London Underground Poster Archives - Page 18 of 19

Pictures down the telephone line

archives

Today, dancing about architecture. Or at least its close relative, podcasting about posters.

Actually, I’m being a bit unfair here. What I’ve been listening to is historian Scott Anthony on the BPMA podcast about Stephen Tallents, the man who brought artists to the GPO poster and Night Mail to the nation. Although the lecture did still have slides, and yes, I couldn’t see them.

poster by Barnett Freedman commissioned under Tallent’s watch at the GPO

Nonetheless, this was a useful listen, not least as a reminder of just how huge and influential the GPO was in the inter-war years. The largest employer in Britain, with over quarter of a million employees, it had a monopoly of communications which is almost unimaginable today, including oversight of the BBC. So Tallents, as their head of public relations, had enormous influence to wield and a huge audience for his efforts.

McKnight Kauffer airmail vintage GPO poster
McKnight Kauffer Airmail Routes for GPO 1935

What fascinates me most is how much the great poster art of the pre and post war periods depended on the individual patronage of a few idiosyncratic individuals. This does not only mean Tallents – who first started using talented designers when he was at the Empire Marketing Board before joining the GPO.

Austin Cooper for Empire Marketing Board, 1933

Also following a remarkably similar track were characters such as Jack Beddington at Shell,

Graham Sutherland Swanage Shell poster
Graham Sutherland, Swanage for Shell

and of course Frank Pick at London Transport.

So why did they do it? It’s a question that I think is important, because their attitude lingered on well after the individuals themselves had left their jobs. Major companies and institutions employed great designers and artists to produce their publicity right up until the 1960s, simply because by then it was the done thing. So how, and why did it start?

Anthony believes that this is mostly the corporate expression of the age-old notion of patronage. Great designers and artists were employed because that’s what important people have always done; it’s just that, after the First World War, the important people happened to be companies and public institutions rather than dukes and kings. There is some truth in that. Nikolaus Pevsner said of Frank Pick that he was the “Lorenzo the Magnificent of our age”.

Man Ray London Transport vintage poster
Man Ray for London Transport

It’s almost possible to justify this as a logical business decision: great artists = great corporate image, which is how Anthony sees it. But I also think that there is more to it than that. In particular, there is a very particular belief in this period, associated with British modernism-lite, that design can be Good For You. The lower orders will be morally improved, or at very least will stop liking chintz and veneers and pictures of kittens, if we just expose them to what great art and design is. In its later incarnations, it brings us Utility furniture (the nation’s taste will be improved by good design because we won’t let them buy anything else) and tower blocks, which will make them happy people via the medium of modernist architecture. But before the war, its main expression was in the commissioning of posters.

Both Jack Beddington and Frank Pick were trying to create art galleries which, while making Shell and London Transport look like forward thinking and enlightened companies, would also enrich the cultural lives of the people who saw them.

BEn Nicholson for Shell vintage poster
Paul Nash for Shell

And as a result they both – unlike for example the railway companies – tended to commission artists at least as much as designers. Shell used Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, Duncan Grant and Ben Nicholson. While London Transport commissioned Man Ray as well as McKnight Kauffer. Even Stephen Tallents commissioned Vanessa Bell to produce a poster for the GPO (although it was never used)

Shell explicity referrred to their lorries which carried their posters on the sides as a travelling gallery, and as John Hewitt notes, they are displayed in a ‘frame’ of white space, with the text not allowed to encroach on the image, allowing viewers to see the design as an artwork as well as advertising.

Shell Lorry with poster billboard
Shell lorry with billboard, 1925

For London Transport, Pick was even more explicit. In 1935 he described the whole of London Transport as a work of modernist art.

…underneath all the commercial activities of the Board, underneath all its engineering and operation, there is the revelation and realisation of something which is in the nature of a work of art…It is in fact a conception of a metropolis as a centre of life, of civilisation, more intense, more eager, more vitalising than has ever so far obtained.

And how better to express that than in the modernist forms of McKnight Kauffer, for example?

Even the GPO was not immune. Anthony pointed out in the podcast that there was a Poster Advisory Group, set up by Tallents, which was there to ensure that the artworks were only of the highest quality. Its members were Kenneth Clark, art historian and general arbiter of taste, the art critic Clive Bell and Shell’s Jack Beddington (Kenneth Clark opened exhibitions of Shell posters for Beddington; the world of good taste was a small one). Now, this for me is a real give away about the purposes of these posters. This committee isn’t a group of people who are going to have an opinion about the commercial effectiveness of posters, they are simply there to make sure that they conforms to the highest possible standards of prevailing artistic merit. The GPO, being such a huge national institution, has a moral duty to improve the quality of Britain, and Kenneth Clark and co are going to make sure that they stick to the task. (I’d quite like, incidentally, to read the minutes of this august body. Perhaps I’ll turn into a historian and do that one day).

(This, by Theyre Lee Elliott was the first design they approved in 1935).

But now those attitudes have almost completely disappeared. We are too cynical to believe that good design, or indeed anything done by a corporation, can improve us. The only national institution which has a vestige of these attitudes remaining, is the BBC, which we still believe should do us good rather than make a profit. Whenever people talk about the BBC, though, these attitudes are always described, somewhat disparagingly, as Reithian. I think that’s a bit unfair on poor old Lord Reith. What Scott Anthony and all these posters have shown us is that the idea that great national institutions should improve our lives in some way, was all around between the wars. It’s just that Lord Reith’s ideas of how this should be done are pretty much the only ones which remain.

As if to demonstrate how much the ideas of what institutions should do for us have changed, an ad for the Post Office came up on Spotify while I was writing this. Twice. They’re giving away iTunes gift cards to coincide with stamps of great album covers. But the end line of the advertisement is “Win enough free music to annoy loads more people”. Need I say any more.

The next BPMA podcast, meanwhile, is Paul Rennie, talking about GPO posters. As someone who relishes a challenge, I’m rather looking forward to it.

Find me an artist. From 1953 please

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.

Guardian writer bien informée

Sitting on the dock of the eBay

eBay

End of the week already, and so time for a workmanlike round up of what’s floated to the surface on eBay recently.

Exhibit A is this Littlehampton poster from the States, which is a bit battered but not beyond the work of man to restore (for something which is, see below). Following on from yesterday’s thoughts, I wonder how it got to the States, and how many Americans holidayed in Littlehampton rather than the Hamptons as a result?

It’s by Studio 7 (whose work has recently started to cross my radar, does anyone know anything about them?) and dates from 1960 says the National Railway Museum. Here’s their copy looking quite nice.

And it’s filed in America under Transportation Collectables/British Airways, so might not get that much notice, should you be hoping for a bargain.

Next, a 1960s/1970s London Transport poster, which is not bad, although would be better for not being the 1973 reprint with added text.

I can’t better the eBay description:

This is an original 1973 copy of the famous poster by well-known industrial photographer Dr Heinz Zinram. First issued in 1965 and then re-issued in 1973 with the added slogan ” First published 8 years ago; still true today”, it shows three versions of a street scene; the first full of cars, then the people from those cars on the street and, finally, one Routemaster bus which has soaked up all 69 people.

Its message would do as well today as in 1965 and 1973. So perhaps posters don’t work that well after all.

And finally, proving that a) everything which has a named designer is not necessarily gold and b) people will try to sell absolutely anything on eBay, a Daphne Padden poster. Or at least some of one.

Now Daphne Padden is an under-rated designer, but that poster is not typical of her normally much less traditional style:

Unlike the BEA one, this is wonderful stuff, and Padden deserves more appreciation than she currently gets. If you want to see more of her graphic style, there’s a good collection of her work on Flickr and not really anywhere else. A set (quite possibly this set) came up on eBay a couple of years ago, and the more I look at these, the more I wish we’d bought at least one of them. Especially the one above with the cat. Ah well, next time.

Four posters in search of a story

posters

I’ve always been interested in the afterlife of objects – how things survive long enough to become collectibles or heirlooms or even national treasures. It’s generally a story of chance and – quite often – being so lost and overlooked that no one bothers to throw you away. It’s also a story that isn’t often told as part of design history; once an object has been created and made, that’s normally the end of it. But often what happens next is at least as interesting, and can also be very revealing about how we appreciate, or disregard, the objects around us.

So, following on from yesterday’s post about just how little survives, here are a few of our posters with the tales of how they made it through to the twenty-first century.

Tom Eckersley, Post Early for GPO, 1955, Crown Folio 15″ x 10″
Saved by a man who went into his local post office and asked them to keep for him all of the posters and publicity material that they had finished with. (I will write more about this one of these days as it’s worth a whole post in its own right.)

F H K Henrion, Changing of the Guard for London Transport, 1956, Double Royal 40″ x 25″
Kept by a tutor in graphic design who used it in his teaching.

Mount/Evans, Anti-Smoking poster for COI, 1965-ish, Double Crown 30″ x 20″
Bought at auction but I believe it came from the designers’ own archive.

ARP Poster, Edward McKnight Kauffer, 1938, Crown Folio 15″ x 10″
Found in the roof of a scout hut. The air rifle pellet holes had to be restored…

Patrick Bogue from Onslows also mentioned in passing that he once found original railway poster artwork being used as insulation in a loft space. Can anyone better that?