Late Saddle River resident left his mark in art, publishing and IBM

One of the first in-house graphic designers to work under Paul Rand at IBM, Arthur Boden helped immortalize former company president Thomas Watson Jr.’s quote, “Good design is good business.”

The late Upper Saddle River resident was among a selection of artists, architects and designers drafted by IBM in the mid 20th century. Including Eliot Noyes, Charles Eames and George Nelson, they set a tone of individualism, modernity and consistency that still influences modern corporate design.

Boden, a multi-faceted artist who later published children’s books, painted in acrylics and printed his own bold geometric design, was driven to create, said wife Sondra Boden. He would return home each night from his corporate gig to either freelance or build his own figures from scrap found at the edge of a neighbor’s driveway, she says.

“He was always using his hands, every single night," Sondra said. “He didn’t just sit and watch television. He was a creative person. He had to do stuff. Sure, he loved to make money at it, but that wasn’t his primary goal.”

Born in 1927, Boden grew up in Newark and attended Weequahic High School, but before he could graduate, he joined the U.S. Navy. Boden never saw combat during his stint in the Pacific Theater during World War II, Sondra said, which allowed him to develop his creative side.

“Even in the service he did art,” she said. “He played the bass fiddle, and he drew on the side. He always knew he could draw, but he didn’t think of it as a career.”

That perspective changed when Boden returned home to work at his father’s upholstery business in North Jersey. There, an uncle recognized his talent and prodded him to apply his G.I. Bill to study at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts. He later studied in New York at the Art Students League, the Pratt Institute with Aaron Burns and the New School of Social Research with Alexi Brodovich.

Boden was working at a Newark advertising agency in 1958 when he heard IBM was seeking a designer, according to Sondra Boden. He had been pasting-up page layouts for the agency but wanted to design them himself, she says. He wanted to make art.

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His interview with IBM was led by Rand and Marion Swannie, who had worked in design for IBM via her role in sales and advertising, and was drafted to lead the company’s new Design and Display Department. The pair, who later married, asked Boden to develop a new letterhead as a trial. Sondra said her husband was the second designer drafted to the department. The first was Chicago’s Mary Beresford, she says.

“It was quite an interesting group,” Sondra said. “They criticized each other’s work, but the main criticizer was Paul Rand, who would come in and tear up everybody’s work.” Rand, the former art director for the Esquire-Coronet magazine house and the Weintraub Advertising agency, joined IBM as a consultant in 1956.

(In a role for which he would become famous, Rand defined the company’s corporate identity in a way that today seems commonplace. Rand adapted and standardized the corporate typeset for marketing publications, lorded over package printing and created a new logo he would later evolve into the famous eight-bar IBM stamp.)

Among the cogs in the Design and Display Department was Boden, who oversaw or personally produced IBM prints and posters that earned international recognition and awards from key industry groups such as The American Institute of Graphic Arts. Boden’s work, often complex in pattern and color and covering key reports, bolstered the appearance of IBM as a transcendent and cutting-edge company that would lead the transition to the information age.

Beyond IBM, his work as the art director of a still-referenced advertising supplement in The New York Times influenced the course of a now dominant industry: data processing. A rare collaboration between RCA, IBM and other data processing rivals, the cooperative advertisement entitled "The Information Revolution" addressed fears over automation triggering unemployment. That anxiety exists today.

Outside of IBM, Boden developed the ADP logo for Automatic Data Processing and freelanced for Fairleigh Dickenson University, NBC and others. He moved to Upper Saddle River after IBM relocated to White Plains; soon, he converted his suburban home’s two-car garage into an art studio he occupied full time after leaving IBM in 1975. There, his focus shifted from the digital to the visceral.

Along with fellow IBM design alum John Woodside, he published children’s books about crafting toy creatures with household items: Boden’s Beasts, Boden’s Birds and Boden’s Bugs.

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Above all, however, he gravitated toward decorative acrylic paintings and screen prints, which he produced late in life; he died in March 2019 at 91. Some were sold at Riverside Gallery in Hackensack. Others are still sold at RoGallery in Long Island City, New York.

Robert Rogal, RoGallery's director, said Boden’s art almost appears as an optical illusion, changing based on the viewer's perspective. Boden’s trademark bright colors and complex patterns still draw buyers young and old, both those who are familiar with Boden’s history and those who are drawn upon first sight, he says. Prices range from $450 for a lithograph poster to $25,000 for an acrylic original. “We do sell his work quite frequently,” Rogal says. “He’s really in style.”

Many buyers pick multiple pieces with similar aspects to create mini-installations, Rogal says. Sondra Boden says her husband created those in spades.

Boden's Upper Saddle River home is still stocked with hundreds of prints and nearly three dozen original acrylics. Sondra said she’d like to donate at least part of her collection to the Newark Museum in the future, because Arthur Boden's art is something people need to see in person to truly appreciate.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Arthur Boden of Saddle River NJ left his mark at IBM and the art world