Karl Momen

Nuremberg

2000

M. Peter Piening was born on March 14, 1908 in Grabow, Germany. He began his education at a private school in Italy, studied at the Jesuit school of Kloster Ettal in Bavaria, and attended the German Stettin Gymnasium, where he graduated in 1926. Between 1926 and 1928 Piening studied design at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany. There he was taught by multiple famous twentieth-century artists, including Joseph Albers, Paul Klee and Mies van der Rohe. After receiving his master’s degree from the Bauhaus in 1929, Piening enrolled at the University of Berlin and obtained his PhD in philosophy in 1931. Piening spent his early career free-lancing as an illustrator and artist for various publishing companies, eventually settling in Paris to work for Condé-Nast’s French publication of Vogue. In 1934 he moved to the United States to work in Condé-Nast’s New York City office. For the next two decades, Piening worked for many important advertising agencies and magazine publishers, including the N. W. Ayer and J. Walker Thompson agencies and Life and Fortune magazines. As art director for Life in the 1930s and for Fortune in the 1940s, Piening completely redesigned the layout of each magazine. He also redesigned the layouts for thirty-four other major American magazines, including Town & Country and Cosmopolitan. Through his design work, Piening had a great impact on the American public, although the millions who encountered his work most likely never knew his name. Between 1934 and 1964, Piening designed over sixty logos and trademarks for internationally-known products and companies. His most widely-recognized logo may have been the three interlocking rings of Ballantine beer. Piening’s other trademark designs include the Lincoln Zephyr...

Original serigraph silkscreen print by German/Canadian expressionist Yargo de Lucca (1925-2008) from the “Canada Suite” series, a hand-signed and numbered Inuit-inspired silkscreen p...