George Lois: The Esquire Covers

In 2008, the Museum of Modern Art acquired a wide range of George Lois’s groundbreaking Esquire magazine covers and put them on display for a full year. The Esquire Covers at MoMA collects the entirety of that exhibit, many more covers, and unseen images from Lois’s private collection, including personal photographs of the designer at work and outtakes of a shoot with Andy Warhol. George Lois, who led advertising’s creative revolution in the 1960s, was hand-picked by the legendary editor Harold Hayes to convey visually that Esquire—a leading proponent of another creative revolution of the time, New Journalism—was on the cutting edge of profound changes in American culture. With images of JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King, Jr. watching over Arlington National Cemetery; of Richard Nixon under the makeup-artist’s powder-puff; and of Muhammad Ali as the martyred Saint Sebastian, he did just that.