A Complete Digitization of the 1960s Magazine Avant Garde: From John Lennon’s Erotic Lithographs to Marilyn Monroe’s Last Photos

Briefly not­ed: Avant Garde mag­a­zine had a rel­a­tive­ly short run. It pro­duced only 16 issues between Jan­u­ary 1968 and July 1971. But it left its mark, influ­enc­ing tastemak­ers with­in the arts world, and it’s now been prop­er­ly dig­i­tized for pos­ter­i­ty.

A col­lab­o­ra­tion between Ralph Ginzburg (edi­tor) and Herb Lubalin (art direc­tor), Avant Garde is part­ly remem­bered for its rad­i­cal pol­i­tics and embrace of erot­ic con­tent. (Issue #5 launched a “No More War” poster com­pe­ti­tion; Issue #11 fea­tured John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s erot­ic lith­o­graphs; Issue #2 pre­sent­ed phan­tas­magoric ver­sions of Bert Stern’s semi-nude pho­tos of Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe.)

But prob­a­bly the great­est lega­cy of the mag­a­zine is the logo Lubalin designed, which gave birth to the Avant Garde type­face that still lives today. (Get more on that here.)

All 16 issues were scanned by the Inter­net Archive, and put online by Mindy Seu. You can read Avant Garde in all of its dig­i­tal glo­ry here.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 336 Issues of the Avant-Garde Mag­a­zine The Storm (1910–1932), Fea­tur­ing the Work of Kandin­sky, Klee, Moholy-Nagy & More

Exten­sive Archive of Avant-Garde & Mod­ernist Mag­a­zines (1890–1939) Now Avail­able Online

2,200 Rad­i­cal Polit­i­cal Posters Dig­i­tized: A New Archive