Hans Unger Archives - Page 5 of 5

Lucky Dip

other

As promised last week, it’s random image day – a whole heap of posters that I have discovered along the way but not managed to use in a post. All sizes, all shapes, every one a great piece of design.

Here’s a Mount/Evans for starters – it’s from the V&A collection and I’ve never seen it anywhere else.

It comes from their prints website (that is prints that they sell you, rather than the Prints and Drawings Department), which tells me it comes from 1960. One day I will rant about the impossibility of getting any kind of fix on what the V&A actually holds, but even describing what it does and doesn’t do is such a daunting task that it may take me a while.

This Reginald Mount (the third of a set which were up on eBay a while back) also comes from there.

And I can’t tell you a single thing about this (which, again, I’ve never seen before) because their system is so byzantine and strange that I now can’t find it again. But, is good.

Not only Reginald Mount, but Hans Unger would also like you to Keep Britain Tidy, although he is rather more anguished about it.

And yes, that is a photograph of a poster pinned to a piece of hessian. You’ve got to love the Design Council Slide Collection. As well as the seventies.

They also produced this pair of Eckersleys, which are a bit different to most of his work.

Not sure about the dates for these, the Design Council puts the first one at 1980, but it looks earlier than that, about the same period as the brochure cover. I’m also taking their dating with a pinch of salt, as they estimate the second one to be c1959-65 – despite the large black 1961 in the top right corner.

Meanwhile, back at the GPO, there are some very strange posters. This one, by Beaumont, for example.

Apparently this is from 1957, although it looks earlier to me. He was clearly saner in 1950 when he did this for them.

And finally, a random bit of early 60s kitch. They must have really loved that diving board at Weston Super Mare, I’ve seen it on so many posters.

Good, now I can tidy them all away. Only to start laying down some more, of course.

Posters, posters everywhere, but not a lot to buy

auctions

Well, it’s here. For the first time under the new rules (which are, as ranted about previously, a minimum lot value of £800) it’s the Christies May vintage poster auction. And, unsurprisingly, it’s not for me any more.

There are lots of cruise posters, some French posters, a fair smattering of Olympic posters, and lots more besides, but very little that I’d actually want to buy.

Perhaps the most interesting one for me is this Hans Unger Safari poster, mainly because I’ve never seen it before

This may also be true for Christies, because they don’t seem to have a date or a publisher for it. Anyone out there with any ideas?

There are also five lots of Lyons teashop prints, which you don’t often see, although I’m not sure whether this is because they don’t often come up, or because they more often make their appearances at Modern British Art sales. This 1947 one by William Scott is probably my favourite,

with Barnett Freedman a close second.

It’s worth noting that not even Barnett Freedman can make himself worth the minimum lot value, and for the estimate of £800-1,200 you get two Freedman prints for your teashop.

A few of the usual suspects are present, like these pair of McKnight Kauffers (estimates £1,000-£1,500 and £2,000-£3,000 respectively)

There is also this Bawden City of London Transport poster (estimate £700-£900)

Interestingly, this comes with six other London Transport posters when I would have thought that it would hold that value perfectly well by itself. I’d also be curious to know whether one of them is its pair poster, as this half is coming up more and more, but you never see the text side for sale. Perhaps I’d better ask Christies.

Further to yesterday’s post, there is also a David Gentleman pair poster,

For your £700-900, you also get its other half and two posters by the very under-rated Sheila Robinson, so a good helping of Englishness to be had there.

From the other side of the Channel, design-wise, this has also appeared.

I wonder if it was lured out by the Antiques Roadshow coverage. The estimate (£3,000-£5,000) is pretty much what they gave, so it will be interesting to see how that does.

In other news, the lot value restrictions haven’t entirely kept out the kitch as this

has an estimate of £600-800 despite being a bit grubby. I’ll be surprised.

And this Carvosso will probably go for at least its £800-£1,200 estimate for its curiosity/ephemera value.

While I admire its attempt to inject glamour into the roll-call of Manchester, Middlesborough, White City, I still don’t like it very much.

This, meanwhile, is just delightful.

It’s by D W Burley but also isn’t dated. But it’s still not £600-£800 worth of nice to me. So I shan’t be bidding.

This post is already far too long, but it’s also my duty to point out, as a grumpy under-bidder, that this Henrion went off on eBay yesterday for a mere £139.

One thing I really miss is knowing who has bought things. In the good old days of eBay, most of the time you’d be able to see who’d beaten you to a poster like this. But now – unless you’re selling it yourself – everyone has a cloak of invisibility which no computer wizardry can pull aside. And with Onslow’s now online rather than in the eccentric Festival-modern hall at Marble Arch, I can’t even go there and see for myself wh0’s won things. There’s no reason why I should know of course, but it’s still annoying.

Operator, I can’t find anything

archives

I’ve been meaning for a while to do a series of posts looking at the different archives that sit out there on the web, just waiting for you to rummage through their files of wonderful vintage posters. These resources have exploded in the last few years, and it’s now easy to find out incredible amounts about the history of posters without ever leaving your chair – the kind of research that would have taken years and many many train journeys in the past, even had it been possible at all. So, while the archives may not be making me fitter, I am certainly now both better off, and considerably more informed than I would otherwise have been. Hurrah for the internet.

My thoughts were that I’d start with one of the straightforwardly brilliant ones, like the London Transport Museum catalogue – a complete itemisation of every poster and artwork they own, image-led, designed for users rather than museum curators. But in fact, I find myself wanting to begin with two really quirky ones. So today’s is the BT archive, which until a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t even know existed.

Pieter Huveneers Telephone poster
Pieter Huveneers, c1950.

The archivist at the BPMA very kindly pointed me in their direction, because the two collections are separated siblings. When British Telecom was split off from the GPO in 1980, they got the posters about telephones and telegraphs, and the Post Office got the ones about letters. But the artists, the poster sizes and even the cataloguing systems are very much the same.

Zero, 1944, TCB 319/PRD 375

That, sadly, is where the resemblance ends. The BPMA catalogue interface is lovely; it’s reasonably intuitive, I can find what I am looking for with some confidence, and all of the pictorial material is illustrated. The BT catalogue is, if I am entirely honest, a pig. The search logic follows its own rules, there is a wierd link called “ContextRef” which throws up an apparently random list of related material (which then defaults to the search page if you click on anything), and, worst of all, only about 10% of the material is illustrated. What’s particularly annoying about that is that, in researching this, I’ve found a company who claim to have had the contract to digitise the entire BT archives. So where have all these pictures gone then? Although, on the plus side, I did find this 1948 Eckersley on their blog, and I swear I’ve never seen it before (if you have, please do say in the contact box below).

But, as you can see, I have spent rather longer than I intended sifting through page after page of slightly dry records (I don’t, I have to say, like reading catalogue numbers) in search of the few illustrations that do exist. Because the few that are there are wonderful. This wartime Henrion is particularly wierd – I’d like to find out more about him, some of the images are really quite disconcerting.

Although this one, from 1951, is quite benign.

Then, after the best part of an evening reading ContextRef numbers and swearing, I found out how to buck the system. Some, and quite possibly all the images are available through the BT image sales website. Which is organised by picture, and theme, making finding images less of a needle in a haystack hunt.

Reiss telephone less vintage gpo poster
Reiss, 1945

There are disadvantages, like the fact that there are rather more pictures of trimphones and Busby than there are posters, and the images are watermarked.. But it does at least, in the advertising and wartime sections, give you a rough overview of what kind of posters the GPO was producing and whether or not you might want to look at some more.

This isn’t the first time I’ve used the image sales get round; for a long time, the only way to find out what posters the National Railway Museum held was to go via the Science and Society website. The NRM now do have a searchable online catalogue (of a railway buff kind) which is better than the slightly random selection that Science and Society used to dole out. But if you’re searching an archive through image sales (do you hear me V&A as well?) it’s a sign that they could, possibly, do more towards making them available on the web.

Moan over. So here’s one last nice poster to cheer ourselves up, a faultless Unger from 1951. Pip pip.

Find me an artist. From 1953 please

Art for all

auctions

Tracking down a bargain is hard work these days. There aren’t many to be found at Onslows any more, and even on eBay, something has to be pretty well hidden not to make good money. So pretty much the only pleasure left are the local auctions.

For example this picture and description in Battle:

E R BARTELT London Transport poster print Circa. 1960s, and MENGUY, Colour lithograph poster print, (2), unframed.

also hid this 1961 gem:

Yours for £45, which isn’t bad. And if anyone knows anything about Mr Bartelt, please let me know, as I don’t. (The sale also had a smattering of original railway poster artwork, but it’s hard to get worked up about that at the best of times, and especially not after the art-fest that was Morphets day two.)

There on the other hand, not everything that is hidden turns out to be treasure.

This listing in Essex:

A 1966 Underground poster, by Hans Hunger
30 to 50 (GBP)

(I make no comment)

Could have been one of these two:

Mmm, lovely John Nash architecture. I got quite excited for about ten minutes.

But what was on offer was this.

Still went for £42 though, despite the nibbled edges and unprepossessing frame, which goes to show something, even if I don’t know quite what. Does anyone have any views on what Unger is worth? I rather like the late 50s and 60s underground posters (with the exception above), but perhaps that’s just me.

But of course the real lesson from all this is that, thanks to internet listing and on-line bidding, because we can find these things , everyone else can too. So soon there won’t be any bargains at all. Then what shall I do?