Visual Arts

NEW YORK – Muhammad Ali, shirtless in white satin boxing shorts and pierced with six arrows, poses as St. Sebastian, a martyr to his faith. The April 1968 Esquire magazine cover is one of the most iconic images of the decade, tying together the incendiary issues of the Vietnam War, race and religion.

Museum of Modern Art

This undated photo released by the Museum of Modern Art shows the April 1968 cover of Esquire Magazine, which shows Muhammad Ali posing as St. Sebastian pierced with arrows. The magazine cover, designed by George Lois, was one of the most iconic images of the decade, tying together the incendiary issues of Vietnam, race and religion.

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Now its creator's work is showcased in an exhibit, "George Lois: The Esquire Covers," that opened at New York's Museum of Modern Art on Friday. Organized by curatorial assistant Christian Larsen, the show features 32 of the 92 covers Mr. Lois created for Esquire from 1962 to 1972.

They include the famous image of Andy Warhol drowning in his own Campbell's soup can on the May 1969 issue and the November 1967 issue that depicts a sweetly smiling Svetlana Stalin with a drawn-on mustache, looking very much like her dictator father. Then there's heavyweight champ Sonny Liston in a Santa hat in December 1963, the height of the civil rights movement.

As Mr. Lois has declared again and again, "They weren't just covers." Rather, they were powerful political statements that transcended their medium.

In the early 1960s, the times were definitely changing, and Esquire , with its long history as a highly literary though somewhat racy men's magazine, wasn't keeping up. The writing was as good as ever, but sales were dropping; its covers were failing to do their job.

"The statements inside [of a magazine] are useless unless there is a statement on the outside," Mr. Lois says. So every month, he set out to create statements that were difficult to ignore.

Among the most affecting are the Vietnam covers: the October 1966 cover in which the horrified cry from a GI in Vietnam – "Oh my God: We hit a little girl" – screams in bold white letters against black; and later, in November 1970, Lt. William Calley, the man responsible for ordering and participating in the murder of hundreds of women and children at My Lai, is pictured in uniform surrounded by four Vietnamese children.

These were not just covers. They were blaring statements of political, cultural and social issues.

The MoMA exhibition is "by far the most thrilling" of all Mr. Lois' many recognitions, he says, because "I have always seen myself as an artist. And this is the Museum of Modern Art."

It's easy to forget that the Esquire covers are at heart advertisements. Curator Larsen explains that although MoMA has a history of "embracing all graphic forms," it is helping to chart new ground with this exhibit.

The issues of advertising as high art or the ways in which popular culture transitions to artistic culture are extremely relevant and loaded questions, which are effectively skirted by MoMA's show. Mr. Lois' covers are meaningful cultural aesthetic statements first and methods of selling a magazine second.

His job was to sell you the magazine, a job he took quite seriously. But his mission was to conceive of, and execute, an artistic legacy just as meaningful today as 40 years ago.

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"George Lois: The Esquire Covers" is on view through March 31 at New York's Museum of Modern Art.