Víctor Moscoso: "You don't have to buy that roll of peace and love"

Víctor Moscoso (Vilaboa, 1936) believes that artists' studios are an extension of their minds. He says this as he removes the padlock from the old log cabin door that marks the entrance to his, formerly a parking space. Inside there are bookcases with hundreds of boxes stacked up to the ceiling, about four meters high. Accumulate African masks, Japanese kites, guitar posters, old dolls, American flags, among many other objects. The site is dominated by a huge painting of a smiling woman riding a striped dinosaur, as if it were a tiger. It is the cover of

, one of the solo albums by Jerry Garcia, leader of the legendary Grateful Dead band.

There is in this place, Moscoso's work area, treasures from the now distant Summer of Love of 1967, jewels of psychedelic design, part of the history of music and fragments of an underground comic book bible that would be unpublishable in the times current.

It is the universe of ink created in his day by this man, one of the referents of graphic design in San Francisco.

Everything remains stored under a thin layer of dust.

Just like the memory of Moscoso, who at 85 years old remembers his first days in his native Galicia.

—My grandfather Manolo and I were in the field.

He told me: “Come home, Vitorio, I'm going to be cool”.

The phrase, which Víctor Moscoso heard before he was three years old, is the only one in Galician that remains in his head, which on this morning in early November is worn by a beret.

At the height of the forehead, on the left eyebrow, he wears a pin of the red cross of Santiago.

He remembers his mother washing clothes in a stream.

Also a

where he hugs one of his uncles while riding on the back of a horse that reminds him of being gigantic.

And a cage of pigeons.

Moscoso, in his study.

Behind his back, his Jerry Garcia album cover 'Run for the Roses'Winni Wintermeyer (Contact)

But not all are bucolic memories.

It also tells how a Francoist came one afternoon to the bar where his father was.

He pulled a pistol from his belt and told him: "We're watching you, José."

He does not remember this, of course, but it is the seed that gave rise to the family exile.

Weeks after the threat, his father, who was born in New Jersey and who was called Cano, short for American, undertook the return to the new continent.

In March 1940, Victor and his mother set sail for New York.

Another memory: the smell of the dining room of the

, the ship with which the American adventure began.

"It was the combination of the people who came down, the food they served and a soap they used," Moscoso describes.

“Every once in a while there is something that —ZUM!— sets it off for me.”

Moscoso grew up and spent his adolescence in a Brooklyn neighborhood filled with Irish, Puerto Rican, Cuban and some Spanish people. His father painted houses with a broad brush. His mother was a seamstress. He remembers when he would leave the house and balance a sewing machine on his head. “She went to the house of the rich ladies, who took out the fashion magazines of the time, opened them and pointed out a dress: 'I want this!', they told her”. Those days left the imprint of a marked New York accent that has not been removed with half a century in San Francisco. He also had the lean, lean body of the kid who ran the mile in 4 minutes and 20 seconds. He used to race to the site of the Brooklyn Bridge, which was built by many of the Irish on his street.

He arrived on the West Coast in October 1959, magnetized by the

magic that he gave off

, by Jack Kerouac.

Also for a small art movement in the Bay Area that did figurative painting with a touch of abstract expressionism.

The young Moscoso found that promising enough to give up his job as a designer in a department store.

A cabin where he keeps his works.Winni Wintermeyer (Contact)

The artist leans on a long board that serves as a work table.

He spent long hours there, especially late at night.

The only company was a battery radio.

Whenever he wanted a song he would call the station so the DJs would play it.

He reminisces about those days until the idea fades.

The gaze remains fixed on something under some cardboard.

"Shit!

It's a joint!

I had completely forgotten about it.

Are you interested?” he laughs as he offers the cigarette.

“People think that he drew while on acid,” he says, denying the legend about his way of creating.

“I did just one and nothing else.

When the trip began I began to see the molecules of the paper.

It seemed irrelevant what he was doing.

The pen began to break through the paper.

It was ridiculous.

It did not make sense".

Fresh from Oakland, the Army tried to sign him up for Vietnam, but Moscoso failed the tests. “The Navy tries to break you so that later they can arm you however they want,” he says. The most important rebuilding experience, however, came with LSD. “Every time I took it I had this image of myself on a block of stairs where my arms, my legs, my head were coming off. I had to arm myself again. When I joined again, I changed the way I was armed. It wasn't the one before," he reveals. It was not during but after the trip that he began to draw. "I had to make up for my weaknesses," he explains.

One of his first posters, from 1966, has a huge gargoyle.

Above, in large round letters, are the names of the groups;

among them, Big Brother & The Holding Company, Janis Joplin's band.

At the bottom, the place of the concert, the Avalon room, and the date.

All too conventional.

Moscoso hates him to this day.

“It was my biggest failure.

I didn't like it, nobody.

I felt hurt, but I didn't give up.

It opened doors for me while closing others”, he analyzes.

An oil self-portrait that, to be honest, he doesn't quite like.Winni Wintermeyer (Contact)

Lysergic acid helped him go against the grain of what he learned in seven years of study at prestigious New York schools, Cooper Union, and Yale, where he was a student of Bauhaus teacher Josef Albers.

“It was easy once I found out I had to break all the rules,” says Moscoso.

So he crossed off the list the things he was supposed to do: for example, legible typography and not using vibrant colors.

From Josef Albers, whom he considers a huge influence, he learned all about experimentation with color which, after the black and white essay on the gargoyle, became one of the pillars of his work.

“I didn't know anything about color.

I thought it was just painting, but for him it was something completely different, something in itself.

The color is like mist.

It's like painting with fog."

The formula allowed him a hectic time of creation in which he made more than 60 posters in about eight months between 1967 and 1968 for musicians such as Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Steve Miller, The Sparrow (Steppenwolf), Canned Heat and Country Joe & The Fish, among others.

It took him just two hours to make one of his best-known works, the poster for The Chamber Brothers, which shows a

of a woman wearing large dark glasses in shades of orange on fuchsia.

The name of the group and the concert information are written on the glasses in large blue letters.

One day one of his colleagues and collaborators, Rick Griffin, showed up at his house to show him a work in progress.

He was carrying the board where he was drawing.

"I'm going to put psychedelic lyrics on this poster that doesn't say anything," Griffin told him. "We always made it difficult to read, but this time it was going to be impossible," explains Moscoso. He suggested to his friend to add an image of the artist. "I took a piece of glass and put it on his face, and started drawing with a crayon." The face merges into a butterfly against a starry sky. Readable information was enclosed in a small globe in the lower right corner. It was for Chuck Berry himself. “Shit man, it was for one of the kings of rock, but that shows you where we were. We didn't care if it was for him,” says Moscoso, who has a photograph of Griffin in his studio. His colleague was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1991.

The artist looks at a drawing he made of a married couple.

Winni Wintermeyer (Contact)

One of Víctor Moscoso's best-known works was done in 1973 for Herbie Hancock.

The jazz player had told him that he was doing a project where he mixed African music with electronic music.

Moscoso carved a large mask out of balsa wood and appeared with it and a photographer one morning as the band rehearsed.

“What the hell is that?

Will you make us voodoo?”, they asked him when he entered the room.

This is how the face of

s was born, one of the best-selling jazz albums.

Moscoso turns the page quickly when he talks about the twilight of the Summer of Love, a moment that came to an end when the success of the bands brought with it the record labels, who began to impose their conditions and the artists for the album art. He says that a

stripped him of many of the rights to his posters

of the Family Dog concert hall, who put the works in his name.

Several years later, in the 1980s, Moscoso and four other psychedelic figures known as The Big Five (Alton Kelley, Griffin, Wes Wilson, Stanley Mouse and him) went to court to try to recover the rights.

The judge agreed with the businessman.

“Don't buy that peace and love thing.

Our money was stolen.

That judge didn't like artists.

One thing he told us and destroyed us is that we wouldn't know what to do with the rights.

I had the concept that we were

and we didn't know anything about business”, he recalls.

Poster designed by the artist Víctor Moscoso, 'The Chamber Brothers', from 1967. Victor Moscoso (MUSAC; The Visual Universe of Víctor Moscoso)

If the Summer of Love had a bitter end, 1968 was promising in the Haight-Ashbury, the boiling neighborhood then in San Francisco. In February, Moscoso and his wife, Gail, ran into fellow cartoonist Robert Crumb on the street, who was handing out a magazine of his cartoons, Zap Comix. By the second issue, released in July, The Big Five was already running what became a cult comic strip.

Moscoso then brought to the world of comics the defiance of the rules that had made him famous as a designer. “In the comics, he eliminated the script, the dialogue and the characters, which we could consider the essential elements. And so it opened the narrative field of graphic stories”, explains David Carballal, the curator of

the retrospective of the Galician carried out by the Luis Seoane Foundation in A Coruña and which can be seen at the Musac in León until February 20 and from March 4 to June 12 at the Niemeyer Center in Avilés. "Anyone looking for unconventional answers to a given problem, not only in the field of visual creation, can find a source of inspiration in Moscoso's work," says the curator.

Poster designed by artist Víctor Mosxoso, 'Annabelle's Butterfly Dance', from 1967. FamilyDog (MUSAC; The Visual Universe of Víctor Moscoso)

After the rights fiasco with the posters, Crumb and the rest of the cartoonists made

a project that protected art.

"It's the most democratic thing we've ever done," he says.

Each cartoonist was paid a 20%

for every page I drew. You earned more if you did the cover or the linings. The model worked and the magazine, which only cost 50 cents, became a symbol of the counterculture. It had several editions, which were not subject to periodicity or advertising, only to the creative flow of its artists, who populated the comic pages that today would set off all the alarms for being considered racist, sexist, radical and pornographic. “We did what we wanted. We were rebels with great freedom. We did something very good by doing something very bad”, states Moscoso, the only one alive among the originals along with Crumb and Stanley Mouse.

The last issue came in 2014. In it, Moscoso winked at Spain, a land where he has not set foot in decades and where he has not been able to go to see his exhibition due to the pandemic.

The back cover of

is a tribute to Velázquez's Las meninas, where the artist inserts one of his characters, an inkwell named Blobman.

About the characters there is only one word: “Goodbye”.