The result of this reevaluation was what he termed Radical Modernism, an improved and updated version of Modernism in which the structural and philosophical heritage of Modernism still provided the foundation but which accommodated a wider scope of expression and a more humanistic purpose. In Radical Modernism he formulated a kind of unifi ed fi eld theory of design that on the one hand helped explain--or perhaps even justify--his amazing life, and on the other hand offered a new, practical and optimistic future for design and for culture. Near the end of his book he offers a 12-point manifesto, as wise and optimistic today as it was 10 years ago:

Live and work with passion and responsibility;

have a sense of humor and fantasy.

Try to express personal, spiritual, and

domestic values even if our culture continues

to be dominated by corporate, marketing and

institutional values.

Choose to be progressive: don’t be regressive.

Find comfort in the past only if it expands

insight into the future and not just for the

sake of nostalgia.

Embrace the richness of all cultures; be

inclusive instead of exclusive.

Think of your work as a signifi cant element

in the context of a more important,

transcendental purpose.

Use your work to become advocates of

project for the public good.

Attempt to become a cultural provocateur; be

a leader rather than a follower.

Engage in self-restraint; accept the challenge

of working with reduced expectations and

diminished resources.

Avoid getting stuck in corners, such as being

a servant to increased overhead, careerism, or

narrow points of view.

Bridge the boundaries that separate us from

other creative professions and unexpected

possibilities.

Use the new technologies, but don’t be

seduced into thinking that they provide

answers to fundamental questions.

Basle presented a very different kind of

environment from Yale:

long quiet classes focused on drawing,

color and formal exercises.

It was all about process.

Yale Symphony Orchestra Poster, 1972

Handoid, 1990

While critics of the Basle system often carped that its students emerged as clones knowing only one formal language, Dan was determined to create a methodology that would be seen as a foundation of, not a replacement for, personal expression. Typical of his intense, directed process of working, within a few years he had published his thoughts and examples of his problems in Visible Language, one of the few critical design journals in the US at the time.

Meanwhile, Wolfgang Weingart, Dan’s former teacher in Basle, had also been perfecting his own experiments with a “new typography” that provided a new and invigorating set of formal an emotional options to the strict tenants of Swiss modernism.

Dan’s encouraged his former teacher to tour the US. Lecturing at scores of schools, including Yale, where

Weingart offered a carefully thought-out alternative to the cannons of high European modernist typography, amusingly titled “How One Makes Swiss Typography.” This trip suddenly turned Weingart into a cult fi gure and kick-started student interest in his typographic experiments.

Coincidentally, for this story, another of Wolfgang’s star students, April Greiman arrived at Philadelphia College of Art, now the University of the Arts, to take the place of a departing visiting faculty member. Ironically, that departing person was Dan. They met, hit it off and not very long after, April turned up in New Haven.

Esther and I would visit them in their Branford Connecticut bungalow fi lled with stuffed cloth boulders and painted rocks, the fi rst inklings of his later domestic decor. Dan and April were alike in many ways: incredibly gifted, taught by the same teachers, and ambitious missionaries of the new typography. But while Dan was intellectual, methodical and focused, April was intuitive, impulsive and spiritual. Dan taught April about method and meaning; April taught Dan about designing from the heart.

Sure enough, a short time later they got married and began a string of collaborative projects. It’s fair to say that Dan and April, inspired by Weingart’s pioneering work and with assists from other Basle graduates like Ken Hiebert and Willi Kuntz, led the way for a generation of what came to be called “new wave” typographers and designers, less steeped in the traditions of classical modernism and inspired by the changing culture in the 70’s and 80’s to employ a more playful, surface-oriented formal language.

For a complex of reasons, Dan and April’s marriage didn’t stick. April split for the new-age hot house of southern California where she quickly became a star and began to teach at Cal Arts. By the mid 80’s she and Dan were in peak form on different coasts, widely published and their infl uence could be felt in the ground-breaking work of other designers following a similar path, like Catherine and Michael McCoy and their students at Cranbrook,

A new chapter in my relationship with Dan began in 1974. That was when Esther and I moved from New Haven to take new jobs in Boston and, simultaneously, Dan left for New York. Distance, the break-up with April and the pressures of professional commitments put a damper on our relationship and we fell largely out of touch. Dan’s move to New York was partly a rebound from his split with April, but also for another reason, I think. Unlike Basle where fi gures like Armin Hofmann and Kurt Hauert proudly devoted the bulk of their professional life to mastering the art of teaching, Yale’s long-time bias for it’s graduate teachers was for practicing professionals like Rand and Matter. People like Dan, and his Basle trained colleagues Inge Druckrey and Philip Burton felt the ironic pressure to make it in the big time design world in order to be fully respected as a teacher.

So Dan went to the big apple, and joined the respected fi rm of Anspach Grossman and Portugal to prove his mettle. And he did. He took on one of the huge, archetypal corporate image programs of the 70’s for Citicorp with scant experience with a project of this scope and political complexity. It was a monster. His meticulous vision for the global bank was codifi ed in elegant posters and a thick document creating templates for every imaginable application so talent-less lackeys around the world could apply the modernist veneer of Citicorp fl awlessly.

Above: Three Mile Island Lamp, 1985Right: Typografi sche Monatsblatter, 1971

Nowhere was this more obvious than

in his apartment, a nondescript, one-

bedroom on the 15th fl oor of Two Fifth

Avenue. For over a decade, beginning in

the late 70’s, he transformed, almost daily,

this domestic space into a laboratory for

experimentation with color, form, materials

and meaning. One Sunday morning in

1978 I picked up the NY Times Magazine

and there he was. In the article Dan

explained it this way: “I have for many

years used my home to push modernist

principles of structure and coherency to

their wildest extreme. I create elegant

mutations, radiating with intense color

and complexity, in a world that is

deconstructed into a goofy ritualistic

playground for daily life.”

For me, these incredible environments

are among his most remarkable work,

spawning ideas for screens, furniture and

assemblages. His inspirations were the

trash structures encountered on his trips

with his buddies to the Caribbean and the

deep memory of Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau

environments from the 20’s. These

infl uences seemed to tap into the deeper

cultural shift being felt at the beginning

of the 80’s from neat to messy, from

newness and originality to appropriation

and transmutation.

Mining the detritus of New York streets,

he made old stuff new, and like Duchamp

before him he endowed dumb objects

with new meanings and turned trash in

to tribal objects of domestic utility. Like

Picasso and Braque, he employed the art

of assemblage, a trusty Modernist device

for managing visual diversity and altering

meaning through bizarre juxtaposition.

By the early 80’s Dan had begun to

fi ll galleries with these post-nuclear

evocations. After a long stretch with

little contact, at his 1984 opening at the

Fun Gallery, I encountered the new Dan,

fl uorescent in his striped, day-glow suit

and pork-pie hat, smiling amid a sea of big

hair and aggressive personas.

In just a few years Dan had made good on

his personal vow to experience a whole

new side of culture, one which he found

full of energy, fantasy and optimism. Dan’s

transition out of design and into the world

of art was facilitated by his friendship with

Keith Haring, a young, brash kid from

rural Pennsylvania who took New York by

storm in the beginning of the 80’s. Like

Andy Worhol a generation earlier, Haring

drew around him a circle of like-minded

eccentrics. Within this circle were talents

of all persuasions: musicians, fashion

designers, poets, performance artists,

DJ’s, fi lm makers and photographers.

“An eccentric”, Dan wrote, “is one

who devotes his or her entire persona

to willfully, creatively, and positively

expanding our view of the world.” This

was a defi nition that Dan obviously also

employed to help explain himself.

As Dan miraculously transformed himself,

our relationship was gradually transformed

as well. As his repertoire increased, he

seemed to become ever more tolerant

and inclusive. It’s not that he changed

his standards, just that more things

became ok. Including us. Paradoxically,

as he became outwardly more and more

different from us, our connection grew

more and more familiar. This is when

he began to visit us in Annisquam with

regularity. He was an exotic presence in

this staid, old-fashioned place, decked

out in his pink high tops and Playboy

hat. He seemed to love it there, hanging

out on the porch, watching the sun set.

Lots of things change, he once said, but

you and Esther seem to stay the same:

still married, still conventional. And he

seemed reassured by that. Largely, I

think, because his own great adventure

into the art scene, while exhilarating and

productive, was also exhausting and

dangerous.

Dan never quite achieved for himself that

household name status that Keith Haring

did, despite a remarkable outpouring

of witty objects, ground breaking visual

essays and unique domestic landscapes.

It is even possible that he was more

widely know as an artist and designer in

France and Italy than in his own country.

In the end, as a student, a teacher, a

designer and an artist, what set Dan

apart, and accounts for his amazingly

diverse but coherent body of work, is that

Dan pursed an approach not a style. “An

approach,” wrote Steven Holt, “is a series

of investigative questions one asks during

the design process, whereas a style is

a series of similar-looking answers to

whatever question is being asked. “Dan’s

approach was based on a conviction

about the bedrock values of Modernism

and its appropriateness to today’s world.

Near the end of Dan’s book is the key

chapter called What is wrong with

Modernism? In it he answers his own

question and lays out his vision of a

new kind of modernism that combined

the best of the humane, pro-social

aspirations of the early 20th century

with the exhilarating, ridiculous, diverse,

unpredictable and dangerous reality of

the life that he had led near the end of the

century.

He starts by saying that many people

today think that modernism is a style

that began at the Bauhaus and fell in

to disrepute in the 70’s and 80’s. But

modernism was not a style, it was an

approach. It was a movement that began

in the mid 19th Century and believed

in progress and the improvement of

life and culture through the egalitarian

application of design and technology. This

philosophy emerged most visibly at the

Bauhaus in Germany in the 20’s where an

amazing collection of practitioners, artists

and teachers developed an approach

to form and function that produced

such a coherent body of work and

experimentation that in fact it did become

recognized as a style characterized by

purity of form, simplicity of purpose and

effi ciency of manufacture.

But equally as important, Dan points out,

the Bauhaus produced a methodology

of teaching. This feature of the Bauhaus

facilitated the spread of its philosophy and

practice around the world, to among other

places, Ulm, Basle and (in a diluted form)

Yale. But what Dan saw when he emerged

from these schools was that designers

were obsessed with modernist form for

it’s own sake, detached from its original

social engagement or philosophical

underpinnings. The visual trappings of

modernism so perfectly fi t the self-image

of global business that by then industry

had co-opted the style as it’s own, dished

out to eager corporations by serious

and profi table studios. Modernism, he

lamented, sacrifi ced its claim to moral

authority when designers began to sell it

as corporate style.

So Dan, whose experiments had taken

him from student to teacher to corporate

designer to hip-hop groupie to artist,

struggled through this period to reconcile

his own personal experiences with the

original pro-social, positivistic tenants

of modernism that were so crucial to

his world view. “Many of us,” he wrote,

“attempted to reevaluate traditional

modernist ideas while introducing, within

their framework, diverse culture, history

and fantasy.”

“As Friedman

began to pursue

projects of personal

meaning rather

than professional

interest at the end

of the 1970’s, his

life increasingly

took on the

dimensions of an

experiment rather

than a career.”

Next was an invitation to join the new Manhattan

offi ce of Pentagram, the classy London based studio.

While Dan turned out a number of elegant projects for

Pentagram, it wasn’t a perfect fi t. Instead of bringing

in the big Citicorp-style clients to Pentagram, he

gravitated towards smaller, unprofi table but enjoyable

freelance jobs for his friends in the fashion industry. This

eventually put him at odds with Pentagram’s commercial

studio model. He began to be much more inspired by

the late night club circuit than his day job as a designer

and in a few years he left Pentagram for good.

Then everything changed. He shaved his head, purged

his body with a macrobiotic diet, openly embraced a

homosexual lifestyle and joined the downtown art scene.

In his essay in Dan’s book Steven Holt had this observation: