An illustrator becomes a designer
Born in Romania to Greek parents, Vassos attended Robert College in Turkey and served with the British fleet during the First World War. He arrived in Boston in 1919 and studied art before moving to New York. Magazine illustration and murals provided work, followed by the books that made his dramatic black-and-white compositions widely known.
His commissions eventually extended from the printed page to manufactured objects. In 1933 he established an internal design department at RCA, where his work included radio cabinets and television sets. He also served as president of the Silvermine Guild of Artists in Connecticut and helped bring the American industrial design associations together. Syracuse University preserves drawings, correspondence and manuscripts from these different parts of his career.
Books made with Ruth Vassos
Contempo, published in 1929, credits John with its creations and Ruth with its text. Subjects such as electricity and advertising gave them opportunities to examine the pace of American life through words and pictures. In the same year John interpreted Oscar Wilde’s poems in The Harlot’s House and Other Poems. His Phobia turned inward, giving named fears a setting and a human figure. Lumitheca holds a selection of eighteen of those illustrations. Their enclosing rooms and perilous ledges show how much of an emotional story he could tell through the arrangement of space.
