Warhol/Basquiat posters
A twitter post from Poster House celebrating Jean-Michel Basquiat’s birthday featured an exhibition poster of the collaborative work of Warhol and Basquiat. After a little digging, I was able to identify who designed this poster. It was designed by Hannah Alderfer—the initials HHA are visible near Warhols’s name. The studio’s website shows this poster. It combines Helvetica Compressed with Futura Extra Bold in mimicking the traditional boxing posters of earlier in the 20th century. The stars, the colors, the image cropping, all reference that genre of poster. The photos of Basquiat and Warhol were taken by Michael Halsband.
Interestingly there are two other versions of the poster (see below) that use other, more famous, photos from this shoot by Halsband. The typography is slightly different on the Palladium poster. It is completely different on the black and white poster which surprisingly uses Radiant Extra Condensed for the main text. Radiant works well with that photography, which is reminiscent of the style of Mapplethorpe (who was originally slated to shoot the two artists) and Avedon. The other two posters are uncredited and look different from the style of Hannah Alderfer’s work.
2 Comments on “Warhol/Basquiat posters”
I can see Futura Extra Bold in the first image, but the second one seems to use Spartan Extra Black.
Confirmed – thanks for lending your keen eye, Bryson!
For anyone who wonders how to tell Intertype’s Futura Extra Bold from ATF/Linotype’s Spartan Extra Black: the latter has thinner bars in A and the middle of E, outer parts of S are much thinner than the spine, G is narrower and more circular, etc.