?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
MASSIMO VIGNELLI (1931-2014) SUBWAY SYSTEM MAP. 1978. 58 3/4x45 3/4 inches, 149 1/4x116 1/4 cm. New York City Transit Authority, New York. Condition A: small tear at top edge; small abrasions and loss in lower left corner. Paper. Vignelli studied architecture in his native Italy before moving to New York City in the 1960s. Having first worked for a larger design company, Unimark, he and his wife started their own firm, Vignelli Associates, in the early 1970s. His clients included some of the largest and most recognized brands including Bloomingdales, IBM, Knoll and American Airlines. Vignelli's relationship to the New York City Subway system ran deep, beginning in the mid-1960s when he helped redesign and unify the signage throughout the network. He designed this map in 1972, which took its visual cues from the map designed for the London Underground by Henry Beck in 1933. As iconic as it has become, Vignelli's design was not without its detractors. As the New York Times reported, "Many stations seemed to be in the wrong places. The water surrounding the city was colored beige, not blue. As for Central Park, it appeared to be almost square, rather than an elongated rectangle, three times bigger than the map suggested, and was depicted in a dreary shade of gray . . . the map was indeed riddled with anomalies, but that was the point. Its designer, Massimo Vignelli, had sacrificed geographical accuracy for clarity by reinterpreting New York's tangled labyrinth of subway lines as a neat diagram" (New York Times, Aug. 5, 2012). This is the revised edition of the 1972 map, printed in February 1978.
