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Over-modern, over here

other

I know I mentioned it in passing, but what with one thing and another, the 1950s Modern book that I wrote for Shire hasn’t really had much of an outing on here, despite having hit the shops before Christmas.

You can buy it on Amazon if you like, but the nice people at Shire have promised me a couple of copies to give out as prizes, so if that’s not an excuse for a post and a competition, I don’t know what is.

The book takes a look at the many and various ways in which that nebulous concept ‘the modern’ took shape in design during that decade. Everything from the obvious, like the Festival of Britain.

To the more ambiguous.

This rather interesting mix of trad and modern is by Barbara Jones, by the way, and is one of her illustrations for the British exhibit at the 1958 Brussels Expo (more here if you’re interested).

One of the many things that amuses me about the design of this period is the strenuous efforts people made in pursuit of the modern. Take this plate, for example, made by Stoke pottery firm J&G Meakin.

These kinds of designs are pretty familiar to us nowadays, but at the time they were strikingly different. And this wasn’t just because the designs and colours had come over from America, it’s also because it’s a determined effort to be as different as possible to a conventional plate as it could be. Shall we list the charges against it?

First is the shape. Most plates are round; this one is squarish. Plates aren’t round by accident, they are round because they are thrown on a wheel. You can’t throw a square plate (well, you can, but to break it rather than make it), you have to cast it, a much more difficult and expensive process. The same is true of the decoration; round plates tend to have circles on them because they’re much easier to paint that way – again you spin the plate round, hold the paintbrush still, Bob’s your uncle. These straight lines take a great deal more effort.

Finally, there’s the kind of decoration. 1950s ceramics acquire their motifs from pretty much anywhere except traditional tableware motifs. In this case they’ve used a tablecloth pattern, which is actually not entirely unreasonable, but I’ve also seen Formica designs and dog-tooth checks. Then of course there are the pictorial ones. The most famous tableware of all from this period has to be Homemaker.

Looks fine, doesn’t it? It’s so much a symbol of the times that we’re accustomed to it. But wait a minute, how much do you really want to eat your food off a picture of a television? And a television that’s staring back at you, to boot.

Homemaker is of course a visual dictionary of all the most up-to-date things that you could possibly put in your sitting room: so that modernity outweighs any scruples you might have about eating off the furniture. And if it’s modern, it almost certainly appeared on a plate. Everything from the Continentally modern aubergine to spider plants, New Look fashions to sharp colours that can’t have made the food look appetising, they all appeared on plates during the 1950s. You can say what you like about the results, but they were definitely trying to be modern.

That digression into tableware, quite apart from being one of my other obsessions (I will refer you to my MA thesis unless you’re careful) is by way of demonstrating the sheer, teeth-gritting commitment that designers had to modernity in the 1950s, even in the face of what would seem to be common sense.

Your mission, if you want to win a copy of the 1950s Modern book, is to find a poster which illustrates that same, barking, modernism in graphic form. Here’s one I quite like.

But I still don’t think that quite encapsulates what was going on. Although it does have a television on it, and there wasn’t much that was more modern than the television in those days.

So, can you do better? If you can, post your thoughts in the comments box and the winner – chosen by me according to my own prejudices – gets a copy of the book. Entries close on Wednesday 30th January. British posters probably score more highly than furrin, too.

If that all sounds a bit taxing, there will also be another competition on the brand new Quad Royal Facebook page at the end of the week. Why not pop over and like that now, then you won’t miss it when it happens. In the meantime, I await your entries.

Going Postal

other, posters

The blog has been a little bit overlooked lately. Apologies for that, I’ve had a rather urgent appointment with some wallpaper that needed to be removed. It’s been a bad time to be distracted as well, because people – well the readers of this blog to be precise – have been sending me things. And they’ve been rather good.

Let’s start with these, mostly because I asked for them. ‘Did Daphne Padden design any other leaflets for British Railways?’, I asked the other day. The answer is a resounding yes.

And here’s another, although I’ll be blowed if I have any idea what a ‘Radio Cruise’ is. Can anyone enlighten me?

She even designed the insides of this one too.

Which include this rather fine map.

Are there more out there? I hope so, although I am anticipating that I might have to do something frightening, like attend a transport ephemera fair, to find them.

Meanwhile through the actual mail box came a small set of these little London Transport prints – I’m sure there is a precise art historical word for what they are but I’m afraid I don’t know it. Anyway, they were a fantastic gift all the way from America so thank you very much.

What I got was four little folders, each containing a small print of a London Transport poster from 1953. Here’s St James’ Palace by David Lewis.

Each print was the pictorial half of a pair poster, so making the transfer to prints quite well. I can’t decide whether my favourite is the John Bainbridge or the Sheila Robinson (both artists who deserve further notice on this blog one day).

I have no idea, however, what the purpose of these were. Were they bought by the public and framed, or where they sent out by London Transport as a form of publicity? Or some other reason that I can’t even guess at. If anyone can enlighten me, please do.

While we’re on the subject of London Transport, this is also rather good.

This also reminds me that I’ve been meaning to mention the work of artist Micah Wright for a while. He’s been working on ironic modern versions of propaganda posters for a while, and got in contact with the blog to say that we might like this take on Pat Keely. He was right.

Most of what he does is American in origin, but it’s still very much worth taking a look at his PropagandaRemix website.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a wall that needs demolishing. But if you’ve got anything else to send me in the meantime, please feel free.

Spot the birdy

designers, other

Another day on Quad Royal, another bird. But today’s isn’t any old bird, oh no; this is a Festival of Britain bird.

Yes really. This very bird was made to ornament some of the room sets in the Festival and it’s not just a copy but the actual thing. So what’s it doing on my coffee table (other than for me to take not very good photographs of it)?

A fewof these birds – along with many other delights – came to visit earlier this summer thanks to their current owner, Nancy Nicholson. Nancy is not only a textile and pattern designer in her own right, but is also the daughter of one of the power couples of 1950s design, Roger and Joan Nicholson.

I’ve written briefly about Roger Nicholson before (since then I’ve discovered even more of his contribution to design at the time and really owe him another post one day). Joan was a talented designer in her own right whose most famous commission was the wall hanging for the Queen’s bedroom on the Royal Yacht Britannia.

She also wrote several classic books about embroidery and produced some delightfully idiosyncratic designs – here’s just one. I hope to show you some more in due course.

But back to the birds. In 1951, Roger Nicholson, along with his brother Robert, designed a number of the room sets in the Homes and Gardens Pavilion at the Festival of Britain This, for example, is the Headmaster’s Study.

At some point, it was decided that the rooms were all looking a bit austere and needed a bit more decoration. So Joan Nicholson was asked if she could help. The result was these birds.

These have to be incredibly rare – how many actual items which were displayed at the Festival still exist? Not many I would guess. But they’re also interesting because they do something which I always enjoy, which is disrupt the conventional narrative of the Festival of Britain.

The story of interior decoration at the Festival is always supposed to be one of a Scandinvian style modernism which sweeps all before it, including decorative clutter. But take another look at these rooms. Yes, they may not have the array of knick-knacks which would have graced a 1930s fireplace. But ornaments haven’t entirely disappeared. The headmaster up there has some odds and ends on his shelf, while the farmer for whom this dining area was designed has a whole trophy cabinet of pewter as well as a rather covetable china bull.

So when we remember the Festival of Britain, let’s not just honour the Robin Day chairs and Terence Conran tables, let’s honour the ornaments too. Because the reality is always so much more complicated than the myth.

More than that, we must also remember the people who weren’t Robin Day and Terence Conran, but who also made the Festival what it was. People like Joan and Roger Nicholson.

Ferry nice

other

Oh heavens, I have just discovered a world of previously undiscovered and mostly rather kitch treasures, found by putting ‘ferry poster’ into various archives. Unfortunately I can’t possibly fit them all in, because the purpose of this post is simply to say that Quad Royal is off across the channel for the next two weeks.

But I can’t stop at just one, so this is how I would like you to imagine us travelling.

Mr Crownfolio will be wearing the sailor’s hat. Au revoir and see you in a fortnight.

Put Out More Flags

other, posters

I was asked to help out earlier this week. Could I find a few vintage posters to act as inspiration for a designer doing a poster for a retro tea-dance? Cakes, bunting, dancing, something nice and festive – it’s not that difficult to imagine the sort of thing. But that sort of thing turned out to be rather harder to find in reality.

If you go back to the 1930s, there was at least dancing, as in this Gordon Nicoll poster from 1932.

As well as in this rather wonderful London Transport design by Clifford and Rosemary Ellis from 1936.

There’s some glamourous going out in a couple more posters, as in this 1925 Fortunino Matania poster for Southport (on sale once more at Onslows this afternoon if you have a few thousand pounds to spare).

Which was available in London as well as Southport, it seems.

Horace Taylor, 1924, since you ask.

But of cakes and bunting, or indeed anything remotely relevant from the 1950s, not a sniff. The closest I could get was this.

Which isn’t really what I was after. Somewhere – and I have lost it and would love to see it again if anyone can help – there is also a 1950s poster of a husband bringing a tray of tea to his family on the beach. But even that isn’t really doing what my friend wanted the posters to do.

What’s happening here is something that I’ve mentioned time and again on this blog, the bending of visual memory. Today, we want to see the 1950s in terms of tea, dancing and bunting, and so that is how we expect them to depict themselves as well. Except they won’t oblige, mainly because they are too busy building a modern, post-war future – as encapsulated in Nick Morgan’s prize winning poster from last week.

No sign of Coronation bunting here, oh no. Not when there’s history to be made instead.

In this respect, bunting, vintage bunting, retro bunting on posters for tea dances work in much the same way as our reusing of wartime posters (full post on that subject here). The meanings tell us far more about ourselves and our worries about the world than they will ever reveal about the past.

Back in the 1950s, bunting was something that you got out for your village fete or Coronation street party, and then put away again.

It definitely meant festive, and so appeared in people’s imaginings of the Festival of Britain.

Although interestingly it was nothing like as prominent in the actual event.

Although, of course, every single article about the South Bank anniversary last year had to make mention of getting out the bunting nonetheless.

You can also find a small string of the stuff on the cover of the Battersea Pleasure Gardens brochure too. Again it’s operating as a sign here: this is not normal life but a carnival. We are going to have fun.

Bunting in the 1950s was just an everyday object that you got out for the jollities and then put back in the cupboard, nothing worth making a fuss about. Certainly not worth putting on posters.

Nowadays though, bunting is not just a thing, but a cultural phenomenon, as even the briefest of Google image searches will reveal.

It represents, amongst many other things*, a desire to return to a more simple life of making our own entertainments. A life which had so few visual stimuli that we were pleased with bunting. A sense of community too. This is all well and good – and indeed perfect for a nostalgic tea dance. I don’t have any problems with that. Just as long as we stop expecting to find it having the same meanings in the 1950s too.

*Bunting does become more problematic when you look at it through the lens of Thorsten Veblen and conspicuous consumption. Bunting isn’t only the fetishisation of an utterly unnecessary object to prove that you have money to spend, it’s also a signifier of conspicuous leisure, because if you’ve got time to shop for, stitch or even worry about bunting, you do have a fair amount of spare time on your hands. I preferred the stuff in its 1950s incarnation, I think.

This is not a poster

other, posters

Or is it?

It certainly claims to be a poster, as one of the set commissioned for the 2012 Olympics, in this case designed by Chris Ofili.

Rather against my will, I have to consider these on an almost daily basis, because a selection are on display in a shop window just a couple of hundred yards from our house. Mr Crownfolio says that he’s quite enjoying them; I’m less sure. Here’s Michael Craig Martin’s offering, which I like a bit more but isn’t there.

The thing is, I’m wrestling with the idea of them being posters. Here’s the 1948 Olumpic poster, designed by Walter Herz, which is a very different beast.

As is London Transport’s only Olympic offering from that year.

They’ve been created by designers, not artists. They’re big and informational and no one wanted you to frame them. So what’s happened in between?

The way that the meaning of the word ‘poster’ has changed over the last sixty or so years was pointed out by the Catherine Flood book which I mentioned a few weeks ago. It’s one of the most thought-provoking ideas in it. A poster was once something that was displayed in public as a form of advertising or information, but somewhere in the 1960s it became a smaller-scale object that was bought in shops and displayed on domestic walls.

In some ways, this is a statement of the blindingly obvious. Even though I knew the facts at some level, I’d never really thought about them properly. But it’s well worth the effort.

We begin in the 1950s, when the display poster is the most prestige form of advertising you can get. There are specialist poster artists, annuals and competitions and posters are in every urban scene, out there, communicating. This, then, is a poster.

And another three, seen here in their natural habitat.

At some point in the 1960s, however, things begin to change. Catherine Flood devotes an entire chapter to this, so I will very much be paraphrasing her descriptions and arguments, but here’s her assessment of where it all begins.

The first flutterings of a consumer love affair with the poster were evident around 1965 in Tom Salter’s trendy Carnaby Street boutique Gear, which was selling comically quaint Victorian advertisements for medicines and corsets blown up to poster size.

The later 1960s are then a very interesting time, in which there is a constant exchange of ideas between these increasingly psychedelic screen prints and posters produced for home display, and the more traditional advertising poster. Below is a great photograph from the Observer magazine in 1967, illustrating a George Melly article on Poster Power. I’m only sorry that I can’t find a bigger image.

Even so, take a squint at the top left corner. In amongst the products of the counter-culture are a couple of images you might recognise. GPO posters to be precise.

That photograph is recording a transitional moment when the poster is just about to become an object for the home, but a few great display designs still exist. So is this one of the last ‘proper’ posters ever? It certainly feels that way to me.

The newer kind of designs were certainly seen as interesting cultural artefacts even at the time. The Daily Telegraph ran its own article about posters in 1968 about how ‘posters are selling in a very pop way’. They noted that they were

expendable art, the perfect child of the consumer age, that costs as little as five shillings to five pounds, can be thrown away if you are tired of it, framed if you want it forever.

It’s hard not to think about Walter Benjamin at this point. I’ve expounded on his ideas about reproduction on here before, but the gist of it is (extreme summary of a dense text here) that the nature of art will change absolutely now that images are infinitely reproducible.

the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. […]. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition.

Benjamin had hoped that reproduction would, in the end, lead to revolution. In fact, what we ended up with was this instead.

The Athena poster of the 1970s is the apotheosis of his ideas, an infinitely reproducible and reproduced image that has no original. They are a genuinely mass market art form, a true popular culture. I don’t think Benjamin would be particularly delighted. (It is intriguing that at the very height of Athena’s domination in the early 1970s, John Berger was popularising Benjamin’s ideas in Ways of Seeing on the BBC. But it’s probably only coincidental.)

What’s notable is that this kind of design didn’t sustain. Since the 1970s, the poster has increasingly crept back towards the domain of fine art. If you imagine most of the contemporary posters you see displayed in other people’s houses today, they are most often for fine art exhibitions of one kind or another. The aura of the work of art had, in the end, too strong a pull to resist; we would still prefer have an image which is associated, however indirectly, with that aura rather than one which just exists in its own right. (Mr Bourdieu would have a lot to say about this too, but if I go down that line of thought we’ll be here all night and then a bit longer too.)

In a way, though, this is just us coming full circle. Because the mass-produced piece of art already existed long before the word ‘poster’ shifted over to meet it. Once upon a time – just before and after the second world war to be precise – they were called art prints, and the School Prints and Lyons Tea Shops series were prime examples of this. These were not reproductions of old masters, but images designed for unlimited reproduction and to be displayed in public. They just weren’t called posters, that’s all.

The one above is by Michael Rothenstein and dates from 1948.

The journey from display poster and art print back to art print via the diversion of popular imagery is a fascinating set of shifts, and one which I’ve only skimmed the surface of here. But to return to our original starting point, there are also a set of Olympic posters which show us the transition exactly as it is happening, and those are the posters for Munich 1972.

Two different sets of posters were produced for these games. The first feel utterly familiar to us today, because they were designed by fine artists and are, in the end, art prints for collecting. David Hockney, for example, depicted swimming

But there are a whole other set of posters too. Designer Otl Aicher created an entire and rather wonderful graphic identity for the games which even included an infinitely reproducible mascot.

If you want to read more about Aicher and his designs there are good articles here and here as well as an entire website here. But part of the graphic scheme was a set of posters.

Which are, I think, still posters. And that is the journey that takes us from the 1948 Olympic poster to Tracey Emin.

Or not if you don’t want to.