The Shocking Hard-Boiled World Of Librarians!

by Stephen J. Gertz

They take no guff from deadbeats.

Original cover art by Casey Jones for Crackers in Bed
by Vic Fredericks. Pocket Books 1053 (1955).

Books and snacks in the boudoir are their after-hours business - and business is good.

Original cover art by Peff (Sam Peffer) for ?, London: Pan Books.

They're know-it-alls with only one answer - the one that men want!

Original cover art by Darcy (Ernest Chiriaka) for Dearest Mama
by Walewska. Digit Books 393 (1956).

They read trash for breakfast, season it with tawdry filth, chase it with smutty little stories, and reach their bliss multiple times but it's never enough to satisfy their primitive hunger!

Original cover art by Bill George for Haunted Lady
by Mary Roberts Rinehart. Dell 814 (1955).

Though they get creeped-out by wacko stalkers with twisted desires,

Original cover art by Rafael DeSoto for The Girl From Big Pine
by Talmadge Powell. Monarch 483 (1964).

they're always willing to go out on a limb for a sweet daddy-o with dangerous eyes and a savage smirk!

They're merciless with bimbos who avoid books,

Original cover art by Reginald Heade for Plaything of Passion
by Jeanette Revere. Archer Books 57 (1950).

and possess mad, unholy desire and strange diabolical hate and all-consuming love for abbreviations formed from the initial letters of other words and pronounced as a word.

Original cover art for The Case of the Rolling Bones
by Erle Stanely Gardner. Pocket Books 2464 (1949).

They play craps with their reputation and gamble away their morals for a chance at the big time - but a good time will do!

They're a strange cult into weird hats and bizarre dining rituals,

Original cover art by Verne Tossey for The Case of the Lonely Heiress
by Erle Stanley Gardner. Pocket Book 922 (1952).

with sensitive janes overcome in the public john by loathsome forces beyond their control!

Original cover art by Rafael DeSoto for Mr. Parker Pyne, Detective
by Agatha Christie. Dell 550 (1951).

But when those sensitive janes detect halitosis and rank B.O. wafting their way they smell trouble and it's pine-scent Mace® for the great unwashed with library cards!

They're no patsies, they ain't like Dr. Jennifer Melfi. Talk therapy don't cut it for some and she knows it.

Dr. Melfi: That Departures magazine out there. Did you give any thought at all to someone else who might wanna read before you tore out the entire page?

Tony Soprano: What?

Dr. Melfi: It's not the first time you've defaced my reading materials.

Tony Soprano: You saw that, huh? People tear shit outta your magazines all the time, they're a mess. I try to read 'em.

Dr. Melfi: I don't think I can help you.

Tony Soprano: Well, change 'em. Bring in some new shit. 

Dr. Melfi: I mean therapeutically.

Tony Soprano: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, OK? Now what the fuck is this? You're, uh, firin' me 'cause I defaced your Departures magazine?

No, when L-Girls are confronted by a chronic defacer of library periodicals they don't mess around. When they say get lost they mean take a long walk off a short pier: they cancel his subscription to life; you won't see him around no more; he sleeps with the fische.

Original cover art by Gerald Gregg for Who's Calling?
by Helen McCloy. Dell 151 (1947).

Silence in the stacks? Tell it to the library card-holding psycho with logorrhia and a Van Gogh fixation!

Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of the library book-drop box? Drop-offs, droppings, or rotting, vermin-infested fast-food left-overs? It's a dirty job but someone's got to do it.

 

And how 'bout that famous writer of L.A.-noir novels who visited his local branch of the LAPL, hit on a married reference librarian I know, wouldn't take no for an answer, kept sending flowers to her, and didn't stop his unwelcome advances until she flipped him an oath and he skulked off and out of the library?

Original cover art by Rudolph Belarski for Don't Ever Love Me
by Octavus Roy Cohen. Popular Library 332 (1951).

The fact that she fought for her intellectual freedom to be left alone while wielding a heater to punctuate her point may have had something to do with it. He had an acute fear of perforation by a stacked n' sultry long tall sally with a MLS, a gripe, and a gat. Yet where had she been all his life?

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All images courtesy of Professional Library Literature with special thanks to the anonymous creator of these brilliant book parodies, who, I suspect, may be in fear of losing their job if outed. Additional thanks to B.T. Carver of LISNews for drawing our attention to this delightful webpage. There are more of the same on the site.

The Sopranos dialogue from Episode #85, The Blue Comet (2007), written by David Chase and Matthew Weiner.

Those with knowledge of the unidentified books (or pulp magazines) are encouraged to leave a comment.

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Of Related Interest:

A Lurid Story of Book Dope And Lives Twisted By Mad Desire!

Caution: These Books Are Too Hot To Handle!
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Two Great Typewriter Posters From 1909

by Stephen J. Gertz

Paul Scheurich, 1909.

A copy of Paul Scheurich's 1909 poster for Oliver typewriters is being offered by Swann Auction Galleries in its Modernist Posters sale, April 24, 2014. It is estimated to sell for $800-$1,200.

Printed by the renowned Berlin shop, Hollerbaum & Schmidt, which, in the years before World War I, was known not only for the quality of its lithography but for its impressive stable of artists, including Lucian Bernhardt, Hans Rudi Erdt and Julius Klinger, as well.

Scheurich (1883-1945) was born and raised in New York City but settled in Germany to work. A painter, sculptor and prolific graphic designer, he was a professor of porcelain painting in Meissenand and worked in Dresden as a graphic designer before moving to Berlin.

Much like his fellow artists, Scheurich's style was heavily influenced by contemporary British graphic design, which emphasized flat tones and no outlining. That is certainly the case in this Sachs Plakat (Object Poster), in which the object being advertised is depicted against a flat background as Lucian Bernhard did in his series of posters for Adler typewriters.

Lucian Bernhard, 1909.

"Bernhard recognized that the image of the typewriter itself, with its potential for speed and efficiency, was an effective way to advertise the product.  This poster, the first of several that Bernhard designed for the Adler company, embodies the simplicity of the Sachplakat while maintaining certain elements of the same late nineteenth century graphic style that overpowered and inspired Bernhard as an adolescent, such as the bold, flat planes of color and the shadow line that emphasizes the curving forms of the letters" (Caitlin Condell, Seduced by an Object Poster).

Caitlin Condell

Caitlin Condell

Note, however, that Bernhard's seminal poster for Adler typewriters was, as Scheurich's for Oliver typewriters, also designed in 1909. According to Nicholas D. Lowry of Swann, it is impossible to determine which image influenced the other.

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Oliver image courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries, with our thanks.
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American Literary Posters 1895-1897

by Stephen J. Gertz

Lippincott's January 1895. 18 x 12 in.
Design by J.K. Gould, Jr.

On August 7, 2013, Swann Galleries is presenting a Vintage Posters auction within which is a collection of scarcely seen American literary posters, lots 31 through 44, from the late nineteenth century. 

Noteworthy for the view they provide of publishers' contemporary marketing tactics, using in-house promotional magazines and posters to tout their books, the visual imagery is arresting and patently influenced by the work of French Art Nouveau artists Théophile Alexandre Steinlen (1859-1923) and Toulouse-Lautrec, particularly those by Edward Penfield.

Lippincott's October 1895. 18 x 12 in.
 Design by Will Carqueville (1871-1946).

Lippincott's March 1895. 19 x 12 1/4 in.
Design by Will Carqueville.

William L.  Carqueville (1871-1946), based in Chicago, designed posters for Lippincott's magazine and others. He was influenced by Edward Penfield's American style, clean, simple and without flourishes.

LO-TO-KAH by Verner Z-Reed, 1897. 15 1/2 x 14 3/4 in.
Design by Maynard Dixon (1875-1946).

Maynard Dixon (1875-1946) is famed for his Western-themed work, in which he deliberately avoided the romantic cliches of the genre to focus on "honest art of the west."

The Century August 1896. 19 x 14 in.
Cover by Joseph C. Leyendecker (1874-1951).

Joseph Christian Leyendecker (1874-1951) was one of the most celebrated American illustrators of the early 20th century. He is best known for his poster, book and advertising illustrations, the trade character known as The Arrow Collar Man, his most famous series of advertising images. He provided the cover illustration to over 320 issues of The Saturday Evening Post. 

Scribner's April 1896. 18 x 14 in.
Design by Henry Mayer (1868-1953).

Henry Mayer (1868-1953) was deeply influenced by French Art Nouveau, too deeply, perhaps. His work was considered "good in method if not strikingly original" (W.S. Rogers, A Book of the Poster, p. 93).

ABOUT PARIS by Richard Harding Davis, 1895. 14 1/4 x 9 1/2 in.
Design by Edward Penfield (1866-1925).

In an era known as the "Golden Age of American Illustration" Edward Penfield (1866-1925) stood out. Influenced (as so many) by contemporary French illustrators, he brought his own sensibility to design and may be justifiably be considered the premier exponent of American Art Nouveau, a direct, down to earth and stripped to its essentials take on the French school with a view toward the flat blocks of color associated with Japanese prints. No flamboyant and ornate swirls for him; he's less Mucha, more less-a. His work has been included in almost every major book on American illustration, and he was a major contributor to the evolution of graphic design. In 1998 Penfield was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame.

Harper's January 1896. 17 x 11 in.
Design by Edward Penfield.

Harper's May 1895. 16 x 13 in.
Design by Edward Penfield.

Harper's March 1895. 19 x 13 in.
Design by Edward Penfield.

Harper's November 1895. 16 x 11 in.
Design by Edward Penfield.

Harper's Christmas 1895. 25 x 20 in.
Design by Edward Penfield.

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Images courtesy of Swann Galleries, with our thanks.
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Aubrey Beardsley's Reading Woman

by Stephen J. Gertz

AUBREY BEARDSLEY (1872-1898)
Chaix, Paris, 1897.
Cropped plate from Les Affiches Etrangères.
The original poster was published in 1894.

 

In 1894, Aubrey Beardsley created a poster to advertise T. Fisher Unwin's Children's Books.

"Printed in black and purple...in its most common form  it was used to advertise Topsys and Turvys by P.S. Newell, four works by Palmer Cox, the first 19 volumes in Unwin's Children's Library, The Land of Puck by Mary Mapes Dodge, and the magazine St. Nicholas. 

"According to Gallatin the poster was also produced in reduced size [as here, 1897].

"Copeland and Day also used Beardsley's drawing (printed in black and yellow) on a poster promoting The Yellow Book... They did so without Unwin's authorization, a step which led to an acrimonious correspondence between the two publishers and threats of legal action after the design was reproduced in an article about posters published in the March 1896 issue of The Overland Monthly, an American periodical" (Lasner).

Lasner 75. Gallitan 791.
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Image courtesy of Swann Galleries, with our thanks.

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How WET Can You Get?

by Alastair Johnston 

Leonard Koren, Making WET: the magazine of Gourmet Bathing, Point Reyes, Ca: Imperfect Publishing, 2012

 WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing (1976–81), was a pioneering example of a California “lifestyle” magazine that was as much about the design and packaging as about the content. There were ads that looked like editorial content and vice versa. Ostensibly about bathing, it ran from 1976 until 1981, when the editor, Leonard Koren, left Venice, California, moved to San Francisco and then to Japan.

  The influence of Japanese culture increased steadily in the US, particularly the West Coast states, after the Second World War. Zen Buddhism was an important element, but so were the graphic arts. And there is the Japanese tea ceremony. “The Japanese tea room – despite its very appealing form and philosophy – was too culturally specific for the vague purposes I had in mind,” said Koren, who was a former architecture student looking for a direction.

   Koren wanted to create some kind of visual expression that was not in the mainstream. He had been thinking about bathrooms as important but overlooked places that were private and cleansing: they had illumination, heat and water. They involved nakedness and contemplation. He had used images of bathers in a series of artworks, and came up with the idea of a magazine about bathing. His magazine was to be about enthusiasms, and since California is about extremes, he though he would create a parody of enthusiasts.

   His inspiration was threefold, first there was Vogue which he saw as dogmatic, full of bombastic bluster and grand pronouncements about fashion, such as “BROWN is the new BLACK!” Then there was Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, which was a compendium of beautifully presented drivel by self-important minor celebrities; and thirdly, there was Gourmet, a foodie magazine which featured pretentious articles about meals. Koren liked the idea of a tongue-in-cheek combination of all three, a “Magazine of Gourmet Bathing,” that was and was not about bathing: mud baths and soaps can only hold your attention for so long, but pretty much anything could work in the context. He started working on WET and delivered the magazine to friends in Venice Beach and Santa Monica, networking to sell ads or find contributors.

WET June/July 1977, photo by Raul Vega; design by Tom Ingalls & April Greiman

   In April 1977 he met the designer Tom Ingalls who had design world connections to photographers and graphic artists, that would improve the look of the magazine from a funky typewritten fanzine into something with more polish. At the time Ingalls was going through a break-up with his girlfriend April Greiman, and Koren hoped they could get along long enough to get the April/June issue of the magazine done. Greiman was on the verge of becoming one of the key figures in the LA design world. Her background was in textiles and she had gone to Basel, Switzerland, to study at the Art School there, but the faculty had plugged her into a series of courses in typography that were to transform her interests. She took the Swiss style she had been schooled in, and elements of Russian Constructivism she had picked up in Europe, and deconstructed them, leading to a postmodern style in American design in the 1980s (popularized, for example, on record album covers from Los Angeles-based labels).

  Cultural historian Frances Butler referred to it as “The LA Slash-and-Spritz style” because of the pieces of film, rubylith and artificial blotches added to the clean layouts that were appearing with the introduction of computerized design. No longer were jobs typeset in metal, repro-ed and pasted up, now there were photo-compositors, and most of the pre-press work was done on the light table. This led to a certain sterility in graphics that Greiman saw at once, and countered with stray bits of Zip-a-tone screen, registration marks and other tools which were normally invisible – a “baring the device” technique that had become popular in literature and film long before. In 1981, Butler wrote, “Sometimes the connection between visual incidents is not made explicit and the reader must try to trap these incidents into a syntax. Much contemporary graphic design has essentially a reader-sequencing structure. This is true of many Japanese posters, especially the early work of Tadanori Yokoo, and now the poster work of the Los Angeles slash-and-spritz school.”

WET September/October 1979, the "Religion" issue: Ricky Martin photographed by Guy Webster; designed by April Greiman & Jayme Odgers

  WET quickly evolved from a funky typewritten news-letter to a slick glossy publication and this attracted attention and advertisers. And while the content is more or less immaterial to advertisers, the nudity aspect didn’t hurt. As Koren said, “There is an appetite for nakedness – not the stagey, self-conscious nakedness of skin magazines, but the nakedness that lets the body pass by itself through the awakening and regenerating extremes of hot and cold, light and dark, wet and dry, that the natural environment is so kind to provide.”

  The magazine took off (events at bath houses created a buzz in the press, followed by television interviews in hot tubs, and Mademoiselle editors coming to mud bath parties) and attracted a lot of talented Angeleno artists: designers John Van Hamersveld, Taki Ono and Rip Georges, cartoonists Matt Groening, Futzie Nutzle and Gary Panter, photographers Herb Ritts, Raul Vega and Jayme Odgers. Some at the start of their careers, lent their talents cheaply and helped push the boundaries of art and design that WET would become known for.

  Koren said, “Scattered throughout California there are certain latter-day saints – a dangerous number of whom seem to be artists, photographers, or writers – who get the joke of gourmet bathing without having it explained. Which is fortunate because the concept is so evanescent and mercurial that to attempt explanation is to risk over-kill.” He did explain that it is not a system, a therapy or a philosophy, it is “at most a point of view having some--thing to do with sensuality, humor, humility, and taking such pleasure in small things that they stop being small.”

WET September/October 1980, design by John Van Hamersveld

  
   The magazine continually reinvented itself. For one thing the designers used it as a calling card to move on to other better-paying or higher profile gigs, but through new approaches to graphics and editorial content, it evolved. John Van Hamersveld, who had already achieved design fame with covers for the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street (1972: a collage of Robert Frank photos with scrawled hand-lettering and visible tape and cut marks), Hotter than Hell by Kiss (1974: showing the influence of Tadanori Yokoo), and Eat to the Beat by Blondie (1979: hand-lettering, angled type and a grid), continued with an illustration career; Jayme Odgers’ trade-mark image of a hand holding a Polaroid was featured on Fleetwood Mac and other best-selling album covers; Matt Groening’s “Life in Hell” cartoon made its first appearance in WET in 1978: it grew to a weekly syndication of 250 papers and launched Groening’s TV show “The Simpsons.”

   Koren found the thematic approach (e.g., “Religion”) was a good solution to pulling an issue together. He persuaded poet Lewis MacAdams to move south from Bolinas and assume the role of editor, which he fulfilled excellently, bringing in another range of literary connections, including William Burroughs’ essay “Is language a virus?” An article on necrophilia created a furor – and sold copies. Koren was well-networked. He dropped in on Noel Young in Santa Barbara and got a copy of Henry Miller’s essay “On Turning Eighty,” which ran in the magazine, as did an article on Henry Miller’s bathroom (Sept/Oct 1981). Fashion and music joined the regular contents. Kristine McKenna brought interviews with musicians that had uncensored language and ideas, making them unfit for more mainstream media. WET caught the Zeitgeist and was light and ephemeral, not predictable or ponderous. The ads blended into the editorial content and vice versa, creating a unified style, which is always desirable in a magazine.

WET September/October 1981, design by "King Terry" Teruhiko Yumura

 
    Koren refers to wabi-sabi, the Japanese concept of finding beauty in imperfection, and seeing profundity in nature, as one of his guiding principles. D. T. Suzuki described wabi-sabi as “an active aesthetical appreciation of poverty.” In graphics there is a style known as hata-uma or good/bad art (literally “clumsy-tasty,” referring to the occasional appeal of the badly drawn), which extends wabi-sabi to illustration. Koren hired Tokyo-based Teruhiko Yumura as art director in 1981. Yumura (known in WET as King Terry) brought this fresh style to LA design and it influenced Gary Panter and others. Again confusing editorial and advertising matter, there is a full-page ad for Terry’s Hit Parade, a “full-color action art book from Japan’s number one illustrator,” available exclusively as a “terrible WET book.”

   The successful marketing of the Californian lifestyle, particularly in the context of water, was a trend that continued with Beach Culture (late 80s) and Ray Gun (Santa Monica, 1992–2000) magazines, designed by David Carson, that were also essentially pointless, but graphically far less interesting.
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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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Book Illustrator Ben Shahn Does Posters

by Stephen J. Gertz

WE WANT PEACE / REGISTER - VOTE. (1946).

"His codified signature neatly scribbled under any of his images conjures up a peerless world of visual and emotional realism" (Art Directors Club Hall of Fame, 1988).

Born in Lithuania in 1898, artist Ben Shahn immigrated to New York with his family in 1906. He apprenticed with a commercial lithographer in 1911 while still a high-school student, and earned his living in the trade until the early 1930s, when he began to receive recognition as a fine artist.

In 1934, after exhibitions of his series of paintings about the Dreyfus and Sacco-Vanzetti affairs, he was commissioned to produce a mural by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. The following year, Rexford Tugwell, a prominent member of Roosevelt's "brain trust," invited Shahn to join the Resettlement Administration. He worked as an artist in the agency's Special Skills Division and was an unofficial, part-time member of Roy Stryker's photographic section.

His first significant contact with graphic design, however, came in 1942 when he was hired to work in the Office of War Information. Shahn later told biographer Selden Rodman that his chief duty was "to explain in posters to the people who need it what is being done for them and to the others what they are paying for."

This image above  was "used by the CIO in a voter registration drive. [And] it represents, perhaps, the best of Shahn's poster work. One cannot soon erase the memory of the hollow-eyed young face begging for peace. Nowhere is Shahn's genius for drawing more evident than in the thrust of the pleading hand...Using the image of this child in the context of an election campaign seems to say that in a democracy the first step toward healing the ravages of war is to exercise one's right to vote" (Kenneth W. Prescott, The Complete Graphic Works of Ben Shahn, p. 132).

Based upon his painting Hunger, Shahn recalled, in 1964, that he told Roy Stryker that a certain photograph of soil erosion would not have a strong impact on viewers. "Look Roy," Shahn said, "you're not going to move anybody with this eroded soil - but the effect this eroded soil has on a kid who looks starved, this is going to move people."

WARNING! INFLATION MEANS DEPRESSION. (1946).

This poster, another for the CIO, "of a farmer, whose seeming integrity and strength greatly impressed Shahn" (Prescott p. 132),  is based on a photograph Shahn took during the 1930s while traveling through Arkansas as a member of the Resettlement Administration and Stryker's photography unit.  It is a haunting image of a troubled working man, memories of the Great Depression fresh and alarming,  yet with an optimistic message to allay his fears : "Register - Vote."

BREAK REACTION'S GRIP / REGISTER VOTE. (c. 1946).

In the years after World War II, Shahn took on a new threat, anti-Labor, Establishment radicals. "The one arm, dressed in coat sleeve and shirt cuff, with hand clasping a colorful map of the United States, represents the country's supposedly small, but powerful, reactionary forces. The poster suggests that however strong, their power could be broken by the greater strength of the progressive forces, as represented by the larger, sleeveless arm" (Prescott, p. 131).

OUR FRIEND. (1944.)

Shahn's political orientation was patent, his views powerful. "This poster was used in the hotly contested 1944 campaign in support of Franklin D. Roosevelt's fourth term. Shahn presented Roosevelt as a warmly sympathetic man whose visage looms father-like above the crowd" (Prescott p. 128). The image, in retrospect, is a bit disconcerting, the obvious influence of Social Realism suggesting the cult of personality exploited by Stalin in Soviet propaganda. You can, in fact, substitute Stalin's image for Roosevelt's and wind up with a typical 1930s Soviet poster celebrating Papa Joe.

Be that as it may, his work here (and, ultimately, most of his work) was infused with a strong concern regarding the forces that undermine the common man, each a visual editorial protesting social injustice. Shahn was always a champion of the less fortunate.

Shahn's uncle was a bookbinder; he allayed Shahn's childhood hunger for books by bringing him volumes from his shop. After World War II he was chosen by Look magazine as one of the "World's Ten Best Artists." He abandoned painting for good and adopted graphic work for better. The book dust jackets he created (amongst other celebrated graphic designs) during the 1950s and 1960s remain classics.

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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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