Typewriter dream of elysian fields

Less eBay, more auctions today, which makes a change.  The main excitement, at least it is if you are me, is a pair of Graham Sutherland posters up for sale at Wooley and Wallis in Salisbury.  This is the catalogue image.

Graham Sutherland How Sweet I roamed London Transport poster 1936

From the text, it appears that the other poster on offer is this (image from the London Transport Museum site).

Graham Sutherland field to field London Transport poster 1936

While I am sure that the catalogue knows what it’s talking about, it’s nonetheless a bit odd, because both of these designs were originally conceived as London Transport pair posters.

London Transport how sweet I roamed pair poster 1936 Graham Sutherland

Graham Sutherland from field to field London Transport pair poster 1936

Given the choice, I think I’d rather have the two on offer.  Not that this opinion is in any way relevant, because the estimate is £2,500 to £3,500, a sum of money which is completely unaffordable if you are currently pouring all of your savings into restoring a knackered old building.

I have to say, though, that if we weren’t being so daft, I’d be tempted.  I don’t know why – after all we’ve never spent anything like that much on a poster before.  So then I doubt my motives for wanting these; is it because it is they are lovely posters, or is it because I like the status of owning not just any old poster, but a Graham Sutherland London Transport Poster.  Am I still in thrall to the idea of the artist even despite buying mass produced images?  Quite possibly.

All of which navel-gazing sent my mind back to the mahoosive Christies London Transport Sale, where the other great Graham Sutherland poster is on offer for £1,500-2,000.

Graham Sutherland London Transport poster 1936

Which I also love, but am also not going to buy, because we need carpets and that’s the end of it.  Except to say that I should probably return to Graham Sutherland’s posters on here one of these days.

Anyway, back to the matter at hand.  Lockdales, an auction house in Ipswich, have a handful of British Railways posters coming up in October.  They are actually quite to my taste, as they’re mostly post-war and just a little bit quirky.

British Railway poster, Broadstairs, The resort with a charm of its own
est. £150-250

British Railway poster, Frederick Griffin, Southend on Sea, Westcliff on Sea, leigh on Sea, Thorpe Bay, Shoeburyness
est. £150-250

Lune Valley 1950 poster Percy Drake Brookshaw
est. £100-150

The third one is by our old friend Percy Drake Brookshaw, and rather fine it is too.

I am mildly amused by this lot, which has been subject to some rather comprehensive cropping and so is described only as “town by an ocean”.

town by ocean auction lot British Railway poster, Alasdair Macfarlane

Shall we turn this into a parlour game?  Can anyone name that railway poster?  (I can’t).

To round this off, there are one or two things on eBay that are worth your time and attention, starting with this.

Derrick Sayer London Transport artwork

Which is a piece of artwork for a London Transport poster, by Derrick Sayer and dating from, so the listing says, the 1940s.

It doesn’t look as though it was ever produced, as there’s no trace of it in the London Transport Museum collection.  Mr Crownfolio says that it reminds him of this Schleger.

Hans Schleger 1937 Highway Code exhibition Charing Cross

I think he has a point there.  The colours also remind me of James Fitton’s work at about the same time.

James Fitton World War Two blackout poster London Transport

I could go on, but I won’t.

Finally, this.  A classic architectural work, with an early Tom Eckersley, well Eckersley Lombers cover to boot.

THE MODERN HOUSE IN ENGLAND Marcel Breuer WALTER GROPIUS Tecton cover Tom Eckersley

Currently at £12.50, but with four days to go, I think it will go higher.  And I have some more Eckersley for you in a week or so too.

That’s modernism, that was

This may not be the cause of great excitement for many of you, indeed it may not even be news, but the Journal of Design History is now freely accessible online.  Which has let me get hold of an article that I’ve been wanting to read for ages, John Hewitt on ‘The ‘Nature’ and ‘Art’ of Shell Advertising in the 1930s’.  Fortunately it turned out to be as interesting as I’d hoped.

Frank Dobson, vintage shell poster 1931
Frank Dobson, 1931

One idea in particular struck a chord, as it links in with the themes that I’ve been mulling over here recently.

By 1930 Shell had come to realise that any whole-hearted endorsement of modernisation was problematical.  The transformation of the environment, occasioned by increasing suburbanisation and expanding commerce and predicated on a dramatic expansion of the motor car industry intensified during the 1920s and 1930s provoking vigorous and sustained resistance from influential lobbies of middle class opinion.

All too soon it had become impossible to see the brave new modern world – as epitomised by the car – as wholly good.  Even worse, advertising itself was seen as a problem of modernity, as enamel signs and billboards sprouted.  So Shell’s advertising changed round about 1930, something which is often ascribed to the arrival of Jack Beddington at the company.  He was part of it, but as Hewitt points out, there was also an important cultural shift taking place.  Hewitt’s essay explores how Shell reconstructed its public image in terms of art and nature, making the threatening motor car seem much more part of a wholesome and quintessential British identity.

Which is undoubtedly true, but there is also another way of seeing it.  Because the change in their advertising was also a flight away from modernism.

Vic vintage shell poster quick starting pair 1930
Vic, 1930

Until Beddington’s arrival, Shell had primarily been selling its products on their technical qualities.  And the underlying language of that was very often modern.

Vintage Shell poster lubricating Tom Purvis 1928
Tom Purvis, 1928.

But when Jack Beddington arrived, he instituted a very different approach.  There was almost no direct selling of the qualities of the product; instead he tried to build up an image for the brand.  And this image was initially based on the English landscape and nature.

The clearest expression of this is in the ‘Quick Starting Pair’ posters.  Before 1930, these had used images of animals, but often treated in a very schematic way.

G S Brien, Quick Starting, chamois, 1929
G S Brien, 1929

But these were then replaced by much more naturalistic images.

Vintage Shell poster Kennedy north 1931
Kennedy North, 1931

As Hewitt points out, there is a tension between the technological idea and the imagery here which doesn’t necessarily make for successful advertising.

But it was the major landcape campaigns that Beddington, and indeed Shell posters in general, are most associated with.  These began with See Britain First on Shell.

Hal Woolf 1931 vintage Shell poster salcombe
Hal Woolf, Salcombe

Followed in turn by ‘You Can Be Sure of Shell’.

Merlyn Evans vintage shell poster 1936
Merlyn Evans, 1936

This is not only a very different kind of advertising, it is expressed in a very different visual language.  But it’s not simply a retreat back to traditional landscape painting.  This is still a very living idiom in the Britain of the 1930s, and the posters tap into the vein of British romanticism identified by Alexandra Harris and others before her.

Vintage Shell poster lord berners 1936
Lord Berners, 1936

Which is why I think this essay, and the changes it describes, are worth going into at such length.  Because this retreat from modernism doesn’t just happen in Shell posters.  I would argue that it is happening in many other places – and not just the graphic arts. Romantic Moderns contains a discussion of Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts which shows how modernist writing was shifting as well.

I find it hard to be surprised by this, though.  Living in Britain in the 1930s, between the Great Depression and the onset of war, it must have been almost impossible to maintain any faith in the endlessly improving effects of modernity.  The evidence against it was easy to see.  And if you don’t believe in modernity, perhaps the jagged edges of the machine age aren’t going to feel very comfortable either.

Of course, reality is always much more complicated.  But by looking at some of the exceptions within the Shell posters, it becomes possible to see how some of these complexities worked.  Because there were still modernist posters being commissioned – here’s an example from McKnight Kauffer in 1937.

McKnight Kauffer vintage shell poster 1937

Celebrating its achievements of this sleek new aeroplane is still, perhaps a safe place to use a modern visual vocabulary.  Even if only one was every produced in the end.  Other technical advertising was done in this style too.

McKNight Kauffer vintage shell poster 1936
McKnight Kauffer, 1936

But campaigns that could be construed as selling a technical advantage didn’t necessarily use modernism as the decade progressed.

Percy Drake Brookshaw, Summer Shell vintage poster 1933
Percy Drake Brookshaw, 1933

Jack Miller vintage shell summer shell poster 1936
Jack Miller, 1936

The other way in which Shell could be said to be using modernism was in its choice of artists like Graham Sutherland, Ben Nicholson, Paul Nash and Tristram Hillier.  But as Hewitt points out, these artists might be called modernist, but that wasn’t really the way they were being used by Shell.

Graham Sutherland Shell poster vintage 1932
Graham Sutherland, 1932

Nor was the use of modernist artists a means by which Shell could celebrate its identification with modern technology… They were involved in the campaigns that played down any references to the modern qualities of speed and power.

Ben Nicholson vintage shell poster 1938
Ben Nicholson, 1938

The visual language was hardly defiantly modern either; none of these posters were very likely to frighten the horses as they raced past on a Shell lorry.  The modern artists had moved on too.

Hewitt also points out that these artists were not in a majority.  For every poster extolling the modern charms of film stars in an equally modern style,

kathleen Mann vintage shell poster 1938
Cathleen Mann, 1938

there was at least one with a much more traditional point of view.

Cedric Morris Gardeners Prefer Shell vintage poster 1934
Cedric Morris, 1934

This is possibly another case where hindsight gives us the wrong view of a period.  The ‘modern’ Shell posters – particularly the ones by the modernist artists – are much more interesting and collectable for us now, so we tend to privilege them and make them seem more normal than perhaps they were at the time.  But in writing this I’ve been through the online images from the Shell Collection.  And what’s there is a very different set of posters to the ones that are normally reproduced, whether in a book or a Christies catalogue.  Sometimes the hunt for modernism can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

One final footnote.  Shell’s advertising did take on a much more modern tone again in the 1950s.

Vintage Shell poster John Castle 1952
John Castle, 1952

Machinery and technological progress had become not just acceptable, but worth celebrating, one way or another.

Terence Cuneo Vintage Shell poster 1952
Terence Cuneo, 1952.

Modernism was once again possible in the 1950s .  Which is a thought I will be coming back to again one day.