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Sex, Rock Optical Illusions

The 1960s are known as a decade of social and political unrest: The Cuban Missile Crisis, the struggle for civil rights, the escalating protests against the Vietnam war, the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King, the formation of radical home-grown organizations such as the Weather Underground. It was also a time of cultural revolution, in music (The Beatles, the Stones, the ascendancy of rock 'n' roll), literature (Ken Kesey, Richard Brautigan, Kurt Vonnegut, et al.), journalism (Tom Wolfe's New Journalism and Hunter Thompson's Gonzo journalism), films (Mike Nichols, Bob Rafelson, Sam Peckinpah), and the heady conflation of Fine Art with the Pop Art movement (Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney).

Comics were undergoing their own revolution and no one epitomized underground comix and psychedelia more than Victor Moscoso, whose posters for such bands as The Grateful Dead, Big Brother The Holding Company and the Steve Miller Blues Band, stand as enduring works of art and instantly recognizable icons of their time. Moscoso (along with fellow artists Rick Griffin, Stanley Mouse, Wes Wilson, Alton Kelley and Peter Max) revolutionized the poster aesthetic and defined the visual culture of a generation. R. Crumb invited Moscoso to join the Zap Comix collective in 1968, and Moscoso's work has appeared in every issue from Zap #2 to present. His comix work contrasted with his fellow artists (R. Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, Gilbert Shelton, et al.) by his unique stylization, less confrontational point of view, hallucinatory visual rhythms, and wordless, dreamlike stories.

Sex, Rock 'N' Roll Optical Illusions is Victor Moscoso's first major, career-spanning retrospective, from his earliest poster work in 1966 to his most recent graphic experimentation. Optical Illusions contains his best posters that advertised bands playing in San Francisco's famous dance ballrooms of the time — the Avalon, the Matrix, and the Fillmoreas well as many of his Zap Comix contributions, and his solo comix work, many in Moscoso's signature color. This wide-ranging career retrospective — Moscoso's famous technique employing "vibrating colors" that he pioneered in his posters is impeccably reproduced with as much fidelity to the original as modern printing can achieve, his black-and-white and full color comix work is collected here for the first time is an intense, vibrant, and revelatory experience.

  • Format
  • hardcover
  • Pages
  • 144
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9781560976578
  • Genres
  • art, comics
  • Release date
  • 2006