Posts - Page 83 of 96

Dark and mysterious

Ages ago, when I last wrote about the Shell educational posters, I mentioned the wonderful designs of Tristram Hillier as being perhaps my favourites of the whole bunch. And now a few of them have come up on eBay.

In total, the seller has five of Hillier’s wondeful designs for Nature Studies on offer, advertised as “will look superb in your country kitchen or seaside holiday cottage”. Or possibly for your long dark night of the soul.

Because these posters are strange and mysterious, disconcerting rather than decoration. Here’s his design for moths from the same series.

Even without having the text to tell you that one of the caterpillers is that of the death’s head moth, the picture is still ominous enough.

It’s hardly surprising, though. Hillier started out as a surrealist painter, and a member of Unit One along with Paul Nash, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, and Edward Wadsworth. Like Nash in particular, he created a very British take on surrealism.

Tristram Hillier, Pylons, 1933

But his peculiar genius was to take reality and imbue it with the strangeness and clarity of his early paintings. It’s a very disconcerting mixture. Here’s a still life from 1950.

And it’s precisely this pecularity which he brings to his Shell designs. Mind you, whoever commissioned him knew what they were doing when they gave him ‘Fossils, Insects and Reptiles’ as his subject. Here’s Minerals (June) and Snails (December).

To make the ordinary extraordinary and strange is a rare gift; for me these paintings are so much more than just poster designs.

Clearly I’m not the only one to think so either. This is Fossils (February).

which, in a way, belongs to every single one of us (if you’re British, that is) because it’s the property of the Government Art Collection. And thanks to the quirkiness of the internet, I can even tell you that they paid £14,100 for it. (The painting was sold as part of quite a big sale of Shell Artwork in 2002, and Sotheby’s still have the catalogue online. I’ll come back to that one of these days as it’s quite an interesting insight into these posters and Shell’s thinking, which was quite outside the poster mainstream.)

If you like these as well, you don’t have to buy them on eBay. The next Onslows Sale (and yes, I will take a look at the catalogue in the next few days) has Minerals for sale (lot 137).

The estimate is £60-100, and if that feels like a lot, then you can always buy the book. Shell Nature Studies: Fossils, Insects and Reptiles, starts at just £5 on Abebooks. Unrefusable.

Such posters

designers

Now, bear with me. I know that I’ve gone on about Hans Schleger’s design work for Macfisheries before, and I also know that some of these photographs are a bit duff. But I still can’t resist showing you some more of these.

They are simply too wonderful to resist.

Once again, the images come from Colin French, who runs the meticulously-researched Macfisheries site. In this case, he managed to track down the son of the company’s former logistics director, who’d kept a whole archive of these display posters.

Some, like the poster above, I’ve seen illustrated before; others are completely new to me.

He apparently rescued them from a skip at Macfisheries’ head office. They’re a fascinating slice through the kind of work that Schleger’s studio was producing – not just the ‘show’ posters like the ones above, but more workaday examples of marketing too.

A few of these posters do worry me though. A fish entreating me to eat other fish is getting dangerously close to cannibalism.

Especially when it starts filleting its brethren.

Mind you, I used to feel the same way about blackcurrants advertising Ribena, so perhaps I worry about these things too much.

One of the many interesting things about these pictures is that the collection doesn’t just cover the Schleger-era designs. There are examples of work from (I’m guessing) the early 1920s right up to World War Two.

And then goes on to what I suspect are designs that came afterwards as well.

But perhaps the most fascinating story is that some of the posters were just design trials, and never made it into the shops. Unfortunately, I have no idea which ones they are. Perhaps this rather hypnotic hare,

which is far too much like a pet to consider eating.

Or possibly the brainwave that you might want to give a MacFish token.

The posters do also make me mourn what the posters present as a golden age of fish shopping, when native oysters and pheasant could not only be bought on the high street but also delivered to my door. But I wonder whether it tasted as good as the posters looked? Remembering the smell of the fish sh0p in the Midlands market town where I grew up, I’m not totally sure that it would have done.

Daphne Padden

designers

After posting briefly about her a while back, I’ve been trying to find out more about Daphne Padden and her very individual poster designs.

Some of my favourites are the ones she created for British coach companies in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

They’re almost child-like in their simplicity and delight – I’ve never seen such an unthreatening bunch of Vikings out on the rampage – but are nonetheless sophisticated pieces of design.

To my surprise, although plenty of people really love her work, I couldn’t really find anything on the web about her, so I’ve been forced into doing some proper research. Sadly, what I discovered is that I’d begun just a bit too late, as she died in September last year. I really hope she knew that people liked her earlier work so much.

But I have been able to find out a few more details about her life. Daphne Padden was born on 21st May 1927, and was the daughter of Percy Padden ARCA who was both a fine artist and a poster designer himself. Here are a couple of his designs – the bus poster is from 1921, I am guessing that the railway one is from the late twenties or early thirties, but I can’t find a date.

As for most of the rest of the story, perhaps it’s best if she tells it in her own words – quite literally. This is the information which she produced for exhibitions of her work.

She worked as a graphic designer from the mid-fifties until, I think, the mid-1970s. Here are a couple of poster designs from 1956 and 1957 respectively.

As her work evolved, she developed a very sharp and distinctive graphic style, mostly created using cut-paper collage.

Here’s one of her originals.

Unfortunately the glue hasn’t aged as well as the design.

As she mentioned above, she also did some more corporate design work. Here’s some in-store display material for M&S, in a world where sell-by dates were an exciting new invention.

But sometime in the 70s, she changed direction and became a fine artist, producing wildlife paintings on a miniature scale.

These barn owls are only 6″ x 5″ in real life, and if you want to see more, her gallery has some here.

It’s not a completely surprising departure, because there are animals in quite a few of her posters, from this cat,

to this oddball collection of travellers (I am a particular fan of the mole driver).

She didn’t do much work in the last five or six years because of ill-health, and she died on 21 September 2009.

Now I have to confess that I’ve been sitting on this information for a few weeks now, because Daphne Padden’s own archive of designs and posters has been up for auction. I’m pleased to say that we did win some, but unfortunately it’s all still in transit and so I can’t show you any of them yet. So there will be another post in due course when they arrive. I’m also hoping to be in touch with some of her friends as well, in which case I will post a more extended biography when I can.

Thanks to Lincoln Joyce Fine Art and Gumersalls Solicitors for help with information, and to Allison for the borrowing once more of her Daphne Padden Flickr set.

Looking at Things

designers

This arrived in the post the other day.

How fantastic is that? I can’t decide which of the three I like best. Although that is in fact the rear view – this is the front.

As it explains for itself, this is a leaflet for a BBC Schools programme called Looking at Things, and it’s by Barbara Jones.

One of the unfortunate side-effects of blogging is that we actually end up buying even more stuff than we would have done otherwise; I had no idea that these brochures even existed until I wrote about Barbara Jones last week. But now I do, and from there it’s only a short step to Abebooks, ephemera and even more stuff around the place.

But this is a particular gem. It’s worth far more than the £2 it cost for the cover alone, but inside is also Barbara Jones explaining how a book cover is designed and printed, using our friends above as the examples.

And there is also a spread about lettering and signs, which could have come from one of her own, grown up, books.

The aim of the programme – which had noted industrial designer Milner Gray as a consultant – was “to awaken the child’s interest in the shape and colour of things around him,” and “to look at the things around you with a ‘seeing’ eye.”

I don’t suppose anything as random and purposeless but yet important as this is taught in schools these days. Although please feel free to tell me that I’m wrong. And now I must go and look for some more booklets to educate my eye.

The ghosts of Notting Hill Gate

London Transport

I’m always intrigued by the afterlife of posters. Most design history – and indeed almost any kind of writing about them – concentrates on how they were made, who designed them, how they were printed and so on. But I’m just as interested in what happened to them afterwards. What did people think about them as they walked past every day? Were there lots of ugly ones as well as the good designs we treasure now? Why do some survive and not others?

Which is why I was so fascinated to find this photo set on Flickr. Here are a complete wall of posters, just as someone might have walked past them (well, a bit dirtier) preserved, not in aspic, but in a forgotten corner of the London Underground.

To be precise, they’re in a disused passageway at Notting Hill Gate Station.

The photos come from Mike Ashworth, who has the rather wonderful job of ‘Design and Heritage Manager’ for London Underground, and so is best placed to explain how they came to survive.

They were discovered during the modernisation work we’re carrying out at the station – and the project team found their way in when some partition work was uncovered. The original Central line station was abandoned, along with the original lifts, during the installation of escalators that took place c1956/9 when the Central & Circle line stations (once separate on either side of the road) were combined after many years of planning. This passageway is one of the remnants of the passageways leading to the lifts that were ‘sliced through’ during the reconstruction.

So, what would I have been looking at as I waited for the lifts in Notting Hill Gate in the late 50s? This rather wonderful Daphne Padden to start with (this week on Quad Royal is rather being brought to you by Daphne Padden, as there will be more on Friday too). The Ideal Home Show as well.

And Pepsodent toothpaste.

If you’re feeling a bit more cultural, there’s also a new exhibition about Iron and Steel at the Science Museum,

And a rather wonderful invitation to cruise the River Thames.

Once again, though, these posters are a reminder that not everything published in the 1950s was a design classic, as these posters for the Evening News and the Chain Garage in Hangar Lane prove.

But for me the real lesson from these posters is just how little survives from the period – and what a selective sample it is. Admittedly, I’ve not done the most comprehensive search ever, but, apart from the Daphne Padden, I can only track down one other of these posters on the web. That’s the elephant that you can see three copies of on the first picture, which is a London Transport poster by Victor Galbraith (thanks to Mike Ashworth for pointing that out too).

It’s a salutary reminder of just how much chance determines what we see, study and collect today. And if anyone can tell me any more about any of these, then I’d love to know.

But please don’t go to Notting Hill Gate expecting to see these posters. They are totally inaccessible in a disused bit of the station – which is probably why they have survived – and there is no way that you can get to them. But the flickr set is there for everyone, which I do think is a great way for London Underground to share them.

Meanwhile, I forgot to mention yesterday that the art of the poster got a very thorough two page write up in the Observer on Sunday. You can read the full text of it here, although without most of the images that accompanied it in the paper version.

It is of course prompted by Paul Rennie’s Modern British Posters book, and the exhibition which accompanies it from next week in London. I’ve had a copy for a few weeks now, and it is a fantastic overview of the evolution of the modern poster, which I am feeling very guilty about not having reviewed properly yet. The problem is that it’s so comprehensive and well-informed that it’s hard to know where to begin. But I will try next week.

6RP7324X32BP (admin code, please ignore)

By coach to Harrogate

auctions

In the immortal words of Smash Hits, it’s back – back, back, back.

Tom Eckersley British Railways Paignton poster 1960
Tom Eckersley, Paignton, 1960

What else can I be talking about but the gift that keeps on giving, the Morphets auction of Malcolm Guest railway posters. Part One was in January, Part Two I mostly ignored because its main attraction was a set of Heath Robinson drawings. But I’ve been anticipating Part Three – all the posters from 1960 and later – for some time now. The catalogue still isn’t up yet, but Morphets have now put a few more teasers on their site. And, to my relief, there are some real gems.

The relief is because I’d heard that there were a lot of letterpress and otherwise dull posters up for sale – although with more than 2,000 posters in the auction, there may well still be. I was also in fear of this kind of thing.

As well as this this too.

But the good news is that, in this preview at least, they seem to be in the minority. Not only are there some fairly entertaining railway posters,

Brighton and Hove British Railways vintage poster 1961
Brighton and Hove, Joseph McKeown, 1961

in varying degrees of kitsch/Ladybird books style, but what brings me real joy is that Malcolm Guest clearly went a bit off-topic and started collecting coach posters as well, seemingly quite a few if this preview is anything to go by.

I reckon that these three at least are by Daphne Padden (of whom more later this week).

But I don’t know for definite, because there’s nothing but the images up at the moment. Any names and identification are my own guesses or research, which could be proved very wrong when the catalogue comes out.

There are two definite Royston Cooper’s as well, with a probable third too.

The last one I’ve never seen before, either.

And then there are just some great posters about which I know nothing. Like these.

Any ideas? In particular, if anyone knows who the artist of the last one is, please do let me know as it’s driving Mr Crownfolio insane right now. He reckons it might be someone associated with Private Eye, if that helps at all.

And there is a rather nice Abram Games from 1967, which may well be a coach poster too.

The sale itself is on 21st and 22nd of July, which by my reckoning gives me just six weeks to work out how I am going to afford any or, ideally, all of this. Right now, I have no idea.