British post war posters and graphics.
I have been enfeebled by gastric flu. Normal service of some kind will be resumed tomorrow. In the meantime, here is a very nice Tom Eckersley that I haven’t seen around very much (although I think Books and Things might have had a copy once upon the while).
The title comes from this Bruce Angrave poster.
Not quite such a good image, but a great line.
And now I am going to lie down again.
A brief update today on my wonderings about why some posters survive and others don’t.
I’ve heard back from the Guinness archive in Dublin. And while Guinness never sold their posters, they were very much available to the general public.
Guinness first began advertising in 1929 and once the Company began advertising Guinness posters were produced in vast quantities and made available to both the general public and publicans. The Company very much encouraged members of the public to write into the company to obtain their copies of Guinness posters and as a result posters were produced in vast quantities throughout the decades.
They also sent over a useful factsheet about Guinness advertising. I had no idea that Gilroy produced posters for them from 1934 (only five years after the company began advertising at all) until 1961.
This was his last poster for the company, in 1961. The same year, they produced their first ever photographic poster. These two facts may have something to do with each other.
So thanks to Deirdre and Eibhlin at the Guinness archive for the information, it’s very much appreciated.
In some ways, if they were giving the posters away for free, I’m surprised that there aren’t more of them kicking around now.
Although a quick trawl through the records made me realise, to my surprise, that Mr Crownfolio and I have owned ten Guinness posters at various points in time. But we’ve ended up selling most of them. I think this is mostly because they’re great posters but not quite our sort of thing, even this Lander from 1956.
And the ones that are, were just too big to put on the wall.
But we have kept a couple This is on the wall (in fact in the collection of animal posters that climb the stairs),
because it’s one of my favourite posters ever, as well as being a reasonable size. We also have this Raymond Tooby next to it,
That wins mainly because the television aerial on the nest is such a brilliant 1957 detail.
But once again, all of these posters are here because the company involved distributed the posters to the public above and beyond the numbers they used for actual advertising. It certainly seems that this is one of the key factors in numbers of posters surviving.
The exceptions to this may be World War Two and National Savings posters, which I left off the original post but which do survive in some numbers. Perhaps people were aware, even at the time, of the historical significance of wartime posters and so kept them? Although that isn’t much of an explanation for National Savings posters – were these perhaps distributed to savings groups as well as being displayed? Or is there another reason that I am missing? Any ideas?
As things stand this morning, this is a bit of a bargain.
And that’s even with £10 or so of shipping from the U.S, but then it does tend to go for £50 or so on Abebooks or eBay over here. When you can find it at all.
Although I’ve posted a few of my favourite images from the book before now, I’ve never really gone into much detail about it.
But the seller has photographed it well, and it shows one of my favourite things about Poster Design.
In it, Eckersley isn’t just writing about his own work, he’s generous in his praise of many of the other designers who were working at the same time (on this page Bernard Cheese, Pat Keely, Lewitt-Him and Cassandre as well as Eckersley himself).
And the book is like this throughout. Here’s another page of his generosity.
I like to think that this is a reflection of his personality as a whole; people who knew Eckersley say that he was both modest and kind. It’s good to know that we can still see that for ourselves.
While also remembering that he was also rather good at designing too.
[Addendum. Mr Crownfolio has pointed out that the Herbert Bayer looked rather familiar for something that was just in his portfolio. So he went and found it.
The artist is Kate Gibb, who doesn’t seem to have been too vocal about her appropriation of Herbert Bayer. But it has been noticed elsewhere.]
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.
Woof.
He’s a fine fellow for a Monday morning, isn’t he. I only wish I felt so well-groomed myself.
You probably won’t be surprised to learn that he’s by Tom Eckersley, and he comes from this:
The book was published in 1947 and is filled with really wonderful illustrations.
So much so that the pictures can really do most of the talking here. They have to in the book as well, because the text really is infernally dull.
There’s a mix of full-page illustrations like the ones above, with smaller insets as well. So penguins are available singly or in fives.
There are also a couple of very pleasing layouts too.
Although the book is post-war, the style very much reminds me of the air-brushed Eckersley/Lombers London Transport posters from the late thirties
Although these rather lovely fish could almost have come from an Eric Ravilious plate.
What’s also pleasing is that I’m not pointing you at something which is jaw-achingly expensive, although you do have the option of buying it from Sotherans for £138 if you like the pain. But it’s on Abebooks for between £15 and £20, which makes a pleasant change.
And if the dust jacket is missing, it’s not quite the crying shame it might be for some books. Because the board covers also feature this lovely cat.
Who might almost have come from this book. I wonder if the Eckersleys kept cats themselves?
Odds and ends from the internet today. Mostly because I wanted to post this.
Normally it lives on the shelf in Richard Hogg‘s studio. Lucky him.
You can buy some later Eckersley on eBay at the moment too.
We’ve got a copy of that already. But I can say with some certainty that it didn’t cost £100, which is its starting price.
There on the other hand, people seem to have come back to eBay after the summer holiday lull with high expectations of what their posters are worth.
Both this Unger
and this William Fenton reproduction (previously mentioned in despatches here)
are up with a starting price of £44.99.
But perhaps the seller isn’t deluded. Because this delightful John Burningham – also a reproduction – has just sold for £56.01.
The John Burningham
Perhaps I might even go on a country walk myself this weekend.