News

Goings On About Town: Art

by Vince Aletti

Alfred Gescheidt

The New Yorker

7/22/2013

Working in the advertising world in the fifties and sixties, the New York photographer perfected his brash, satirical style—equal parts Madison Avenue and Mad magazine. His specialty was the photomontage, a seamless mash-up of imagery seen here in his 1964 series, “30 Ways to Stop Smoking,” which was turned into a book that was less a how-to manual than an essay on compulsion and excess. Gescheidt’s poster-ready Pop surrealism packs a bracingly vulgar, subversive punch: in one picture, a smoker lights his cigarette with a few blazing sticks of dynamite. Through July 19.