London Underground Poster Archives - Page 7 of 19

U-Turn (on the river)

As I am sure many of you will remember, when we debated the subject of reproduction posters, and London Transport reproductions in particular, I said something about how I really wouldn’t want to buy a poster with ‘This is a Reproduction’ stamped all over the bottom.

It turns out that I am wrong, because we’ve just bought two. Worse than that, we might even frame them. It’s all down to the quality of the illustrations though, and these are spectacularly great ones by John Burningham.

The originals are both from 1965 and were probably both reprinted in about 1971. Above is A Day On The River, but I like Winter even better than that.

While I am on the subject of John Burningham, can I also recommend his illustrated and very good autobiography. Not many artists or designers are able to write so fluently about the process of designing and making, so it is well worth the (slightly coffee-table) price. From this you can find out that designing posters for London Transport in the early 1960s was his first real leg-up to a career in illustration. This is his first ever poster, from 1961, courtesy of the London Transport Museum site .

Even though the posters are lovely, I’m still a bit surprised at our volte face. The only consolation is that we are in illustrious company, as Rennies have a copy of A Day on the River on sale on their website. Perhaps reproductions are the new vintage poster. Or perhaps just John Burningham reproductions are.

Stuff Stuff Stuffety Stuff

eBay

It’s time for a round-up of what’s for sale at the moment. I’ve been swerving this for a few days, mainly because there are bits on offer all over the place in a rather scattergun fashion. But bear with me and we will take a tour, starting with the Swann Galleries.

Unfortunately their new catalogue doesn’t have the stellar offerings of their last Modernist posters sale, and the British posters are spotted all the way through. In a way, this is a good thing, as it shows that they’re being taken seriously rather than tucked in a corner like some elderly aunt to be patronised. But it does make flicking through the catalogue much harder work than it might have been.

It also makes for some interesting juxtapositions. This English bathing beauty from 1955 is valued at a rather startling $700-1,000 (by someone who has clearly never experienced the reality of Ramsgate).

But just a few pages before is her American counterpart from 1960. Which does rather make me think that the Americans did some parts of ‘midcentury’ better than we did.

She’s also a bit less high-maintenance at $500-750.

For the same price as the Ramsgate bathing beauty you could instead have this rather fine Shell poster by Colin Statham, about whom I can find out nothing at all (except that someone of that name is very active in amateur dramatics in Berkshire).

I did learn that this design is apparently the only poster in this series with a background colour that isn’t neutral, so there you go.

But for me one of the most interesting posters on offer in the sale is also one of the least visually interesting.

My mind is on the subject of World War Two posters quite a bit at the moment, so you may not be as excited as I am. But it is worth thinking about, for two reasons. One is that it’s a reminder of the fact that design often wasn’t the main driver when these posters were produced. This comes as part of a lot of nine posters, which also include: Only Use Boiled Water; How to get Help After Air-Raid Damage; This Shelter is Not Gas Proof; You Can Get Water At; If You Have Lost Your Home; For Help and Information Go To; This is a Rest Centre. All of these must have been designed for immediate use in the aftermath of a raid, so their concern is being visible and legible, not being pretty. Each and every wartime poster had a purpose, and ‘good design’ was only used when it might help that purpose, it wasn’t their main reason for being.

It’s also a reminder of just how many posters were produced during the war, and that not only were the numbers vast, they are also pretty uncountable today. The Imperial War Museum Archive on VADS doesn’t seem to have a record of any of these nine, and I’ve never seen them reproduced anywhere else before. Which means that there are probably plenty of others which have disappeared entirely, and so a full record of every poster of the war will never be possible. So keep your eyes peeled, and you could perhaps hit the marketing jackpot with the next ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’. Although perhaps not with these posters.

Back on this side of the Atlantic, there are also a couple of railwayana auctions, at Talisman and Gteat Central Railwayana. While both have a reasonable selection of perfectly fine railway posters (although, as ever neither estimates nor dates), nothing is leaping out screaming ‘buy me!’. Although Great Central Railwayana do have this Studio Seven gem, which would probably do quite well in the Swann Auctions.

And this, which I am just amused by.

The catalogue tells me that it is ‘from the series Famous Public Schools on the LMS’ so there are more to collect should you feel the urge.

I can only ever bring myself to admire this Pat Keely London Transport poster from afar, rather than actually wanting to own it and have it on the wall.

At Talisman, as well as no estimates or dates, there aren’t even proper pictures, so you will just have to look to the bottom right here to see what I am going on about.

I rather like that, partly for the typography, but mainly because I cannot imagine the circumstances under which Weston Super Mare would be better still. Than borstal, perhaps, but that’s about it. It’s got a muddy estuary instead of sea, a tide that goes out half way to Wales and a prevailing wind that gets sand into each and every sandwich. I used to wonder why there were so many railway posters advertising it, until I realised that no one would go there otherwise.

And finally eBay, which has been a bit quiet recently, which might be down to the summer holiday lull beginning to kick in. Although MrSpencer007 would like you to pay the best part of ninety quid for this.

I, for one, am not biting.

A similar aura of optimism applies to the pricing of this Lowestoft poster too.

Cheerful, yes, but not £450 worth of cheerful I don’t think.

But there are more reasonable prices to be found, most notably with a seller called 2mkantiques, who has clearly found a whole treasure trove of posters somewhere, 93 to be precise. It’s a real mixed bag, with everything from Dutch bus posters to 1970s Sealink advertising, but there are some good ones in there, and mostly at reasonable prices.

I like both of these 1950s travel posters, for example, and they’re at £150 and £100 respectively.

Plus the seller will take offers, so you may even get them for less than that. There are also some National Savings posters, at slightly higher prices – this Norman Wilkinson is on offer for £250, for example.

But the real star exhibit, for me at least, is this, yours for £199 or thereabouts.

Now, what does that signature say? I could almost swear it reads Henrion. Anyone else got a thought on that? It has a pair, too, which is on for £225 even though it’s not quite as nice.

There have been a couple of other finds on the Bay too, but they haven’t made this post because we’ve bought them. Sorry about that. More on a few of those later in the week.

Recent Acquisitions

auctions, eBay

In the days when I used to be in the V&A, which is quite some time ago, each department used to have cases where they displayed recently bought objects, before they found their place in the main collection, with a small paper sign in which read Recent Acquisitions. A friend of mine got hold of one of these and stuck it on her fridge, which amused me a great deal at the time.

All of which is by way of saying that we’ve bought a few things recently (in fact, thanks to the wonder of modern phones, we managed to do most of this on holiday). These GPO posters are small, Demy I think, but each one perfectly formed.

Tom Eckersley vintage posters 1955 GPO
Tom Eckersley, 1955

Beaumont, can’t find a date

Frank Newbould, 1930s?

Although small daughter refuses to be quite persuaded that the image above is actually a telephone.

There’s also the Bloomsbury Sale, which was on Wednesday. I didn’t get time to preview it, what with being in France, but that’s also been handy because I didn’t want to point at this too hard.

It’s by Lewitt Him, and dates from 1938. I’d never seen it before, even though it is in the London Transport Museum Collection now I look. And I think we won it, although I haven’t definitely heard from Bloomsbury that we have yet. We better had, that’s all I’m saying.

There were a few other nice things in there, but the online catalogue seems to have disappeared already so I can’t tell you about then. More fun next week, though, when there will be some pictures of actual vintage posters on billboards for you, and rather good posters at that.

Buy, Buy, Sell, Buy

auctions, eBay

There are a lot of posters about at the moment; it’s only Monday morning and I’m exhausted just thinking about it. Not only have there just been the Christies and Onslows sales, but there’s also quite a bit coming up on eBay too. I’d like to sum it up in some kind of executive summary of the market at the moment, but however hard I try, this eludes me. So I’m afraid you’ll just have to bear with me as we sift through the evidence.

One feeling I have is that prices, and more importantly expected prices, are going up. Take these eBay items, for example. There’s a signed, recent, Tom Eckersley poster for £295, which has to be more than even a gallery would charge for it.

In an interesting take on eBay selling strategies, this was previously on offer for a £175 Buy It Now, but when it failed to sell, they relisted it and upped the price.

Even more excitable is the seller of this 1935 GPO Schools poster by John Armstrong, for sale for a rather steep $2,950 Buy It Now.

He is also accepting Best Offers, as he explains in rather breathless red text on his listing.

The highest offer of the 3 that I have received is $ 2,155 I will let it go to the next offer of $ 2,200.

While I know that this is a classic poster reproduced in all sorts of texts, I don’t actually like it very much and so I am able to resist this offer, or indeed pretty much any kind of offer which didn’t involve giving it to me for free.

These Shell posters, even though they are a full set of the highly-desirable Trees, by the highly-desirable SR Badmin, are surely up at the top end of the value range too at £350.

And I say this with some confidence, given that we have just got four of the Roads of Britain in this series for the grand sum of £15, including (I have said this before, and I will say it again) my favourite Shell educational poster ever, the Ridgeway by David Gentleman.

This coach poster, too, is probably also overpriced at £75 – although it’s very fashionably retro and so probably would go for much more than its £75 asking price in the right gallery.

Expensive doesn’t just apply to posters, either. This lovely little booklet with illustrations by Barbara Jones has a starting price of £90.

I begrudge this price a bit less though; it’s a rare book, published in just after the war and on that very contemporary subject of good design in the home. Having said all that, you can also find it online for just £60, so maybe it is a bit over-priced too.

The Christies auction didn’t come cheap either. These two posters were the stars of the show, both dramatically exceeding their estimates.

The Alexeieff above went for £34,850 (est. £15-20,000) while the McKnight Kauffer Underground poster sold for £27,500 (est. £8-12,000).

The Kauffer poster is particularly interesting, because a copy also turned up in the Swann Galleries auction a few weeks before, where it went for £20,580, so the price wasn’t just a flash in the pan (or even a flash from the fist).

As for the Christies’ auction as a whole, my initial reaction was that the prices seemed steep; but when I took a closer look, most sales were within the range of the estimates. What this means, I don’t know (and would love to have anyone else’s thoughts on the matter). My guess would be that some posters are getting more expensive, and that Christies are now, with their minimum lot policies, concentrating on these. There may also be psychology involved, though, too; if there’s nothing priced at £150 or even £250 in an auction, does it make the high prices seem more reasonable? To some people at least, if not me.

But fear not bargain hunters, because there are still cheap posters on eBay, even cheap underground posters. These ducks, for example, are starting at just £29.99, and are linen backed to boot.

They’re by Richard Barrett Talbot Kelly and date from 1948, while this 1923 MacDonald Gill London Transport map of Barrie’s Kensington Gardens is even cheaper at £25, although it hasn’t reached its reserve at that price, so may not be as cheap as it first appears.

Elsewhere – in the U.S. to be precise – this 1947 London Transport Central Line extension poster by Hans Schleger/Zero is perhaps better described as reasonable at £148 rather than cheap. But it is wonderful enough to justify the price.

Although if you do want a cheap Zero poster, that’s on offer as well; this British Railways museum poster from the early 1960s is a bit more crumpled, but then it is on with a starting price of only £2.99.

If that doesn’t tickle your fancy, perhaps you might like this Daphne Padden Post Office Savings Bank poster – one of my favourites – currently still at its starting price of £10.

Once again, eBay also offers me the opportunity of pointing out how badly designed most National Savings posters are. This is also a savings poster, and it has an owl on too, but that’s all it has in common with the one above.

It, however is priced at £49.99. I have nothing more to say on the matter.

All that remains is the Onslows sale, which seemed to be neither cheap nor expensive, so I’d be interested in hearing anyone else’s thoughts, or indeed about any bargains you may have bought. But it is worth remembering that they do take offers on unsold lots (until 18th June) so a second look at the online catalogue might prove worth your while.

Swiss eye

auctions, London Transport

I’ve mentioned Poster-Auctioneer before in passing – they’re a specialist poster auction house in Switzerland. And until now I thought they only sold Swiss posters (for Swiss people, etc). But either I hadn’t looked at their website properly, or they’ve expanded it, because now they have a poster shop with plenty of things for immediate sale.

There are still lots of posters of mountains, skiing and cheese, naturally, but a rather useful search function lets you filter out posters by subject. And should you select Public Suburban Traffic, you’ll come across something rather interesting, a set of more than forty pre-war London Transport posters.

Anonymous, 1938, €120 each

What makes them interesting is that what’s on offer here isn’t a collection of the usual suspects. Instead, these look like the pre-war output of London Transport selected with what I can only describe as a Swiss eye, one which is much more interested in photography and type than illustration or whimsy.

Anonymous, 1938, €120

The result is a very different version of London Transport’s output. There are plenty of posters here I’ve never seen before, even though each and every one of them is represented in the London Transport Museum Collection.

Anonymous, 1938, €90

While others only crop up very rarely.

Maurice Beck, 1931, €120

The Petrol Tax poster from this set did come up for sale at the Swann Galleries earlier this year, but Poster-Auctioneer have all three on offer.

There are also some interesting designers represented, like Richard Beck, with both halves of this pair poster up for sale.

Richard Beck, 1938, €230 each

Even better are these two posters by Milner Gray. These seem to be the only two posters he ever designed for London Transport, and both are being offered by Poster Auctioneer.

Shop Early vintage London Transport poster 1938 Milner Gray
Milner Gray, 1938, €120 each

Now the sharp-eyed of you will have noticed that the vast majority of these posters date from 1938. I can’t actually explain this, but I do have a vision of a Swiss designer coming over to Britain just before the war, and spending quite a lot of money at the London Transport Shop before he returned home.

Beath Timber exhibition vintage London Transport poster 1937
Beath, 1937, €180

But however this collection came together, it’s an interesting proof of the fact that you find what you are looking for. A British designer or design historian would argue that, even in London Transport, British modernism never quite happened. But to a Swiss eye, out and about in the capital in 1938, it was very much there, and he carried the proof back with him.

Eckersley Lombers, 1938, €120

This also makes the date even more intriguing. Perhaps a form of continental modernism was about to flower in Britain, only to be cut short by the war? It’s unprovable, but these posters certainly make the idea seem possible.

Of course, the collection is also not quite as didactic and tidy as I am making it seem. In addition to the photographic and typographical posters, there are also some pair posters from after the war, which are much more romantic. I particularly like this John Wood pair poster from 1950.

John Wood, 1950, €250

There’s more flamboyance than that too if you want it.

Denys Nichols, 1950, €240

Another shopping trip perhaps, a recognition that the world had changed after the war. Or perhaps the modernism had all but disappeared from the walls of the Underground. We’ll never know. But I’m very grateful to whoever did put together this collection of posters, because it’s allowed me to see British design in the late 1930s from the outside – and from a very different point of view.

When did you last see an auction?

auctions

So, spring is in the air and the auctions are springing up like dandelions on the lawn. Christies is tomorrow, as mentioned before, and in the meantime two more catalogues have popped up on the web, Onslows and Van Sabben, with auctions on the 18th May and 4th June respectively.

I’ll start with Onslows first, because it is a great soup of an auction and I don’t quite know what to think of it. All of the usual subjects – cruises, railways, travel posters – are represented as you’d expect, but with very few jumping out at me demanding to be either bought or written about. I quite like this Lander, partly because if the Isle of Man is in any way continental, I am an otter.

Eric Lander, 1960, est. £500-700

Our non-existent friend Ralph Mott is also represented with several posters, this being my favourite, mainly for the slower-moving world which it evokes.

Ralph Mott, n.d., est. £150-200

There are also pages – and I mean pages – of wartime propaganda posters from both world wars. Unfortunately, most of them are visual proof of the fact that most wartime posters were not masterpieces of design. And I can’t even find a single one which I really love, this is about as good as they get.

Anonymous, est. £100-150

But not all is doom and gloom if you wander through the catalogue. This Rex Whistler is battered, but still lovely through the creasing and tape.

Rex Whistler, 1930, est. £300-400.

Even better (if you’re me, at least) are a selection of post-war London Transport posters. Probably the most noteworthy is this Bawden.

Edward Bawden, 1936, est. £300-400

But there are other treasures too.

Abram Games, 1964, est. £200-300

Enid Marx, 1964, est. £150-200

Peter Robeson, 1956, est. £100-150.

I’ve always loved that last Robeson poster. Although it’s called ‘When did you last see your Velasquez?’ it’s much more about being contemporary than art historical; in fact it’s like the essence of the mid-1950s distilled onto a single poster. All of which means that, in my book at least, it’s a bit of a bargain at that estimate. But I’m likely to be wrong on that one.

There’s quite a lot of overlap between Onslows and Van Sabben too. Obviously they’ve both got a lot of foreign posters of various sorts, some of which are rather good.

Jean Colin, 1963, est. £250-300

Anonymous, est. £150-200

These are both from Onslows, but as you can imagine, Van Sabben has literally hundreds more.

Max Velthuys, est. €80

More surprising is the other thing they have in common, which is a selection of large format GPO posters by interesting artists. These two are in the Onslows sale:

Hans Schleger, 1942, est. £200-300

Manfred Reiss, 1948, ext. £200-250

While these three are from Van Sabben.

Beaumont, 1960 (?), est. €160

Rothholz, 1948, est. €280

Reiss, 1950, est €150

If only I were a GPO museum, then I’d go on a spending spree, as they’re probably my favourite things on offer. But there are a couple of other interesting items in Van Sabben too, like this pair of Reginald Mount posters.

Reginald Mount, 1950, est. €150

Reginald Mount, 1950, est. €180

The design of the latter one is almost good enough for me to overlook the fact that I am being addressed as Housewife again. I’m not sure if Mrs Housewife is better or worse.

Other than that, it’s the usual suspects here: a few war posters, a couple of railway posters, and, of course, a BOAC poster.

Abram Games, 1953, est. £500

I think they’re compulsory these days.

But for a small selection of posters (perhaps only 30 out of over a thousand) Van Sabben have managed to pull a few interesting ones out of the hat once again. Still don’t know if I’m actually going to buy anything though…