English
Samoa writer Albert Hanover relates in his strange novel Daughter of light how before hearing the story about its design, he only smoked Lucky Strikes because the package invariably made him think of the American artist Jasper Johns.
He had already had fun with the word game of the American brand of cigarettes, allowing to identify a stroke of luck which the name announced with the lighting of the match (to strike a match) that would ignite the cigarette, and that, somehow, also evoked Johns and his elegant and incisive Duchamp irony which admirably illustrate works such as The critic smiles, consisting of a toothbrush metal mold placed on a plinth made of the same material.
All in Johns, despite the deliberate banality of his themes and forms -or precisely because of it, as banal designs do not generate any energy anymore- is always elegant, starting with his exquisite and masterly treatment of the canvas painting that refers to the concept of inertia of Kenneth Noland paintings, and ending his interest in the idea of painting as object and not as representation.
It was in Lisbon, however, while Hannover worked as a Spanish teacher at a language school, where the general director of Lucky Strike in Europe, then a student of him, assured that Johns hadn’t had any involvement in the design of the package, which was designed by Raymond Loewy, co-creator of the Shell logo and one of the biggest names in industrial design.
In the original pack an area painted red on a green background represented a ball on a pool table -adding a new word-game to the cigarettes’ name. Apparently during the World War II large amounts of green paint were assigned to the military sector so that the color was running short, Loewy redesigned the pack using the characteristic red and white. The advertising campaign announcing the new pack was referring to the phenomenon using the clever phrase “The Lucky Strikes greens have gone to war. So here is the stylish new uniform for good tobacco”. It seems that women, who entered the labour market en masse and its habits while men were mobilized, were much more attracted by the white package, so they never undid the change.
Despite the detailed explanation, Hannover always continued to find in the packet of cigarettes intense resonances with unforgettably elegant Jasper Johns’ dartboards, these dartboards which, along with their flags, numbers, letters, maps, and stimulating neo-dada sensitivity accounted a real starting point of pop art in the United States and changed forever the face of the art world to turn the object into painting and neutralize the gap between life and art.
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Paul Oilzum
Now, until April 24, the Institut Valencià d´Art Modern devotes a retrospective exhibition displaying 91 works from all periods of the artist. If you rent one of the apartments in Valencia you can’t miss it.
