POSTERS POSTERS A GLOBAL HISTORY ELIZABETH E. GUFFEY REAKTION BOOKS To Matt and Ellen Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 33 Great Sutton Street London EC1V 0DX, UK www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2015 Copyright © Elizabeth E. Guffey 2015 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Printed and bound in China by 1010 Printing International Ltd A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 78023 371 0 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 7 1 CONSUMING WORDS ON THE STREET: 1840–1950 41 2 TRASHING TRADITION: 1945–1965 89 3 NEW ART, NEW SPACE: 1960–1980 125 4 FETISHISM AND THE GLOBAL POSTER: 1960–1980 181 5 A NEW GOLDEN AGE – DIGITAL ENCHANTMENT: 1980–2014 231 EPILOGUE: POST-POSTERS? 281 REFERENCES 289 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 304 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 307 PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 308 INDEX 310 INTRODUCTION In 1999, an intern cut letters into the skin of Stefan Sagmeister’s torso and arms for more than eight hours. Then Sagmeister was photographed, and he used the resulting image in a poster announcing his lecture at Cranbrook Academy of Art, near Detroit. Now an icon of contemporary design, the poster opens up multiple discourses about the body in the second millennium, with allusions ranging from exhibitionism and tattooing to sadomasochist subcultures and even the self-injurious practice of cutting. The poster announces the date, time and place clearly enough, but the image of incised flesh and rising welts challenges us to read the information; while functioning as an announcement of a specific event, it serves as well as a desperate cry to draw attention to the poster itself. Sagmeister’s plea speaks volumes. But how did we get to the point of Sagmeister’s mute blandishment? Moving from Paris cabaret advertisements to Soviet propaganda to San Francisco psychedelia, the ‘history of the poster’ is already well ensconced in books, exhibition catalogues and other written records. But this is more than a story of stylistic innovation or a series of topical messages printed on paper: it is also a tale of posters as things, of material forms with which we spend our lives. Posters endure as one of the most permanent and solid forms of visual communication, and they exert a palpable physical presence, shaping spaces while reflect- ing and altering human behaviour. Posters, for instance, can establish zones of behavioural expectation: ‘Work Hard to Increase Fertilizer Production!’ They can provide a unified voice to large numbers of people: ‘Vote for Green!’ They can even assert ownership of space itself: ‘Lebanon is Christian.’ After a century and a half of innumerable uses by Stefan Sagmeister, poster various people, posters remain uniquely positioned to materialize the for AIGA lecture, Cranbrook, Michigan, 1999. increasingly immaterial nature of visual communication. 7 A history of posters as things may well start similarly to familiar narratives, with posters emerging in the capitals of Europe and North America as an outgrowth of mass produc- tion. Indeed, in this early stage of their history, posters were little more than communica- tions of text and/or image, printed as multiples on paper and hung in the public realm. Posters’ birth was attended by the Industrial Revolution, in the tight, cluttered walls and side streets of Paris, London and New York. Yet the spaces into which posters were placed were not in any sense a tabula rasa: the poster materialized in a culture where printing was already well established and valued, and posters made these spaces over into one ‘The result of careless of the most visually and verbally saturated environments in human bill-posting’: a cartoon history. The culture of posting only increased throughout the from Punch (1898). nineteenth century, with nearly any and every available surface of urban space crowded with a dense cacophony of handbills and advertisements. Posters began to reshape this typographic landscape through their sheer size and physical presence. They also transformed the nature of reading and communications: the brash, crass instance of Victorian posters and handbills cut across class lines and bent reading from a leisurely and physically private exercise into a distracted public act. Traditional histories usually note that posters came into their own with the widespread use of chromolithography in the late nineteenth century, as artists pushed illustrated posters from curious ephemera to become things of beauty. Yet this change also came from significant social shifts and economic upheaval. For instance, the bounding and 8 introduction José Guadalupe Posada, ‘Saludo y felicitación al Señor D. Francisco I. Madero’, 1911. effusive female ‘cherettes’ that typify Jules Chéret’s work were given life not only through his skilful adoption of lithographic printing techniques but also by the lifting of France’s traditionally strict censorship and bill-posting laws in 1881. The elegant, daring compositions of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Théophile Steinlen and Alphonse Mucha echo the day’s artistic avant-garde but also document the near-electric charge of consumers’ new buying power: the rapid profusion of mass- produced cigarettes, soaps and other consumer goods enabled the poster to blossom in Paris and spread throughout Europe. For these 9 Jules Chéret, ‘Bal au Moulin Rouge’, 1896. Théophile Steinlen, poster for sterilized milk, 1896. Adolfo Hohenstein, Chiozza e Turchi soap poster, 1899. introduction Will Bradley, ‘Victor reasons, the late nineteenth century is usually hailed as the ‘golden Bicycles’, c. 1895. age’ of the poster.1 Most histories note that the illustrated French poster was quickly rivalled in London and New York. The new presence of illus- trated posters throughout the urban spaces of Europe and America changed some public perceptions. As large, colourful posters began to command the spaces of public streets, markets and squares, the format itself took on a civic respectability never afforded to Victorian handbills. The Beggarstaff brothers in Britain, Toulouse-Lautrec and Steinlen in France and Edward Penfield or Will Bradley in North America designed commercial advertising posters that were nonetheless seen as public decorations and even regarded as ‘art’; the very streets of Paris, New York and London were lauded as ‘the poor man’s picture gallery’.2 While some critics decried the poster as a quick-blooming, big-headed, overbearing upstart, others saw posters as educators; they could make public space into a kind of open classroom, teaching the general public some aesthetic lessons in good taste or even democracy.3 Whether perceived as civic art or public nuisance, nineteenth- century illustrated posters were unequivocally capitalist, urging consumption even as they were themselves consumed. As posters 13 Posters lining the old lieutenancy building, Honfleur, France, c. 1895. grew in popular appeal, dedicated collectors began saving, trading and buying them for ever-increasing sums. The poster was perceived as both public image and physical object: posters still wet with paste were pulled off the sides of buildings, unpeeled from railway carriages and even bought directly from printing houses. For the dedicated devotee, the editor of The Poster warned in 1896 that money ‘is mere green paper, [but] posters are worth their weight in gold’.4 The popularity of posters also revealed a new geography of consumption: local governments and property owners began to recognize large, flat spaces as a potential source of rents, and a large-scale remapping of cities and towns ensued. Posters not only disrupted the existing visual order, but they also rendered visible previously disregarded spaces, 14 introduction including the walls of derelict buildings and berms that ran along railway tracks; even the sides of goods carts or wagons and boats were suddenly seen as revenue-generating space ready to be sold. But the illustrated poster also moved indoors, tracking the mud and dust of the public sphere inside with it. If posters grew more domesticated, part of their appeal was their fundamental coarseness. With their sheer size, sharp colour contrasts, aggressive typography and insistent messages of mass-market advertising (whether sly or bombastic), they remained somewhat rude and carried a titillating whiff of ‘the street’ into bohemian parlours and mannered drawing rooms. Collectors could rival orchid enthusiasts as they fussed over the care of their poster collections, arguing about the merits of specially built cabinets or flat file storage and parsing the advantages of portfolio cases or shallow drawers. By 1901, one collector reputedly owned some 10,000 posters and had constructed a special room for their storage and display.5 While posters helped to reshape the public face of the great capitals of Europe and America, they also travelled more widely than is commonly assumed. Commercial enterprises, too, began to distrib- ute commercial and calendar posters: frequently printed in Britain or Germany, these visually dazzling timekeepers often showcased the chromolithographic skills of printers as much as advertising particular products, including dubious patent medicines, borax and baking powder. Charming, informative and effusive, these posters were welcomed in homes and businesses from Hamburg to Cheyenne. But calendars were among the first mass-produced posters that also had an international presence. The British government used them to concretize its wide-flung network of political power, providing calendars to both colonial outposts and local rulers throughout south Asia and Africa. Commercial firms also distributed showy, colourful posters of various types as advertising overseas. The British-American Tobacco Company made significant inroads in East Asia around the turn of the century, dis tribut ing cal en dar posters as ‘gifts’ to customers marking the New Year. In addition, poster design provided an early opportunity for independence groups to flex their muscles.