posters Archives - Page 7 of 8

1962 and all that

posters

Our subject today is this, which arrived in the post the other day.

It’s a book which does what it says on the cover. Posters, lots of them. And most of them from 1960 or 1961. Can’t argue with that.

Unfortunately, the vast majority are reproduced in black and white. The only artists to earn some colour coverage for Britain are Ronald Searle and Hans Unger.

(The Unger is a poster for coach travel, but you’d be hard pressed to guess that as there is no text in the reproduction at all.)

Sadly, most of the rest of the pictures are not only monochrome, but also small; I’ve found better images where I can but, as you will see, this hasn’t always been possible..

Now I do like these kind of annuals, and not simply because they’re a lovely wallow in a golden past of poster design. It can also be thought-provoking to see a cross-section through time like this. For a start, you get a good overview of where design was.

And 1962 turns out to have been quite an interesting time; the whimsy of the mid to late 1950s hadn’t quite departed yet, but the tide of sans-serif modernism was definitely on the rise. Which means that the Ronald Searle illustration above was paired with these three Alan Fletcher designs on the opposite page.

And London Transport could win commendations for this,

as well as this – which was, incidentally, produced by an agency, S.H. Benson Ltd, rather than a designer.

The times they are indeed a-changin’.

But there’s another way in which this selection is worth our attention; the posters included are not simply an archaeological sample of posters past, they’re also a picture of what 1962 thought was important then. Which isn’t always what you might expect now.

There are some things on which past and present do agree. London Transport posters are good – these two are by Dorrit Dekk and G.B. Karo.

In total, over a fifth of the posters shown were designed for London Transport, which is an impressive proportion. But just to prove that posterity (or archival survival) doesn’t always get it right, there are even more coach posters than there are LT exhibits (by one), including these two Royston Coopers.

The same is true of the designers: Abram Games, Hans Unger, FHK Henrion and Tom Eckersley are also all, unsurprisingly, feted.

Abram Games for London Transport

Hans Unger for GPO

But then there are a few designers included that might not be the first to spring into your mind today. 1962 really liked four of these coach posters by Christopher Hill.

His stuff doesn’t seem to come up much these days(apart from at Morphets, of course, what didn’t) but these two are both available at Fears and Kahn for the right kind of money.

I’ve never heard of Donald Smith before at all, but he has five posters in the book in all, including these three very delightful posters for the Post Office Savings Bank below. (Where is the Post Office Savings Bank archive, does anyone know?)

But most mysterious of all was Barrie Bates. He had four posters included, and they’re all very striking.

So why had he not turned up elsewhere? It transpires that there was a very good reason for this. Because in 1962, he became someone else altogether.

When he came to the end of his graphics course at the Royal College of Art, Barrie Bates bleached his hair and eyebrows in order to become Billy Apple, conceptual and pop artist extraordinaire.

This is American Supermarket, the 1964 New York show, a landmark Pop Art exhibition. With exhibits by, amongst others, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselmann, Jasper Johns and one Billy Apple.

Apple/Evans was working for Madison Avenue advertising agents at the same time, which rather pleases me, as he was eliding the difference between product and art even more than the exhibition might have suggested. And it’s also good to know, given how good his 1962 work was, that he hadn’t given up on graphics altogether.

P.S. You’ll be pleased to know that Billy Apple is still working as an artist in Auckland, New Zealand, and there is plenty more information about him and his work out there if you’re interested.

Kill All Flies

other, posters

It’s August, it’s the silly season. In Quad Royal world this means that I have a house full of people, a holiday to plan for and no time to write anything. Elsewhere, it manifests itself in the fact that news is so slack that posters have made an appearance on the BBC news website.

Wierdly, these have taken the form of a slideshow, with music. I know, it’s almost as though they’ve forgotten that television has been invented. But there are a few lovely posters on it. I’ve taken quite a shine the one above, mainly I suspect because it reminds me of a Macfisheries poster. And they’ve also included this rather entertainingly blunt Abram Games poster, which I’ve had on my ‘to post’ list for ages.

The reason for all of this is, apparently, the publication of a book on the subject by the WHO. It’s taken me some digging and delving to find anything about it, and then it turns out to have been published for a while now, so quite what is going on here I don’t know. But it’s called Public Health Campaigns: Getting the Message Across and is available on Amazon should you be interested.

While not many of the posters in the book would qualify as high design, the book does raise some interesting questions. The main one of which is, do posters work?

In the slideshow, Dr Laragh Gollogly argues that marketing posters can at least quantify their effectiveness by seeing whether sales rise or not (although that does remind me of the famous quote – ‘half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don’t know which half.’). But for posters which seek to influence what people do, there is no test at all.

How do we know what really works? There has been no systematic collection or evaluation of massive social marketing campaigns and indeed this book presents only a smattering of the total global output on the subject. Posters vary hugely from country to country and over time. By publishing this book WHO hopes to spur those involved or interested in public health care campaigns to stop and think critically. Which posters work and which don’t? How do we evaluate their effectiveness? Can a poster work on its own or does it need to be part of a much bigger approach to behavioural change? Although posters are getting flashier, are they getting better?

These are questions which don’t just apply to the posters in the book. How much did World War Two posters affect what people did or didn’t do? Did they even make people feel better or worse about what was being asked of them, from recycling to the blackout? I’d love to know.

The book itself is a bit frustrating, because it doesn’t give any context for the posters themselves, in terms of place or date, and even scratching through the acknowledgements at the end doesn’t help much. Although it did let me identify this Lewitt-Him for certain.

But this is also a reminder of just how difficult collecting and curating posters can be. There’s an interesting article on the Wellcome Library blog about this, as a spin-off from the book too. They also link to their own online catalogue, which includes many posters. But no pictures, which makes it simultaneously fascinating and deeply frustrating. I’ve been wondering for some time about Summer is here–and now extra cleanliness please. Issued by Danish Bacon Company Limited. It’s by Unger, it’s from the 1950s, and it’s probably not half as interesting as I imagine. But because I can’t see it, it’s now, in my head, the greatest poster ever. Still, and more importantly, I wonder if it did its job and prevented any cases of food poisoning? We may never know.

Modern British Collecting

posters

I’ve had Paul Rennie’s Modern British Posters: Art, Design & Communication for a few weeks now, and am guiltily aware that I haven’t given it a proper mention yet. Now there are a whole heap of real life reasons why this hasn’t happened, which I won’t go on about, but I am also aware that I’m finding it hard to come to a conclusion about it. Which is absurd, so here are a few thoughts which may or may not come to a definite answer at the end.

Tom Eckersley Seven Seas vitamins advertising vintage poster
Tom Eckersley, Seven Seas Vitamin Oil, 1947

This doesn’t mean that I don’t like it. The book is beautiful and would justify its cover price (more on that below) for the illustrations alone. You’ve seen a few on the blog already, there are plenty more littering this post. There simply isn’t another book covering these subjects in this detail and with this kind of wonderful reproduction, so it’s a great thing to have.

H A Rotholz, vintage GPO poster stamps in books
HA Rothholz, Stamps in Books, GPO, 1955

Even better, the book mentions Quad Royal which is very flattering indeed. So now it’s been immortalised in print, I’d better keep this thing going for a while, rather than just be a fly-by-night blog.

Reginald Mount, Keep Britain Tidy, 1950s

But as well as the book being a whole treasure trove of beautiful images, Paul Rennie also makes some really good points about posters and collecting, so much so that I am going to repeat them all over again here. At the start, he observes that part of the reason that no one else has written this book before him is that the world of the poster, in Britain at least, is absurdly fragmented.

For example, railway posters, motoring posters and war propaganda all form specialised archives within separate institutions. Within the context of these distinct institutions, there is no urgent requirement to integrate the various and disparate parts into a history of visual communication.

I’ve touched on this in posts before – this odd disjunction between disciplines results in quirks like the National Railway Museum not thinking about its posters in terms of designers on their website and many other odd occurrences. People who know all about railway posters might have no idea about the history of the Ministry of Information; the Imperial War Museum has no reason to care about what designers did before or after the war. As a result, Modern British Posters is therefore pretty much the first decent survey of the whole, and that can only be applauded.

Abram Games London Transport poster
Abram Games, At London’s Service, London Transport, 1947

I’m also really interested when, at the end of the book, he sets out the history of how they started collecting, and the rationale behind what they chose to buy. Partly because he started out by being fascinated by the Festival of Britain and then, in discovering more about Abram Games and the Festival symbol, found himself intrigued by a wider world of graphics and communication. I trod exactly the same path too (I still have the little Festival badge that I used to wear on my hat as a teenager); it makes me wonder how many people have followed the same thoughts, and also why the Festival exerts such a potent hold over our imaginations even now.

Abram Games British Railway Poster
Abram Games, See Britain By Train, British Railways 1951.

But he also explains why they bought what they did.

Our collecting began, back in about 1982, with an interest in modern design… In 1982, the words British and Modernism seemed like a contradiction in terms.

The direction of our collecting was formed in relation to this widespread,and misguided, perception of British resistance to modernity. Conveniently, it turned out that British items were generally of little interest to international collectors and were, accordingly, less expensive to purchase.

In a way, I wish he’d put this manifesto right at the start of the book, because it’s really important. This is partly because this is – and Paul Rennie freely acknowledges the point himself – a very partial book. Every single illustration is from their own collection and so knowing the history behind it makes a big difference to the way you might read the book as a whole. (I have been trying to work out whether there is a similar unifying idea behind our own collecting; so far I have only managed to come up with: It was cheap and we liked it).

Henrion BOAC poster
Henrion, BOAC Speedbird, 1947

The idea of the British relation to modernism itself is really interesting, and something I’d want to think about at length and probably devote a whole blog post (0r three) to. But it also informs a lot of the arguments that he’s making in the main bulk of the book, so it would have been good to know beforehand.

Now, I have to confess that between these two ideas I did get a bit lost in the middle of the book. Now this is partly I think a problem of the form – Paul Rennie is heroically attempting a complete survey not only of the history of posters in Britain, but also of the social and economic conditions which affected how they were produced. So it is, of necessity, a bit of a race through quite a lot of ideas and thoughts.

But also – and this is the bit I have been pondering for a while – Modern British Posters is at heart an academic book. It’s having a dialogue with a lot of other books, and theories of art and design, ideas about cultural production and the transmission of modernism, and that simply isn’t a conversation that I am part of any more. Academia and I gave up on each other more than twenty years ago, and since then I have been concentrating on the much simpler task of telling stories about people and things. So the fault is probably with me rather than the book, for which I can only apologise. I’d be interested to hear what anyone else thinks about this, particularly if you’re a design historian and have read it.

Telephone Less Tom Eckersley 1945
Tom Eckersley, Telephone Less, GPO, 1945

If you haven’t read it yet, and want to have an opinion, which of course you do, I am pleased to say that there is also a special Quad Royal readers’ offer (we’ve never had one of those before, get us). The book is available at a massive 40% off the list price to you our esteemed reader. To get hold of it, just email jess at blackdogonline.com, with Quad Royal Readers Offer as the subject line, and she will sort out the rest.

Name your price

posters

Shall we talk about this?

It fell out of my and Mr Crownfolio’s newspaper at the weekend; a handy pocket guide to collectables and antiques. To my surprise, they even included posters. Or really just the one.

Just in case that’s a bit too squinty for you, here it is, along with the mindboggling / dealer-worthy / under-valued price (delete according to your own opinion) they attributed to it – also online here.

Now, I know this is revisiting lots of things I have said before about the differential between dealers’ prices and the real world and so on, but really. Eight hundred pounds? My mind, this time, has been well and truly boggled.

So I went out hunting. And I genuinely couldn’t find that poster as having been sold anywhere – it doesn’t seem ever to have been auctioned.

But I did find this.

It’s a year earlier, and I think was published by British Rail rather than London Underground.

Now, I don’t think it’s as good as the later Underground poster – you can see his design evolving to give the poster more impact between the two. But is it worth ten, twenty times less? Or even eighty times less?

Because this poster was sold at a railwayana auction earlier this year for just £10. Yes, you did read that right. Folded, but VGC. My mind is now even more boggled than it was before. So much for the internet flattening out poster prices. If anyone can explain what is going on here, I’d love to know.

Properly Designed Posters Please

posters

Today, a wallow in some lovely designs for no good reason at all

I’ve been meaning to write about the Post Office’s ‘Properly Packed Parcels Please’ series for ages, ever since finding them praised in Design Magazine.

There’s a whole series of these posters (they seem to stretch from 1962 until the early 70s), and what I like about them is that they’re still trying to do great modern poster design at a time when most other institutions have more or less given up.

Perhaps the most arresting are this psychedelic series from about 1967-8.

Paul Rennie has the first one down as being by Negus Sharland; ours (hence the rather grim photos, apologies as usual) are signed either Tom Bund or Bund/Negus and Negus, so go figure.

Unfortunately I don’t know enough about the organisation of British advertising and design in the 1960s to be able to shed much light on this. However, a bit of light Googling has told me that Tom Bund is alive and working, so I’ve dropped him a line and perhaps he can help.

There were also some more cartooony designs by Andre Amstutz and Harry Stevens in 1965 and 1963 respectively (from the BPMA catalogues).

But I do have to confess to a slight pleasure that we’ve got a few of these posters that the BPMA don’t (I know it’s mean, but they’re a museum, and we’re not, so it’s not something I can often do). They do have this 1968 one by George Karo.

But not this, from the same year.

And just in case you’re wondering why people need so much telling about packing their parcels properly, an earlier, 1952 poster by Karo gives us an insight into the strange things that the British public get up to with their postal service.

Remember, fruit juice may cause serious damage to the mails. Now there’s a lesson to take away with you for the weekend.

Mr Benjamin, is this poster a copy?

eBay, posters

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.