Avant Garde Magazine Issue # 3 "Revaluation of the Dollar: 19 Artists Design a New One-Dollar Bill" May 1968 (Volume 1)

The third issue of Avant-Garde, May 1968, ran an attention-grabbing feature entitled 'Revaluation of the Dollar: 19 Artists Design a New One-Dollar Bill.' You can see the magazine's cover in 'Up close and tight', the Eye 75 feature about Avant-Garde's legendary art director Herb Lubalin. Avant-Garde, published and edited by Ralph Ginzburg and art directed by Lubalin, commissioned friends and contemporaries such as Seymour Chwast, Bob (R. O.) Blechman and Edward Gorey to come up with nineteen fanciful currency designs, colourful blasts of exuberant and irreverent 1960s illustration, with little regard for currency design guidelines or usability. As the short introduction says, 'All in all, these dollars won't pay the rent, but then they won't buy an M-16 riflt, either. And in these days, that's something.' The bills make interesting viewing in the context of Richard Smith's Dollar ReDe$ign Project. Avant Garde was a magazine notable for graphic and logogram design by Herb Lubalin. The magazine had 14 issues and was published from January 1968 to July 1971. The editor was Ralph Ginzburg. From January, 1968, through July, 1971, Ginzburg published Avant Garde, which like Eros, an earlier publishing attempt, was a handsome hardbound periodical. While it could not be termed obscene, but it was filled with creative imagery often caustically critical of American society and government, sexual themes, and (for the time) crude language. One cover featured a naked pregnant woman; another had a parody of Willard's famous patriotic painting, "The Spirit of '76", with a woman and a black man. Avant Garde had a modest circulation but was extremely popular in certain circles, including New York's advertising and editorial art directors. An article on folk music written by United States Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas was a topic in the congressional hearings on his attempted impeachment in 1970.