George Tscherny, whose graphic designs defined an era, has died at the age of 99

George Tscherny, a leading figure in postwar graphic design whose work married the sharp, clean lines of European modern art with an American commercial pop sensibility, died Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 99.

His daughter Carla Tscherny confirmed the death.

Mr. Tscherny (pronounced CHAIR-nee) began his career in the early 1950s, at the dawn of a long golden age of American consumerism and business growth—a period that required new types of advertising.

Many of the designers who created the era’s signature images were European immigrants, often refugees like Mr. Tscherny, who was introduced to the latest in modern art and design. Their work graced advertising campaigns, produced on Madison Avenue, that brought cigarettes, toothpaste and airplane travel to American homes.

After five years of interning at design studios in Manhattan, Mr. Tscherny opened his own practice in 1955. Soon he had a client list that read like a Who’s Who of postwar American business. American Can, Colgate Palmolive, Pan Am and RCA all hired his office to design advertisements, logos and annual reports.

His work differed from that of the many graphic designers who were drawn to the so-called Swiss style, a spare, stripped-down aesthetic heavy on grids, clean lines and abstraction. He brought humor and humanity: for an advertisement for Overseas National Airways promoting winter travel, he arranged silhouettes of airplanes to resemble a snowflake.

“He didn’t follow any set rules,” Steven Heller, a former art director of The New York Times who now teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York, said in a telephone interview. “There was always a cheerful humor in his work.”

Mr. Tscherny once described his design approach as “maximum meaning with minimum resources”; he also called it ‘the human element’. One famous poster, for furniture designer Herman Miller, featured a cowboy hat on one of the company’s signature chairs and the text “Herman Miller Comes to Dallas.”

“I see myself as a bridge between commerce and art,” Mr. Tscherny said an interview for the Art Directors Club in 1997, when the club inducted him into the Hall of Fame. “For just as copy can be literature, design can be art when it reaches a certain level of originality and distinction.”

George Tscherny was born on July 12, 1924 in Budapest. His father, Mendel, was a Russian soldier during World War I who was captured by Austro-Hungarian forces and imprisoned in Hungary; When the war ended, he stayed.

George’s mother, Bella Tscherny, a Hungarian Jew, worked as a seamstress.

The family had very little money, and when George was two, they moved to Berlin to escape anti-Semitism and to be close to some of his mother’s relatives, who helped support them.

He recognized from an early age the way in which high art and commercial art overlapped, flowed into each other and even nested within each other. There was perhaps no better place for that education than Weimar-era Berlin.

“Growing up in a poor working-class family, I had to find art and culture outside the home,” he said a 2014 interview with Print magazine. “The modern architecture, which appeared on the streets of Berlin around 1930, caught my interest during walks through the city.”

The family came under pressure to flee Germany when the Nazis took power in the 1930s. In 1938, one day after the Kristallnacht pogrom, George and his brother Alex, got on a train to the Netherlands, where they lived in a home for refugee children.

Their parents emigrated to New Jersey, but it would be another three years before their children followed them there.

Mr. Tscherny joined the U.S. Army during World War II. He served in France as a translator, and later in occupied Germany. After being discharged in 1946, he studied for a while at an art school in Newark and then transferred to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

He married Sonia Katz in 1950. She died in 2020. Together with his daughter Carla, he leaves behind three grandchildren. His brother Alex died in 2020. Another daughter, Nadia, died in 2019.

With only a few credits remaining before graduation, Mr. Tscherny left Pratt in 1950 to work for Donald Deskey, a renowned industrial designer. In 1953 he moved to the office of George Nelsonwhere he worked primarily for one of Mr. Nelson’s largest clients, Herman Miller.

He left in 1955 to start his own company. That same year, he answered a want ad for a design teacher at what was then known as the Cartoonists and Illustrators School and is now the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.

Although Mr. Tscherny taught there for only eight years, he left an indelible legacy at what would become one of the nation’s premier schools for aspiring art directors. He created the graphic design program and later teamed up with other artists to create a famous series of advertisements promoting the program on the New York subway.

In 1996, he unveiled the school’s famous squiggly flower logo, which is still used today. It was classic Tscherny; Placed next to the school’s name, written in what he called the “icy perfection” of the elegant, formal Bodoni font, the scribbled image hints at the “human element” behind each design.

“It reflects what SVA has become: an art school with a wide range of offerings, from technology-based programs to painterly pursuits,” Mr. Tscherny said. “I think the logo avoids the ‘hard edge’ sameness of the usual corporate brand.”