Three Visually Arresting Modernist Judaica Posters

by Stephen J. Gertz

Designer Unknown.
"M". c. 1931.

We revisit the Swann Galleries Modernist Poster sale held May 13, 2013.

The linocut poster above is for the original release of film director Fritz Lang's "M" at the Moghrabi Theatre (built in 1930) in Tel Aviv.

After a distinguished career during the silent film era, Lang's first talkie - considered to be his best film - starred Peter Lorre as Hans Beckert, a hunted, haunted by "this evil thing inside me" child murderer who whistles Grieg's ominous In the Hall of the Mountain King when approaching his prey. 

Due to the lurid nature of film's subject matter Lang, who had made his films at the celebrated and artistically influential German studio, UFA (Universum Film AG), worked with Nero Films for this movie to deflect the political pressure bearing down upon him from UFA, a government-supported entity. When sound arrived UFA routinely released versions of major films in several languages. Given that Jews were  persecuted in Germany soon after the movie's release and, later, exterminated wherever Nazis found them, it is fascinating to learn that UFA felt the need to release a version in Hebrew to cater to the audience in then Palestine. It was strictly a financial decision. With the advent of sound movies and language barriers the studio could no longer depend on easy distribution and box-office receipts throughout the world.

Designer unknown.

This same, stark image of a hand, emblazoned with a red "M," appeared on the original German poster but did not have the repeating motif of the letter against the background.

Abram Games (1914-1996).
Give Clothing For Liberated Jewry. 1945.

As a Jew who had been exposed to Nazi atrocities through British war films, Abram Games (1914-1996) was in a unique position to be able to channel his horror in a manner which could potentially assist the decimated Jewish communities of Europe. His Give Clothing For Liberated Jewry (1945) starkly and dramatically captures the desperate plight of concentration camp survivors. (Abram Games: His Life and Work, fig 219).

Abram Games, one of the twentieth century's most influential British graphic designers, believed in using the simplest possible design to create the greatest possible impact.

Beginning as a commercial artist, when WWII broke out he was recruited as an Official War Artist and in that capacity designed over a hundred posters, later creating the symbols of the BBC and the Festival of Britain.

He experimented with "unusual juxtapositions of illustration and typography. Games strove to ensure that his wartime posters were as striking and seductive as the best commercial art.

The "Blonde Bombshell."

"Sometimes Games’ work was deemed too seductive, notably the glamorous ATS girl dubbed the 'Blonde Bombshell' which was criticized by the House of Commons for being too glamorous. Games favored stark, simple and, therefore, all the more arresting images produced by sticking to his philosophy of deriving 'maximum meaning' from 'minimum means'" (Design Museum).

Abram Games (1914-1996)
DP / Over 200,000 Displaced Jews Look To You. 1946.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, Games designed "posters which demanded, rather than appealed to, the Jewish public to give aid to the refugees . . . [In Displaced Persons] two eyes stare out of the initials DP with an appalling urgency; the vestige of a face an embodiment of despair. The lettering underneath . . . is by contrast plain and tiny: no words are really necessary. This is Games at his most powerful" (Abram Games: His Life and Work, p. 177, and fig. 220).  

“All Abram Games’ designs were recognizably his own. They had vigor, imagination, passion and individuality...And he was lucky - and clever - in contriving, over a long and creative working life, to keep on doing what he did best” (David Gentleman).
 

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Images courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries, with our thanks.
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An Arts & Crafts Poster For A Bookbinder

by Stephen J. Gertz

Modernist poster madness continues on Booktryst; the goodies at Swann Galleries' recent sale keep piling up. 

TH. H. Molkenboer (1871-1920) designed this poster for Amsterdam bookbinder Elias P. Van Bommel in 1897.

After completing his studies in Amsterdam, Molkenboer worked in various fields of the Applied Arts including pottery and book ornamentation. This  poster, portraying a bookbinder in profile absorbed in his work, is a very rare example of woodblock technique applied to poster art.

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Image courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries, with our thanks.

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Seven More Stunning Modernist Posters

by Stephen J. Gertz

More from Swann Galleries' Modernist Posters sale, held yesterday.

James Harley Minter designed this poster, Bal Pa'Pillon, in 1931 for The Kokoon Club of Cleveland, Ohio, founded in 1911 by Carl Moellman and William Sommer, young American artists inspired by the Dadaist movement and similar avant-garde organizations in Europe, and modeled after New York's Kit Kat Club. The club held annual costume balls, which began in 1913 and continued through 1938.

"This decadent, cubist-influenced image is an electric, microcosmic view of Cleveland's avant-garde artistic community. Presaging the psychedelic posters of the 1960s and reflecting many of the concurrent graphic art trends in Europe, this poster, and the entire series for the club's yearly balls, are bright, bold, daring and stand out as exciting and innovative examples of American design. Each poster also served as an invitation to the event, with the invitee's name written in across the bottom" (Nicholas D. Lowry). I hope Margaret Brennan had as much fun at this soirée as I did viewing its poster.

I am pleased to report that the head-snapping whiplash I experienced after learning that Cleveland possessed an avant-garde artistic community has been successfully treated via review of gangbuster Elliot Ness's checkered career as Cleveland's Public Safety Director followed by an unsuccessful run for mayor of Cleveland in 1938. I have no snobbish animus toward Cleveland; I simply had no idea that the city possessed a hip culture. 

For more about The Kokoon Club of Cleveland, including a survey of other gorgeous posters for its costume balls go here.

For Viaggiate Di Notte (1930), designed by famed graphic artist Adolphe Mouron Cassandre (1901-1968) for Wagons Lits (a railroad sleeping car company),  the artist chose an "unquestionably persuasive" (Mouron p. 69) symbolic and poetic approach to advertising.

"The breathtakingly simple device of a red light glowing in the foggy darkness of a railroad siding is perfectly consistent with our poetically charged experience of looking out the window of a speeding night express" (op cit, Mouron).

"It is an elegant and inviting approach, evoking travel by night. The poster exists with different text variants, but this one is the least cluttered. This is also the rare Italian version. We could locate only one other copy in the collection of the Suntory Museum in Japan" (Lowry).

Cassandre, again. Turmac / La Cigarette is one of his earliest posters, designed in 1925. "It predates the time when his work began to reflect his radical and ingenious design theories. He employs a sensuous approach which doesn't appear again in his work until 1937, when a similar smoldering cigarette is featured in his poster for Sensation Cigarettes. Nevertheless, it also foreshadows some of his subsequent graphic finesse: within the stylized smoke and the outside border, he plays with the interchange between shades of blue, white and black in a manner that presages his typographic work in later posters such as Pivolo, Nord Express and Étoile du Nord. The actual typography on this poster is an exceptional mix of Art Deco and the Arabesque. We have not found another copy at auction for the past 30 years" (Lowry). 

Jac Leonard (1904-1980), a Canadian artist, created Beware The Walls Have Ears c. 1940, It's one in a series of posters printed by Canada's Wartime Information Board, similar in aim and approach to those published by the American War Office in its Careless Talk Kills series issued during World War II.

A swastika-eyed secret villain, photo-montage, bold, bright typography and powerful imagery - this progressive design has it all and makes its point as firmly as a hammer to the noggin.

Edgar Scauflaire (1893-1960) was a Belgian artist who studied at the Académie des Beaux Arts in Liége, where he was born. Many of his paintings clearly reflect the influence of Picasso and Braque. He also designed murals and tapestries. This Art Deco-inspired, aquatic allegory is one of at least two posters used to promote the International Exposition de L'Eau of 1939.

After studying art at the Munich Academy under Julius Diez and Angelo Jank, Hermann Keimel (1889-1948) went on to become a teacher at the same institution. He was a member of the artistic group "The Twelve," and also of the new Munich Association of Poster Artists. He designed numerous commercial posters, generally employing a crisp Art Deco style. Muenchner / Plakat Kunst (1931) is his masterpiece and remains an icon of poster self-promotion: to promote an exhibition of Munich poster art Keimel constructed this cubist face out of colored sheets of printing paper.

Manilo Parrini (1901-1968) created this striking aeronautical-themed poster for the 3d International Aircraft Exhibition held in conjunction with the Milan Trade Fair of 1939.

He worked during Mussolini's regime in Italy, which is to say in a monumental, over the top, grandiose glory of Rome epic style, light on subtlety; the anvil school of messaging. Here, in a Fascist salute to Il Duce, he incorporates a trio of fasces on the tail fin of the plane in the foreground, while the three planes in the distance are streaming the colors of the Italian flag behind them.

In case anyone misses the symbolism of fasces on the tail, it's a visual representation of baciarmi il  Fascista culo,  if not an official, explicit political slogan, a casually implicit one.

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Réne Magritte designed posters and sheet music? Stop by Booktryst tomorrow for the story.

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Images courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries, with our thanks.
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Stunning Modernist Posters At Swann Galleries

by Stephen J. Gertz

Today, Monday, May 13, 2013, Swann Auction Galleries is hosting a spectacular graphic arts sale, an extravaganza of Modernist posters, 253 lots of some of the most visually arresting images you'll ever see. It's so impressive that Booktryst is devoting this week to highlights from the auction.

"His name should have an important place in the history of posters because of his innovative aesthetics." So notes the Bénézit Dictionnaire des Peintres, Sculpteurs, Dessinateurs et Graveurs of Orsi, of whom little is known despite the fact that he designed as many as 1,000 posters. Bénézit  praises Orsi's sense of simplification, his bright colors and his creative ideas.

Philips Electronics was one of his primary clients. Here is Lampe Flourescente, printed by Bedos & Cie, Paris, c. 1940. As Nick Lowry, head of posters at Swann (and now its president), notes "the pointillist effect he creates to advertise a fluorescent light bulb is a classic example of the extent of his talent. The diagonal of the bulb itself, the unique handling of the coloring, the typography and the overall feeling of fluorescence make this an exceptional image."

Charles Verschuuren Jr. (1899-1955) was an illustrator, cartoonist and part-time painter born in the Netherlands. He designed over 100 posters before emigrating with his family to New York City in 1922. Once settled he contributed many illustrations to the Brooklyn Eagle Sunday Magazine. He also designed posters for the WPA and briefly worked for Disney.  This poster, designed c. 1917, was for Drukkerij Kotting, the Amsterdam printer for whom Verschuuren did all of his design work before moving to the United States.

Sven Hendriksen (1890-1935) designed this poster, a bold image amplified by shadow effect, in 1934 for the moderate left-wing Danish Worker's Party, which published Social-Demokraten, a newspaper printed by Jensens Trykkerier of Copenhagen. Henriksen was a self-taught artist turned graphic designer who created this poster for the paper's 60th  anniversary. I'm particularly attracted to the image because if its implicit subtext of reading as a political act.

Otto Baumberger (1889-1961) was one of the most prolific Swiss poster designers, with well over two hundred designs to his credit. Beginning in 1917 he regularly worked for upscale Swiss clothing retailer PKZ.

As Lowry notes, "this poster [created in 1923] is not only the best he produced for the company but is also an icon in poster history. The tweed coat is rendered in near-photographic perfection to the point where you can practically feel the fabric. Baumberger took a totally new approach to advertising by ingeniously incorporating the poster's text into the image in the form of the label in the coat.

"With this poster Baumberger cemented his role as master of the 'Object Poster,' (a title he earned four years earlier with a classic image of a top hat), and began the trend of 'New Objectivity' within the Swiss school of Graphic Design. A sensation from the day it was issued, this image remains compelling and proves to be one of the finest of the PKZ posters."

Pierre Segogne (?-1958) was a prolific poster designer for the cinema yet he and his work have been largely been forgotten and certainly under appreciated. But for a short period during the 1920s he was extremely inventive and developed a singular style using a stencil technique, applying colors using either a sponge or a roll. This gave his posters a singular appearance.

This poster was designed in 1923 for Diany Dorange, a circus performer with a popular equestrian act. A program from 1925 bills her as the star performer at l'Empire, one of the largest Parisian Music Halls. Gitty-up.

This poster for Vitalis - Les Rayons Qui Guérissent was designed by Henry Farion (?-1991) c. 1935.

Nikola Tesla and George Lakhovsky (who, as everyone knows, invented the MWO-multi wave oscillator; it wasn't, as I presumed, Moe Howard; thanks, Nick Lowry, for setting me straight) were celebrated in France; the use of electricity for curing all manner of physical woe was widespread. Electrotherapy kits for home use, such as those produced by Vitalis, were sold in sets that came in their own cases with separate attachments suited to treat different parts of the body. Such electrotherapy kits were prevalent in America until they were banned in the 1930s.

American men of a certain age will scratch their heads and let the dandruff fall where it may: in the U.S., Vitalis was a popular hair tonic offered in barbershops - along with Brylcreem, Wildroot Cream-Oil, Kreml, and Dapper Dan - as an alternative to "greasy kid-stuff," as its advertisements characterized the competition. With a couple of toes in the grave I confess to having used Vitalis and Brylcreem as a '50s kid in a desperate attempt to keep my curly hair straight and flat on my scalp and forestall its inevitable explosion into a Jew-'Fro for as long as possible. It's a little known fact that the trend for long, curly hair during the 1960s was established for my personal benefit, Harpo Marx my hairstyle model. 

Nicholas D. Lowry, the popular appraiser on Antiques Roadshow who enjoys "drinking scotch while listening to heavy metal music" (AR bio),  appears to be a fan of Vitalis - the hair tonic not the electro-stimulator.

Just who F. Tarazona - the designer of the above celebration, c. 1925 ala Weimar, of 1920s music hall decadence and excess - was remains a mystery, as does the specific location in Spain of Teatro Apolo - Velasco.

Be sure to stop by tomorrow when Booktryst continues its look at Modernist posters offered by Swann Auction Galleries.

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View the entire catalog in 3D here.
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All images courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries, with our thanks.
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Stunning Posters Celebrate Walt Whitman

Monumental linocuts created by artist Paul Peter Piech in 1992 to honor of the 100th anniversary of Walt Whitman's death come to market.

by Stephen J. Gertz

A near-complete portfolio of twenty-five (out of a probable twenty-nine) poster-sized linocuts of exceptional rarity that honor  America's magnum poet, Walt Whitman, by master printmaker Paul Peter Piech, who devoted his artistic output to themes of social justice, politics, and pacifism, has recently surfaced and is being offered by a rare book dealer in Virginia, United States.

 

Published in a  small limited edition of twenty-five sets, only one complete copy is recorded by OCLC/KVK in institutional holdings worldwide, at University of Iowa. Only one other record exists for the series, at Harvard's Houghton Library, yet their copy is woefully incomplete with only three linocuts present. This set, then, is the most complete seen in many years; they are scarce in any state, astonishingly so to possess so many prints in the series. Many if not most of the sets have, presumably, been broken up to individually sell the linocuts.

Piech (1920-1996) "was born in Brooklyn in 1920, the son of Ukrainian immigrants looking for a new way of life in America. From their tough example Piech learnt both to work hard and to speak out when it mattered. His books and posters confront the viewer with the need for global responsibility and co-operation...

"...Piech studied at the Cooper Union College of Art, New York. In 1937 he went to work as a graphic artist at Studio Dorland, an international advertising agency located in Berlin, under Herbert Bayer... Between 1951 and 1968 Piech worked as an artistic director for W.S. Crawfords Advertising" (The Independent), having remained in Wales after service during WWII to marry and settle down.

 

In 1959, Piech established the Taurus Press and began his rise as one of the foremost artists of his generation to incorporate themes of social justice and pacifism. His background in advertising design led to a boldly graphic and urgent, poster-like style to his linocuts, his preferred medium.

 

From 1969 until his death in 1996 he freelanced as a graphic designer while teaching as several prestigious art schools.

Printer and writer Kenneth Hardacre described the firmly insistent determination of Piech's output as that of "a man whose need to communicate his faith and his fears was so pressing that it often appeared to be impatient with the very means he had chosen for expressing that need." The intensity of his work is palpable.

These dramatic linocuts boldly sing Whitman electric, trumpeting justice triumphant, uncompromising liberty and equality, the justification of candor, the justification of pride, and the universal truth of nature.

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PIECH, Paul Peter. In Celebration of the 100th Anniversary of Walt Whitman's Death. [Willowdene, Herts. (U.K.): Taurus Press, 1992].  Limited to twenty five sets, this being No. 15. Twenty-five (of 29?) pencil signed and dated linocuts, each 25 x 18 inches (64 x 45 cm) and numbered 15 of 25.
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Portfolio images courtesy of Lorne Bair Rare Books, with our thanks.
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The Man Who Married Text And Art

 

Front endpaper to: SATIÉ, Alain. Pour ainsi dire. Gravures de Isidore Isou,
Maurice Lemaître, Roland Sabatier, Alain Satié, Jacques Spacagna.
Paris: Éditions PSI, 1971.

At the close of WWII, Isidore Goldstein, a precocious Romanian artist-poet born in 1925, came to Paris, looked around, decided to remake the arts, adopted the surname Isou, and staked his claim:

Destruction of WORDS for LETTERS

ISIDORE ISOU    Believes in the potential elevation beyond WORDS; wants
    the development of transmissions where nothing is
                  lost in the process; offers a verb equal to a shock. By
    the overload of expansion the forms leap up by themselves.
ISIDORE ISOU    Begins the destruction of words for letters.
ISIDORE ISOU    Wants letters to pull in among themselves all desires.
ISIDORE ISOU    Makes people stop using foregone conclusions, words.
ISIDORE ISOU    Shows another way out between WORDS and RENUNCIATION:
                   LETTERS. He will create emotions against language, for the
                   pleasure of the tongue.
           It consists of teaching that letters have a destination
     other than words.
ISOU            Will unmake words into their letters.
                Each poet will integrate everything into Everything
                Everything must be revealed by letters.
POETRY CAN NO LONGER BE REMADE.

ISIDORE ISOU IS STARTING
     A NEW VEIN OF LYRICISM.
           Anyone who can not leave words behind can stay back with them!

[Extract from Introduction à une Nouvelle Poésie et une Nouvelle Musique. Paris: Gallimard, 1947. Manifesto of Letterist Poetry, B. Innovation I.]

Isidore Isou. Self-Portrait. 1952.

Declaring himself a Lettriste while still a teenager in Romania, he established the Lettrism group in Paris of which he was the only member. No membership drive necessary, he was soon joined by others, Gabriel Pomerand amongst the first, all eager to explore the liberating possibilities unleashed by Lettrism, Isou in the lead.  By the 1960s, Lettrism theory, a marriage of art and typography with the letter as visual symbol, had spread across the entire landscape of culture and the visual arts as Hypergraphics, a refined synthesis of text and other media forms that is now firmly embedded into Western culture. Lettrism, once avante guard,  the cutting edge intellectual and artistic spearhead of the international post-War II youth rebellion, is now mainstream and fully integrated into Western consciousness.

Enzyklopädie des Osiris.
Berlin: Verlag grotesque kunst, 1919.
An example of Dada Quatsch (Pseudodada),  
a parody of Dada utterance and typography.

Lettrism’s roots lie in Dada and Surrealism. Though not his intent, Duchamp's Disques Optiques  is considered an exploration of the letter "O" as the central visual element.

Duchamp, Marcel. Rotorelief. Disques Optiques.
[Paris: Privately published, 1935].

Isou considered his fellow countryman, Tristan Tzara, to be Dada's foremost exponent, yet he believed that by the 1940s, the movement had become stagnant.

Cover to: ILIAZD (Ilia Zdanevitch). [Ledentu as a Beacon].
Paris: Éditions du 41º, 1923.

We also see a foreshadowing of Lettrism in Futurism and the work of Russian Futurist, Iliazd (Ilia Zdanevitch)...

Pages 52 and 53 from: ILIAZD (Ilia Zdanevitch). [Ledentu as a Beacon].
Paris: Éditions du 41º, 1923.

...And in the work of Italian Futurist Fortunato Depero.

DEPERO, Fortunato. Veni VD Vici.
Milano: Verzocchi (V&D), 1924.
Catalog for brick manufacturer V&D.

Lettrism gains traction during the 1950s, and after Isou publishes Le Lettrisme et l'Hypergraphie dans la peinture et la sculpture contemporaines in 1961 Lettrism becomes the dominant visual force of the 1960s and 1970s.

ISOU. Isidore. Le Lettrisme et l'Hypergraphie dans la peinture et la sculpture contemporaines.
Paris: Jean Grassin, 1961.

Lettrism crossed the Atlantic and influenced, amongst others, Ed Ruscha...

RUSCHA, Ed. Honk. 1962.

...And Roy Lichtenstein.

LICHTENSTEIN, Roy. Masterpiece. 1962.

By the late 1960s, the powerful influence of Lettrism on Pop-Art is seen in the visually stunning psychedelic posters for Bill Graham's Fillmore auditoriums in San Francisco and New York.

Wes Wilson. 1966.

Wes Wilson. 1967.

 Meanwhile, back in France...

LEMAÎTRE, Maurice. Le lettrisme dans le roman et les arts plastiques.
Devant le pop-art et la bande dessinée.
Two-page spread across first two blanks.
Paris: Collection "Lettrisme." 1, 1970.

BROUTIN, Gérard-Philippe, et al. Lettrisme et hypergraphie par Gérard-Philippe Broutin, Jean-Paul Curtay, Jean-Pierre Gillard, François Poyet.
Original gouache and ink by Dany Tayarda.
Paris: Éditions Georges Fall, 1972.

BROUTIN, Gérard-Philippe, et al. Lettrisme et hypergraphie par Gérard-Philippe Broutin, Jean-Paul Curtay, Jean-Pierre Gillard, François Poyet.
Original gouache and ink by Roland Sabatier.
Paris: Éditions Georges Fall, 1972.

LEMAÎTRE, Maurice. Poems et musique lettristes.
Paris: Lettrisme, 1971.

By the 1980s, Lettrism is fully integrated into all media and is a catch-all for any work uniting text, typography, and the visual arts.

KRUGER, Barbara. Your Body Is a Battle Ground. 1989.

DEVAUX, Frédérique (preface). 11 photographies originales de
Michael Amarger, Jean-Paul d'arville, Gérard-Philippe Broutin,
 Françoise Canal, Frédérique Devaux, Albert Dupont, Isidore Isou,
François Poyet, Woodie Roehmer, Roland Sabatier, Alain Satie.
Original photograph with hand-painted interventions by François Poyet.
Paris: Éditions de Cluny, 1990.

When he was only twenty-one years old Isidore Isou planted his flag in the arts, published his manifesto, and, by the time of his death in 2007, had left an indelible stamp upon the world that crystalizes into three simple words:

TEXT IS ART

BROUTIN, Gérard-Philippe, et al. Lettrisme et hypergraphie par Gérard-Philippe Broutin, Jean-Paul Curtay, Jean-Pierre Gillard, François Poyet.
Original gouache and ink by Isidore Isou.
Paris: Éditions Georges Fall, 1972.

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With the exception of the Kruger, Ruscha, Lichtenstein, Isou self-portrait and book, all images courtesy of Ars Libri, Ltd., Catalogue 154.

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