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CHAPTER ONE.
Art Posters |
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| CHAPTER TWO | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Modern and Professional |
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FORMAL ART MOVEMENTS The term 'modern' has come to suggest a certain hollowness when applied to the arts - as though it represented a solution in design that time has quietly filed away with all the other styles. The twenties had an air of stylish optimism summed up in the title of Aldous Huxley's book Brave New World, and yet so much of its faded elegance has an element of what we now call 'camp'. Two elements seem to have been at work: formal modern design and decorative modern. The first springs from the idea of function, which replaced the single word 'ornament' that had described the design of the nineteenth century. It represents that forward-looking design that links art with industry and the age of technology. The second element, decorative modern - regarded as a backward-looking style by Le Corbusier and his supporters - thrived in times of affluence, it represented the work of the individual and, as far as posters are concerned, was usually connected with painting. Formal modern was to find a synthesis in the work of the Bauhaus, decorative modern in two periods - the first between the end of Art Nouveau in about 1900 and the rise of Bauhaus influence in the early thirties, the second after the Second World War in the first decorative era of the consumer society. Inevitably some elements of formal design appear as decoration and this, as we shall see, was usually regarded as a compromise between the more rigid principles of design and the decorative manner that developed as a result of the emergence of new forms, The obvious example is the way in which the formal possibilities of Cubist design were turned into almost neo-classical decoration, not only by designers of posters but even by Picasso. The character of both those design elements that went to make up the new form of posters, as well as that of painting, appeared within a few years after 1900, although the dividing line between the world of the nineteenth century and the new, mechanized world of the twentieth is often ascribed for convenience to the effect of the First World War. As far as design is concerned, or as far as art movements were affected by that catastrophic event, one can find only two major connections between the war and art. The Futurist movement seemed to anticipate the nature of mechanized warfare; and the Dadaists were born as a result of the despair produced by the hopelessness of it all. Otherwise, the many changes of style of the various art movements of the twentieth century have their foundations in the years between 1900 and 1917. The most important element in early twentieth-century design was the search for a new structural order, which was most apparent in what we call here 'formal art movements', such as Cubism, De Stijl and Constructivism. As far as the public was concerned, the dates when these different art movements were made known occur between 1908 and 1917. The first Cubist works of Picasso and Braque appeared in 1908. In 1913 Malevich exhibited his first Suprematist work, Quadrat, a black square on a white ground. In 1917 De Stijl, the Dutch progressive movement, was founded by Van Doesburg. Cubist paintings presented a new language of pictorial art which tended towards abstraction. But however far the Cubists travelled away from reality, they always returned to it, for Cubism was basically an art concerned with the real. The Cubists, in fact, had more to say about art and reality than many other painters who had worked in the tradition of illusionistic representation since the Renaissance. The Cubists made the artist's approach to reality both intellectual and sensual. An artist did not necessarily record what he could see of an object from one particular viewpoint - a convention established by centuries of tradition in painting. Instead the Cubist made an analysis of what he knew to be in front of him. Therefore, an object was represented from all viewpoints simultaneously, and in order to make this feat a possibility it became necessary to take reality to pieces and to re-assemble its fragments in a new structural form. In this way, painting becomes more obviously a concept of the artist's intellect, and in the work of art a new language of form was developed to describe space. A painting produced in these terms has a life of its own. It has its own reality, which one is invited to explore mentally. In the past, one had been invited to 'take a walk' in a landscape with the help of various pictorial devices, like the road leading into the middle distance with subtle twists and turns. The Cubists rejected these methods of association, which were after all often merely sentimental responses to the illustration of a view. Instead, they substituted an artificial structure which was to be grasped with the mind and the senses as a fresh experience. In order to give the feel of a new reality, a great emphasis was laid on the tactile elements of the objects of the painting, cither by implied surfaces of wood graining or marbling, or by literally incorporating pieces of material into the work. Collage, sand, parts of posters, lettering were pasted onto the work. The work of art is therefore an independent entity that is itself a new reality. It is interesting that this movement in twentieth-century art was the direct result of a collaboration of personalities - Braque and Picasso. It is important to see that Cubism was both an intellectual and a sensory revolution: most writers on art underline the former, but painters have shown that the appeal to the senses and to the technical language of painting itself has been just as significant. To this double revolution one must therefore add a third element -the invention of the technical device of collage. Together, these developments were to be responsible for changes in the style of posters during the twentieth century. In addition to the discoveries of Braque and Picasso, the effect of the work of Fernand Leger was to be reflected in posters. Leger's interest in the technical elements of modern civilization linked Cubist discoveries with the spirit of the new era. 'L'Esprit Nouveau' found expression in the writings and work of Amedee Ozenfant and Le Corbusier. Their precise treatment of objects and materials became known as the Purist Movement. This formal presentation of reality had clarity and directness - it was to be the principal influence on the applied arts everywhere; that of Leger was confined to France. In Apres le Cubisme (1918), Ozenfant and Le Corbusier stated: 'What we demand in art is precision. The necessity for order which alone can be effective has brought about a daring geomctricization of the spirit which is entering more into all our activities. . . . Contemporary architecture exemplifies this process. Trams, railways, motorcars, implements are all reduced to a rigorous form.' The authors felt that Cubism had, for example, in the neo-naturalism of Picasso's works of 1915-16, reverted to the old pictorial concepts of the past; certainly Picasso's later neo-classical work justifies this fear. The revolution of Cubism and the new technology of the age prompted Ozenfant to write later, in Journey through Life (1932), of'... the first Purist School 1918-26 which, dissenting from Cubism, was both a seeking after the principles of form and a protest against the arts of the drawing room.' In the same work, he also said that he wanted to find some means of making mass-produced paintings: he felt that genius lay in the all-important quality of invention. Problems of the loss of the personal touch in the execution of such works were of secondary importance. ' . . . if we really set out to look for mechanical or semi-automatic processes, some modern Gutenberg would very soon find them. Processes of this kind would do about eighty per cent of the work, and the master would do the rest by hand.' At this point, designers in Paris such as Cassandre (1901-68) took up the language of the formal art movements and applied them to the advertising poster. The name 'Cassandre' was the pseudonym of Jean-Marie Morcau, who had been born in the Ukraine. By 1921 he was able to show that the mechanization of design - loved by the Futurists and by Moholy-Nagy - had in fact become a social reality, although he presented his mechanized compositions within the terms of Paris painting. In a colourful descriptive passage, he wrote that the poster had ceased to be a display but had become instead 'an an-nouncing-machine' - a part of the repetitive process of mass-communication. In an introduction to a publication called Publicite (1928-29) he gives a poetic account of Paris, alive with the sights and sounds of modern advertising media and presided over by the illuminated Eiffel Tower. Cassandre rarely used montage - Wagon-bar (1932) is a brilliant exception - but he simulated the effect of montage photographs in carefully worked-out designs. At the age of twenty-four he produced his design for L' Intransigeant (1925), a work of almost classical purity, rigidly laid out on the Golden Section. A few years earlier, Ozenfant had written, 'Nous aurons aussi notre Parthenon, et notre epoque est plus outillee que celle de Pericles pour realiser l'ideal du perfection.' Cassandre's most acclaimed work has been his design Etoile du Nord (1927), which combines a feeling for the new technology and a comlete faith in its function. One senses the inevitable reliability of the railway system and the vast spaces that the track covers so directly. The set of three posters that Cassandre designed for Dubonnet (1934) are good examples of the use of precise arrangement in the popular idiom. Cassandre expresses movement here in the way a film sequence develops a series of events: the three panels of the poster show three stages through which a man is seen to anticipate, savour and finally become attracted to the aperitif. The automaton-like figure becomes suffused by the drink, which also causes his eye to roll around, in the accepted reaction to this condition. The letters that spell out 'Dubonnet' are also gradually suffused in the same way, implying, in French, a gradual acceptance of something, something that is good, something that is also the name of the product. Such a decorative and humorous use of the clean lines of Purism shows how the formal possibilities of the new design could lead on into decorative treatment. In Dubonnet Cassandre joined other designers in Paris in the thirties whose work contributed to the decorative style of that era, and to which we must return later. At the moment we are concerned with that formalized approach to design which Cassandre derived from the abstract movements in the arts and which led to posters like his L'Intransigeant.
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DECORATIVE ART MOVEMENTS It is by now a commonplace observation that great exhibitions commemorating art movements usually announce that the style is dead and that by the time the official organizations have managed to accumulate enough examples and funds to mount the display, creative talent is busy elsewhere. In 1900, an Exposition in Paris proclaimed the beginning of the end of Art Nouveau. In 1925 the Exposition of Decorative Arts in Paris revealed the climax of another chapter in the history of design, although the effects of twentieth-century decorative design were to continue down the scale through successive waves of imitation until the advancing tide of new decoration from the United States introduced fresh elements of style in the 1940s. Decorative poster design in Europe from 1910 until 1939 seems to have proceeded in different countries according to the local elements of decorative design. For example, in Germany the delicate pattern of Secessionist design produced one element, the heavy shapes of Munich Jugendstil another - and both of these appear constantly in German posters. In England, the most significant posters derived from the simple, flat patterns of the posters of the Beggarstaff Brothers. In France, the colour of Les Fauves, the fashion designs of couturiers such as Paul Poiret, and the work of Jean Cocteau prepared the way for a decorative style that was further enlivened by the many influences that gravitated to Paris, which remained, during this period, the principal art centre of the world. The visit of the Ballets Russes to Paris is just one example. Picasso designed 'Cubist' decorations for Diaghilev's Parade: particularly significant are the set of drawings showing the metamorphosis of a sandwich-board man wearing his posters into a Cubist pattern of still-life and portrait, together with the lettering and picture-plane of the poster. That one of the founders of Cubism could make use of his discoveries in this decorative way shows that the lament on the part of the Purists - that the work of the Cubists lacked 'precision' - was justified. The decorative possibilities of Cubist discoveries also contributed to poster design, although in a way that was quite different from the austere influence of the formal art movements. The 'angularity' that one associates with so much 'Art Deco' is found in the fashion designs of artists such as Boussingault in his drawings for the fashion designer Paul Poiret (an example can be found in La Gazette du Bon Ton in 1914). Poiret himself detested Cubism and its austerity, and we must therefore accept that we have two distinct lines of development in poster designs between 1910 and 1939, one stemming from Cubist abstraction (but even more precise), and the other, based on decorative angular patterns that also take in Cubist developments. Our division of the 'modern' into formal and decorative therefore seems justified by the very real antipathy that existed between artists at the time. Le Corbusier despised the so-called decorative arts - an article in his L'Esprit Nouveau (1924) by Paul Boulard condemned 'phoney-cubism', laid out by the kilometre. (He attacked Cassandre's first widely distributed poster, Аu Bucheron, as a 'gros messieur' in the tradition of Meissonier.) Corbusier in his turn seems to have been persecuted at the Decorative Arts Exhibition of 1925 when his pavilion, already confined to a poor site, was surrounded by an 18-foot-high wall. The first prize that an international jury had awarded him was vetoed by the French member of the jury. The posters of Cassandre were derived partly from the work of Purist designs - as we have seen already in his Etoile du Nord and Wagon-bar - and partly from neo-classical decoration, as is evident in his posters Grew (1933) and Angleterre (1934) - a more decorative development than Cubism, which appeared also in the work of Braquc as well as that of Picasso. Cassandre later made designs in the United States for Harper's Bazaar and also turned his attention to theatre decor. His style also relates to that of other poster designers in Paris at that time, notably Jean Carlu (born 1900), who, in turn, also helped to spread the Paris style in the United States, where posters and billboards tended to be realistic photographs, paintings from these or cartoon gags enlarged to poster size. In his poster, America's Answer - Production (1945), Carlu displayed some of the devices of the Decorative Arts in Paris. The title lettering of the poster is displayed across the work. Beyond this, a large gloved hand in the form of a symbol grasps a wrench which is fastened around the first 'o' of the word 'production' as though it were a nut. In this way the typography is made part of an implied picture from reality. This device is typical of Carlu's earlier work, which always has strength and simplicity: the neon version (1935) of his poster Cuisine Electrique shows these characteristics. He made other excursions into mixed media poster form, including work for Osram, Martel and, with Claude Lemeunier, Cordon Bleu.
Paul Colin, who exerted a great influence both through his work and through
his design school, is represented here by a study for the poster Bal Negre.
This brilliant design clearly relates the poster to decorative painting of
the time. It also presents the new entertainment world of Paris that had
succeeded the cafe chantant as the subject of the music and variety poster.
The work of musicians and singers such as Josephine Baker represented a
continuation of the cosmopolitan life of Paris as reflected in the posters
of the 1890s. There is, however, the important change technically in the
transference of ideas from canvas to print. In the work of
Cassandre,
Carlu
and Colin, surface marks, whether of brush or of collage, are usually
invisible in the immaculate poster-prints. Even hand-lettering is
indistinguishable from type. The effect of photo-montage is simulated: there
is none of the 'artist's handwriting' that one finds, for example, in an
Expressionist poster. This seems to be a concession towards the
mass-production precision of the time, implying that decoration itself was
leaning towards formalism. The appearance of the actual painting surfaces of
the works of Constructivists and De Stijl artists may have been the obvious
source - as they were to be for the painters of hard-edge compositions in
the 1960s. Another, less obvious, source for an 'impersonal' technique of
execution was the work of
Dali and
Tanguy.
Posters such as Cointreau (1926) by A. Mercier; Mlle Rahra (с. 1927) by
Bernard Becan; Pierre Fix-Masseau's Le Transport Gratuit and Paulet
Thevenez's poster of 1924 are all typical works that relate to the 'Art Deco' style.
Jean Dupas's London Passenger Transport Board, from the
thirties, is characteristic of his paintings, which are so much a part of
the period. The fashion designs of
Georges
Lepape that appear in the Gazette
du Bon Ton and Les Choses de Poiret (1911) - two sources that are
indispensable for those interested in the design of this era - are also
reflected in his poster, Soiree de Gala pour L'Enfance. The influence of
Paris design on decorative posters lasted from before the First World War
until well after the Second, as in the sensitive work of Picart-Le-Doux and
Nathan-Garamond. In France the Union de l'Affiche Francaise furnished
printers, designers and agents with a form of organization which other
countries lacked. Posters in France, however, did not have so wide a
dissemination in the community as they did, for example, in England.
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THE PROFESSIONAL DESIGNER While the modern art movements had contributed stylistic changes to the art of poster design, another factor had been developing which was to affect the place of posters in advertising generally and, ultimately, to affect their style as well. The importance of the professional graphic designer had emerged from the interchange between the fine and applied arts at the turn of the century, which, in turn, had derived from the original design movements of the nineteenth century. The liaison between industry and the designer had an early precedent in the commission that the firm Tropon gave Van de Velde in the 1890s; this resulted in the famous poster of 1898, as well as Van de Velde's designs for packaging, and a prospectus. Similarly Peter Behrens was commissioned to design, for the Allgemeine Elektrizitatsgesellschaft, everything from the notepaper heading to the building itself - an early example of complete design coordination. In England, Frank Pick was responsible for developing a series of design elements for London Underground Railways that gave the amalgamated transport system of that metropolis a coordinated pattern. For the same organization Edward Johnston designed a typeface in 1916, which was the first sans serif type to be cut from new designs in the twentieth century. It is still in use and makes an interesting comparison with the same, although independently developed, use of sans serif at the Bauhaus. An inspired use of design, that extended throughout the advertising of a single product and introduced a number of outstanding visual innovations, was the series of decorative posters and murals made by Charles Loupot for the firm of St Raphael in France. Following the anonymous design, which appeared in 1928, showing two waiters bearing St Raphael Aperitif, Loupot produced a number of variations in 1938 which made a formal pattern out of the design. During the years that followed, until 1957, his work -later carried out from the Atelier Loupot - developed into designs-for large painted wall-space, breaking up the formal patterns into fragments. These were distributed in any given locality, often appearing as giant abstract shapes with no acknowledgment to St Raphael; but the simple colour combination of red, white and black, and the sweeping triangular shapes, made their identity obvious. The most interesting part of this campaign was the establishment of design in an environment - free from the conventional hoarding or billboard if necessary, and relating one mural to another over a wide landscape. The same design was also used on cars, and buses: even to the extent of linking the movement of the bus to set the elements of the design in motion.
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THE CONTEMPORARY FORTIES AND FIFTIES A change in style in the decorative arts appeared in the 1940s and 1950s. In Europe, an amalgamation of formal and decorative styles, developed in the Scandinavian countries, was imitated with less success in other areas. In the United States, a more flamboyant version of the same amalgamation appeared in the 'streamline' decoration of automobiles and in architecture. The significant distinction between the two areas lay in the way the new style was adapted by the imitators in each case. In Europe, the minimal elements of design used in work based on ideas from De Stijl or Constructivism too often degenerated into mere austerity in countries that had suffered economically as a result of the war. In the United States, industrial and technological expansion led to the development of popular design elements. The two broad areas of expression on each side of the Atlantic produced a new style, as diverse as Art Nouveau. In Britain this New World seemed less 'brave' than its predecessor in the twenties: the style was described, rather flatly, as 'contemporary'. The desperate attempt to stay modern yet be acceptable to a new consumer society - in some cases re-building its shattered towns - led to a form of mannerism. That term, as applied to sixteenth-century art, suggested elements of paradox and contradiction that were the product of another age of uncertainty: apparent functionalism yet actual meaningless decoration, exaggeration of scale, the high tensions of melodrama. This was a style at once classical and anti-classical. The new mannerism of the forties and fifties generally produced striking points of similarity. The earlier age had always suggested a world of movement and drama that seemed to anticipate the future art of the cinema; in the post-war years of the forties the cinema had come into its own. Films such as Citizen Kane by Qrson Welles contained many of the devices of the mannerist tradition. Film techniques had already influenced poster design in the twentieth century, as in the work of Moholy-Nagy and El Lissitzky, but now the cinema was to exert an even greater influence on the appearance of posters. For example, German State Railways (1955), by Eugene Max Cordier, demonstrates the mannerist devices of the period. First, ambiguity: the image is both descriptive and stylized, abstract and realistic - without too much of cither. The underlying idea is to show how the passengers of a train (modernized to seem like air-travel) are presented with a picture-window view of the passing landscape. The outline of this window is also the shape of a cinema or television screen, implying that our vision is now conditioned by the viewfinder of the camera. Many posters have used this device of the outlined screen to enclose a visual quotation or simply to give an otherwise straightforward image the technical modernism of the photographic frame. In any case, film and television advertising forced the poster into a less significant role in visual advertising - at least as far as the development of new imagery was concerned. Eugene Max Cordier's poster has the double meaning of the two passengers being given the reality promised by the travelogue movie; further camera devices, such as close-up, the zoom and the effect of a panning shot, were all introduced into poster design. Among the important influences that contributed to the 'contemporary' style of posters were the Cubists' collage and textural effects, and other of their stylistic elements, such as the full-face profile image often used by Picasso and Braque in their paintings and drawings in the 1930s. Interpretations of the style of the School of Paris had already been given currency in posters through the work of Cassandre and others; now many designers made renewed use of these conventions. In Switzerland Herbert Leupin - Poster for a Printer in Lausanne (1959) - and Hans Erni produced elegant examples of this style; in France Raymond Savignac continued to make his sophisticated designs, for example, Ma Colle. In England, Tom Eckersley - General Post Office (1952) - and F.H.K.Henrion produced many designs that demonstrated the use of the simple, direct message of posters. The main characteristic of the period after the Second World War was a rather uneasy attempt to make a connection with the posters of the thirties. This earlier and relatively 'innocent' era - the spirit of which was often reflected in the popular movies of the period as well as in advertising - could not compare with the complex nature of the Nuclear Age. In the 1960s, poster design, often produced by highly professional artists, became subject to influences that were more characteristic of a period of uncertainty, and took the form of a more emotional and erotic approach to visual advertising - for example, the 'sick' element of surrealist humour.
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