"1978 Annual of Art Directors Club of New York"
This year, Mr.George Lois was nominated as 'Hall of Fame' by Art Directors Club of New York.
This dramatic breakaway was furthered through the 1960s by - more than a few artists and writers who started new ad agencies and demonstrated by their success that the art of advertising was substantially more than making layouts or crafting exquisite designs. Power had come to the people who made the ads. It was a yeasty time to be an art director with a rage tocommunicate, to blaze trails.
In January 1954, Private George H. Lois, U.S. Army, US51161237, newly returned from Korea, threw a punch (according to Lois) at a fat Cracker sergeant in Camp Brunswick, New Jersey. A few days later the Army returned Lois to civilian life with an honorable discharge. (I have seen the document.)
He went to work as an art director for Bill Golden at CBS, a designer's paradise with an atmosphere of the atelier that he left after a few years to make his mark in the roughhouse world of advertising. In 1957 he was hired by Lennen & Newell, a gigantic, conventional ad agency. His career there was brief and explosive. After several months of fruitless hard work,
Lois evidently took furious exception to the way his work was being manhandled by the account group on American Airlines.
In a by now legendary Madison Avenue episode, he overturned a potentate's desk (there are live witnesses) in a paroxysm of outrage against the Philistines of Lennen & Newell.
By the ripe age of twenty-six, Lois was evolving into a composite persona of Zorba the Greek, Joyce Cary's Gulley Jimson of "The Horse's Mouth" and Elliott Baker's possessed poet Samson Shillitoe of"A Fine Madness."
He went to work for Sudler & Hennessey under the gentle and supremely talented Herb Lubalin, where he settled down, but not for long.
