Posts - Page 92 of 96

Life (and design) During Wartime

auctions

Just because posters were produced at a time when some of the very best designers were working, it doesn’t mean that they were all great design, or even interesting. This thought was brought on by a collection of posters on sale in Lewes next week.

The idea – 20 lots of wartime and post-war HMSO posters – sounds wonderful. The reality is, sadly, rather less appealing. The vast majority of the posters are pictures of tanks, aeroplanes or people fighting. Dramatic, probably effective, but not for me. Even the home front ones are anonymous, and more social history than art:

(lot 591)

There are a collection of H.M. Batemans as well,

(lot 599)

But to my mind, the best posters are a set of anonymous recruiting posters for the ATS, which I’ve never seen before.

(lot 606)

which are a rather nice mix of photomontage and snappy type. If anyone has any info on the designer, do let me know; even the Imperial War Museum have them down as anonymous.

But I still don’t even like these enough to go to the trouble of putting an absentee bid in and then, somehow, getting them transported from Lewes to Crownfolio HQ.

However, they’re still a salutary reminder about the quality of graphic design in the war vs the quantity. I, certainly, have a tendency to imagine a bombed-out London plastered with one beautiful poster after another, all the work of Abram Games, Lewitt-Him or James Fitton. The reality, however, probably looked nothing like that, and most walls were covered with exhortations, pictures of planes, speeches from Churchill and rather average illustrations. The ones we cherish now were the exception, not the rule.

Still, some of them were great. In the course of researching the auction lots, I came across this, a Henrion I’d never seen before.

Now if that comes up for auction, even in the Orkneys, I’ll be making a serious bid.

Collect Posters Carefully

archives, designers

These thoughts are the result of what was quite literally fall out from my previous musings about poster sizes. When I was scanning Eckersley’s illustrations, his obituary (from The Times, August 18 1997) dropped out of Poster Design. And it told me something I didn’t know.

I’d always been aware of his being Tom Eckersley, O.B.E., but I had no idea that he’d got the honour in 1948, at the age of just 34. It was in recognition of his contribution to the war effort. Which looked like this.

And also this, amongst many, many others.

He was awarded the honour for all of his posters for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents – and possibly also for the fact that he designed all of these posters while at the same time drawing maps for the RAF as his day job. I find it really interesting – particularly in light of the current backlash against ‘Health and Safety’ – that this campaign was seen as such a central part of wartime propaganda, to the extent that Eckersley was, as far as I know, the only wartime poster designer to be honoured in this way. Although please do correct me if that’s wrong.

But I’m not just telling you this because it’s an interesting snippet. ROSPA, who commissioned all of these posters, have als0 put up an interesting archive of all of their World War Two Safety Posters, with images from Abram Games and Arnold Rothholz as well. So there are lots of lovely images for you to look at, and a bit of history as well. (If you want to follow the trail any further, it leads, with a certain inevitability, to Rennies who have many more posters on their site).

On the menu today

eBay

Now look what you’ve made me go and do. This, to start with.

And this.

All I did was write about Daphne Padden, and then post images of a few menus that Dorrit Dekk had designed for P&O. The next thing I knew, MrCrownfolio had pressed a few buttons on eBay, and these popped through the letterbox a few days later.

Both are from the same August 1958 cruise of the S.S. Chusan, and the food and entertainments listed are almost as evocative as the design. Anyone for Dancing to Relayed Music, or Housie Housie in the Lounge? Or how about some Consomée Tosca, or Sweetbreads Godard? So they are wonderful things, and a bit of a bargain at just £4.99 each.

But at the same time, I am utterly appalled. We can’t start collecting anything else, who knows where it will end up? In a house stacked with piles of old leaflets, tickets and newspapers and no room for us, probably. We are both natural collectors, and until now I’ve been feeling slightly smug about managing to restrict ourselves to just posters, which are at least either on the wall or not taking up much space. And now this. Ephemera. Help.

If I’m entirely honest, it isn’t the first one either. A while ago, MrCrownfolio bought this.

It’s a Tom Eckersley menu, from the Royal Designers for Industry Dinner in 1985. We’re doomed, there’s no escape. But we will go down in great style, eating Noisettes of Lamb Shrewsbury and Caramel and Orange Salambos. Anyone care to join us?

Mr Huveneers, I presume

designers

Unless you have studied GPO posters with a rather unnatural intensity, you probably wouldn’t know the name of Peter (or possibly Pieter) Huveneers. But it’s worth making his acquaintance. He designed a whole series of delightful posters for the Post Office throughout most of the 1950s.

The BPMA have about 20 of his designs catalogued, including this gem.

And he also worked for British Railways into the early 60s.

Until 1963, when the last piece of design I can track down is a British Railways poster in the National Railway Museum collection. And then he disappears.

Fast forward to 1968, when another designer called Pieter Huveneers sets up a design company in Australia. Now, if you’re Australian and of a certain age, Pieter Huveneers is a big name. He’s the down-under equivalent of Wim Crowel or Hans Schleger, a designer who shaped the fabric of everyday life.

Huveneers’ work is still written all over Australia. He designed the logos and identities for two of Australia’s national institutions, Australia Post and Telecom Australia when they were created in 1975.

an australian stamp

(The Australia Post logo, with its neatly incorporated post-horn is still in use, although slightly rejigged in recent years. Telecom Australia rebranded itself as Telstra in 1995).

He not only designed the logo but also created the name of the bank which emerged from Australia’s biggest ever bank merger in 1981, when the Commercial Bank of Australia and the Bank of New South Wales became something much more modern and international.

And completely rebranded one of Australia’s iconic breweries, Tooth – this is his logo design from 1981.

And that’s just what I’ve been able to find out about from the other side of the world, I’m sure there’s more as well.

The thing is, I have no way of proving that this is the same person. The dates add up, and the Australian Pieter Huveneers was born in c1926, which gives him plenty of time to be designing GPO posters before emigrating to Australia, and the chances of there being two of them in the design world at the same time have to be pretty slim anyway. But is it or not? I can’t say for sure.

But I seem to have reached the limits of what I can find out without being either a) Australian or b) within easy reach of the British Library. So if there are any Australian design historians out there who are able to tell me a bit more about him and his design studio, I’d really love to hear from them. As far as I can tell, he’s still alive too, so perhaps he might be able to answer the question of whether or not he designed those posters himself. Hope so.

Market failure?

auctions

At the end of last year, MrCrownfolio and I made some enquiries about selling some posters at Christies. We have done this before, although the combination of something being good enough quality and us wanting to get rid of it doesn’t come round that often. But, as will become apparent, it’s unlikely ever to happen again. Because the (very polite) reply from Christies was that they now had a minimum lot value of £800. Yes, that’s right, £800.

I couldn’t quite get my head round this, because it seemed so unlikely. Would Christies really want to turn away so many of the posters which have filled their recent sales, from railway posters like this,

(£375, Sept 2008)

which is a species of railway poster I rather like, probably because of the type. Or this classic Abram Games

(£375, June 2008)

So I contacted Nicolette Tompkinson, the head of their poster department, who confirmed that this their new policy.

…the general policy here at Christie’s for new consignments is to include posters that have a minimum lot value of £800. Our aim is put together higher quality sales with less lots as we feel that at £800+ we consistently sell a high percentage of lots at a good price.

I still find this both extraordinary, and a great shame. There are now a whole swathe of poster types which now won’t be sold at Christies, from the kitchier post-war railway posters such as this anonymous Clacton poster,

(£275, Sept 2007)

to post-war London Transport posters (and, indeed, a great many pre-war ones as well).

London Transport Bainbridge vintage poster (£250, Sept 2007)

And there are a number of designers – not only Abram Games, but also Royston Cooper,

(£375, June 2008)

and of course Tom Eckersley

(£264, Sept 2006)

who just won’t appear in their sales any more.

Now, you may be wondering, does this really matter? After all, there are other auctions where these posters can be bought and sold (if I were Patrick Bogue, say, I would be rubbing my hands with glee right now). But I think it does; not just because these are exactly the kind of posters I like and I don’t want to see them left out in the cold, but because I believe it will damage the market in two ways.

One is quite simply that I think fewer posters will now come to market, because they won’t fetch such high prices as they would have done at Christies. Nicolette Tompkinson seemed to suggest that their higher fees were putting off buyers anyway,

In addition, due to a commission rate of 15% and the minimum marketing fee of £40 it is also expensive to sell here at a lower level.

Personally, we’ve never found that too much of a problem. Most of the time the extra fees at Christies are more than cancelled out by a much higher hammer price, so the good posters are – or were – almost always worth putting into their sales rather than somewhere else, despite the costs involved.

But I think the Christies decision will do more than just depress the market financially. There is a sense in which a large auction house operating in this area acts to underwrite the market – these posters are perceived as being both more valuable and more collectable because they are sold at prestige auctions. Without those auctions happening – and without those visibly high prices – post-war graphics and posters are going to struggle for a while. It’s rather like buying a house in an ‘up-coming’ area; fine during the boom, but rather harder to sell in a recession.

But not all of this is Christies’ fault; to some degree they are just reflecting what is happening anyway. Going through their catalogues has made me realise just how much prices have dropped from the peak of a few years ago. Take this rather wonderful Hass poster,

That sold for £1,500 in September 2007, but just £375 two years later. And the cheaper one was in better condition too.

Plus it’s not even all doom and gloom for us either. As collectors, we could now afford things that would have been out of reach before (that Hass poster, for example). It’s just that the posters under the bed may not be our pension fund for a while yet.

One final note of cheer. Here’s an Eckersley for sale in a posh auction – Bloomsbury Auctions on 25th March. From the description, I’m pretty sure it is this,

from 1976, estimated at £100-£150. So life could be worse really.