Railway Posters by Frank Newbould

Frank Newbould (1887-1951) was an almost exact contemporary of fellow poster artist, the better-known Tom Purvis. Both did a good deal of poster art for British railway companies in the 1930s, especially the LNER (London and North Eastern Railway). Also, by 1930 both were using a style featuring many broad areas of flat colors where outlining was scarce or entirely absent. Unfortunately, I don't have enough information to say who practiced that style first (I suspect Purvis), though it became associated with the LNER due to its extensive use.

Not a lot of biographical information on Newbould is on the Internet, so this Wikipedia entry will have to do for now.

Newbould's work was strong, but I rate him not as good as Purvis or Fred Taylor, another railway poster man. Below are his posters for domestic sites. He also did Continental scenes that I might deal with later.

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A nice, strong poster for the spa town not far from York.

A silkscreen look, even though this was probably a lithograph.

Another nice design, this for an East Anglia port town.

Post for a Scottish destination.

On the North Sea coast, a few miles north of the mouth of the Tyne.

A more extremely simplified design, this for the Great Western Railway.

Yorkshire coastal town about 15 miles south of Scarborough.

This poster and the one above have a different typographical theme than the others.  My guess is that they date from shortly before British railroads were nationalized in 1948.

Edward Penfield and His Poster Style

Edward Penfield (1866-1925) is considered America's first great poster artist. His Wikipedia entry is here, a chronology of his life and career is here and a Society of Illustrators' Hall of Fame appreciation is here.

His posters and magazine covers might seem pretty tame today, but they were striking when they first rolled off the presses. His basic style was cloisonniste, using dark outlines with areas filled in using flat colors. However, Penfield's outlines tended to be on the thin side, so the impression generated was more like a conventional illustration than something with a more designed look that thick outlines might have yielded.

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Harper's poster - August 1897
That's a semi-enclosed beach chair next to the girl, with beach houses and a boardwalk in the background. Harper's was and is a magazine, and Penfield was one of its art directors for about ten years during the 1890s and designed and illustrated many of its publicity posters.

Collier's cover - 28(?) April 1902
Just in time for the start of baseball season.

Pierce-Arrow advertising - ca. 1907
Pierce-Arrow was an American luxury automobile maker whose fortunes steadily declined after the Great War of 1914-18.  Here, it was in its heyday.

Penn and Cornell athletes - ca. 1907
Similar posters were done for some other Ivy schools. In all cases, we view huge bodies and comparatively tiny heads.

Collier's cover - 10 October 1914
This seems to be in reaction to the start of the Great War in August of 1914, even though the USA was not yet at war.

Collier's cover art, ca. 1918
The caption on the Web where I found this indicated that it was for Collier's, but I can't yet verify that.  Again, the heads are a bit too small.

Washington's Birthday Holiday poster

Saturday Evening Post cover - 4 March 1905
This is interesting because here Penfield did not use his usual flat, poster style of illustration.

El Lissitzky: Mostly Non-Objective

Lazar Markovich Lissitzky (1890-1941), who styled himself El Lissitzy (the "El" might be from Eleazar, or perhaps from an aspect of the Unovis movement of 1920 when he first identified himself as "El"), was a major player in the group of Russian modernists who briefly thrived around the time of the Great War and for a dozen years or so in its aftermath. Biographical information on him can be found here, and this site features a number of large images of his graphic work.

Lissitzky trained in architecture in Germany and traveled in the west, but was forced to return to Russia when the war started in 1914. He did not serve in the Imperial army though he was of military age. This might have been because of tuberculosis, a disease that killed him at age 51. (Though one source mentions that the disease did not impact him until after the war, so perhaps his professional training or other factors kept him out of the army.)

The October Revolution kicked his creativity into high gear, his Jewishness no longer being a social barrier. Lissitzky's graphic designs helped anticipate the work of the Bauhaus in Germany and modernist-inspired designs elsewhere up into the 1950s when angled design elements became largely passé.

Some of his designs spilled over into painting, where his works were what was termed Non-Objective Art, a phrase used during the 1930s by New York's Museum of Modern Art for abstractions often comprised of geometrical elements. Aside from some Op-Art pieces in the 1960s and 70s, this geometrical type of decorative painting seems to have been an artistic dead-end.

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"Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge" poster - 1920
This was in support of the Bolshevik armies during the post-revolution struggle against anti-Bolsheviks.  The Red Army eventually succeeded against the White forces, but didn't do well in its push into Poland.

Preliminary version of poster design - 1920

Proun design

Proun design

Vyeshch cover - 1922
Vyeshch was an avant-garde, modern art review that seems to have been multi-lingual to a degree. Note the German and French, especially at the lower left. The title is the three large Russian letters, the third of which symbolizes the "shch" sound.

"Iron in Clouds" design for Strastnoy Boulevard structures - 1925
The note at the upper right indicates that this drawing was a gift from Lessitzky to J.J.P. Oud, the Dutch architect who happened to have been born the same year.

Kusntgewrbemuseum Zürich catalog cover - 1929
This is perhaps Lissitzky's best-known graphic design, the merged heads being a clever but not particularly meaningful touch.  The event was a Russian exhibition, presumably of architectural and graphic designs.

Otis (and Dorothy) Shepard: Billbord Masters

Otis "Shep" Shepard (1894-1969) and his wife Dorothy Van Gorder Shepard (1906-2000) were important figures in American poster and billboard design. Dorothy was trained at the California School of Arts and Crafts, whereas Otis ended formal education after the fourth grade and left home at age 12 to get on with life. His art training was informal, but he had plenty of natural ability along with an active mind that allowed him to exploit it. He got involved with billboards working at Foster & Kleiser, a major West Coast firm, rising to general art director in 1923.

Otis and Dorothy were married November 8, 1929, a few days after the Wall Street Crash, and went to Europe on honeymoon where they experienced first-hand modernistic poster designs. They carried that inspiration home and Otis applied it and the use of the airbrush to a poster for Chesterfield cigarettes (see below). This success led him to go free-lance.

In 1932, not long after he took charge of the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company, Philip K. Wrigley met Shepard and soon hired him as what amounted to design chief for the chewing gum company whose other interests included the Chicago Cubs baseball team and Catalina Island, near Los Angeles. Shepard was involved with everything from billboards to designing Cubs uniforms to creating architectural and design harmony for Catalina. Not bad for a man lacking formal education.

I wrote about Shepard here in 2009 on the 2Blowhards blog.

An excellent book about the Shepards was recently published. Its cover is shown above and its Amazon link is here.

A web site devoted to the Shepards and the book is here. An interview with one of the authors about the Shepards is here.

Below are (mostly) examples of their poster and billboard work.  Unless otherwise noted, the design and artwork was by Otis.

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Otis and Dorothy Christmas card - by Dorothy - 1929

Chesterfield cigarettes billboard - 1930
This launched Otis' national-level career as a billboard artist/designer.  Dorothy was used as the model.

Underwood typewriters poster by Dorothy
Besides images, Dorothy often did typography.

Doublemint chewing gum billboard

Doublemint chewing gum billboard
The Doublemint Twins theme was used for years.

Juicy Fruit chewing gum billboard

Juicy Fruit chewing gum billboard
An interesting feature is the mouth appearing on the slogan banner.

Norman Wilkinson's Travel Posters

Norman Wilkinson (1878-1971) was an illustration all-rounder. As his Wikipedia entry indicates, besides the travel posters treated in this post, he was a noted painter of naval scenes as well as a camouflage expert. With regard to the latter, he is credited with inventing "dazzle" camouflage for ships during the Great War.

From what I can glean from viewing Images in Google, most of Wilkinson's poster work was done for the London, Midland and Scottish Railway between the world wars. The LMR's main routes were up the west side of Britain, so places such as the Lake District, Wales and Western Scotland were often featured in his work.

Not shown here are Wilkinson's naval paintings -- I might feature those in another post. For those, he used a painterly technique quite different from the areas of flat color he judged appropriate for poster work. A versatile professional, and good at what he did.

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Of course, London itself was a tourist destination for people living in other parts of the UK. True to form (as all the other images shown indicate), Wilkinson includes water -- in this case the River Thames. I chose to use a downstream sequence of views for the three posters shown above.

Jupp Wiertz Poster Art

A lot of artistic talent and effort went into poster design and illustration during the first several decades of the twentieth century, especially in Europe. I have already written about German artists Ludwig Hohlwein and Werner Axster-Heudtlass. The present post deals with Jupp Wiertz (1888-1939), another capable German illustrator. Unfortunately, I could find little about him in English, but his Wikipedia entry in German is fairly substantial.

Wiertz was versatile, as the images below indicate.

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The first posters shown above seem to have been done in the 1920s and even before. By the 1930s, he was illustrating travel posters such as this one featuring Aachen. Note the touches of color at the street cafe and market, contrasting with the drab background elements -- a clever touch.

A rather extensive collection of elements here. The background is clearly New York City, but the presence of silhouetted palm trees puzzles me: a reference of California? Brazil, even? The ocean liner, airplane and Zeppelin obviously are travel means, and the silhouettes evoke Germany.

This is nicely dramatic, a Berlin view of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche on the Kurfürstendamm with its busy traffic.

Frank Wootton's Poster Art

Frank Wootton (1911-1998) is best known for his aircraft and automobile paintings and illustrations, but he also painted landscapes and illustrated travel posters, among other projects. The main biographical information I found on the Web was this obituary from the Independent that incorrectly has his birth year as 1914.

Wootton's poster work was done in a nice, clear style that nevertheless included plenty of detail to add visual interest.  His posters for air travel tend to have compositions where the main subject matter is curiously peripheral. Well, maybe not so curious after all, because a tiny image of an airliner can be found in those big, otherwise blank skies.

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Wootton did a few posters for Britain's nationalized railway system after World War 2.

This is his painting for a poster titled "By Rail to Wales."

Below are some posters illustrated for BOAC, Britain's main international airline of the 1950s.

The poster immediately above is a personal favorite because I've always liked the way Wootton handled highlights on his automobile illustrations. The scene itself seems to be imaginary, an evocation of New York-ness from a foreign perspective. The cars are also imaginary, but suggestive of General Motors styling from around 1950. Wootton chose to portray American cars as being lower than they actually were in those days.