When Robert Rauschenberg reminisced about Josef Albers teaching students that their art had to do with “the entire visual world,” he was suggesting an inclusive realm of visual expression from which Albers intended his students to draw. Beyond finding inspiration only in fine art objects, Albers pushed them to look outside the confines of their studios and classrooms and onto the streets and landscapes where they would be confronted with the visuality of mass culture. Thus, a project such as Albers's assignment to build a gray scale out of photographs found in a single magazine was intended to hone students’ awareness of the subtlety of the increments between the darkest black and the brightest white, as well as to attune them to the existence of these subtleties in print materials. And indeed, printed images were all around them: in a 1966 discussion of pop artists titled “The Image Duplicators,” Ellen H. Johnson noted,

In looking closely at these printed images, though, artists like Rauschenberg learned not only that visual inspiration could be found in quotidian objects but that those objects were also the products of aesthetic decision making, that they were designed. And designers’ own concerns included the very urban makeup described by Johnson. Although the visual workings of mass culture have sometimes been met with discomfort by art historians, artists’ engagement with designed objects— their “personal sense of looking,” as Rauschenberg went on to describe it— has a long and significant history. This book proposes to investigate a moment of that history through an exploration of the interaction between art and graphic design in New York in the years between 1959 and 1972.