I was, of course, on the trail of something else altogether when I found this.

It’s an exhibition at MoMA, New York in 1949, displaying – as the wall tells you – new posters from sixteen countries.

I’m very taken with the sparse layout.  If this show had been appeared in Britain in 1949, I’d have assumed that the design ended up this way because of the privations of post-war austerity.  But in fact it doesn’t work like that at all.  Britain, in 1946, with no money, raw materials or time to expend on exhibition design, produced Britain Can Make It.

Which was, in truth, mental.

America, with all the plasterboard, paint, metal and ingenuity it can want, produces this instead.

Go figure.

The pictures here are all from MoMA’s website, but perhaps even more interesting is that they have also reproduced the exhibit checklist from the show as well.

So I can tell you that in the middle picture above, the posters on the right hand side are all RoSPA posters, just as they look to be.  But better than that, we can start to seek out some of the exhibits.

The brief for the exhibition was to show non-commercial designs, in part as a response to the use of posters for propaganda purposes during the war.  Their publicity notes that there is increasing use of well designed posters, particularly in England.

The British are well-represented in the exhibits, predominantly by RoSPA posters like this Schleger.

Along with this less well known George Morris example.

There’s also a Manfred Reiss GPO poster about helping the export drive, which might well be this one, although there is at least one more in the series.

Others are harder to track down.  There’s an Abram Games poster whose only description is ‘London Transport’.  This doesn’t narrow things down very much, but given that this one is of the right date and in the MoMA collections, I’ll take a punt. (If you want to know more details of the punt, it looks as though lots of the works in the 1949 exhibition entered the MoMA collections as ‘gift of the designers’ in 1953.  Which this one did as well.  So there.)

It’s also sparse enough.  The more I look through these posters, the more I can see that the aesthetic of the exhibition design is also that of the exhibits as well.  The curators have chosen minimalist posters, with some elements of photography in places.  The whimsy of the British early 1950s is hard to find, although traces do exist.

If only just.  That’s by Peter Hatch, and you can see it on the right in the first picture.

But British neo-Romanticism is almost nowhere to be found.  That’s not what posters do, at least not in MoMa-world.  The only exception is this wild card, by Nora Kay for London Transport.

Nora Kay went to the Royal College of art, that’s all I can tell you about her.  (The picture is similarly anonymous, as it came from Pinterest, although I think via Rennies, but it’s not on their website any more so I hope they don’t mind.  The poster seems to be as elusive as its designer.)

If I had more time, I’d try to reproduce the entire exhibition, if only so that I could walk round it in my head and see what late 1940s America thought the future might look like, at least in terms of graphic design.  But that will have to wait for another day.

I’ve been thinking a lot about hoarding recently – of various different kinds – which reminded me that this post probably deserved another airing.  Two questions, has any more been written on this subject, and just what is the etymology of a poster hoarding anyway?

What do these four posters have in common?

John Burningham, London Transport, 1961

Andre Amstutz, British Railways, 1956

Daphne Padden, Royal Blue Coaches, c. 1957

Edward McKnight Kauffer, Shell, 1934

Well, three out of the four of them are on the walls here, but you’re not really expected to know that.  Perhaps more to the point is that they represent four out of the five areas of ‘collectable’ posters: railways, London Underground, Shell and coach* posters (the fifth for me would be World War Two posters, for what it’s worth).

*This may be wishful thinking on my part, but we do seem to have quite a lot of them now (thanks to Malcolm Guest, mainly) and so they are at very least collectable by us.  Anyone else?

But those four areas also share something more than just being collectable.  In each case the companies they are advertising owned the hoardings that the posters went on.

That’s reasonably obvious for the bus, tube and train stations – but Shell posters were also designed to be displayed on the vans which delivered petrol to the garages.

Now set down like that it doesn’t seem like so much of a blinding revelation.  But it isn’t, as far as I know, something which has been much commented on.  And yet it had a big impact on their posters.

The most obvious example is that all of these companies had a much greater incentive to produce posters than anyone else.  Not only was this in effect a subsidised form of advertising for them, but they also needed to churn them out in order to fill up spaces when they hadn’t sold enough commercial advertising.

Here’s Enfield West Station in 1934, with a McKnight Kauffer poster for Eno’s Salts clearly visible on the hoardings.

They also continued to produce posters in great numbers later on, when the poster had ceased to be the main medium for advertising, because the spaces were still there and still needed filling.

In addition, there may have been more reason for the companies  to produce ‘artistic’ and possibly also more subtle posters, because this will have a very direct effect on the station environment.  Although this probably worried Frank Pick more than it did the owners of Victoria Coach Station.

I’ve also read an interesting suggestion that in the early days, London Underground commissioned lots of posters of wide open spaces to counteract the perceived claustrophobia of the tube, but I don’t think there’s any proof of that.

Burnham Beeches, Walter Spradbury 1912

Now originally this was going to be my only point, that all of these people owned their hoardings and so had to invest more in posters and poster design than other companies, which in turn may be one reason why their posters are collectable.  And that this hadn’t really been noted until now.

But then I found a really interesting article by David Watts (insert Jam or Kinks record into your head here as you wish) about pre-war depictions of Yorkshire in railway posters.  It’s an exemplary look at how posters worked and were consumed, rather than just what they looked like, and backed up by a ton of research.  The world of posters could do with a lot more of this kind of rigorousness (not that I’m volunteering to read 200 volumes of railway company internal correspondence, you understand).

One of his points is that the context of railway posters is all-important.  They didn’t need to have pictures of trains on, because they were posted up in stations.  The fact that they were advertising railway travel rather than just the location pictured could be asssumed.

Andrew Johnson, no date

The same is true of London Transport posters.  They can just say Go to Uxbridge.

Charles Paine, 1921

That you’d use the underground to do so is implicit in the fact that the poster is displayed at a tube station.

But, as Watts points out, this contextualisation of the posters has other implications.

…omitting any visual reference to rail travel allowed posters to be detached easily from their ‘mundane commercial purpose’.

So the companies, as I’ve mentioned before, could promote their posters as examples of good design for the masses, and even as fine art, in part because they didn’t need to say Go By Train in large letters at the bottom.

Now Watts argues that this made railway posters at least a rather poor form of advertising.  And he does put forward some evidence that the train companies themselves thought this way by the early to mid 1930s too.  Images of trains, or at least the idea of train travel did become more prominent after then – as in the Tom Purvis that is coming up at Christies next month.

But he also says – and I think that this is entirely right – that the fact that the posters were semi-detached from their commercial purposes is one of the factors that has made them so collectable.  They exist in a limbo between fine art and outright commercialism, and are so more appealing than an advertisement for Eno’s Fruit Salts or Gilette Razors.

Although it is worth remembering that it’s only because the companies were promoting them as ‘art’ that these posters are available to collect at all.  Shell, Underground and railway posters were all available for sale to the public when they were first produced, so they do survive in attics and collections, while the most commercial billboard posters weren’t and so aren’t.  (I’ve mentioned this in passing before, but really ought to pull together all the sources on this one day, because it’s not said often enough.  Even here.)

But I think there’s also another way in which the context affected railway posters in particular (although the same is probably also true of London Transport and coach posters to some degree as well).  Watts points out how much the railway posters are selling an image of ‘deep’ England, by which he means an archaic, un-modernised and highly rural vision of the countryside.  Now whenever this vision is called up at this time, it is almost always intended as a direct contrast to the modernity, ribbon development and speed of the 1920s and 30s.

Edwin Byatt, 1940

But in the railway station, that contrast is always there anyway.  Most of these poster would have been displayed in an urban setting, and even where they were put up at local stations, there was the machinery and bustle of the railway itself.  So the posters are also using their context to suggest that there is an alternative, an escape.  And that’s something else that they don’t need to spell out in words at the bottom.