Cipe Pineles

Cipe Pineles (June 23, 1908 – January 3, 1991) was an Austrian-born graphic designer and art director who made her career in New York at such magazines as Seventeen, Charm, Glamour, House & Garden, Vanity Fair and Vogue. She was the first female art director of many major magazines, as well as being credited as the first person to bring fine art into mainstream mass-produced media. She married two prominent designers, twice widowed, had two adopted children, and two grandchildren.

Biography Pineles was born June 23, 1908, in Vienna, the fourth of five children, spending her early childhood in Poland, and her father was often sick. In 1915, she immigrated to the United States with her mother and sisters at the age of 7. from 1927 to 1931. She continued her education in 1930 at the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation.

Career In 1929, Pineles first position was teaching as an instructor in watercolor paintings at the Newark Public School of Fine and Industrial Art in New Jersey. After her graduation and post Great Depression, Pineles also began work at Green Mansions, an adult resort/summer camp in the Adirondacks. Her work at Green Mansions continued into the 1950s, where she designed the resort's annual brochure, stationery, and mailings for events and special holidays.

She started her career at the age of 23 at Contempora an industrial design firm founded by European émigrés after struggling to enter the work force due to sexism in the industry. She worked there from 1931-1933 until Condé Nast’s wife noticed Pineles’ work at Contempora. In 1932 (to 1936) she became an assistant to Dr. M. F. Agha, the art director of Condé Nast Publications. Agha, testing new ideas with photography and layout, allowed Pineles great independence, therefore she designed a considerable number of projects on her own. She soon became the art director for Glamour, a publication directed at young women. This is where her style as a playful modernist developed through various uses of image and type. she worked as a graphic design consultant for the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York, supervising the creation of branding and marketing materials for this institution of the arts.

At Seventeen, Pineles worked alongside Helen Valentine, founder, editor-in-chief and a writer for the magazine, and Estelle Ellis, a marketer for the magazine. The magazine recognized that women held two jobs: one in the workplace and one at home. Pineles described Charm as "...the first feminist magazine. There would have been no room for Ms. magazine if Charm had not been dropped." Similar to her work at Seventeen, Pineles worked her interests into elements of Charm. She planned the number of four-color pages, two-color pages, and the general pattern for the issue itself.

“We tried to make the prosaic attractive without using the tired clichés of false glamour,” she said in an interview. “You might say we tried to convey the attractiveness of reality, as opposed to the glitter of a never-never land.” Her work contributed to the effort to redefine the style of women’s magazines. Her efforts also contributed to the feminist movement by helping to continue to change women's roles in society.

Pineles joined the faculty of Parsons School of Design in 1963 and was also its director of publication design. She became the first female member of the Art Directors Club in 1943 after being nominated for 10 years and was the second woman inducted into Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 1975. According to Pineles, most of the recipes in the book were passed down by her mother, Bertha Pineles, who appears as a gray-haired woman in several illustrations. "I think it was a way of celebrating the background of the family... bringing with them some of what they had had in Europe," said Carol Burtin Fripp, Pineles' daughter. The manuscript was bought by a collector at an estate sale and was eventually found by illustrator Wendy MacNaughton at an antiquarian book fair in San Francisco. MacNaughton and magazine editor Sarah Rich purchased the manuscript with writer Maria Popova and design writer Debbie Millman and spent three years researching Pineles, interviewing old colleagues and members of Pineles' family, searching Pineles' archives at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and recreating all of the recipes. The modernized recipes are meant to be more accessible to modern cooking methods and ingredients and to fill in for the experience cooks were expected to know with the original recipes. On the book, Rich said, "The aim was to tell her story, show her artwork, and emphasize the food."