4 Modern Art, Modern Graphic Design

 

see also:

Purism

Purism

Near the end of the First World War, two artists, the Frenchman Amedee Ozenfant (1886-1966) and the Swiss-born Charles Edouard Jeanneret (1887-1965), sought to create a new style based on a reinterpretation of Cubist principles. Built on a combination of Analytic Cubist faceting as well as Synthetic Cubist collage, the movement Ozenfant christened "Purism" ultimately had a significant impact on graphic design in France. It is impossible to understand the underlying beliefs of Purism outside the context of the First World War. The Purists asserted that the war had been a "great test," a sacrifice that could lead to a more secure and harmonious future for Europe. Because they blamed the breakdown of shared values between European nations for causing the war, Ozenfant and Jeanneret wanted to establish a lyrical, universal aesthetic that could unite the continent.

The Machine Aesthetic

Purist paintings such as Ozenfant's Still Life with Bottles (fig. 4.30) demonstrate Purist ideas in visual terms. Combining a contemporary machine idealism, visible in the clean geometric shapes and smooth surfaces, with Classical references—note how the objects in the picture resemble monumental architecture—Still Life with Bottles represents an attempt to harmonize the past and the future. While some of the objects resemble Classical architecture, others reference the modern world of industry. In reconciling the past and the present, the Purists sought to show how the modern world could contain a Classical aesthetic if designed correctly. Part of Purist thinking was what is called a "Machine Aesthetic," an art-historical term that refers to the style of the works, which evoke the smooth, polished shapes of machines, as well as expressing a general high level of admiration for industrial society. The Purists wanted to show that mass-produced goods could be beautiful. This "machine idealism" contrasts sharply with earlier art movements, including Cubism, which tended to ignore or outright reject the modern world of the machine. Ozenfant's colleague Jeanneret had trained as an architect, and there is a clear architectural element in the composition of Still Life with Bottles. The clear, strong forms in the painting, as well as the grid-like compositional structure, suggest an architectural influence; art historians call this style "architectonic."

The Purists were heavily influenced by the fashion for Neoplatonist philosophy during this era. Neoplatonists asserted that there is an unchanging and eternal reality that is masked by the constant flux of the world perceived by the senses. In paintings such as Still Life with Bottles, Ozenfant wanted to portray a modern world that is as timeless and harmonious as the Classical age, at least as the latter was portrayed in European literature. The simple, pure shapes are intended to point the viewer toward a Platonic vision of calm and peace. While the Purists attempted to create an art of universal significance, it is arguable that the result­ing synthesis of modern Cubism and a return to classicism speaks more of traditional themes of French art than that of other nations. A shonhand phrase that summarizes the essence of Purist ideals and aesthetics is as follows: "Neoplatonist reductive geometric abstraction."

It is arguable that the Purists took the Cubist style and removed any element that was radical or aggressive, thereby rendering it more palatable to a European public tired of chaos and destruction. Purism completely suppresses individual expression in favor of universal harmony, and wholly rejects the emotional pyrotechnics of artists such as Egon Schiele and the contemporaneous Expressionist movement. It seems natural that a traumatized continent would be ripe for the Purists' Neoplatonist message; the suggestion that a tranquil realm of eternal values existed in a higher plane must have been supremely comforting to a population that was counting war casualties in the tens of millions.
 

4.30 Amedee Ozenfant, Still Life with Bottles. 1920.
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, 1976

The New Spirit

The Purists were convinced that their ideal of L'Esprit Nouveau ("the new spirit") would serve as a visual template for a new soci­ety. They shared with a number of modern art movements, such as the Futurists, a desire not only to make compelling art works but also to change society in general. The Purists' sense of responsibility for the rebuilding of post-war Europe is most obvious in the architecture of Jeanneret, who for most of his life used the pseudonym Le Corbusier. In a parallel to the aesthetic developed in 1918 for Purist painting, Le Corbusier felt that modern architecture needed to combine a Classical harmony with modern materials. He felt that this balanced combination of past and present would serve as the basis for a new architecture that could serve the millions of working families that had congregated in major cities, creating housing dilemmas across Europe.

The most high-profile example of Purist architecture ever constructed by Le Corbusier was the Pavilion de l'Esprit Nouveau (fig. 4.31), designed for the 1925 exhibition of decorative arts held in Paris. Called the "Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes'' this European fair brought enormous atten­tion to modern design styles. Le Corbusier's Pavilion de l'Esprit Nouveau shows the same regard for fundamental abstract shapes that characterized Purist painting. He has arranged his modern materials into a reductive abstract design in which ornament has no place. Rather, the interplay of geometric forms is the basis for the aesthetic element. This simple, classical beauty is designed to be at the same time highly functional, establishing an economical modular unit that would become the basis for twentieth-century urban housing.
 

4.31 Le Corbusier, Pavilion de I'Espnt Nouveau, 1925.

see also:

Art Deco

Art Deco in France and Britain
 

Purism as a cohesive movement quickly began to decline after the 1925 exposition, and by the following year Ozenfant and Jeanneret had gone on to pursue independent careers. While few people had embraced their ideals, let alone their stark modern aesthetic, later decades would witness the Purist style diffusing into the design arts. In fact, the "Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes" in Paris proved to be the catalyst for a new wave of attention directed toward the "decorative and industrial arts." The exposition became associated with a drive for a modern, unified design style, such as Art Nouveau of the 1890s. Beginning in 1966, "Art Deco," an English term derived from the title of the exposition, became used as a catch-all term for the work of different types of designers pursuing geometric abstraction. Of course, the latter part of the Art Nouveau movement, especially the style promoted by the Wiener Werkstatte, in many ways portended the geometric simplicity of Art Deco. While the term 'Art Deco" specifically connects the style and the 1925 exposition in Paris, by no means all of the works in that exposition shared an Art Deco style.

    The ascendance of Art Deco represents the gradual process whereby modern art styles—especially Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism, and Purism—were turned into trendy fashion so as to be marketed to a broad public. As this process unfolded, many of the philosophical beliefs and social commitments behind modern art, from Futurism's call for violent revolution in Italy to the Purists' desire to see a new Utopian age of harmony, were sepa­rated from the artistic styles allied with them. In place of these varied philosophies there arose a commercial message that cele­brated the glamour and excitement of affluent modern lifestyles. Some aspects of modern art ideology, such as its machine idealism, remained, but in general the commercial message behind An Deco was as sleek and smooth as the developing style. The basic elements of the Art Deco style—simplicity, symmetry, planarity, geometry—formed a visual language that was applied across a tremendous range of art and design products. Using the same basic vocabulary of rectilinear and orthogonal elements, the Machine Aesthetic, and reductive geometric abstraction, a cross section of young architects and designers devised new visual forms for the commercial market. While the stylistic elements of the Art Deco style eventually filtered down to the world of mass production, the majority of An Deco work was expensive and handmade, as had been the case with Art Nouveau.

The English china manufacturer Shelley Potteries produced a tea service in the 1930s called "Vogue" that featured stanlingly modern forms (fig. 4.32). Conceived by Eric Slater, the radically tapered shape of the cup combined with a boldly triangular han­dle to create a thoroughly unconventional design. The reductive geometric sunrise pattern, a favorite element of British An Deco, asymmetrically folds itself over the lip of each cup and saucer. On the edge of each saucer, the flat, stylized beams of light, reminis­cent of elements in Vonicist paintings, cut across the band that delineates the basic shape of the saucer. The vocabulary of forms that make up this tea set is consonant with the use of geometric abstraction in British Art Deco graphics such as the Underground posters of Edward McKnight Kauffer seen earlier (see fig. 4.9), whose earliest work displays an An Deco synthesis of modern art avant la lettre.

    Another elegant household object, in this case a cocktail shaker by the Frenchman Jean Puiforcat (1887-1945), was executed circa 1926 (fig. 4.33). Here, the sleek form of the shaker is topped by a succession of curves, the dominant one of which creates a perfect semicircle. Like most Art Deco objects, this shaker was made in limited quantities for wealthy members of the bourgeoisie. Its expensive material, sterling silver, is indicative of the exclusive nature of Puiforcat's clientele.
 

see also:

Cassandre

Poster Art: Cassandre and Carlu

see also:

Art Deco

Perhaps the most well-known Art Deco graphic designer in Paris was a Ukrainian immigrant named Ad olphe Jean-Marie Mouron (1901-1968), who used the pseudonym Cassandre. Cassandre was well acquainted with the members of the Purist group, and counted Le Corbusier as one of his closest friends. The architec­tonic structures and clearly delineated forms of Purist painting are evident in his posters. While Le Corbusier's architecture had been harshly condemned at the 1925 exposition, Cassandre won an award for one of his Purist-inspired lithographs. Cassandre's new style is evident in posters such as one from 1932 advertising the cafe cars of the French railways (fig. 4.34). The sleek, pure shapes of the bottles and the perfect circle that underlies the shape of the wine glass are reminiscent of Ozcnfant's painting. The architectonic structure is clear by the way the crisp forms stand out like the skyline of a city. The bottles and glasses that signify the cafe car are collaged, like in a Cubist work, on to a fragment of a train's undercarriage. The shape and direction of the bold words "Wagon-Bar" connect visually to the black rail and the whole mass of the train undercarriage. The pristine clarity of the forms is matched by the simple palette of primary colors: red, blue, and yellow.

     In 1926, Cassandre published an essay on poster design in Revue de I'Union de I'Afficbe Frangaise. In this text, he invoked the medieval tradition of communicating meaning through images alone, a strategy he hoped to emulate in his own work. But while he was committed to the traditions of graphic design, Cassandre—and artists like him—was not an ideologically com­mitted member of any modern avant-garde movement. Rather, he was one of many artists who poached stylistic elements from a variety of different, contrasting modernist groups and remade diem to serve as signifiers of glamour and affluence. In Cassandre's case, the ideological underpinnings of Purism, its belief in the creation of a wholly new Utopian society, were transformed into a decorative style that reinforced the status quo. If there is any Utopian element in Cassandre's posters, it is a resplendent capitalist Utopia of unbridled wealth. Unlike Kauffer, who worked mostly in the fine arts and who hoped to collapse the distinction between fine and commercial work, Cassandre saw his own work as distinct from the art of painting, and this belief in "separate spheres" obviously informs the way in which he disman­tles modern art into useful stylistic elements devoid of their original meaning.

An advertisement for Dubonnet liquor (Jig. 4.36) proved to be one of Cassandre's most memorable posters because of the way he used the images to convey meaning. The three successive panels show a man drinking Dubonnet, which gradually flows through his body, symbolically fulfilling him as his form is filled in with color. With this poster, Cassandre invented the idea of the serial poster, whereby successive images expand on a concept.

The repetition of the image is itself suggestive of the modern world of standardized mass production. As a parallel to the successive images, the text first spells out "Dubo," which sounds to a French speaker like "some beautiful," then "Dubon," which sounds like "some good," and finally the full name of the brand itself.

     Cassandre had succeeded in the Dubonnet poster in achieving his goal of designing a work that had an instantaneous visual impact, and therefore could be grasped when glanced briefly from a moving vehicle on a city street. The man's body has the same sort of smoothly abstract form that characterizes Cassandre's images of inanimate objects, his torso a crisp rectangle while his head forms a semicircular dome that is as smooth as the product of a machine. In this poster, Cassandre effectively presents the product in the language of desire that structures modern advertising, so that the viewer connects the product to an intangible, satisfying experience—the sense of being filled up—rather than to a mundane, mass-produced beverage.

     Jean Carlu (1900-1997) produced a magnificent lithograph in the Art Deco style for the department store Au Bon Marche in 1928 (fig. 4.35). The image shows a doorman, styled in a reductive geometric fashion, holding an umbrella over a pert bourgeois child. While the doorman's body is structured orthogonally with a dominant rectangular shape, the little girl is framed by an equilat­eral triangle. Considering that Carlu had trained originally as an architect, the use of architectonic forms probably came naturally to him. The two erect figures with their tightly delineated, sleek shapes contrast with the chaotic jumble of toys and stuffed ani­mals held by the doorman. The poster is aimed broadly at the middle class, as it is advertising "toys and New Year's gifts" for children at a store whose name emphasizes economical prices. As was the case with Art Nouveau, lithographs represent some of the only Art Deco works that were intended for the general urban public, and this populist element contrasts with the majority of Art Deco products, which were especially commissioned for the carriage trade.

Carlu and Cassandre were both founding members in 1925 of the Union des Artistes Modernes (UAM), a trade group of modern architects and designers that also included Le Corbusier, Sonia Terk Delaunay, and the influential French typographer and art director Maximilien Vox (1894-1974). The UAM was formed of a group of likeminded artists and designers who together sought to advance the modernist style as a unified design language appropriate for the modern world. They explicitly rejected prewar design in an attempt to erase the war's memory. In place of prewar styles, they advocated the cheerful and ebullient spirit and machine idealism of the Art Deco. In both their membership and their ideology, UAM came the closest to establishing a bridge between the commercial design movements and the fine art groups like the Purists who had inspired them.
 

4.34 A.M. Cassandre, Wagon-Bar. 1932. Poster.
Lithograph. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

4.35 Jean Carlu, Au Bon Marche, 1928 Advertisement and poster.
Lithograph. Bibliotheque Forney, France.

Jean Carlu. Posters.

4.36 A.M. Cassandre, Dubo Dudon Dubonnet, 1932. Color lithograph. Museum of Moder'i Ait, New York.

The Normandie

If any one object symbolized the glamour and wealth of the con­sumers of Art Deco, it was the ill-fated French ship Normandie, designed by Vladimir Yourkevitch (1885-1964) and launched in 1932 (fig. 4.38). The Normandie was the first French ship of over 1,000 feet in length that had the speed to match the great British liners and contend for the cherished Blue Ribbon that was awarded to the fastest Transatlantic crossing. Built in the Pcnhoet shipyards of Saint Nazaire, France, the Normandie swept across the Atlantic on her maiden voyage from Le Havre to New York City at a crusing speed of 29 knots. The Normandie was designed to serve a narrow slice of European society, with the majority of its interior spaces given over to first-class lounges and a magnifi­cent dining room. But its glamorous image was publicized to a larger swath of society as a symbol of the wealth, technological prowess, and aesthetic sophistication of the French nation.

Yourkevitch, a Russian immigrant to France, created a vessel with the sleek lines and smooth surfaces of the Art Deco style. The Normandie is a fine example of another Art Deco stylistic mainstay, streamlining. This strategy used clean, sweeping curves to create a sense of movement. While a fast ship such as the Normandie represented streamlining that was functional in that it reduced wind resistance while in motion, the use of streamlined forms became less a functional element than a decorative gesture when it was later applied to stationary objects such as refrigera­tors. Just as Art Deco separated modern art styles from their ideological underpinnings, so it separated streamlining from its functional aspect and made it nothing more than a sleek, decorative design element.

Cassandre's poster publicizing the Normandie (fig. 4.39) features the prow of the ocean liner looming over the text. The sleek lines of the ship are evident, although Cassandre has treated the mass of the ship reductively, like a bottle in a Purist still life. The smooth, planar body of the hull stands erect on the water without cutting into it. The word "Normandie" sits symmetrically right below the hull and is of the same width, serving as a pedestal for the liner as well as providing a transition from image to text. In August 1939, the Normandie made her last westbound voyage, as she was held in New York after the outbreak of the Second World War. Tragically, fire broke out in 1942 during the ship's conversion to military use, and an inexperienced firefighting team flooded the ship, causing it to roll on to its side in New York harbor. Hopelessly damaged, the Normandie was sold for scrap in 1945.
 

4.38 Vladimir Yourkevitch [designer], SS. Normandie. Photograph.

4.39 A.M. Cassandre. Normandie. 1935. Poster.
Colored lithograph. Les Arts Decoratifs.
Musee de la Publicite, Paris. Photo: Laurent Sully Jaulmes.

Art Deco in Asia

see also:

Art Deco

During the Art Nouveau era in the late nineteenth century, the influence of Asian aesthetics, particularly Japanese woodblock prints, was paramount to the development of that key commercial style. Inverting the original cross-cultural exchange, the European Art Deco movement had a substantial impact on commercial graphics in Asia during the 1920s and 1930s. For an Asian audience, Art Deco graphics were sug­gestive of the same themes of affluence and modernity that they invoked in Europe, but with an additional, exotic element because of their 'Western, non-Asian style. Since Art Deco is in many ways yet another manifestation of the decorative line and flat forms that Western artists had adopted from Asia since the nineteenth century, there is a certain circularity in the way that the style was passed back to Japan and China decades later.

An anonymous 1925 advertisement for Shiseido cosmetics (fig. 4.37,) displays a clearly Western-looking woman on the left side of the frame. Her elongated torso has a distinct rectangularity that is indicative of Art Deco. In addition, her simple, elegant clothes and casual manner are an outgrowth of European Deco graphics. The landscape along the bottom of the image is a common element in posters by Edward McKnight Kauffer and others; it is similarly made up of slices of form that demonstrate the influence of Analytic Cubist abstraction.

      In China, the port city of Shanghai, known in the early twentieth century as the "Paris of the East," had become a major commercial and banking center mainly because of its extensive trade ties with the West. Shanghais cosmopolitan citizens heartily embraced the Art Deco style in many media, including a number of high-profile architectural projects. Because of its commercial significance, Shanghai was also the first Chinese city to sustain a substantial graphic design industry. Called Meinu Yuefenpai in Mandarin, advertising posters made in Shanghai generally featured images of beautiful young women. Most of the women represented were inventions of the artists, although famous actresses and other modern women were also portrayed on occasion. The true novelty of Meinu Yuefenpai was the use of realistic Western drawing styles and figure compositions, so that Shanghai Art Deco posters display more modeling of the figure and more traditional poses than is common in contemporary European graphics. The basic ele­ments of the images, however—fashionable young women rendered in a combination of realistic and abstract modern styles—are fundamentally the same in both cultures.
 

4.37 Mitsugu Maeda, Skin Lotion Advertisement, 1925. Poster.
Shiseido Corporate Museum, Tokyo.

Typography

Cassandre designed a number of display typefaces throughout his career, beginning with Bifur, introduced in 1929 by the influen­tial French foundry Debcrny & Peignot (fig. 4.41). Bifur is another example of the stylized reductive geometric abstraction characteristic of Art Deco, as the letters have been reduced to their most fundamental geometric shapes, with smaller details indicated by shaded areas. While geometric Art Deco types such as Bifur are never austere in their geometry, Cassandre designed the sweeping streamlined curves of the letters with attention to decorative flourishes. Type such as Bifur is conceptually tied to Cassandre's poster aesthetic, inasmuch as it uses strikingly stylized shapes in order to grab the viewer in the blink of an eye. While ostensibly not a display face according to Cassandre, Bifur, like many An Deco faces, makes such a strong visual statement that it was very seldom used for unassuming general purpose text. Broadly speaking, most Art Deco types are so easily associated with the look of this era that they did not develop longstanding or universal appeal.

While American Art Deco is discussed at length in Chapter 7, it is notable that one of the most familiar typefaces of this era was designed by the esteemed American typographer Morris Fuller Benton (1872-1948) of American Type Founders. His 1929 Broadway (fig. 4.40) is titled to suggest the connection between the stylized letters and New York City's famous entertainment district. Essentially a revival of the early nineteenth-century "fat faces" fused with a sleek geometric sense of form, Broadway became instantly indicative of the glamour of the ultimate modern city, New York. During this period, European graphic designers idealized New York City as the pinnacle of urban mod­ernism. While clearly not intended for general use because of its low readability and precarious legibility, Benton's type uses dramatic contrasts in order to call immediate attention to itself. In one of the few instances in which an Art Deco typeface has been able to transcend its dated style, Broadway has become established in a niche of its own as the preferred lettering for twenty-first-century nightclubs and restaurants that want to project an aura of sophistication.

Cassandre had his greatest success as a type designer with the introduction in 1937 of the all-purpose face Peignot, which was destined to become an icon of the Art Deco era (fig. 4.42). Named after Georges Peignot (1872-1915) of the foundry that had supported his works for years, Peignot made a huge splash at the 1937 exhibition in Paris, the last great world's fair to be held before the Second World War. Carved into the side of the fair's major architectural landmark, the Palais de Chaillot, Peignot was the most unique visual identifier of the An Deco style that still predominated twelve years after its introduction in Paris. This sans serif alphabet was intended by Cassandre to be both legible and readable while retaining some of the unique geometric styling of Art Deco. In the lower-case alphabet, which is actually made up of small capitals, Peignot extends the idea of elegant, attenuated form to a radical extreme. For example, the "l" is almost a pure vertical, while the lower case "h" features an asymmetrical ascender on its left half.

The Deberny & Peignot foundry was also responsible for the publication of two influential periodicals in the 1920s. Its trade journal Les Divertissements Typograpkiques was given away to people in the publishing industry as a way of marketing Deberny & Peignot's aggressively modernist house style. The cover for the first volume of Divertissements Typographiques was designed by the French typographer and Deberny & Peignot consultant Maximilien Vox, and shows his ready adaptation of modernist abstraction to graphic design (fig. 4.43). The orthogonal composi­tion that is structured by the vertical bars on each side is nicely complemented—in the manner of a Purist still life—by the centered black circle, the latter made more dynamic by the diagonal hand that cuts across it from lower left to upper right. Issues of Les Divertissements Typographiques were used to introduce new products, such as Cassandre's Bifur, which nonetheless never recouped the initial high investment in engraving the type. Maximilien Vox secured a noteworthy place for himself in design history when he created a new and influential system of typeface classification called ATypI-Vox that is still in use today.

Deberny & Peignot's second publication was not a trade periodical, but was rather aimed at wealthy consumers of Art Deco products. Called Arts et Metiers Graphiques, this magazine was started in 1927 as a forum for articles on modern art and culture as well as fine printing. Like The Fleuron in London, this journal served as a key source for designers interested in the newest trends and design philosophies. Journals such as this were necessary in carving out a rationale for modernist design because of the divorce of Art Deco design from the fine art philosophies that had inspired it. But beneath this surface subject matter, the true raison d'etre of the journal was to publicize the fine printing and typography of the firm.
 

4.40 Morris Fuller Benton, Broadway Typeface,
American Type Foinders, 1929

Bookbinding

Some of the most truly stunning bookbindings of the twentieth century were designed as part of the Art Deco movement. One notable artist, Pierre Legrain (1889-1929), returned to Paris from the war after a medical discharge in 1916, and soon found work there with Jacques Doucet (1853-1929), a major collector of modern art. Throughout the 1920s Legrain went on to design bindings for over 1,000 books, many of them one-of-a-kind covers for works from Doucet's own library. Legrain's cover for Doucet's copy of Paul Morand's Les Amis Nouveaux (fig. 4.44) consists of a soft blue calf leather binding attached to steel plates. This material, which was at the height of fashion during the 1920s, tied the book directly to the modern world of the machine. The plates themselves are pierced by holes in a symmetrical geometric design, each hole adorned with a gold dot. The restrained elegance of this design, combined with precious materials that are beautiful in themselves, is a testament to the beauty ot Art Deco luxury goods.

     A bookbinding by Paul Bonet (1889-1971) unites Art Deco aesthetics with one of the early leaders of the modern movement. Guillaume Apollinaire. In 1932, Bonet created a new edition of Apollinaire's Calligratnmes (fig. 4.45) that featured a Cubist-inspired design. The lettering shifts back and forth between positive and negative forms while the kinetic rhythm of the rectangular facets is enhanced by their overlapping, textured, and three-dimensional qualities.

4.44 Pierre Legrain, Les Amis Nouveaux, 1927. Illustrated by Jean Hugo.

4.45 Paul Bonet, Calligrammes by Guillaume Apollinaire, 1932.
Book cover. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Art Deco and Colonialism

see also:

Art Deco

Most Art Deco graphic design was concerned with publicizing products, from travel to beverages, that were a part of the affluent urban lifestyle. However, in an interesting aside, a number of Art Deco graphic works were commissioned to advertise the colonial empires that were a huge part of the European economy. In the face of criticism at home regarding the economic and moral issues of colonialism, both Britain and France sought to convince their own citizens of the virtues of empire.

In 1926, the British government established the Empire Marketing Board, in order to persuade its citizens to do business with British colonies. After its success in the First World War, the British Empire had increased to its greatest size, encompassing 25 per cent of the world's population. Britain oversaw colonies in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, the Pacific Islands, and the Americas. The Board's assignment included a variety of duties, such as overseeing agricultural research, but its most high-profile activity was the mounting of publicity campaigns. The Board spent over £1 million to increase the importation of foodstuffs from around the Empire. It was hoped that, as colonial economies found new markets for their export foodstuffs, they would increase the amount of finished goods purchased from Britain.

The publicity section of the Empire Marketing Board, which included among its members figures such as Frank Pick, of London Underground fame, commissioned over 800 lithographic posters between 1927 and 1933, when the Board was dissolved. Pick brought to the Board the conviction that modern abstract styles were more effective at catching the eye of the viewer than traditional illustration, and this view held sway with the other members. At the same time, the Board maintained authority over the designs, as artists were forced to submit them for approval on completion; in a number of instances, designers were forced to remake an image that did not pass muster with Pick and the other Board members. The posters produced for the Board varied greatly in size; the first major commission went to MacDonald Gill (1884-1947), whose Highways of the Empirewas reproduced at the huge scale of 10 by 20 feet. However, most of the graphic production of the Empire Marketing Board was much more modest in size, no more than 20 by 30 inches, and was intended to be displayed in stores, schools, and government buildings around the country.

     Empire Buying Makes Busy Factories (Jig. 4.48), by Clive Gardiner (1891-1960), is an example of an image from one of these installations. It shows the familiar Futurist man-machine theme that was reproduced in a style based on Cubist geometric abstraction. The men in the image are just as anonymous as the machines, even though they have slightly more irregular contours. This futuristic glorification of industry refers to the idea that strong colonies will buy more and more manufactured goods from Britain.

     In January 1927, Pick initiated the idea of building special hoardings for the Board's posters, as he had in the London Underground. Pick's idea was that each hoarding could serve as the site for an ensemble of similarly themed posters, all 40 inches high but with varying widths. There is no more dramatic example of the theme of a white Briton bringing "civilization" to the primi­tive cultures of the Empire than the pair of posters by Adrian Allinson (1890-1959) on the theme of "East African Transport" (figs. 4.46, 4.47). Paired as part of one of Pick's five-poster ensembles, the two images do not communicate an economic theme, but rather are intended to convey the message that the Empire has improved life in the colonies while at the same time assuring the public of the benevolent control exercised by the white man. In this case, the British overseer in one poster is compositionally paired with the fierce-looking African woman on the other, adding a sexist patriarchal theme as part of this portrayal of East African society as needful of European assistance.
 

4.46 Adrian Allinson, East African Transport—Old Style, 1931. Poster.
National Archives Picture Library.

4.47 Adrian Allinson, East African Transport—New Style. 1931 - Poster.
National Archives Picture Library.

4.48 Clive Gardiner, Empire Buying Makes Busy Factories. 1928.
National Archives, Surrey, England.

The 1931 International Colonial Exposition

During the first half of the twentieth century, the French nation several times addressed its own citizens as well as those of the rest of Europe through the medium of the World's Fair. The 1931 International Colonial Exposition held in Paris sought to show the success of France's huge empire, much of it acquired as a result of the First World War, after which France counted over forty-five nations under its control. The goal of the Exposition was to create a sense of community among the different colonial peoples represented by exhibits spread out over 500 acres in the forest of Vincennes, just outside the city. While the North African Arabic lands under French control were familiar to visitors, there was tremendous fascination with objects and people from the new Central African and West Indian possessions. Over 34 million visitors went to the Exposition, making it one of the most popular international exhibitions ever mounted.

     The Art Deco style predominated at the exposition. For example, the only permanent building, an art gallery designed by Leon Jaussely (1875-1932) and Albert Laprade (1883-1978), has the sleek, elegant lines and simplified geometric forms of Purism (fig. 4.50). Alfred Janniot (1889-1969) contributed an immense relief sculpture illustrating the connections between Paris and the overseas colonies, again in a style informed by reductive geometric antecedents. The building likewise visually demonstrates the strong connections between Art Deco and the French classical tradition, as both have roots in elegant materials, balanced proportions, and a sturdy sense of geometric form. The gallery was later transformed into the Museum of African and Oceanic Art.

     Echoing the colonial sensibility of British posters, the French painter Victor-Jean Desmeures's poster publicizing the exhibition (fig. 4.49), captioned "all the world in one day," displays caricatured stereotypes of non-Europeans, most prominently in the face of the Asian in the foreground. His furtive glance is suggestive of Europeans' view of Asians as "inscrutable." Desmeures has used a basic palette of bold flat colors to differentiate between the citi­zens of different parts of the French empire in a schematic and ornamental way. Again, the Art Deco tendency to emphasize decorative form at the expense of substance is evident here.

     A poster by Jules Isnard Dransy (1883-1945) aimed at pro­moting Italian tourism attempts to make a connection between the Exposition and a more traditional Art Deco theme, entertainment (fig. 4.51), but nonetheless reiterates a racist mindset. Paris at the time was famous for its African American singers, especially the American expatriate Josephine Baker (1906-1975), and this poster shows a woman of color seductively pulling aside a curtain. Obviously, the sexual availability and imagined exoticism of women from the colonies was a major undercurrent in European culture during the colonial period.

     Art Deco represents only one of the main routes whereby modern art movements were transformed into stylish commercial messages. The next chapter will grapple with a second route, showing how Dutch De Stijl and Russian Constructivism also served as springboards for graphic design.

4.50 Leon Jaussely and Pierre Laprade, South Facade of the Colonial Exposition Gallery
(now the Musee des Arts d'Afrique ei d'Oceania), 1931.