Posts - Page 38 of 96

Things

Which lead on to other things. Like this greetings telegram.

It came from the local ‘Antiques and Collectors’ (i.e. 1970s cookery books, artificial flowers and old tools) market just near me. A rare gem in amonst the flotsam, then.

Its main story – and why this telegram exists at all – is that it was sent by some people to someone else. To John Rees, in fact, in Troedyrhw in Wales who was celebrating his 90th birthday. He must have been well-loved, because he got a whole clutch of these, all written in the same hand by his local Post Office. I hope he had a lovely day.

He was lucky to get anything as decorative, because it turns out that this design was the first Greetings Telegram to be produced after World War Two; his birthday was 22nd Jan 1951, and these were only reintroduced on 20th November 1950, as paper rationing was finally eased. So it’s also a historical document of sorts, a reminder of a time when the world of austerity was finally ebbing away and pretty things just for the joy of themselves were permitted once more.

He was twice lucky because the first design they chose was also very good. There’s a tiny signature in the bottom right hand corner which, when I squinted at it, seemed to say Freedman. The lettering also looked a bit like his work, at which point I started to wish that I had bought the whole batch. But I couldn’t quite persuade myself (or Mr Crownfolio) that the first word was Barnett, so went off to do a bit of digging.

What I discovered was that my instincts were not far off, as the design is actually by Barnett Freedman‘s wife, Claudia. There’s a very good article on the blog Adventures in the Print Trade about both of their work, which gave me this biography:

She was born Claudia Guercio in Formby, Liverpool, of Anglo-Sicilian parentage. She studied at Liverpool School of Art and the Royal College of Art. Working initially under her maiden name, she took the name Claudia Freedman on her marriage to Barnett Freedman in 1930. Compared to her husband, Claudia Freedman’s output was relatively small, but works such as the autolithographed book My Toy Cupboard (undated but published in the 1940s by Noel Carrington’s Transatlantic Arts) show that she had a talent equal to his.

Which then led me to finding the telegram in Ruth Artmonsky’s book Bringers of Good Tidings: Greetings Telegrams 1935-1982 where it is listed under her maiden name of Guercio.

The piece on Adventures in the Print Trade makes two crucial points, that her work, unlike her husband’s, is now pretty much unknown, and that there was never very much of it in the first place. These two things may be connected.

They illustrate her very rare wartime book, My Toy Cupboard and it’s worth going over to the blog to see the rest of it, as it is wonderful.

But there is a bit more out there to be found. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the trail also led me to Mike Ashworth’s Flickr stream (which will one day be declared a National Monument of Ephemera and preserved for posterity).

Claudia Freedman designed this ad for Shell in about 1950, he tells me. It’s a fantastically complex thing and must, I guess, have been designed for magazines as it could never have been reproduced in newsprint.

And finally, I came back full circle to not only a blog I have visited before but also another telegram. This one was sent to A. Muriel Pierotti on her appointment as General Secretary of the National Union of Women Teachers in 1940, and so is now kept in the archives of the NUWT.

Despite the fact that it was sent during wartime, it is nonetheless decorated – the ban on these didn’t come into force until 1943. I hope Muriel Pierotti enjoyed her appointment as much as Mr Rees enjoyed his birthday.

Not all objects are so forthcoming however. I also bought this map of Ontario at the same stall.

There is no artist’s name, no clue at all, just a very endearing town and the name of a garage on the back.

The only story here is mine; I bought it mainly because I have a stack of my father’s old maps teetering on the windowsill in the bedroom waiting to be sorted through one day. My father loved maps very much. Top of the pile is this Stockholm map, which he must have had when we used to live in Copenhagen and he travelled to Stockholm for business quite regularly.

The Swedes clearly have no problem with being both historical and modern at the same time. Unlike us Brits.

When I saw the Ontario map, it reminded me of the Stockholm one because it seemed to have the same sunny optimism about the city it portrayed, so I bought it. And that’s the end of the story.

File under miscellaneous

auctions, eBay

The email from the Swiss auction house Poster-Auctioneer announcing their latest auction has once again dropped into my mailbox. So I flicked through page after page of foreign posters, pretty sure that none of them would appear on the blog. Until I came to this Donald Brun and my resolution crumbled.

It’s the perfect mixture of sophisticated and daft, isn’t it. Clearly they are expecting quite a lot of people to think the same, because it has an estimate of 900 swiss francs, which is over £600. Never mind.

Once I’d given in to that, I thought I might as well include this poster too, mainly on the grounds that it’s a kind of style that really the British never even attempted, and so I do hanker after it a bit.

It’s by the rather brilliantly named Kurtz Helmut, and isn’t dated, although it doesn’t really need one, and it could be yours for in the region of 500 francs.

Elsewhere, there are some bits and bobs of Barbara Jones available on eBay should anyone be interested. Exhibit A is a handful of original drawings, as brought to my attention by James Manning. This one is the best, mainly because of the dog.

The better treasure, for me at least, is a copy of Design for Death, which is a wonderful book and definitely worth buying in its own right (as I have explained at some length on here before). But how much better if it comes with this.

It’s Barbara Jones’ own Christmas Card from 1960, featuring two owls who bear more than a passing resemblance to Twit and Howlett. We do have the book, so I cannot possibly justify spending a minimum of £25 on one small card. But I am tempted.

retromonochrome

other

A slight digression today, but as I shall be producing a wide range of 1950s graphics to support my case, I think it’s probably allowable.

For the last few months I’ve been writing a small book for Shire about 1950s Modern, looking at all the different ways that being modern was expressed in the design of the time. And frankly, my retinas have been so seared by all the technicolour involved that they are only now starting to recover.

This is G-Plan in the mid 1950s, adhering to the then universal tenet that one colour simply isn’t enough, and that the real fun in interior design is to be had with contrast, the bolder the better.

Want more proof? Here is my prize exhibit, Noel Carrington’s 1953 book Colour and Pattern in the Home, which is so wonderful that I could quite happily scan the whole thing for your entertainment.

The illustrations are lithographs by Rowland Collins and are wonderfu in their own right. But he’s not off drawing only the most avant-garde of houses – the interior above is in a doctor’s house in Tunbridge Wells, hardly a hotbed of revolution. While below is the living room in a Georgian house in Norfolk.

What struck me most after a couple of weeks of staring at this kind of thing, is how completely we have managed to forget 1950s colour. There is a complete deluge of splay-legged, contemporary-styled furnishings out there to be bought, so much so that it’s a wonder that the retro antiques trade still exists. But almost none of it is bright. Here’s John Lewis’s current contribution to the flood.

While here is another one by a company called Plumo.

By way of reminder and contrast, here’s another image from Noel Carrington.

There seems to be an almost complete amnesia about the high colour levels of the 1950s. Instead, they have been replaced with a palette of grey, oatmeal and a slightly sludgy moss green. The irony is that these are the colours that 1950s designers set themselves against, as one designer remembered. ‘The days of varnish, brown paint and porridge wallpaper were served notice in 1951. We were no longer afraid to start with white and then use any colour or combination from the rainbow.’

Does this matter? On one hand it doesn’t at all. Of course fashion revives things with a different twist, and styles never come back quite the same. But I find it interesting for a couple of reasons. The first is a very simple one, which is that it’s a reminder that history isn’t a fixed account, but always being rewritten and reinterpreted. This applies to the visual sphere as much, if not more, than any other version. So when the 1950s were first characterised, the kitsch appreciation of the style focussed on atomic design and eccentric pattern choices, along with New Look clothing. Now there’s a demand for a more sophisticated kind of 1950s, that which would have been created by an architect furnishing his first house in Canonbury. But even then, it’s not a complete recreation, because the colour has definitely been drained away.

And I think this also tells us something about how we perceive history. Back in the 1950s, colour was seen to be the most modern thing there was. Not only did the birth of polyeurethane paints make it easier to put on the walls, new plastics meant it could also appear on everything from kitchen tables to dustpans for the first time.

This is Wareite, the British challenger to Formica, and one which got its name because it was made in Ware, Herts. I do wish people still named things this way.

So the home was bright then, very bright. But the thing is, colour is still something we see as modern now. Should you go shopping in John Lewis to find your retro furniture, you will also discover some pretty bright objects in there too (in some cases, like silicone kitchenware, also born from new materials too).

So if colour is modern now, it definitely couldn’t have been modern 60 years ago. Therefore we must look at the 1950s through a sepia-porridge filter in order to see what we want. Even if the reality was actually somewhat different.

I do think that the patch of pink at the back is the extra touch which marks out this design as being truly 1950s in its pursuit of contrast.

One final thought, is that despite years of looking at 1950s posters, I still find these illustrations startlingly bright. Which suggests to me that although poster artists of the time did use a fair amount of colour, unsurprisingly for an object which is meant to grab people’s attention, they never got quite as contrasty as the interior designers did.

There are a couple of exceptions to this. Lander was quite fond of some near-fluorescent colours on occasion.

As was Hans Unger.

But I wonder whether, perhaps, it just wasn’t the done thing. A good poster was meant to arrest the viewer’s attention by the wit and economy of its design. To do that by just using a bright colour or three would have been the easy route. In fact it would have been close to cheating. Not the done thing at all.

Midcentury

other

We used to go to Midcentury at Dulwich before we left London to go west, but that’s a long time ago now, and they certainly didn’t sell any posters at it then. But now they definitely do.

The next one’s tomorrow, and in a set of coincidences which make it look as though I have been planning this all week, you will be able to buy posters by both David Klein and Daphne Padden there.

The David Klein is being sold by Travel on Paper, who will also be bringing a few very apt coach and railways posters along.

(I know that poster’s been on here before, and I still don’t know what it’s trying to tell me).

While Dan from Modernish will be selling the Padden, along with this technicolour gem. Beware flying fishermen.

One day I must do a small but important post on ‘Imagery of the British Fisherman in travel posters 1920-1960’. Bet you can’t wait.

Anyway, there are other dealers there too, including Kiki Werth so there will definitely be more on offer. And if anyone does go, can they come and report back here please.

Bunny’s Dinner

archives, designers

Now here’s something I never ever thought I’d see. Daphne Padden’s sketch book from when she was just six years old.

Note period detail of LMR coal truck below.

This would be a fantastic thing on its own, but what it means is that some more of Daphne Padden’s archive has turned up (with many thanks to Dan from Modernish who put it and me in touch).

I’ll post some more of it next week, when I’ve had a chance to get my thoughts together, but here is a taster for now.

Anyone seen Animal and Zoo magazine before? I haven’t.

But with all of these designs was also a stack of art and design magazines, including some lovely Graphis Annuals, and then these – a selection of little Art and Industry magazines from the early 1940s until late 1950s.

And yes, that cover is by Tom Eckersley.

Now it’s not a complete run and the magazines are tatty, but they are interesting in part because they’re tatty – the notes at each top corner are Daphne Padden’s own indexing system.

I would also imagine that these wartime editions have to be quite rare too, as I doubt that many were printed in the first place.

These – along with the rest of the stuff – have been left to Oxfam who now have a duty as a charity to maximise the value of the bequest. The Graphis magazines will probably go on eBay, but if anyone wanted to make a generous offer for the Art & Industry heap, let me know and I will pass it on. Otherwise they will probably go to an auction.

Exceptional

designers

As the masthead suggests, Quad Royal is meant to be a blog about British graphics and design. But I often find myself making an exception when a David Klein poster comes up in an auction I’m mentioning, mainly because they catch an optimism about the 1950s that the British tend to express more in a cheery whimsicality than in the neon and rush of the city.

It’s not something Britain ever really had in the 1950s, with the possible exception of Piccadilly Circus. We didn’t have Klein’s golden sunshine either.

I am making an exception of him once again today, mainly because I have discovered (and apologies because I can’t remember who pointed me to it first) the Compleat David Klein on the web. The posters alone are wonderful.

These posters would, I imagine, have been seen over here quite a bit. This one alone must have been a direct influence on R M Lander – take a look here if you don’t believe me.

But what’s actually best about it is the collection of original art works – many for posters which aren’t themselves displayed.

My favourites, perhaps unsurprisingly, are those advertising the neon and the rush.

The European destinations are sweet, but just don’t have that same excitement. Klein was much much more about the new than the old, as his portrayal of Britain also shows.

The other set I do like are those advertising travel for American Service families.

This is mainly because they are among the very few posters from this time that look like the graphics now fed back to us as 1950s retro. This kind of visual memory is always very partial, and this is a subject I’ll be coming back to in a week or so.

Anyhow, there’s way more on the website than I could display here – all I’ve even looked at is the TWA posters and there is much more besides – so do pop over and take a look, it’s well worth it.