Arty Farty-ish Friday ~ Modern Art & Logos

A change from looking at painters, their work and their natal charts today. First a very good cartoon on the topic of modern art styles. I hope Canadian cartoonist, John Atkinson whose website Wrong Hands never fails to provide me with an admiring chuckle or two, will not mind my borrowing it today (if he does, and lets me know, I shall remove it at once).

I found this piece about well-known logos (a type of art, I suppose) interesting:

10 Famous Logos That Have A Hidden Meaning


A few samples follow. Commentary under the article argues with interpretation of some logos, especially those of BMW and Apple, as outlined.

BMW = either a tribute to the company’s history in aviation, showing a propeller in motion with the blue part representing the sky, said to be due to the company’s role of building aircraft engines for the German military during World War II...alternatively (and I think far more likely) a representation of the Bavarian blue and white flag - honouring the company's original HQ in Bavaria.





Apple could = derivation from the story of Adam and Eve in the Bible - bitten apple represents the fruit from the “Tree of Knowledge”.....or Isaac Newton's fallen apple - with a bite (byte?) because without it Steve Jobs thought it looked like a cherry....or a reference to Alan Turing, one of the fathers of computing. He was prosecuted for homosexuality in 1952, and after being subjected to estrogen treatments as an alternative to prison, was found dead from a cyanide overdose in 1954 with a half-eaten apple next to him (which wasn’t tested, but is suspected of being the source of the poison). One of the early Apple logos is in rainbow colours, similar to the homosexual flag. Take your pick!


The FedEx logo is so simple yet so good, hiding in plain sight. I had to squint before I saw the arrow between the bottom half of the "E" and the left-hand side of the "X".

The article proposes: The white lines passing through give the appearance of the equal sign in the lower right corner, representing equality. I don't agree. I immediately saw this IBM logo as representing that old green and white horizontal striped computer paper of long ago. One commenter had thought the same, while most were probably too young to remember that paper. I actually once, briefly, worked for a company who manufactured it in the UK, so remember it well.

The well-known Chevrolet logo wasn't mentioned in the article linked above, but I'd already researched that one for myself, when preparing a post about Louis Chevrolet some years ago. Here's what I came up with:

The Chevy logo, now so well-known, came into being in 1913. Stories of its source have become muddled through time. Take your pick: it was copied from a wallpaper design in a Paris hotel room; it was copied from a newspaper advert for Coalettes; it was drawn on a dinner napkin in a restaurant by Durant [Buick owner William C. Durant, founder of General Motors]; or... it's a stylised version of the cross from a Swiss flag (reflecting the name Chevrolet's origins).