying a visual experience comes first. Coca-Cola x Twitch’s advertisement fails to echo this effect, which makes it feel disjointed in a sense from the source material. These design elements in both modern advertisements lead us to an interesting conclusion.
From the years since psychedelic art first became a prevalent artstyle in the 1960s, all the way into the modern age of the 21st century, it is clear that psychedelic art has had a lasting and complex impact on graphic design in advertising. Some aspects, such as the nearly unreadable lettering styles, have been significantly dampened, while many others have made significant strides in opening the playing field to more experimental options. Elements such as bright and flashy colors, absurdist imagery, and trippy shapes/designs have become inseparable from many modern advertising styles, all elements which were widely popularized during the psychedelic art movement. This much is undeniable, but can it truly be said that psychedelic art as a style movement has persisted into the advertising world today? To that, the answer is no. Modern advertisements that pull from psychedelic styles may reflect many of the visual choices made by early psychedelic artists, but they have lost the purpose and energy behind the work. Advertising agency Media Heroes has this to say on the subject of psychedelic art:
…graphic designers can take particular elements of psychedelic design and weave them into their work for businesses, creating a freshness that makes people sit up and pay attention, especially if it’s unexpected. Design is pure creativity after all, and there’s no hard set rules as to what you can and cannot do. Businesses can use this wonderfully experimental design style to seize the attention of their target audience, hypnotise them with blasts of colour and surreal imagery, and impress them enough that they might decide to become customers (Mouttet).
This philosophy runs in direct opposition to the soul of the psychedelic movement, using the style not as a form of free expression, but as a tool to influence audiences with clinical precision. Overall, this mindset among the advertisers of new and old has created an atmosphere where psychedelic art has an abundantly present impact on promotional artwork, but does not retain its original ideals. Clearly, American values have shifted over the years, and the changes in psychedelic style usage reflect a pivot to valuing commercialism more than individual expression. And so, for now, the boundary-breaking artworks of Mouse, Kelley, and so many others will remain an influential, but era-bound part of art history.
Author: Patrick Barrett, Class of 2027
The first day in our class on 60s and 70s counterculture that we went to the library collections and viewed genuine psychedelic art pieces from the era, I knew that I was fascinated enough to stake my final paper on the concept. The process of actually finalizing my thesis was difficult, as I had many different ideas revolving around the same central idea of psychedelic art, but eventually I started to realize that the ideology behind the art interested me the most. I was interested in how that ideology had persisted – or how it had been appropriated and crushed – through modern-day artwork, especially advertisements, and that’s how I decided on the thesis you’re reading now.
Once I settled on my thesis, the research proved to be much less of a struggle than I initially assumed. I ended up receiving some crucial assistance from Rebecca Johnson Melvin, who works with the University of Delaware special collections and museums, and had some expertise in the area of interest. She provided me with some options for sources to start my research, and from there the rest of my books and digital documents came snowballing at me rapidly. I ended up asking numerous people their opinions on certain iterations of the paper, and compiling different artworks to narrow down which I would use as evidence (there were so many incredible pieces of art to choose from).
What gave me the most trouble overall was trying to word why this was an important topic in a way that readers would find compelling. The final product is something I can say I’m truly proud of, and I think it powerfully demonstrates the importance of societal shifts through artistic means and how they can be warped with perceptions of stylistic techniques over time. Getting the opportunity to write something like this about a topic I am passionate about was a very empowering academic experience.
Instructor: Kevin Burke
My E110 Honors course for the Fall of 2023 examined the cultural upheavals of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s and their reverberation in society today. We read writers of the Beat Generation whose work challenged norms of sexuality, drug use, spirituality, gender, and race, and considered the anti-war movement, the beginnings of the women’s and gay liberation, the Black Power and environmental movements, and the alternative lifestyles of the 1960s. Students completed a number of shorter assignments in response to selected writing and music and participated in a series of student-led sessions on student-selected topics. One of the highlights of the semester was a session with Special Collections Librarian Rebecca Johnson Melvin in which examined the library’s fine collection of psychedelic rock posters from the 1960s. This session was the inspiration for Patrick’s paper, which exemplifies a number of features essential to good, researched writing. Patrick drew on Rebecca’s presentation during our session and consulted her for advice on research. He integrated a variety of sources, including images and film, accounts by the artists, and academic discussions. The resulting essay is a sophisticated analysis of the interaction of artistic, ideological, and social dynamics.
Works Cited
Alcorn, John. The Campbell Hang-Up. 1968. Click Americana, https://clickamericana.com/topics/food-drink/campbell-kids-vintage-brand-soup-mascots.
English, Michael, and Nigel Weymouth. CIA v UFO. 1967. Victoria and Albert Museum, https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O22952/cia-v-ufo-poster-english-michael/.
Gaddy, James. “Technicolor Dreamcoats.” Print, vol. 60, no. 5, Sept. 2006, pp. 63–67. EBSCOhost,search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&AN=22099564&site=ehost-live.
Golding, Peter. Rock Graphic Originals : Revolutions in Sonic Art from Plate to Print ’55-’88. Thames & Hudson, 2018.
Grunenberg, Christoph. Summer of Love : Art of the Psychedelic Era. Tate, 2005.
Heller, Steven. “The Acid Aesthetic.” Print, vol. 71, no. 1, Spring 2017, pp. 14–15. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&AN=122084693&site=ehost-live
Diederichsen, Diedrich, et al. Pop Art Design. Vitra Design Museum, 2012.
Laundry. Drink Break. 2020. Stash Media, https://www.stashmedia.tv/coca-cola-twitch-drink-break-laundry/.
Moscoso, Victor. Pink Panther. 1967. Denver Art Museum, https://www.denverartmuseum.org/en/object/2007.4406.
Mouttet, Stefan. “Psychedelic Design | Epic Examples + How to Use It.” Media Heroes, 14 Feb. 2022, www.mediaheroes.com.au/blog/psychedelic-design/.
Obarski, Dan, et al. The Tale of the Dog : The Family Dog Denver, 1967-1968. My Crime Media, 2020.
Wieden + Kennedy. Komodo, Fiji, Matterhorn. 2011. Ads of the World, https://www.adsoftheworld.com/campaigns/komodo-012a3a2a-7af7-4f9f-8ac3-fc8e9f7bfa90.