British post war posters and graphics. So that you don't have to.

I’ve got lots of things to say about all sorts of things, including the Goons, army life and Graphis, but no time to say them in.  So all of those thoughts will have to wait for a day or two.  Shall we throw our hats in the air instead?

I’ve mentioned this greetings telegram before, and now we’ve got round to buying one. It’s by James Mawtus Judd, who is still as ungoogleable as he was last time I tried to look.

He did two other poster designs, at least that I can find.  They are both in the BPMA online archive,  both also dating from 1962, the same as the telegram.

And that, my friends, is it.  After that – or indeed before it – nothing at all.  I imagine, given the date and the fact that he was clearly very good at design, that he then went off and worked in an advertising agency where he wasn’t allowed to sign things.  Or made television commercials instead, perhaps.  But if anyone knows differently I would love to hear the story.

I mentioned a while ago that I was trying to be nice about railway posters.  It’s all Grayson Perry’s fault.  We came late to his Channel 4 series about taste, and it’s only available on 4OD for just a few more hours, but I am sure it will get repeated because it was one of the best pieces of television I’ve seen in a very long while ( as an ex-tv person, I have high standards).   There wasn’t a poster in sight, just plenty of spray tan, Jamie Oliver tableware and cushions with pictures of labradors on, but it’s still got me thinking about what I do and don’t approve of on this blog, and why.

One of the reviews described Perry as being ‘like one big, walking open mind’, and that was the real pleasure of the series.  He managed to enjoy every visual environment he came into, and to treat them all with equal respect.  That picture above is him dressed up for a night out with the girls in Sunderland, so it isn’t the kind of respect you might expect, but it was very genuine.

Perry had obviously been reading his Bourdieu about how class and wealth are the determinants of taste – his script even used the phrase ‘cultural capital’ when talking about middle class people with the confidence to buy art from junk shops.  But he wasn’t just spouting the jargon, Perry walked around clearly believing that everyone’s choices in decor, clothes, even tattoos, were as valid as anyone else’s.  It was a rare and refreshing spectacle.

So why am I banging on about this, other than to persuade you that the series is well worth three hours of your time when it is finally repeated.  Well, it made me think about a lot of things again and one of them, perhaps strangely, was how I categorise railway posters.  Here’s Exhibit A (all posters courtesy of the NMSI today).

I found it really quite hard to choose this poster, a typical landscape one, as I kept being tempted by ‘more interesting’ ones on the search.  So that’s my taste laid bare.  Now for an even harder task, I’m going to find a Terence Cuneo and post that too.

It won’t come as any surprise to you that I do not love this sort of thing. But lots of other people do, clearly; his works go for thousands and there is a statue of him in Waterloo Station.  I don’t think there’s a statue of Tom Eckersley yet, but I much prefer this.

Or even, for a fairer comparison with the posters above, this.

Not only am I ranking these in a hierarchy of taste which is not based on a coherent theory, in fact on nothing more than my own personal opinion, but I’m also, in the process, implicitly criticising other people for liking pictures of fields and trees.  Or, indeed, trains.

Now on the one hand this is fine.  Not even Grayson Perry would argue against personal taste.  It is what it is, and what’s the point of having a blog and writing thousands and thousands of words without pay unless it is to indulge your own taste and opinions.  But I think he would be trying to find the good in the other things too.  And in the case of these railway posters I may be able to manage it.

Instead of categorising these posters as not-an-Eckersley and therefore failures, it’s possible to see them as a natural development, and a very democratic one too, of one of the key strands in British art, the landscape painting.  In the period both before and after the war, when fine art was off on a continental, abstract and primitivist path, British landscape artists were never going to be in fashion.  Unless they were very lucky, they were going to find it hard even to be seen as fine artists.  But that didn’t mean that the art died out, it just went somewhere different for a while, on to posters.  (There’s a lot more that could be said in this argument, but that can wait for another post).

In seeing these as inferior to the more abstract poster designs by artists like Games and Eckersley, I’m just expressing the cultural preferences (or perhaps prejudices) of my kind; I’ve been brought up with the narrative of the progress of fine art and so the more graphic designs are, clearly, superior.  I don’t have the money to buy a Picasso, but I will flex my cultural capital by putting a poster on the wall instead.  See my discrimination at work, even if I can’t afford the real thing.

But other people with other backgrounds might have a very different opinion.  Imagine being brought up in the landed gentry, in a house stocked with eighteenth and nineteenth century watercolours alongside the pictures of dogs and pheasants.  If you didn’t have the money for fine art, a railway poster might look very appealing indeed.  It’s just a different story, that’s all.

In the course of the series, Grayson Perry, as well as exploring, makes a series of tapestries about the people he’s met and their tastes. The programme would be worth watching for these alone; they’re based on Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress and are wonderful.

Their collective title,though, is The Vanity of Small Differences.  Which pretty much sums up the situation with railway posters, because there isn’t that much difference between them in the end, just the slight distinctions of personal taste.

Well except for the pictures of trains.  I still haven’t managed to get my head round those yet.  But I will try, I promise.

I’ve been meaning to post this for ages, and now the Jubilee has been and gone but I’m carrying on regardless.  They’re Marks and Spencers’ Jubilee packaging designs – this is the tin we bought.

Remind you of anyone?  To me, there is a definite touch of Daphne Padden about them, particularly this pigeon.

And of course she designed for Marks and Spencers too.

But this isn’t them raiding their archives, they are apparently by an illustrator called Phil Hankinson.  I must drop him a line and ask whether he likes Daphne Padden or whether it is just a happy accident.

The pictures (because I ran out of time to take them myself and we’re still eating the shortbread anyway) are borrowed from H is For Home’s blog about the packets.  They did it properly, and on time, not like me.

While we’re on the subject of Daphne Padden, a few of her paintings (and a couple of her father’s too) are up for auction tomorrow.  It’s a saleroom close to where she lived, so I wonder what the connection is?

Daphne Padden, est £30-50

Dominic Winter’s forthcoming sale, meanwhile, contains a small set of McKnight Kauffer posters, which are worth taking note of because they include this one which I’ve never, ever seen before.

McKnight Kauffer, 1942, est. £400-600

Yes, that is for an elephant ballet to the music of Stravinsky.  I will let the catalogue explain more…

This advertised the extraordinary Circus Polka, an act featuring fifty elephants in tutus ridden by similarly-clad dancers, which brought together the remarkable talents of the dancer and choreographer George Balanchine (1904-1983), the composer Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), and the circus manager John Ringling North. By 1942 Stravinsky was an established composer living in Hollywood, and Balanchine was a well-known choreographer and the founder of the American School of Ballet. The elephant ballet was performed during the 1942 season entitled Holidays, in New York’s Madison Garden building where Barnum’s circus had performed since 1881.

These two are also discoveries for me.

McKnight Kauffer, 1926, est. £200-400

McKnight Kauffer, 1938, est. £100-150

This is considerably more familiar, mind you.

McKnight Kauffer, 1938, est. £100-150

There seems to be an unerring rule that wherever the McKnight Kauffer ARP poster is offered for sale, the Pat Keely treatment of the theme must also be there too, and it applies here just as always.

Pat Keely, 1938, est. £100-150

I wonder whether these went out together, and whether quite a few were saved together by their recipients as souvenirs of what must have seemed, even then, to be a turning point in Britain’s history.  Later on in the war, the pressure to salvage paper must have been greater, and so fewer posters survived.  Or do these ones exist in great numbers because of an enormous print run?

Also for sale are a couple of Lyons prints, of which my favourite is this John Minton.

John Minton, 1951, £200-300

More obscure, but quite enticing despite this, are a collection of Edward Bawden and John Aldridge wallpaper samples.

Edward Bawden, c1940s-50s, est £300-500

But then they’re just as expensive as a good poster, and quite a bit smaller, so perhaps not.

While we’re on this kind of track, shall I draw your attention to a few things worth noticing on eBay as well?  Top Quad Royal tip is this Hans Unger, although it comes with a rather aggressive start price of £193.  But it’s still nice.

We have a copy ourselves, but one which could probably win a competition  for worst preservation and condition of a poster ever.  It’s so bad that I am too embarrassed to put a picture of it on here.  Mr Crownfolio is saving it for when he retrains as a poster conservator, but even then it may still be beyond rescue.

This earlier London Transport poster is rather less my personal cup of tea but probably a bit more of a bargain at £120.  It’s by Alan Sorrell and dates from 1938 and is, if you ask me, a rare example of neo-classicism in poster design of the times.

While this is an interesting and quite rare Home Front poster for just £39.99.  This campaign was one of the rare early succeses for the Ministry of Information. who generally spent the first two years of the war getting everyone’s backs up.

But then that price probably reflects the fact that while it is a very important piece of historical ephemera, most people, including me, don’t actually want to sit and look at it all day.

A sentiment that also applies in even greater measure to this.

Advertised as a ‘fantastic train poster from the 60s70s’, it has a Buy It Now price of  £175, but then the seller clearly had a crisis of confidence because the opening bid is set at £10.  What am I missing here?  Can any train fans enlighten me?