other Archives - Page 8 of 18

A post of a copy

other

Or indeed a copy of a post. Because the post I’ve pulled from the archives today is indeed all about reproduction. The subject came up again in the comments here recently, so I thought it might be interesting to revisit this. The eBay links no longer work, but the argument still applies, I hope.

Exhibits A and B for today’s argument come from eBay.

This is a London Transport poster by Abram Games from 1968.

Except it also isn’t. Here’s the description from the listing itself.

“Sightsee London” by Abram Games 1968. This is an authentic LT poster printed by Sir Joseph Causton & Sons in 1971 for sale in the LT shop and carries the line “this is a reproduction of a poster designed for London Transport” – it is not a recent reprint.

So, I don’t want to buy it because it says all over the bottom that it’s a reprint. An old reprint, true, almost as old as the original poster, but still a copy.

There’s another one too, a rather natty bit of swinging 60s design.

And I’m not going to buy that one either, for just the same reason.

But why should this matter? It’s still an old poster. Come to that, why don’t I buy a giclee print of whatever poster I fancy instead of spending time and money in pursuit of the originals?

Mr Crownfolio asked that question the other day, and I didn’t have a good answer. If we buy posters for the good design and because they are lovely images to have around, a reprint, of any kind, shouldn’t be an issue. I could have this Lewitt Him for £30 from Postal Heritage Prints,

which is considerably cheaper than the amount we actually paid for an original copy. And yet I still don’t want it. Why is that?

There are some relatively straightforward answers, like the thrill of the chase and the bargain, and that the originals will make much better investments. That’s all true, but there’s more at stake here than that. And to explain it, I may have to use some theory (but don’t worry, there will be nice pictures as well along the way).

Back in 1936, the critic and writer Walter Benjamin (in an often-quoted and pleasingly short essay called ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’) argued that the original work of art had an ‘aura’ – its presence, uniqueness, history and associations. Now this, for me, is what an original poster offers. Its past life, its direct connection with the artist and their times, its apparent authenticity compared to a giclee print, all of these make a poster more interesting than a later copy.

F K Henrion, Post Office Savings Bank poster, 1944

Seems sensible, but it would have had Benjamin foaming at the mouth with fury. He believed that even fine art works would lose their aura once high quality printing and photographic reproduction could make them accessible to everyone; while modern creations like films and photographs (and, by implication, posters) would have no aura at all, because there could be no original.

McKnight Kauffer, Explorers Prefer Shell, 1934

And without an aura, he thought that art would have to change entirely. Being of a Marxist persuasion, he thought that it would have to be about politics instead of reverence for the individual work. Which is why he’d be so infuriated by my faffing about, worried about which London Transport posters are original and which are not. Somehow (the mighty and indistructible powers of capitalism in all probability), we have managed to transfer all of our myths and beliefs about individual art works on to these reproduced, never-original copies. Benjamin must be spitting tacks.

John Tunnard Holiday School Print 1947
John Tunnard, Holiday, School Print, 1947

The sad thing is, he came quite close to being right. In a very British, watered-down way, ideas like the ‘School Prints’ series were an attempt to put his theories into practice. In the late 1940s, fine and avant-garde artists including Henry Moore, Picasso and Braque created lithographs that were designed for reproduction and offered to every school in the country, making the best of modern art available to everyone who wanted it (nice article here if you want to know more). These artworks were designed to be reproduced, in theory infinite in number, just as Benjamin would have liked them to be. This should have been art without an aura, easily encountered on the walls of schools and hospitals rather than art galleries, in a political gesture very typical of the egalitarian post-war period.

Michael Rothenstein School Print Essex Wood Cutters, 1946
Michael Rothenstein, Essex Wood Cutters, School Print 1946

But, of course, it didn’t end up as he had hoped; we now collect them, value them, treasure them for their limited availability. The Henry Moore is worth close on £1000. If you can get hold of a copy of course.

The School Prints were not alone either. The late 40s and early 1950s were a Benjamin-esque frenzy of art for all. Lyons Tea Shops commissioned prints from modern artists between 1947 and 1955 with much the same motivation. (Like the School prints they are now valuable, collectable unique items. There is a slew of them on offer today at the Christies auction, as mentioned a few weeks ago.)

john nash landscape with bathers lyons print 1947
John Nash, Landscape with Bathers, Lyons print, 1947

And I’ve already blogged about the way that London Transport Shell and the GPO commissioned fine artists and avant-garde designers to design their posters both before and after World War Two with some of the same motivations. Art was no longer the preserve of the privileged, it needed to be made available to everyone in this new, modern, reproducible world. All these prints and posters were Benjamin’s theories made flesh.

Night Mail Pat Keely vintage GPO poster
Pat Keely, Night Mail, GPO, 1939

But each and every one of these objects are now unique, collectable, valuable. They’ve all acquired an aura. And so I do mind whether or not I get a print, whether my poster was printed in 1968 or 1971. I am, frankly, a lousy revolutionary.

Two other points to bear in mind. One is that I used to work in a museum, so there are other reasons for collecting old things as well. I’ll blog about them one day too, when I’ve articulated what on earth they are.

I also need to admit we’ve bought a couple of these reprints before now. Like this Carol Barker.

(I’d like to blame this on initial naivete, and some slightly dodgy eBay listings, but I think lack of attention to detail may have had something to do with it as well. Repeat after me: I must read descriptions more carefully.)

Once again, the reprint is only a few years later than the ‘original’ but it still wrong and we’ll probably sell it on at some point. Walter Benjamin would be very disappointed in me; I just can’t help seeing auras.

AP Again

other

As the piles of boxes grow around me, here are some more Artist Partners delights from the archives.

Today, a second helping of the AP2 Artists Partners book. (Is it a brochure? a catalogue? I’m not entirely sure how to address it).

I ran through a few of the obvious highlights by the big names like Hans Unger, Saul Bass and Tom Eckersley last time, but there are plenty more treasures for your entertainment.

In fact, the sheer quantity of other stuff is one of the notable things about the book. Most of what would now be seen as the big names are in the creative design section, but there are six other categories in the book, including realistic figure, humour and whimsy (section cover by Reginald Mount)

fashion and sophistication, photography ( a wonderful graphic by Heinz Kurth)

scraperboard, still life and industrial,

and finally architecture, landscape and nature.

It’s a reminder, once again, how easy it is to recreate the past in terms of what we like best now. For every classic bit of graphics, one equal and opposite bit of kitsch was created (although this is not just any old figure illustration kitsch, it’s Artist Partners kitsch by Rix).

Good to know that about the dripping, too.

But that’s not to say that there aren’t some stylish things in the other categories too, such as this Christmas card for ABC Television, by Bruce Petty.

Or once again, Patrick Tilley, this time with a cover for a Shell almanac, filed under Humour and Whimsy. No one would ever admit to doing whimsy any more, would they, it’s hardly cool; I think that’s rather a shame.

Almost as strange as that career change are these two window displays by George Him, for De Bejenkorf (which seems to be a department store in Amsterdam). The first one in particular, looks almost impossibly modern.

The second is just brilliantly odd.

More of this kind of thing please.

AP, again

designers, other

While everything is in flux here at Quad Royal central (I am writing this in a room already stacked with boxes and wev’e still got a week to go) I thought I would dig out a few posts from the earlier days of the blog which are worth revisiting, especially as not everyone will have seen them first time round. This one seemed like a good place to start, especially as it was Artist Partners’ own website who first alerted me to the existence of the Patrick Tilley posters.

Sometimes, writing about posters can feel like a constant harking back to a golden age of British graphic design, long since lost to the evil forces of photography, Photoshop and general bad taste. But not everything from that time has disappeared.

Like Artist Partners for example, who are not only still going but have set up a usefully informative website which covers their past as well as their present. And their past was very glorious indeed.

Founded in 1950, the agency represented some of the biggest names in illustration, graphics and photography from the fifties onward. There’s no point repeating their entire history, because they’ve done the job already. Although I was particularly interested to see that Reginald Mount was one of the founding partners. He’s a fascinating character who seems to pop up at all sorts of interesting points in the history of graphics, and I’d be interested in finding out more about him one of these days.

They’ve put together a small retro section on their website as well, with a few nice images, like these Sunday Times advertisements by Patrick Tilley.

But it’s not the website that made me want to post about them, it’s this (the cover also, incidentally, designed by Tilley), which we’ve had on the bookshelves for a while now.

Dating from, I guess, the early to mid 50s, it’s a brochure for the artists represented by AP, and a very delightful book in its own right. Here’s one of the section headings for example.

Or this one, by none other than Tom Eckersley

Oh to be sitting at at an advertising agency desk in 1954 and trying to decide who to commission. Because there is such as wealth of wonderful talent in this book. Amongst other people, Artist Partners represented Eckersley, Hans Unger, George Him, Eileen Evans, and of course Reginald Mount. And even Saul Bass. Here’s a trade advertisement for Enfield Cables.

And a rather fetching advertisement for Technicolour by George Him.

My main sadness is that it’s only partially in colour, because there are simply hundreds of pieces which I haven’t ever seen before. For every page like this

(Two Hans Ungers – one GPO, one London Transport, a Leupin and another Patrick Tilley)

there are ten like this.

I’ve managed to find the peas one in colour at least for your entertainment.

That’s more than enough for now, but I’ve still only barely scratched the surface of this wonderful book.

Every poster tells a story

other

Well, a few do at least. This justaposition is so wonderful that I have pulled it out from the comments for a post all its own – but it’s not my discovery, the Eye-Spy skills belong to mm instead.

So, here is the Ramsgate poster, as posted on Monday, from the Swann Galleries sale.

I have subsequently discovered that it’s by Alan Durman and dates from about 1955. And that date turns out to be important, because this isn’t the only poster he did for the town. But perhaps I should let the next two posters speak for themselves.

How brilliant is that? It’s like a Just Seventeen picture story in posters. The other two are, of course, by Alan Durman as well and date, according to Christies at least, from 1958 and 1960 respectively. I’m impressed that she made the bikini last so long. A huge thank you to mm for finding the series, it’s quite made my day.

RIP COI

designers, other

So the Central Office of Information is to be no more (news here in the Guardian). This is a sad end because once upon a time they produced some rather wonderful posters. Here’s a handy thought from them for this time of the year.

Coincidentally, I reccently bought a history of the COI from Abebooks. (I don’t suggest you do the same: this would be the driest book I have come across for some time, had it not been beaten by History of The Second Word War: Food Volume 2 – Studies in Administration and Control which currently sits on my desk, waiting to bore me out of my wits.) The real problem, at least as far as I am concerned, is that the book doesn’t mention posters much. Here’s pretty much the most interesting – or at least relevant – paragraph in the whole thing.

Over this entire period [i.e. since 1946] the COI has also had the part-time services of Reginald Mount and Eileen Evans as consultants and designers of a long succession of award winning posters, most notably for health education.

Posters like this.

Which does at least answer the question I raised a few weeks back, which was when did Mount/Evans leave the COI and set up on their own? Although the answer does seem to be a kind of Schroedinger-esque uncertainty principle in which they both left in 1946 when the COI was founded and at the same time never left. I suppose that as long as we never look in the Ministry box, it will be fine.

What does seem to be true is that the vast majority of the COI posters I have come across seem to be by either Mount/Evans or Reginald Mount on his own. My very slightly anal database tells me that we have had 28 COI posters at various times, but with very few other artists represented. One is Thelwell, who produced a whole series of Countryside Code cartoons.

While the other is the magnificent Royston Cooper.

I also suspect that this Henrion may also be a COI production, but can’t prove it.

But that’s almost it. Which is surprising, because the COI book has a list of designers who worked for them, and it reads like a who’s who of graphic design in the 1950s and 60s.

For posters and book illustrations in the department’s lifetime these have included Rowland Hilder, Milner Grey, John Minton, Topolski, Ardizzone, Abram Games, Ashley Havinden, F H K Henrion, Hans Unger, Eckersley, Laurence Scarfe, James Fitton, Ronald Searle, Edward Bawden, Andre Amstutz, Tunnicliffe and the Crosby/Fletcher/Forbes group.

Now, I can see that our collection is a bit skewed, simply because we bought a lot of Mount/Evans posters at auction a few years ago when what I suspect was their studio archive was being sold off. But even then, whenever we’ve seen and bought other COI posters they’ve been by them too – like this Keep Britain Tidy design by Reginald Mount.

A search of auction houses and archives like VADS reveals pretty much the same pattern – much Mount/Evans and Mount, very little else from the COI.

One reason for this may lie in the history of the COI itself. The Central Office of Information was formed in 1946 as a replacement for the Ministry of Information, which had produced most of the government’s publicity and propaganda requirements during the war. But for many people, propaganda of any time was seen as fundamentally not British and unsuited to a democratic state – i.e. this was something that the Nazis did and therefore, by definition, we shouldn’t. It could only be justified by the needs of war, and so the Ministry had to go at the end of hostilities.

The problem with this was that the war itself didn’t finish so neatly. Austerity and rationing continued right into the early 1950s, and indeed was stricter in the late 1940s than it had been during the war. This in turn meant that much of the wartime instruction and exhortation to work hard and make a nutritious meal out of little more than cabbage had to carry on too. So when the Central Office of Information was founded, it had quite a lot of work on its hands, and I suspect that many of those artists worked for the COI in those early years.

However it’s very hard to tell which these are; my suspicions are that most get lumped in under the heading of ‘World War Two’ posters. For example, I’ve seen both of these posters, by Lewitt-Him and James Fitton respectively, dated to 1947 rather than during the war itself.

Neither of these would have been produced by the COI, since the Ministry of Food ran its own posters and publicity throughout the war and I can’t imagine changed that afterwards, but they are good examples of how the wartime messages carried on past 1945. The only COI poster I know of which is definitely from this period is by Dorrit Dekk.

Dorrit Dekk only started producing posters in 1946, when she was demobbed from the WRNS and went to work for Reginald Mount at the COI, so this must be from between then and 1948 when she left. But without knowing this biography, it would be impossible to date the poster and it too would probably be ascribed to the war years as well. So I imagine that vast swathes of the COI’s early output has either disappeared, or been labelled as ‘wartime posters’ and, unless someone puts in a formidable piece of archival research one day, will never be known. I also suspect that those were the posters designed by that great list of artists in the book.

As the years went on, the need for government publicity decreased – although this anonymous COI poster is reminiscent of wartime appeals.

Judging by her hairdo, I’d put this at quite soon after the war anyway, but I’d be interested to hear if anyone else knows more.

By the late 1950s or early 1960s though, the government just didn’t have as much to say. Get a passport on time, don’t drop litter, smoke a bit less. Don’t drink and drive. And remember to tell the milkman when you go on holiday.

It doesn’t have quite the same heady excitement as the war years. Although the designers were allowed out for a few digressions, such as United Nations Day.

Not every COI poster was aimed at the general public either; Mount/Evans also produced a number of internal campaigns for the government, most notable ‘Keep Our Secrets Secret’ which I’ve mentioned before on here but which are so excellent that I can’t resist posting one more time.

The other reason why there were fewer posters, of course, is that they were no longer the biggest game in town. More and more, the COI’s main campaigns were conducted through short films, whether in the cinema or in public information slots on the television. (Should you be interested, the National Archives have put tons of these online for your amusement). Only the less important messages like UN Day or internal communications would have been put out by posters alone.

But all of this has now gone, and every government message will just be put out by advertising agencies and be indistinguishable from commercial campaigns. Perhaps one day someone will produce an illustrated and possibly even interesting history of the COI, to show us just what design classics they did produce in their heyday.

Off to the country

other

Happy Bank Holiday. courtesy of Edward McKnight Kauffer and the London Transport Museum.

However, I am already in the country, and it’s raining. I shall sit tight and await futher instructions.

I hadn’t intended to post anything more today, but can’t resist pointing out this.

I mentioned it last week – a 1923 MacDonald Gill London Transport map of Barrie’s Kensington Gardens. It started last week at £25 and ended up at an utterly jaw-dropping £1,106.89. Even eBay prices are shooting up it seems.