Mehemed Fehmy Agha

Subject of my article is ... Dr. Mehemed Fehmy Agha (1896 Mykolaiv - Pennsylvania, 1978) was a Russian Designer and Art Director who was one of the pioneers of modern American publishing and was instrumental in defining the role of the magazine art director, in the early 20th century. Cultured and brilliant, he brought the full force of European avant garde experimentation to the pages of Vogue, Vanity Fair, and House & Garden, the Condé Nast publishing company's flagship magazines in the United States.

Early life and education

Agha was born in the Russian Empire (now Ukraine) to a family of Turkish descent. His education ranged broadly from a degree in economics from the Emperor Peter the Great Polytechnic Institute in Kiev to a degree in Oriental languages in Paris. He pursued training in the arts, and achieved proficiencies in photography, typography, and the sciences.

Career

In 1928 he became the art director of Vogue Berlin. Agha’s commanding personality and unshakeable confidence jettisoned his rise to prominence at the Paris and Berlin offices of Vogue. His inventive layouts came to the attention of Condé Nast himself who persuaded Agha to take over the art direction of the American edition of Vogue in 1929. His responsibilities soon came to include Vanity Fair, one of the most the influential arts and letters magazines of the day, as well as the venerable home-style journal House & Garden. Dr. Agha introduced Sans-serif types, photographs by such luminaries as Edward Steichen, Carl Van Vechten, and Edward Weston, as well as the pictorial feature.

Agha left Condé Nast in 1943 and became a sought-after graphic arts consultant for various companies including publishers and department stores. He became president of both the Art Directors Club (1935) and AIGA (1953-55) and enjoyed a near mythic status as an arbiter of good taste in design. In a tribute published by PM Magazine in August 1939, William Golden wrote about the lofty expectations Agha placed on his designers: "Agha's demands seem so simple. Make something legible, present it logically and make it look somehow luxurious... in a way that he will like. So they devise not merely one version of how they think a page should look, but ten, or twenty, or forty... And for sheer productivity this method is unequalled. As for those bales of rejected layouts that have never seen the light of day; I don't think they are completely wasted. Some day, a less jaded scholar of the Graphic Arts will unearth them and discover again the amazing amount of original and exciting work that was stimulated by the man who knew too much to like anything." -- DP

Development and Theory

The impact on publishing Agha, above all linked to the world of fashion, has been significant. He has adjusted the graphics , simplifying layout and imposing a close relationship between text and images. Typical Agha is the composition of full pages, the exasperation of photographic cuts, the search for asymmetric equilibrium. Everything from a register strict and sober. [1]

Bibliography

1. Daniele Baroni e Maurizio Vitta. Storia del design grafico. Milano, Longanesi, 2003. ISBN 978-88-304-2011-3.

http://library.rit.edu/gda/designer/dr-mehemed-fehmy-agha

http://library.rit.edu/gda/content/educational

References

Art Directors Club - Hall of Fame 1972

http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehemed_Fehmy_Agh

Contributors 1934-1942. "M. F. Agha." Dr. Leslie Project. http://www.drleslie.com/Contributors/agha.shtml.

Hall of Fame 1972. "M. F. Agha." The Art Directors Club. http://www.adcglobal.org/archive/hof/1972/?id=293.

"The Man Who Knew Too Much," by William Golden. PM Magazine. Vol. 5, no. 2 (Aug./Sept. 1939).http://library.rit.edu/gda/content/educational