“Among the great creative geniuses to stalk the halls of Esquire, none have been greater or more creative than George Lois. With his first cover for Esquire he became as much a part of the New Journalism as any wordsmith of that era. In a decade of unforgettable covers for Esquire, he changed the face of magazines.”

ESQUIRE

“Politically, Esquire showed the most guts, and earned the most glory, during the Hayes/Lois years, for its prescience regarding Vietnam. During those years, the Establishment Press was heralding certain victory, (how could peasants in pajamas match the armed might of the United States?). Lois’ covers sounded an early alarm about America’s relentless march into the mud, and he kept at it. But his earliest warning was one of the few ideas that Hayes vetoed – a spooky greeting from Vietnam he intended for a December 1962 cover bearing the season’s greetings “Merry Christmas. I’m the 100th GI killed in Vietnam.” Concerned that a peace deal might be brokered before the issue hit the stands, he convinced Lois that it was a risky cover. Hayes’ rejection didn’t reflect a failure of nerve. It was a prudent editorial decision that lacked the gift of prophecy.

JAMES WOLCOTT, VANITY FAIR

“No committee’s, no editing, no discussion. Just the trust of a great editor (Harold Hayes) and the gut instinct of an artist (George Lois).”

ASSOCIATED PRESS

“Lois’ covers made statements that stood the test of time. They proved that a singular image could attract a reader, that a sophisticated audience can be challenged when scanning a newsstand with $5 in their pocket...it was a golden time when a magazine cover could symbolize a culture in one provocative image, each and every month.”

JUXTAPOZ MAGAZINE

“They say you can’t judge a book by it’s cover? But what about a magazine? Well, that can be a different story, especially if the cover of the magazine was created by George Lois, who made Esquire covers back in the ’60s, works of art!”

MATT LAUER, THE TODAY SHOW

“Every industry has its stars, and in the world of advertising, George Lois is a supernova. Since the 1950s, he’s had a titanic influence on Pop culture as the mastermind of unforgettable marketing ideas for big-name corporations, including Xerox and MTV, and made designer Tommy Hilfiger an overnight sensation, as well as creating the most famous magazine covers of all time for Esquire in the ’60s.”

TIMEOUT NEW YORK

“George Lois, brash son of Greek immigrants, burst upon the scene in the late '5s and knocked the complacency out of the ad and magazine business...a remarkable graphic designer and commentator."

THE NEW YORK TIMES

“Media Renaissance man George Lois concocted a fresh style for magazine cover – smart, fun, funny and visually fluent.”

NEW YORK OBSERVER

  “Four month’s after Liston won the title, Esquire thumbed its nose at its white readers with an unforgettable cover. On the front of its December 1963 issue, there was Liston glowering out from under a tasseled, red-and-white Santa Claus hat, looking like the last man on earth America wanted to see coming down its chimney.”

SPORTS ILLUSTRATED

“George Lois’ Esquire cover depicting Sonny Liston as America’s first black Santa...is one of the greatest social statements of the plastic arts since Picasso’s Guernica.”

TIME MAGAZINE

“Although the audacious covers he designed for Esquire in the ’60s and are lauded as one of the marathon achievements in magazine history, these testimonials are nothing but talk – magazines today have never played it safer. Circulation soared during the Hayes-Lois years and dove after they left, yet no one seems to have picked up the baton, or the hint.”

VANITY FAIR

“George Lois’ covers sold magazines – but separate a Lois Esquire cover from said function, stand them alone, and the works are pieces of art.

JUXTAPOZ MAGAZINE

“Of the 50 Best Magazines Ever, the Esquire of the ‘60s is far and away No.1. Esquire captured last century’s most dynamic decade, visually and literally altering the way  Americans thought about their changing country: Sonny Liston as a black Santa Claus! Anti-Vietnam War martyr Muhammad Ali as St. Sebastian! Ed Sullivan as a Beatle! And St. Patrick’s as a movie house! We rest our case.”

GOOD MAGAZINE, THE MEDIA ISSUE

“ Kennedy without Tears served as both headline and cover line for a story on assessing Jack Kennedy’s political life after he was assassinated and George Lois provided a sly riff on that thesis. A full cover, sepia-toned photograph stares straight out at the reader while, from the bottom of the page, a man’s hand holding a white handkerchief – both depicted in full color – dabbed at a spot under the president’s eye. Above the handkerchief, spilled tears beaded up on the photograph. Was the man attached to the hand weeping? Or was the slain president crying for his lost legacy?”

FRANK DiGIACOMMO, VANITY FAIR

“Four decades ago in the reign of George Lois, the position of Esquire cover designer carried the power to revolutionize the visual vocabulary of magazines.”

THE NEW YORK OBSERVER

“George Lois designed a classic series of covers for Esquire that reflected controversial issues of the times such as the war in Vietnam, the assassinations in America, politics, race relations, the women’s movement and America’s obsessions with sex, dope and doom. The great adman created covers that were statements that force-fed an irresistible taste of the great magazine’s content.”

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

“This Bronx-reared Barnum has magazines in his blood. In 1962, he created the prototype of New York Magazine as a supplement to The Herald Tribune, and in the ’60s turned Esquire’s covers into a galley that registered every shock of those seismic years. And as an adman, he has been called ‘an iconoclastic genius’, ‘a legendary advertising guru’, ‘the Superman of Madison Avenue’.”

TIME MAGAZINE

“George Lois reinvented celebrity, topping Sonny Liston’s scowl with a Santa hat, slapping a Beatles’ wig on Ed Sullivan, or popping Andy Warhol into the soup to create his own Pop classic.”

ESQUIRE

“Esquire covers didn’t stoop to agitprop. They were too sophisticated to double as protest signs. Lois packed subversive messages into the snowballs he tossed, but he wanted their dramatic content to trigger debate rather than agreement.”

JAMES WOLCOTT, VANITY FAIR

“Harold Hayes had the exact thing that all of the great editors have, which is that he absolutely trusted his gut, and the talent he trusted most was a Runyonesque character named George Lois who swore like a longshoreman but exuded the confidence of a shipping magnate...to an industry that was still throwing off the dull mannered strictures of the ’50s, Hayes’ arrangement was shocking...he let Lois do his thing. In Lois, he had struck gold.”

FRANK DiGIACOMMO, VANITY FAIR

“The peculiarly Loisian notion of pushing an idea to its ultimate, of crafting effective communications from little more than disarming simplicity, hit the newsstands month after month, in a golden decade of journalism in the ’60s.”

PRINT MAGAZINE

“George Lois was already a legend almost 50 years ago, leading advertising’s Creative Revolution and overturning the  world of publishing with his iconoclastic covers for Esquire.”

PENTAGRAM DESIGN

“A review of George Lois’ Esquire covers of the’60s doubles as a lesson to today’s sycophantic use of celebrity.”

WWD

“Image genius George Lois was a boy wonder of the ad world in the ’60s when he created iconic Esquire covers still beloved by journalism lovers – Big Idea covers, a singular image, minimal type, a visual pun. He made it the time covers were covers.”

BUSINESS WEEK

“Reviewing George Lois’ decade-long Esquire cover career doubles as a lesson to today’s sycophantic use of celebrity.”

WWD

“Mr. Big Idea: George Lois is an advertising and graphic design legend – what’s been overdue is high-caliber recognition for his magazine work, which, though widely celebrated, and frequently (if faint-heartedly) imitated, have never had the full curatorial treatment. MoMA, boldly, steps forward with an exhibition of images that helped Esquire define a decade, and created a visual language that people still feel they must learn to understand, if not speak well.”

THE NEW YORKER

“Esquire didn’t let its cynicism acidify into contempt. Some of Lois’ most beautiful covers were hallmarks of hero worship. The image of a retired Joe DiMaggio (portrayed by Lois himself), taking a swing at the plate at an empty Yankee Stadium – a tiny, lone figure in a hushed cathedral – suggests a man measuring himself against the magnitude of his own fame.”

JAMES WOLCOTT, VANITY FAIR

“The object of Lois’ greatest devotion was and remains Muhammad Ali, the subject of three Esquire covers. For his opening salvo, he showed Floyd Patterson, who had been viciously “whupped” the previous year by the champion, surprising the sports world by heroically supporting the embattled Ali’s refusal to fight in a bad war.”

VANITY FAIR

“The art of the outrageous: Dashing, inventive and bold, George Lois shook up American Pop Culture in the 1950’s and beyond with controversial magazine covers that grabbed the public’s attention and forever raised the bar of creativity.”

TOWN & COUNTRY

“The driving reason Lois has no contemporary heirs is that the magazine world has become drastically depoliticized since Esquire’s heyday, removed from battle. Politics has been ghettoized into the opinion journals, where liberals and conservatives sit in their chosen sandbox."

VANITY FAIR

“This cover created by George Lois in 1966 was the modern equivalent of the Ernest Hemingway, six-word short story: ‘For Sale. Baby shoes. Never used.’ The words on the cover give the reader a gut feeling of horror. These are soldiers and this is Vietnam...yet another senseless casualty...the horror, the horror in one simple, bold, terrifying cover. Whether or not you picked up the magazine, simply reading the words woke you up.”

FPO MEDIA MAGAZINE

"Even though an Esquire profile was largely favorable, Lois rendered Vice President Hubert Humphrey as a ventriloquist's dummy - the foldout cover bomb lobbed into the White House!"

Vanity Fair

“George Lois’ frescoes are the covers he did for Esquire.”

ODYSSEY MAGAZINE

“The first step in selling is stopping the eye. No one has mastered that rule as well as George Lois. For Esquire, the media renaissance man concocted a fresh style for magazine covers – smart, fun, funny, and visually fluent. He has married the outrageous to the fantastic.”

TIME MAGAZINE

“George Lois, flamboyant adman, famed Esquire cover designer of the ’60s, created a stir in the American psyche. Lois has shown a vivid track record in grasping the public’s taste...making weirdly moving and powerful statements about America’s culture.”

THE NEW YORK OBSERVER

“Let’s get one thing straight: George Lois didn’t become the world’s most renowned art director by taking orders. In his long career, Lois has created a body of remarkable work – from legendary ad campaigns to seminal Esquire covers –  without compromising his aesthetic or conceptual vision one bit. Ever.”

GEORGE KALOGERAKIS, ODYSSEY MAGAZINE

“Lois’ seductively smart covers for Esquire in the ’60s are revered: the images favored clarity over clutter, communicating startling juxtapositions, such as Andy Warhol being sucked into a giant Campbell’s soup can, or Muhammad All posing as arrow-pierced St. Sebastian, or punching Ursula Address in the eye. Shifting between advertising and publishing, Lois created an era when celebrities were truly celebrated.”

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY MAGAZINE

“In 1962, erudite but commercially ailing Esquire magazine hired prominent adman George Lois to juice up its covers; those gathered in MoMA’s concise show are an exhilarating time capsule of politics, graphic design, and journalistic daredevilry. With an adman’s brazenness, Lois transported the magazine cover beyond Norman Rockwell's small town and Time’s head-shot formality to something that snagged the eye and blummoxed the brain.”

THE VILLAGE VOICE

“At the pulsing intersection of ’60s iconography and iconoclasm stood George Lois, genius adman, who went on to sock it to the nation’s eyeballs as Esquire’s cover designer.”

VANITY FAIR

“George Lois created the most memorable covers in American magazine history...unusual, unconventional,and instantly famous: the dreaded heavyweight boxing champion and ex-con, Sonny Liston, in a Santa Claus suit; Svetlana Stalin, the Soviet dictator’s daughter, with her father’s mustache; and St. Patrick’s Cathedral as a movie theater. Harold Hayes loved the controversy they engendered.”

WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE

“Legendary Adman George Lois, created some of the most memorable campaigns of the past 45 years...and his Esquire covers inspired a generation of editors and designers. In the process, he helped midwife the birth of modern celebrity culture. And along the way, no one had more fun.”

NEW YORK MAGAZINE

“With a halo protruding out of his collar, Joe McCarthy’s henchman looked more menacing than if he had been fitted with horns and forked tail.”

VANITY FAIR

“George, that’s the closest Roy Cohn will ever get to heaven.”

SENATOR ROBERT KENNEDY

“The April 1968 Esquire cover of Muhammad Ali posing as the martyr St. Sebastian was one of the most iconic images of the decade, tying together the incendiary issues of the Vietnam War, race and religion. The image is so powerful that some people of a certain age remember where they were when they saw it for the first time.”

ASSOCIATED PRESS

“George Lois’ covers for Esquire in the’60s are classic. His April 1968 image of Muhammad Ali to dramatize the boxer’s persecution for his personal beliefs, is the greatest magazine cover ever created, making a political statement without being grim or stupid or predictable. It’s not just a great idea, but visually elegant, economical, perfect.”

KURT ANDERSEN, HOST OF NPR’s STUDIO 360

“Lois’ 1968 cover conveyed a death wish: eyes closed, his face expressionless, Richard Nixon looks as if he were being prepared by a pit crew of morticians for open-casket viewing.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES

“Between 1962 and 1971, Esquire featured one remarkable cover after another, each conceived and designed by Madison Avenue’s Wunderkind, George Lois. Lois’ covers are Icons of the age, acerbic critiques of contemporary society, politics and manners that subverted the conventions of mainstream magazines...a chronicle of a magazine in its golden age, a critical period of American social and political turmoil and the legacy of a remarkable graphic designer and communicator.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES

“There may be a greater variety of magazines in America today than ever before, but none has the continuing impact of Esquire in publishing’s Golden Age in the ’60s, under the inspired leadership of Harold Hayes, whose visual banner was flung daringly aloft by George Lois. Those shocking, scorching, often outrageous Lois covers had a power and influence never seen before, and will probably never be equaled.”

GENE SHALIT, THE TODAY SHOW

“Vital to any montage of ’60s iconography is the cavalcade of Esquire covers designed by George Lois in the gold-rush days of editor Harold T.P. Hayes – what those ballistic talents Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were to the rejuvenation of Comic books at Marvel in the’60s, the playfully fearless Hayes and Lois were to the liberation of magazine journalism.”

JAMES WOLCOTT, VANITY FAIR

“The magazine industry continues to drool over George Lois’ infamous covers in the glory days of Esquire magazine, before all editors and art directors gave up and just put Tom Cruise on the cover month after month after month.”

NEW YORK OBSERVER

“If you didn’t live through the epoch of those Esquire glory days, and you want to be inspired – as well as totally consumed by an artist’s passion – look up George Lois’ covers. They will be a revelation. If you did live through those times, you’ll be shocked to learn that the lessons Lois taught about cover design have been all but forgotten.”

STEVE HELLER, PRINT MAGAZINE

“Before the ’60s, Art Director George Lois established himself as a top-flight ideas merchant in advertising, before freelancing for Esquire, when he magicked-up the most memorable magazine covers the publishing world has ever seen, creating images that challenged a decade...and still exist with an enduring significance.”

SUNDAY LIFE MAGAZINE, AUSTRALIA

“If any icons of American graphic design are worth preserving, George Lois’ Esquire covers are.”

PRINT MAGAZINE

“Blessed with the partnership of editor Harold Hayes, who allowed the art director creative control, Lois’ visceral approach to art direction gave this particularly vibrant and turbulent era a memorable face.”

AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF GRAPHIC ARTS (AIGA)

“The lost art of the magazine cover – for anyone who works in magazines, George Lois’ Esquire covers from the 1960s are both an inspiration and a rebuke. The art of the magazine cover – especially the mainstream version – has been in decline since Lois’ last Esquire cover. Everyone talks about doing ‘George Lois-type covers,’ but no one really does them.”

METROPOLIS MAGAZINE

“The most familiar–and provocative–images of the age...Superman of Madison Avenue...this immigrant-florist’s son is America’s master communicator. George Lois is a genius.”

NEW YORK MAGAZINE

“The great master of the conceptual magazine cover was the art director, George Lois, who created so many legendary covers for Esquire in the sixties. When Muhammad Ali was convicted of draft evasion and stripped of his heavyweight boxing title, Lois depicted him as the martyred St. Sebastian, with arrows sticking out of his body – and he drowned Andy Warhol in a can of Campbell’s soup!”

ANNIE LIEBOVITZ

“The MoMA exhibit of George Lois’ Esquire covers of the ’60s is full of work that seems startling now – and must have looked positively extra-terrestrial back then.”

BOSTON GLOBE

“If one agrees with the Marshall McLuhan statement that ‘historians and archaeologists will one day discover that ads of our time are the richest reflections of our society’, then the advertising and magazine work of George Lois is the revealing mirror of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. Lois is surely America’s most resourceful art director and it’s most prolific.”

AMERICAN MODERNISM: GRAPHIC DESIGN, 1920-1960

“A Madison Avenue legend and America’s premiere art director, George Lois rewrote the book on magazine covers. Lois’ brash and irreverent ideas landed on the magazine industry with the ‘soft touch’ of a mortar shell.”

AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHER

“By the time they ended their dreams years working on Esquire, Harold Hayes and George Lois had become icons for anyone who had ever hoped to be hip. Everybody, regardless of gender, wanted to be like Hayes and Lois.”

VANITY FAIR

“Trying not to stare at a George Lois Esquire cover is about as difficult as trying to ignore George Lois, who is, in a sense, the Ali of Advertising – boastful, flamboyant, loquacious, entertaining, completely original, supremely talented contemptuous of authority and always capable of delivering a surprise knockout punch.”

COMMUNICATION ARTS

“Lois has proved his entire life that celebrities, tickled behind the ears and taught a new trick, can provide the perfect snapshot of ‘the marriage of myth and marketplace.’”

JAMES WOLCOTT, VANITY FAIR

“The key word in understanding Lois’ approach is simplification. His work over the years, whether in advertising, corporate identity, magazine design, packaging or television, shows a creative directness with a powerful sense of impact gained through wit, irony and ambiguity that made it memorable.”

AMERICAN MODERNISM: GRAPHIC DESIGN

P.S. Twenty years later, I found myself having breakfast with Hoffman and Steve Ross, the chairman of Time Warner, during the period my ad campaign “Make time for Time” was a hit of the ad world. Gobbling up my cereal (and feeling my oats) I proudly preened to Hoffman, who, as a struggling off-Broadway actor, had become an instant star in The Graduate only a few years before: “Remember me? I’m the guy who did that Esquire cover of you in 1970.” Dusty replied, “Esquire cover? I was never on an Esquire cover!”

Ouch!

“No editor worth his personal stationery wants to forgo prerogative and strike the dream deal that Lois enjoyed with Harold Hayes, who committed himself to run whatever Lois finally dropped on his desk, damn the primal screams of outraged advertisers and cranky subscribers. As Lois says, ‘The easiest thing in the world is to do great, exciting work. The hardest thing in the world is to get somebody to run it.’ Which Hayes almost unfailingly did.’

JAMES WOLCOTT, VANITY FAIR

“The November 1970 issue was a Molotov cocktail. An excerpt from a book by John Sack of the story of Lieutenant William L. Calley Jr., the soldier facing trial for the My Lai massacre. Lois’ cover was a masterpiece. It made his great Sonny Liston as Santa Claus cover look like a Disney cartoon. The image showed Calley in uniform, surrounded by Vietnamese children. He was the nation’s Frankenstein monster. And in the photo, Lois had him smiling.”

FRANK DiGIACOMO, VANITY FAIR

“New Esquire editor Harold Hayes promised ‘humor, irreverence, fine writing, controversy, topicality and surprise.’ These qualities were delivered in great measure not just by writers like Norman Mailer, but by George Lois’ covers. Combining a brilliant visual imagination with intolerance of arrogance and injustice, Lois was, in Hayes’ words, ‘impossible to regulate or control.’ Esquire’s predictable formula of sex and style since the ’30s was replaced by George Lois’ striking commentaries on American culture and politics in the decade of the ’60s, with great gains in readership and influence for the stalled magazine.”

MAGAZINE COVERS, DAVID CROWLEY

“The century’s most accomplished progenitor of the Big Idea in graphics, George Lois gave birth to an astonishing birth array of commercial campaigns and imagery that have meshed high-minded design with hard-core sell. The most memorable manifestations of his hybrid talent as art director and guerrilla advertising undoubtedly came in the form of the covers he created for Esquire in the ’60s and ’70s...Lois’ talent has always been to capture the zeitgeist of an age.”

AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF GRAPHIC ARTS (AIGA)

“George Lois, the first art director to form his own ad agency (1960), is known for his advertising campaigns with an iconoclastic, even shocking character, combining dramatic graphic layout in combination with images and text that can be humorous or disturbing with powerful impact in both advertisements and immensely popular magazine covers.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES

“George Lois has had a star-studded career: his genius lies, at times, in putting celebrities in surprising situations. The pleasant shock of unexpected juxtaposition helped Lois to express startling and outrageous selling ideas and magazine covers.”

USA TODAY

“Lois wrestled and cajoled with countless celebrities over his long and illustrious career. His ability to fuse images together in seemingly impossible ways to make powerful, vicious or sometimes hilarious images remains unsurpassed to this day.”

UK DESIGN MAGAZINE

“George Lois’ Esquire covers are considered among the most memorable propaganda imagery in any medium, and certainly the most provocative in the history of the magazine industry.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES

“George Lois, Image-maker extraordinaire, tussled with the famous...baited presidents, tangled with boxers and persuaded Hollywood stars to disrobe – all in pursuit of the most eye-popping images possible...visual gut punches   and rib-ticklers!”

THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH MAGAZINE, LONDON