London Underground Poster Archives - Page 12 of 19

That’s Shell, that was

eBay

I really wish I hadn’t started this post now. It was meant to be a simple one about stuff on eBay, and now it’s gone and turned into a mystery.

The beginning was this poster, which ended two days ago. Along with a confession.

Which is that I didn’t actually mention it while it was on sale, on the off-chance that it went un-noticed and we could pick it up for a pittance. Some chance – six bidders and twenty bids pushed it up to £412. I almost wish that we’d gone that high.

So, piqued, I started investigating Denis Constanduros. It turns out that he also did this rather lovely rendering of Llanthony Abbey (one of my favourite places anyway) for Shell.

As well as this Farmers Prefer Shell poster too. Which, although very pretty, I find a bit odd because looks as though someone’s just being eaten by the machinery.

But that’s about it. His only artistic remains seem to be those three Shell posters, all probably pre-war. So what’s the problem, you say?

Well there’s also a Denis Constanduros who wrote a 1940s radio serial called ‘At the Luscombes’ about West Country village life (by coincidence, set no more than ten or so miles from here, in a place I drive through quite regularly). Who then – unless there’s a third Denis Constanduros which I have to say seems pretty unlikely – worked throughout the 1960s and 70s on adapting classic books for television, particularly Jane Austen. That Denis Constanduros died in 1978. But is it all the same one? Did he just do a few posters and then go off into writing, in the style of an earlier Patrick Tilley? I do not have the foggiest idea, the internet is just confusing me and the Shell Poster Book says nothing at all. Can anyone else shed any light?

I’m bothered not just because it’s not making sense and so needs sorting out, but also because these three posters are all really rather good. They’re very much of their late-1930s period, but in a good way, with echoes of Ravilious in the style and colours. And also in the subject matter of course; Ravilious wasn’t just a painter of chalk hills, but also drew the Long Man himself too.

So it seems a pity that Constanduros never painted much more than his Shell posters. But then, if it was him who went on to write ‘At the Luscombes” and adapt classic novels for television, his journey was very much that of his times. Before the war, the poster was king. But afterwards, the new, shiny, exciting broadcast media took all the glory; if you had the talent for it, who wouldn’t have made the switch. Posters were no longer the place for a smart young man to be any more, there were new and more exciting furrows to plough.

One final note, and that’s the price. Its not remarkable for itself – it’s a fine poster and well worth the money. But it is remarkable for having been achieved where it was – I can’t remember having seen a poster match the price it would have reached at a specialist poster auction on eBay before. Not that many of that quality turn up, but still, it’s an interesting precedent. (I can’t be bothered to do the maths, but I wonder how the eBay selling fees compare to Christies charges. Not that well, I should have thought…)

And, having said that these things don’t turn up very often, there in fact a couple more classics out there right now. This Henrion,

And this John Bainbridge too.

They’re both from the same seller, and it will be interesting to see how they go.

The Bainbridge, meanwhile, is also being offered by Sotherans at the moment. for £895. If eBay can scale those heights, that really would be a turn up for the books.

Put it there

other

What do these four posters have in common?

John Burningham for London Transport vintage poster autumn
John Burningham, London Transport, 1961

Andre Amstutz Camping Coaches poster British Railways
Andre Amstutz, British Railways, 1956

Royal Blue Daphne Padden Coach Poster c1957
Daphne Padden, Royal Blue Coaches, c. 1957

McKnight Kauffer for Shell 1934
Edward McKnight Kauffer, Shell, 1934

Well, three out of the four of them are on the walls here, but you’re not really expected to know that. Perhaps more to the point is that they represent four out of the five areas of ‘collectable’ posters: railways, London Underground, Shell and coach* posters (the fifth for me would be World War Two posters, for what it’s worth).

*This may be wishful thinking on my part, but we do seem to have quite a lot of them now (thanks to Malcolm Guest, mainly) and so they are at very least collectable by us. Anyone else?

But those four areas also share something more than just being collectable. In each case the companies they are advertising owned the hoardings that the posters went on.

That’s reasonably obvious for the bus, tube and train stations – but Shell posters were also designed to be displayed on the vans which delivered petrol to the garages.

Now set down like that it doesn’t seem like so much of a blinding revelation. But it isn’t, as far as I know, something which has been much commented on. And yet it had a big impact on their posters.

The most obvious example is that all of these companies had a much greater incentive to produce posters than anyone else. Not only was this in effect a subsidised form of advertising for them, but they also needed to churn them out in order to fill up spaces when they hadn’t sold enough commercial advertising.

Here’s Enfield West Station in 1934, with a McKnight Kauffer poster for Eno’s Salts clearly visible on the hoardings.

They also continued to produce posters in great numbers later on, when the poster had ceased to be the main medium for advertising, because the spaces were still there and still needed filling.

In addition, there may have been more reason for the companies to produce ‘artistic’ and possibly also more subtle posters, because this will have a very direct effect on the station environment. Although this probably worried Frank Pick more than it did the owners of Victoria Coach Station.

I’ve also read an interesting suggestion that in the early days, London Underground commissioned lots of posters of wide open spaces to counteract the perceived claustrophobia of the tube, but I don’t think there’s any proof of that.

Burnham Beeches walter spradbury 1912
Burnham Beeches, Walter Spradbury 1912

Now originally this was going to be my only point, that all of these people owned their hoardings and so had to invest more in posters and poster design than other companies, which in turn may be one reason why their posters are collectable. And that this hadn’t really been noted until now.

But then I found a really interesting article by David Watts (insert Jam or Kinks record into your head here as you wish) about pre-war depictions of Yorkshire in railway posters. It’s an exemplary look at how posters worked and were consumed, rather than just what they looked like, and backed up by a ton of research. The world of posters could do with a lot more of this kind of rigorousness (not that I’m volunteering to read 200 volumes of railway company internal correspondence, you understand).

One of his points is that the context of railway posters is all-important. They didn’t need to have pictures of trains on, because they were posted up in stations. The fact that they were advertising railway travel rather than just the location pictured could be asssumed.

Woodhall Spa vintage railway poster
Andrew Johnson, no date

The same is true of London Transport posters. They can just say Go to Uxbridge.

Uxbridge London Transport poster Charles Paine, 1921
Charles Paine, 1921

That you’d use the underground to do so is implicit in the fact that the poster is displayed at a tube station.

But, as Watts points out, this contextualisation of the posters has other implications.

…omitting any visual reference to rail travel allowed posters to be detached easily from their ‘mundane commercial purpose’.

So the companies, as I’ve mentioned before, could promote their posters as examples of good design for the masses, and even as fine art, in part because they didn’t need to say Go By Train in large letters at the bottom.

Now Watts argues that this made railway posters at least a rather poor form of advertising. And he does put forward some evidence that the train companies themselves thought this way by the early to mid 1930s too. Images of trains, or at least the idea of train travel did become more prominent after then – as in the Tom Purvis that is coming up at Christies next month.

But he also says – and I think that this is entirely right – that the fact that the posters were semi-detached from their commercial purposes is one of the factors that has made them so collectable. They exist in a limbo between fine art and outright commercialism, and are so more appealing than an advertisement for Eno’s Fruit Salts or Gilette Razors.

Although it is worth remembering that it’s only because the companies were promoting them as ‘art’ that these posters are available to collect at all. Shell, Underground and railway posters were all available for sale to the public when they were first produced, so they do survive in attics and collections, while the most commercial billboard posters weren’t and so aren’t. (I’ve mentioned this in passing before, but really ought to pull together all the sources on this one day, because it’s not said often enough. Even here.)

But I think there’s also another way in which the context affected railway posters in particular (although the same is probably also true of London Transport and coach posters to some degree as well). Watts points out how much the railway posters are selling an image of ‘deep’ England, by which he means an archaic, un-modernised and highly rural vision of the countryside. Now whenever this vision is called up at this time, it is almost always intended as a direct contrast to the modernity, ribbon development and speed of the 1920s and 30s.

Edwin Byatt Vintage railway poster 1940
Edwin Byatt, 1940

But in the railway station, that contrast is always there anyway. Most of these poster would have been displayed in an urban setting, and even where they were put up at local stations, there was the machinery and bustle of the railway itself. So the posters are also using their context to suggest that there is an alternative, an escape. And that’s something else that they don’t need to spell out in words at the bottom.

Right to copy?

eBay

We’re all about questions today on Quad Royal. Or rather, one question in particular: just how much of what is sold in the poster department of eBay is in fact legal?

The reason I’m asking is that, I was playing with the eBay app on the iPad, and so stumbled back into their bottomless pit of poster reproductions. Normally there’s a whole set of clever filters and searches (operated and maintained by Mr Crownfolio) which means that I don’t even notice that these items exist. But on the iPad, none of this is set up, and so an idle search for ‘vintage poster’ reminded me of the sheer volume of prints, giclee prints and A3 photocopies that are out there should you want them.

They range from reasonable quality,

to ones where even the seller isn’t convinced about the reproduction.

These posters are meant to be affordable reproductions of vintage posters that are rare and hard to acquire elsewhere. There are more expensive and higher quality prints out there. Our posters look great on the wall but may not stand up to a thorough examination. I fully admit the small print may be blurred and slight pixelation may occur on certain prints. These are fun items, not works of art.

Despite that write-up, he is still selling them. By the hundreds every month, judging from his feedback.

But I’m not asking philosophical questions about the relative values of reproductions versus originals this time. I’m just wondering how legal these are?

The basics of copyright are quite simple, that if an artist died after 1945, their work is protected for 70 years after their death. Which means that if a seller is selling a print of a 1950s railway poster (for £4.99, printed on a photocopier or bubblejet printer), there is a reasonable chance that they are infringing copyright somewhere along the way. The example above, incidentally, is by Jack Merriott, who died in 1968).

But what happens after that? Do you need to be the legal owner of a piece to have the right to reproduce it? Let’s take this 1923 poster by Grainger Johnson as an example.

No one seems to know much about him and his biography, so we will be generous and assume it is out of copyright. Does that then make it fair game for the eBay copyists? Or do they need to own a copy of the poster in order to have the right to reproduce it? I don’t know, and I would like to.

The next question is whether the nature of a commercial contract changes copyright too? (This link seems to suggest it does). So if a poster is commissioned by Shell, or London Transport or British Railways, do they still own the rights over the image? And for how long – for the same 70 years as the artist or until the company ceases to exist?

In other words, can these reproduce this 1930 Charles Burton as much as they like on their bubblejet printer, or should London Transport be consulting a lawyer?

Finally, is this also true of Crown Copyright, in particular where this applies to the huge number of World War Two posters which are being reproduced?

Questions, questions. But can anyone out there help me answer them?

Going Underground

auctions

So, the Christies auction. Which is coming up on 5th November.

I do have to admit that I was a bit hard on it last week when I said that it didn’t containg anything I was interested in. This is not true, it just doesn’t have anything I can afford.

Austin Cooper 1933 London Transport Poster
Austin Cooper, 1933, est £800-1,200*

I think my cynicism might have been caused by Christies’ brand new ‘cool wall’ technology, which does let you browse through whole swathes of an auction at once (screenshot below). It moves and tilts and does all sorts of other fancy things too that I can’t show on here.

All of which has the side-effect of reducing the posters to small coloured blobs which are quite easy to dismiss. But I now have a PDF of the catalogue, which means that I like it a great deal more.

Picadilly express McKnight Kauffer London Transport poster 1932
McKnight Kauffer, 1932, est £600-800

What I like most is the first hundred lots or so. These are a stunning collection of pre-war London Transport posters, which all come, apparently, from one collection.

Vintage London Transport poster Betty Swanwick 1936
Betty Swanwick, 1936, est £600-800*

Lucky them, because it’s an incredible selection. I can hardly pick out my favourites. But I rather like the type on the Pears boats below.

Charles Pears London Transport poster 1935
Charles Pears, 1935, est £600-800

While this is just fantastic in every which way: subject, image, title and general un-Britishness.

Vladmir Polunin 1934 London Transport poster
Vladmir Polunin, 1934, est £700-900*

What’s interesting (if you’re me, at least) is that I had several of these posters on my wall when I was a student – only as postcards mind you.

Alan Rodgers London Transport poster 1930
Alan Rogers, 1930, est £600-800*

Frederick Manner, 1929, est £800-£1,200

Annie Fletcher, 1926, est £1,500-2,000

But I don’t think there has ever been a time when I could have afforded them (or indeed anything else nice from the period) so I ended up collecting, and interested in, post-war design. It goes to show how much taste is formed by necessity as much as pure aesthetic appreciation.

I shall also, have to mourn, once more, that I never bought one of this pair when it was for sale for considerably less than that at Rennies.

Edward Wadsworth London Transport pair poster 1936
Edward Wadsworth, 1936, est £1,00o-£1,500

It is also my duty to point out that there are not one but two rather good Edward Bawdens up for sale too, should you have a couple of thousand pound burning a hole in your pocket.

Edward Bawden London Transport poster 1936
Edward Bawden, 1936, est £800-1,200

Edward Bawden, 1936, est £600-800

Other than the swathes of London Transport joy, there are some railway posters, which are generally the usual suspects, apart from this Tom Purvis, from a series that I have always rather liked.

Tom Purvis 193o LNER poster
Tom Purvis, 1930, est £600-800

And this train-nerdy one which looks like a vision of the future rather than anything to do with British Railways. Does anyone know if it ever actually ran? And can I go on it?

Then there is the usual miscellany of Mucha, foreign travel and other odds and ends, of which these two Herbert Bayers are probably the most interesting.

Herbert Bayer 1930 Exhibition poster
Herbert Bayer, 1930, est £1,000-£1,500

Herbert Bayer, 1953, est £1,000-£1,500

Despite all of these wonderful things, I am nonetheless still going to complain. And, as usual, my complaint is about Christies’ minimum lot price. It’s supposed to be £800, although given the number of posters estimated at £600-800, they’ve clearly softened their line a bit these day.

It has two rather unfortunate effects. One is that there is very little post-war design about at all – and what there is ain’t British. Apart from the Herbert Bayer above, there are a few kitschy railway posters and then these two rather fabulous American posters by Stan Galli from 1955 and 1960.

But that’s your lot, and I, for one, am disappointed.

The other, and perhaps more serious one, is that there are far too many multiple lots. For example, the Alan Power Speed poster above, also comes with “two posters by T. Eckersley and E. Lombers”. Eh? Surely these are things of value in their own right? And that’s not the only one – Electricity Supercedes St Christopher comes with six, count them, six other London Transport posters. While this fabulous Herry Perry comes with four.

Herry Perry, London Transport poster 1930
Herry Perry, 1930 est £700-900

I’ve asterisked all the ones which are parts of multiple lots, just so you can see precisely how many there are.

Now, why does this annoy me? One reason is that there are tons of posters in this catalogue that I just can’t look at. Being based in the sticks, I can’t just wander down to South Kensington and take a look at the other parts of the lots. Yes, I could interrogate someone at Christies and ask for pictures of all of them (I have their name, and I may just do that), but it rather takes the point out of there being a catalogue. Furthermore, it seems rather a retrograde step. One of the great things about the internet is that auctions not only all over Britain but internationally too have become available to everyone. You no longer need to be there to see what is on offer, and to bid. But the Christies catalogue takes some of that away from me, and I think it’s a shame.

Perhaps even more problematic, though, is that multiple lots make it harder to value individual posters. When the Alan Power is sold, will its value be for itself alone, or for the two Eckersley/Lombers which come with it? How shall we tell what share of the worth comes to them – or perhaps they will be bought by an Eckersley collector who will sell the Power on elsewhere. Then who can tell what the value of anything is? Not me, that’s for certain.

How to get there

auctions

It’s auction time again. Or, as an email I received this week would have it, Reminder Poster Auctioneer.

“We are pleased to offer these posters at call prices far below their value.” they go on to say. ” Don’t hesitate, come and discover for yourself – we are convinced that everybody will find what they are looking for.”

Sadly, we probably won’t though, because they are trying to entice us to bid at a Swiss auction, Swiss not only in the sense of being held in Zurich, but also in that it is almost entirely comprised of Swiss posters. Hundreds of them.

There are some nice things, like the Emil Hotz and Wolfgang Hausaman above, but nothing really to detain us. Except of course, being British, a poster that says Pschitt.

It shouldn’t be funny, really, but it is.

More locally, though, Cameo Auctions are having a travel, advertising, railway and everything but the kitchen sink auction next week. And in amongst a soup of Olympics and Austrian travel posters are a couple of real gems. This Zero from 1947 is my favourite.

But for a real modernist design classic, you couldn’t do much better than this – McKnight Kauffer at the peak of his powers in 1922.

It has an estimate of £3-5000 though, so I probably won’t be bidding on it.

If that’s a bit too painful for your purse there are also a range of London Transport oddities for a more reasonable price (mostly under £100). This 1962 poster by J E Kashdan is probably my favourite.

But there are also these three ‘How to Get There posters’ from the same period.

The first two are by Victoria Davidson, the last by Hans Unger.

Plus this rather over-informative British Railways poster on the subject of freight, by Blake.

But what really grabbed my attention was the close-up of the background. They really should release that as wall-paper.

As if that wasn’t enough, Christies have also released the catalogue for their November poster auction. At first glance, it looks as though the new higher minimum lot price has excluded almost anything that I might be interested in. But I’ll take a proper look at it over the weekend and report back next week.

1962 and all that

posters

Our subject today is this, which arrived in the post the other day.

It’s a book which does what it says on the cover. Posters, lots of them. And most of them from 1960 or 1961. Can’t argue with that.

Unfortunately, the vast majority are reproduced in black and white. The only artists to earn some colour coverage for Britain are Ronald Searle and Hans Unger.

(The Unger is a poster for coach travel, but you’d be hard pressed to guess that as there is no text in the reproduction at all.)

Sadly, most of the rest of the pictures are not only monochrome, but also small; I’ve found better images where I can but, as you will see, this hasn’t always been possible..

Now I do like these kind of annuals, and not simply because they’re a lovely wallow in a golden past of poster design. It can also be thought-provoking to see a cross-section through time like this. For a start, you get a good overview of where design was.

And 1962 turns out to have been quite an interesting time; the whimsy of the mid to late 1950s hadn’t quite departed yet, but the tide of sans-serif modernism was definitely on the rise. Which means that the Ronald Searle illustration above was paired with these three Alan Fletcher designs on the opposite page.

And London Transport could win commendations for this,

as well as this – which was, incidentally, produced by an agency, S.H. Benson Ltd, rather than a designer.

The times they are indeed a-changin’.

But there’s another way in which this selection is worth our attention; the posters included are not simply an archaeological sample of posters past, they’re also a picture of what 1962 thought was important then. Which isn’t always what you might expect now.

There are some things on which past and present do agree. London Transport posters are good – these two are by Dorrit Dekk and G.B. Karo.

In total, over a fifth of the posters shown were designed for London Transport, which is an impressive proportion. But just to prove that posterity (or archival survival) doesn’t always get it right, there are even more coach posters than there are LT exhibits (by one), including these two Royston Coopers.

The same is true of the designers: Abram Games, Hans Unger, FHK Henrion and Tom Eckersley are also all, unsurprisingly, feted.

Abram Games for London Transport

Hans Unger for GPO

But then there are a few designers included that might not be the first to spring into your mind today. 1962 really liked four of these coach posters by Christopher Hill.

His stuff doesn’t seem to come up much these days(apart from at Morphets, of course, what didn’t) but these two are both available at Fears and Kahn for the right kind of money.

I’ve never heard of Donald Smith before at all, but he has five posters in the book in all, including these three very delightful posters for the Post Office Savings Bank below. (Where is the Post Office Savings Bank archive, does anyone know?)

But most mysterious of all was Barrie Bates. He had four posters included, and they’re all very striking.

So why had he not turned up elsewhere? It transpires that there was a very good reason for this. Because in 1962, he became someone else altogether.

When he came to the end of his graphics course at the Royal College of Art, Barrie Bates bleached his hair and eyebrows in order to become Billy Apple, conceptual and pop artist extraordinaire.

This is American Supermarket, the 1964 New York show, a landmark Pop Art exhibition. With exhibits by, amongst others, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselmann, Jasper Johns and one Billy Apple.

Apple/Evans was working for Madison Avenue advertising agents at the same time, which rather pleases me, as he was eliding the difference between product and art even more than the exhibition might have suggested. And it’s also good to know, given how good his 1962 work was, that he hadn’t given up on graphics altogether.

P.S. You’ll be pleased to know that Billy Apple is still working as an artist in Auckland, New Zealand, and there is plenty more information about him and his work out there if you’re interested.