Bert Stern had no desire to be hemmed in by a single profession or creative pursuit. Today known best for his photographs of Marilyn Monroe shortly before her death as well as his groundbreaking fashion and advertising images, Stern was a true multi-hyphenate. As a director, he made “Jazz on a Summer’s Day,” a 1959 documentary film about the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, though it was directing commercials that fattened his bank account. By early 1968, he was seen also as a business executive, “overseeing a $1,000,000-a-year-empire built around his talent for looking through the eye of a camera.” Stern had taken over a five-story former boys’ school at 109 East 60th, which he was converting into an “elevator-equipped studio, office, darkroom, workshop, cutting-room and library complex for TV, silk-screen and still work.” His 35 employees (including switchboard operators, darkroom technicians, photographic assistants, and silk screeners) worked from there, under the aegis of his different companies—Bert Stern Inc., which covered his print work, and Libra Productions Inc., which took care of TV and movie work. For Stern, all of this was necessary for his creative expression; “It has become, as you say, an empire. But it’s the only way I can see that I can find any freedom to do anything creative in photography. What you call creative is to go off and take more of the same kind of pictures I took when I was younger. But that to me is not being creative.”
Not content to endlessly rehash his prior work, Stern was eager to expand his creativity while using his commercial work to bankroll it. In 1968 this was through the aforementioned silk screening—using the process to convert his photos (like those of Marilyn) into groovy psychedelic posters. For Stern, it was an opportunity to operate more as an artist; “Usually, the photographer is not the creator of the final product… I’ll take 500 images of a certain thing and they’ll pick one which is to me the worst one or the one I didn’t mean. But they like it. So they’re being the artist in a sense. An artist makes a painting, his finish is unique. Nobody can crop it or change it—that is the product. But for the photograph, the finished product comes after the photographer’s work is over. So what I’m trying to do now is to create my own product. That is what the silk-screen things are. And we’re selling them as an artist sells prints.”
“On 1st Press” was established to sell these prints, named after the avenue where Stern’s newest venture was to be based. Taking over a storefront around the corner from his studio (1159 First Avenue)—next to Maxwell’s Plum and across the street from the original TGI Friday’s—Stern set to work developing a groovy shop-cum-art gallery, filled with “familiar objects but with an artist’s touch” all specially commissioned for On 1st. Galina Golikova, the wife of British pop artist Gerard Laing, was hired to run the space, while the Latvian-American artist Sven Lukin was brought on to translate his three-dimensional abstract canvases into an eye-catching façade. He built giant lowercase “o” and “n” out of steel, positioning them in front of the store so that the “n” became an arching entrance. “1ST” was painted large on the wall beside, while the “o” window was filled with nine closed-circuit television screens that broadcast from within the store.
“We are not particularly interested in making miniature sculptures in limited or unlimited editions… We do think that everyday objects, the things we use like paper plates and wrapping paper, could become very exciting in the hands of artists.”
Graphic artist-designer-conceptualizer Jerry Metzner and architect Harold Lindahl—together known as American Thought Combine Inc.—designed the interior. They were called a “conceptual corps formed to do and design anything.” Gray glass doors opened into a dark concrete-colored vestibule, leading into the main sales space—a blue-carpeted womb (including the walls and ceiling), all rounded corners and no hard edges, with the objects artfully arranged around the space spot lit from a steel rack of lights, more commonly seen in theatres or nightclubs. Gray-mirrored columns reflected the infinite blue. One report in an architecture magazine described how the “totally enclosed, monochromatic dark blue makes the space appear a sunless, infinite outer space—or non-space. On the other hand, the texture of the carpet surfacing undeniably produces an acoustical effect associated with intimate enclosure—like a telephone booth. So the space is both visually infinite and acoustically confining—a contradictory and ambivalent experience.” Those acoustics were further emphasized through the twenty hidden speakers, all managed through an undulating blue control table. A circular staircase—painted off-white at the top and shifting through the spectrum through yellow, apricot, orange, flame red, and finally blood red—led down to a red room below.
Though originally set to open by Easter, the debut didn’t come until many months later—launching with a party and an empty store on November 12th. Two days later, it opened for customers with only two items available for purchase—Gerald Laing’s patterned paper plates ($3 for a set of 20) and Roy Lichtenstein-designed wrapping paper ($1 per 30” square sheet)—with everything else for order. A roll of special-order Lichtenstein wallpaper (printed on silver foil) cascaded down the ceiling, while another wallpaper emerged from atop a blue-painted plinth. The paper plates arranged as a sculpture sprouted up in one corner—their boxed sets piled in front—while around the space were placed the plastic chairs, plastic light-up tables, and similarly lit plastic columns (all by Carlos and Ruth Sansegundo.) Hanging from these objects in clothesline fashion were giant silk scarves printed with Stern’s photos of a nude Monroe (an edition of 20 for $30) or with Lukin’s logo design. Isadore Seltzer designed a giant rainbow number puzzle, while Billy Apple created a sliced apple lamp. Other lamps were designed for the store by Stanley Landsman and David Musselman.
“Decoration is the danger, function is the idea. We protect our thing from becoming junky; that’s why we limit it. It’s not going to Azuma or Bloomingdale’s.”
The red downstairs was considered the fashion room—around the space hung hip British clothes while the dressing rooms were one-way mirrors, “so that when dressing you see outside to someone preening in what he thinks is a mirror” (New York magazine called it “very erotic. And very manipulative.”) Among the designers carried were Ossie Clark and Alice Pollack of London’s Quorum. Bert Stern had visited Ken Scott’s studio while in Milan and picked up a large pile of Scott’s bright floral remnants, which he had made into cowboy shirts for the shop. Kenneth J. Lane’s heavy jeweled belts and pieces were sold to complete the luxe hippie effect. By December, the store was also carrying Paco Rabanne’s plastic disc belts and bags alongside Emmanuelle Khanh’s white lace bras.
The “on-the-premises” designer was James Lee Byars; among the pieces he had on display were a “mile-long dress for two” and a “garment for 100 people to wear” (yards of fabric with holes cut out for heads.) Below you can see his “Mask or Underwear”—a chiffon oblong 12 inches by 5 feet that could be used however the wearer chose to. Eugenia Sheppard described Byars as “looking like a Mennonite father with shoulder-length hair, a wide-brimmed black hat and a frock coat.”
At the launch, Stern declared that On 1st would change its “show” monthly with different artist-designed objects cycling through. The whole space was designed to be flexible—lending itself as well to parties and Happenings as to selling. It was also meant to operate as a club with $100 annual dues that would entitle patrons to be “first off the 4:40 express to South Hampton with the newest set of Gerard Laing paper plates.” There was also meant to be a members’ day once a week, where everyone could gather at On 1st along with artists and other cool kids. Whether the club ever started is hard to know. Though Stern supposedly sunk $150,000 in renovating the space and producing the stock, there is little evidence that On 1st lasted more than a few months.
Due to the nature of most of On 1st’s products and the low quantity they were produced in, the shop left little material behind. One of Lichtenstein’s paper plates for On 1st is available right now for $605, while one of Laing’s can be purchased for $825. Several pieces are in museum collections; among them, Lichtenstein’s wallpaper in the National Galleries Scotland and Stanley Landsman’s lamp is in MoMA’s collection. As Todd Alden of Alden Projects (who, in 2015, showed all remaining Lichtenstein pieces from On 1st) has written, “Bert Stern’s enterprise commissioned practical objects for an impractical setting, dedicating itself to an unsustainable dream.” Small amounts of stock, high expenses, and a specialized vision might have made On 1st unsustainable in the long run, but Stern’s idea of bringing artists into home goods led the way for the raft of art-home goods collaborations we have seen in decades since.