British post war posters and graphics.
There’s not a great deal I can say about this. It’s by Tom Eckersley and is from 1970.
The magazine is the Guinness in house magazine, and unless you want to see pictures of Edward Heath drinking Guinness and find out more about the Suggestions Awards, the contents are not enthralling. So here’s the back.
A slight departure from his usual minimalism and so good to see. And, er, that’s it.
That’s what this copy of Graphis is asking in 1950. (And yes, the cover is by Tom Eckersley).
Unfortunately for us, most of the answers are in black and white, apart from this design for Kia-ora by Lewitt-Him.
And this Christmas advertisement for Simpsons of Piccadilly.
I think there may have been some more at some point, but my copy seems to have a page missing. By way of compensation, I’ll try and find colour versions of the posters and illustrations they’ve reproduced where I can. Still, it’s worth putting up with the black and white because there is some wonderful stuff included in their survey of British design. I would like this Lewitt-Him showcard whatever colour it turned out to be.
Oddly, one of the things that makes this article particularly interesting is the small print. Each image is credit twice, once to the artist and/or illustrator and once to the advertising agency which commissioned it. Which means that, for a change, it’s possible to see how posters and advertisments came into being.
Let’s take Crawfords, for example (I would happily take almost anything from Crawfords’ considerable output if anyone is offering). Their art director was Ashley Havinden, who did produce some of the illustrations for his own press advertisements.
Even within a single campaign, more than one artist might be used though; so this cartoon is by John Parsons.
(Apologies for the wobbliness of the scans, but I don’t want to damage the magazine.)
At the same time, Havinden was also commissioning entire campaigns from other designers, like Tom Eckersley’s work for Gillette.
As well as Eno’s Fruit salts, which was also produced by Crawfords. A different format of this advertisement is reproduced in Graphis; the French caption provides the extra explanation that Enos is ‘un digestif’. I think, if forced to make a choice between some French pastis and a glass of Enos, the pastis would win every time.
These double attributions of the advertisements, thougb, are a useful reminder that designers of the period were not artists, producing whatever they liked, but were working within a very commercial framework, receiving commissions from people they knew, often, I imagine, to quite a tight brief. This is something that can get forgotten as we collect and admire posters today; increasingly they become detached from their original purpose and seen as artworks rather than functional pieces of design. But that’s not how they were originally produced at all.
This is a point also made, in a slightly different way, in the essay which goes with these illustrations. The author, Charles Rosner, thinks that the standard of posters and other commercial art has declined considerably since the war. The only high points are provided by what he calls ‘the cultural and social activities in advertising’, by which he means commissions from the BBC, London Transport, the Arts Council and the GPO. By which he is also implying designs which aren’t contaminated by the need to sell things.
But were these high-minded designs really better? From this distance it’s hard to say for sure because so little British commercial advertising survives. But take this page of F H K Henrion’s work. The poster designs for the government health campaigns are more in the international modernist style with which I tend to associate him.
This wasn’t all he could produce though. Take these fine fish for example.
(I’m rather fond of the sheep too, which is why it’s here, even though it’s not actually by Henrion).
On the opposite page are also a couple of his better-known designs for Punch.
But which of these are better? Public information edges or Punch decorative? I find it hard to say, but then my pro-modernist bias probably isn’t as strong as some people’s. What do you lot reckon?
The text makes an interesting point about posters as well. Remember, this is 1950, and television advertising hasn’t been imagined yet, but posters are already seen as being in decline, and for reasons I’ve never seen put before.
Posters are victims of the great speed of modern traffic, congestion of town streets, squeezing out of hoardings from town centres to areas with less appeal in publicity value, and town and country planning regulations, with only vague definitions of the places where hoardings are still allowed to stand.
So the golden age of the poster was partly caused by the fact that people were moving slowly enough to look at them. Now there’s a thought.
But the article isn’t all about answers, it’s also made me ponder a couple of questions too. This post is going on a bit, so I’ll return to them in the next few days. For now you can just have this rather wonderful Lewitt-Him artwork as a clue about the first. It is illustrated in Graphis, but if anyone has sighted it anywhere else other than the GPO archive, I’d like to hear from you.
It’s September, school has started (in the case of small Crownfolio, for the very first time) and the auction season is getting back into gear too. First in the queue are International Poster Auctions in New York, whose Auction of Rare Posters is on Sept 8th.
Most of what’s on offer consists of things that Americans like and I don’t (Barnum and Bailey Circus posters, Art Nouveau, that kind of thing) but there are a few British gems on offer.
Quite a few of these are pre-war London Transport posters like this Dora Batty, but there’s nothing wrong with that.
Dora Batty, 1933, est. $1,000-1,200
This Roy Meldrum is less often reproduced but also rather fine. It seems to have an odd familiarity to me, but I don’t know whether this is because it looks like a mixture of so many other images from that period, or simply that I used to own a postcard of it once upon a time.
Roy Meldrum, 1933, est. $1,700-2,000
There are also a couple of McKnight Kauffer classics up for grabs.
E. McKnight Kauffer, 1926, est. $1,700-2,000
E. McKnight Kauffer, 1931, est. $3,000-4,000
But my favourite is much later than any of these, as it dates from 1973 and is by David Gentleman.
David Gentleman, 1973, est. $700-1,000
Clearly prices rise as posters cross the Atlantic: this poster went for just £130 on eBay last month, much to the disappointment of at least one reader of this blog.
Elsewhere on eBay, it’s still a bit quiet. This Tom Purvis is out of focus, a bit battered and in the U.S., although that doesn’t seem to be deterring the bidders.
It is also my bounded duty to point out that Cyclamon has yet another of these small but perfectly formed Eckersley GPO posters for sale on a Buy It Now for £35.
I don’t think he’s printing them.
As the piles of boxes grow around me, here are some more Artist Partners delights from the archives.
Today, a second helping of the AP2 Artists Partners book. (Is it a brochure? a catalogue? I’m not entirely sure how to address it).
I ran through a few of the obvious highlights by the big names like Hans Unger, Saul Bass and Tom Eckersley last time, but there are plenty more treasures for your entertainment.
In fact, the sheer quantity of other stuff is one of the notable things about the book. Most of what would now be seen as the big names are in the creative design section, but there are six other categories in the book, including realistic figure, humour and whimsy (section cover by Reginald Mount)
fashion and sophistication, photography ( a wonderful graphic by Heinz Kurth)
scraperboard, still life and industrial,
and finally architecture, landscape and nature.
It’s a reminder, once again, how easy it is to recreate the past in terms of what we like best now. For every classic bit of graphics, one equal and opposite bit of kitsch was created (although this is not just any old figure illustration kitsch, it’s Artist Partners kitsch by Rix).
Good to know that about the dripping, too.
But that’s not to say that there aren’t some stylish things in the other categories too, such as this Christmas card for ABC Television, by Bruce Petty.
Or once again, Patrick Tilley, this time with a cover for a Shell almanac, filed under Humour and Whimsy. No one would ever admit to doing whimsy any more, would they, it’s hardly cool; I think that’s rather a shame.
Almost as strange as that career change are these two window displays by George Him, for De Bejenkorf (which seems to be a department store in Amsterdam). The first one in particular, looks almost impossibly modern.
The second is just brilliantly odd.
More of this kind of thing please.
While everything is in flux here at Quad Royal central (I am writing this in a room already stacked with boxes and wev’e still got a week to go) I thought I would dig out a few posts from the earlier days of the blog which are worth revisiting, especially as not everyone will have seen them first time round. This one seemed like a good place to start, especially as it was Artist Partners’ own website who first alerted me to the existence of the Patrick Tilley posters.
Sometimes, writing about posters can feel like a constant harking back to a golden age of British graphic design, long since lost to the evil forces of photography, Photoshop and general bad taste. But not everything from that time has disappeared.
Like Artist Partners for example, who are not only still going but have set up a usefully informative website which covers their past as well as their present. And their past was very glorious indeed.
Founded in 1950, the agency represented some of the biggest names in illustration, graphics and photography from the fifties onward. There’s no point repeating their entire history, because they’ve done the job already. Although I was particularly interested to see that Reginald Mount was one of the founding partners. He’s a fascinating character who seems to pop up at all sorts of interesting points in the history of graphics, and I’d be interested in finding out more about him one of these days.
They’ve put together a small retro section on their website as well, with a few nice images, like these Sunday Times advertisements by Patrick Tilley.
But it’s not the website that made me want to post about them, it’s this (the cover also, incidentally, designed by Tilley), which we’ve had on the bookshelves for a while now.
Dating from, I guess, the early to mid 50s, it’s a brochure for the artists represented by AP, and a very delightful book in its own right. Here’s one of the section headings for example.
Or this one, by none other than Tom Eckersley
Oh to be sitting at at an advertising agency desk in 1954 and trying to decide who to commission. Because there is such as wealth of wonderful talent in this book. Amongst other people, Artist Partners represented Eckersley, Hans Unger, George Him, Eileen Evans, and of course Reginald Mount. And even Saul Bass. Here’s a trade advertisement for Enfield Cables.
And a rather fetching advertisement for Technicolour by George Him.
My main sadness is that it’s only partially in colour, because there are simply hundreds of pieces which I haven’t ever seen before. For every page like this
(Two Hans Ungers – one GPO, one London Transport, a Leupin and another Patrick Tilley)
there are ten like this.
I’ve managed to find the peas one in colour at least for your entertainment.
That’s more than enough for now, but I’ve still only barely scratched the surface of this wonderful book.
Despite the holidays, there are a few faint signs of life on eBay now. In fact more than faint, as this 1963 Tom Eckersley went for a whopping £123.65 a few days ago. Not to us, I hasten to add.
I’m not sure what’s going on here. It may be that later Eckersley posters are starting to rise in value, which would make sense as they certainly seem to be very popular out there on the visual web. Equally, it could be that people are engaging in silly bidding because there is so little else on offer right now.
It’s not just the Eckersleys either. The seller had a few more London Transport posters for auction, so this John Farleigh went for £83 too, in spite of some of the more eccentric (and less informative) photographs I’ve seen for a while. This is the best, which isn’t saying much.
They dated it as 1960s but it looks a bit earlier to me. But I can’t find it on the London Transport Museum site or indeed anywhere else, so if someone out there knows more, I’d love to hear from you.
We did get this Carol Barker for just £23, though.
She’ll be fashionable one of these days, you mark my words.
Elsewhere on eBay, in America to be precise, there are a set of three World War Two British Navy posters for sale. They’re pretty expensive too, at $140 a pop starting price, but I mention them because they are quite interesting.
They’re a celebration of what are clearly some of the less exciting jobs within the Navy – Stores Assistant anyone? Although I don’t know whether their aim is recruitment, or just to reassure the people in these jobs that they are also a valuable part of the Navy too.
What makes them really interesting is that I have never ever seen them anywhere else before (and goodness knows I have been looking at more than enough World war Two posters over the last few months). They are by an artist called M Bertram about whom I know nothing either and generally they are a complete mystery. But I do think they are real.
Finally, my searches for the John Farleigh poster above did lead me to this. Which needs no further comment really.
