Shell poster Archives - Page 4 of 5

A shilling life

designers

I was going to write at length about Barbara Jones this week, but I have a sore throat and no childcare, so it will have to wait.

Instead, either as compensation or to whet your appetite, have this.

The Shell Shilling Guide to Berkshire, cover design by Barbara Jones.

It’s easy to think of the various Shell County artworks as having been produced entirely for the purposes of posters (particularly should you happen to write a blog about posters). But the illustrations and text were also advertisements and, of course, these rather lovely glove-box sized guides. Here’s the whole thing across the front and back (although the artworks are cropped top and bottom to fit them onto the guides).

I am particularly liking the pig.

According to the guides themselves, the advertisements came first. But in some ways these little guides, sold in petrol stations and designed to be used rather than just collected on a bookshelf, are the most satisfying. Each Shilling Guide manages to cram in a short essay, a map, a list of stately homes and other sites open to the public, a gazetteer of some of the county’s chief places and a bibliography into just twenty pages, along with some evocative photographs.

I’ve never thought of Berkshire as bleak before, but I may have to change my view.

And that’s what I love most about these guides. They’re not written by a committee; they’re not interested in received opinion. Instead they point out modern factories, rare flowers, folklore and literary references with equal abandon, not just describing places but making them seem more interesting. They don’t insult your intelligence (imagine gettting a Further Reading list today), and they are fascinated by local distinctiveness, whether that’s in geology, buildings, traditions, or just the kind of people who live in a county.

Of course, they do owe a lot to the larger Shell Guides, but I think their eccentricity is even more radical for being available for just a shilling over the counter in villages and towns all over Britain.

Here are a few more, by Keith Grant, John Nash and David Gentleman respectively. Imagine if modern guidebooks came with covers as good as this.

If you want to know more, there is a short overview of the Shilling Guides here and an interesting essay on the motivations behind Shell Guides generally here.

But perhaps the best news of all is that these are really affordable collectables, going for between £1-4 on eBay, a bit more at a second-hand bookshop. Why on earth don’t I have all 48?

Mr Benjamin, is this poster a copy?

eBay, posters

Exhibits A and B for today’s argument come from eBay.

This is a London Transport poster by Abram Games from 1968.

Except it also isn’t. Here’s the description from the listing itself.

“Sightsee London” by Abram Games 1968. This is an authentic LT poster printed by Sir Joseph Causton & Sons in 1971 for sale in the LT shop and carries the line “this is a reproduction of a poster designed for London Transport” – it is not a recent reprint.

So, I don’t want to buy it because it says all over the bottom that it’s a reprint. An old reprint, true, almost as old as the original poster, but still a copy.

There’s another one too, a rather natty bit of swinging 60s design.

And I’m not going to buy that one either, for just the same reason.

But why should this matter? It’s still an old poster. Come to that, why don’t I buy a giclee print of whatever poster I fancy instead of spending time and money in pursuit of the originals?

Mr Crownfolio asked that question the other day, and I didn’t have a good answer. If we buy posters for the good design and because they are lovely images to have around, a reprint, of any kind, shouldn’t be an issue. I could have this Lewitt Him for £30 from Postal Heritage Prints,

which is considerably cheaper than the amount we actually paid for an original copy. And yet I still don’t want it. Why is that?

There are some relatively straightforward answers, like the thrill of the chase and the bargain, and that the originals will make much better investments. That’s all true, but there’s more at stake here than that. And to explain it, I may have to use some theory (but don’t worry, there will be nice pictures as well along the way).

Back in 1936, the critic and writer Walter Benjamin (in an often-quoted and pleasingly short essay called ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’) argued that the original work of art had an ‘aura’ – its presence, uniqueness, history and associations. Now this, for me, is what an original poster offers. Its past life, its direct connection with the artist and their times, its apparent authenticity compared to a giclee print, all of these make a poster more interesting than a later copy.

F K Henrion, Post Office Savings Bank poster, 1944

Seems sensible, but it would have had Benjamin foaming at the mouth with fury. He believed that even fine art works would lose their aura once high quality printing and photographic reproduction could make them accessible to everyone; while modern creations like films and photographs (and, by implication, posters) would have no aura at all, because there could be no original.

McKnight Kauffer, Explorers Prefer Shell, 1934

And without an aura, he thought that art would have to change entirely. Being of a Marxist persuasion, he thought that it would have to be about politics instead of reverence for the individual work. Which is why he’d be so infuriated by my faffing about, worried about which London Transport posters are original and which are not. Somehow (the mighty and indistructible powers of capitalism in all probability), we have managed to transfer all of our myths and beliefs about individual art works on to these reproduced, never-original copies. Benjamin must be spitting tacks.

John Tunnard Holiday School Print 1947
John Tunnard, Holiday, School Print, 1947

The sad thing is, he came quite close to being right. In a very British, watered-down way, ideas like the ‘School Prints’ series were an attempt to put his theories into practice. In the late 1940s, fine and avant-garde artists including Henry Moore, Picasso and Braque created lithographs that were designed for reproduction and offered to every school in the country, making the best of modern art available to everyone who wanted it (nice article here if you want to know more). These artworks were designed to be reproduced, in theory infinite in number, just as Benjamin would have liked them to be. This should have been art without an aura, easily encountered on the walls of schools and hospitals rather than art galleries, in a political gesture very typical of the egalitarian post-war period.

Michael Rothenstein School Print Essex Wood Cutters, 1946
Michael Rothenstein, Essex Wood Cutters, School Print 1946

But, of course, it didn’t end up as he had hoped; we now collect them, value them, treasure them for their limited availability. The Henry Moore is worth close on £1000. If you can get hold of a copy of course.

The School Prints were not alone either. The late 40s and early 1950s were a Benjamin-esque frenzy of art for all. Lyons Tea Shops commissioned prints from modern artists between 1947 and 1955 with much the same motivation. (Like the School prints they are now valuable, collectable unique items. There is a slew of them on offer today at the Christies auction, as mentioned a few weeks ago.)

john nash landscape with bathers lyons print 1947
John Nash, Landscape with Bathers, Lyons print, 1947

And I’ve already blogged about the way that London Transport Shell and the GPO commissioned fine artists and avant-garde designers to design their posters both before and after World War Two with some of the same motivations. Art was no longer the preserve of the privileged, it needed to be made available to everyone in this new, modern, reproducible world. All these prints and posters were Benjamin’s theories made flesh.

Night Mail Pat Keely vintage GPO poster
Pat Keely, Night Mail, GPO, 1939

But each and every one of these objects are now unique, collectable, valuable. They’ve all acquired an aura. And so I do mind whether or not I get a print, whether my poster was printed in 1968 or 1971. I am, frankly, a lousy revolutionary.

Two other points to bear in mind. One is that I used to work in a museum, so there are other reasons for collecting old things as well. I’ll blog about them one day too, when I’ve articulated what on earth they are.

I also need to admit we’ve bought a couple of these reprints before now. Like this Carol Barker.

(I’d like to blame this on initial naivete, and some slightly dodgy eBay listings, but I think lack of attention to detail may have had something to do with it as well. Repeat after me: I must read descriptions more carefully.)

Once again, the reprint is only a few years later than the ‘original’ but it still wrong and we’ll probably sell it on at some point. Walter Benjamin would be very disappointed in me; I just can’t help seeing auras.

Take your Pick

auctions

I was going to ignore the second Wallis and Wallis auction of World War Two posters, on the grounds that they mostly illustrate the same truth as the first auction, which is that there were far more bad wartime posters than good ones.

Once again in this auction, pictures of aeroplanes and excerpts from Churchill’s speeches are by far the majority. Posters like this.

There’s perhaps one classic,

And a couple which I quite like for no real good reason.

They’ll all go for a lot of money, though, so who cares what I think.

But then Serena, who had clearly been reading the catalogue more closely than I had, pointed out that lot 588 was quite interesting.

588 2 WWII ATS recruiting posters: “ATS as Signal Operators” 3 operators, one with morse key (51-9700) and “ATS carry the messages”, despatch rider on motor cycle (51-9796); in a sleeve. VGC

To be precise, at least one of them is by Beverley Pick and is rather good.

I’m guessing that the other one is also from the same series, but I can’t find an image of it. Pick also did this one as well.

I rather like the mixed photo-montage and text – Pick did the same sort of thing in these two great posters (apologies for not very good images).

I can find a few other things in the same sort of style, like this wartime one whose point I can’t entirely grasp.

And a few other things which are entirely different.

Then that’s about your lot. I think that, after the war, Pick concentrated on exhibition and industrial design rather than posters, including parts of Britain Can Make It and the Festival of Britain, and I ought to do some more research when I am less pressed for time. More on this later then, and thanks again to Serena for flagging the poster up.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world of auctions, this Abram Games has come up on eBay.

It’s lovely, it’s backed on linen, I’ve never seen it before, but it is still eye-wateringly expensive at $1,700 Buy It Now. You can make a best offer, though; perhaps I will go for £150 and see what they say. There on the other hand, as it’s almost 80″ x 120″, and I don’t have an advertising hoarding to put it up on, perhaps I won’t bother.

It’s Easter, don’t move

auctions

We seem to own a piece of railwayana, how did that happen?

Fortunately, this didn’t end up being as relevant as it might have been this Easter.

But it still has a purpose, as you can also buy its cousin in a few days time in Chertsey. If that makes its estimate of £150-250, there may be another one coming onto the market quite swiftish.

The auctioneers have this down as 1930s, but they’re both published by the Railway Executive Committee, who ran the railways from the start of WW2 in 1939 until nationalisation created British Railways in 1948. And the ‘don’t travel’ message pretty much has to be wartime, I should think.

By way of completeness, here is a third from the National Railway Museum collections.

They’re all by Reginald Mayes, who was staff artist for the London Midland and Scottish Railway before the war and so presumably stayed on to produce a wide range of anti-travel and propaganda posters for the Railway Executive Committee. What’s interesting is that I can’t find any traces of anything he designed for the London Midland, so it looks as if he only started signing things after 1939. If anyone can tell me any more, please do.

In other auction news, Dreweatts in Bristol are selling a second collection of works by Percy Drake Brookshaw, once again being sold by the family of the artist (I blogged about the first sale in February). Some are the same posters,

and quite a few are in the same style as those in the last sale (i.e. with the colour turned up to 11).

But there are also a couple of interesting ones. This 1958 London Transport poster is rather lovely, and you’d get two copies for an estimated price of £50-70, which seems entirely reasonable to me.

Meanwhile the big estimate of £300-400 is on this Summer Shell poster.

The Shell Poster Book tells me that it’s from 1933 (there, incidentally, is an archive that would really benefit the world were it online) so it may well go for more. Happy shopping.

The Shell Guide to auctions

auctions, posters

Not that long ago, I mentioned the Shell Educational posters in passing, with the intention of saying more about them one of these days.

But I’ve been rather pre-empted by the appearance of a whole group of them at auction on Thursday. (At first glance, I thought they were being sold by Alan Partridge Auctioneers, but sadly that isn’t the case).

Dorset Shell educational poster John Nash
Dorset, by John Nash

What’s on offer are four lots of the ‘County’ posters, each with five or six posters in each, all carrying an estimate of £60-100, and all photographed having a bit of a lie down.

Sussex Shell educational posters SR Badmin
Sussex, by SR Badmin

As well as a set of twelve Shell Guides to the countryside by Edith and Rowland Hilder.

Now, with my collectors head on, Shell posters can be very variable. They’re on gloss paper, which yellows and spots and then yellows some more. Plus at top and bottom they have black metal hangers which rust at the first possible opportunity, and also means that you can’t really put them in a frame. Having said all of that, a good one is still a lovely thing to have around the home (David Gentleman’s Ridgeway Path being my ornament of choice). And of course, because they come in sets, they bring out the worst of my collecting impulses.

With my thinking about posters brain engaged, they are interesting, not least because I’ve never seen anything written about them. They’re really a class apart, as almost all the artists who were commissioned are better known as illustrators rather than designers.; there’s more overlap between these posters and Ladybird books than there is with the rest of poster design. But some of them are beautiful, some – mostly by Tristram Hillier who was a surrealist artist when not producing these – are weird and strange, plus they are jolly informational things to have hanging on the wall. About which I will write properly another day.

Should you be interested, you can bid via the-saleroom.com if you don’t fancy the trek to Congleton.

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.