Posters: A Concise History | Notes 4

Posters and Society - The Popular Idiom

pg. 183 - 'A poster can never be obscure. The designer cannot allow his work to express a private idea that subsequent generations may be able to unravel: he must achieve instant contact.'

(How much can this be pushed/subverted?

Does an instant message really need to be achieved??)

'To do this he must, like an entertainer, work with his audience. In many cases it becomes necessary to speak to the unprofessional audience in a popular way, although there are also times when an audience expects a degree of technical brilliance'

'Posters frequently reflect the popular idiom because their function is to communicate as well as to be decorative.'

'Because visual communication is the first justification for their existence, it is the character and extent of popular influence on their appearance that establishes the peculiar nature of posters as such.

Having Reached a Climax at the Age of 29, I Was Dead (1965)
Tadanori Yokoo, exhibition poster

In fact, it is in this area of expression that one finds the essential qualities of the poster as opposed to its near relations, the painting or the graphic image.'

'...the appearance of posters is mainly governed by professional artistic factors: that is to say, fashions in style and means of expression.'

'It is often thought that posters are necessarily a compromise of artistic styles, but we have seen that they frequently express visual ideas as well as paintings have done. In fact, posters have sometimes affected the other arts'.'

'When this reciprocal process has occurred, it is precisely the popular aspect of poster design that has caught the imagination of painters, for it is the expression of the popular idiom that gives the poster its unique place in the arts.'

'The popular idiom has two main directional currents. One flows upwards from the level of folk art and brings with it a common factor of integrity and a certain naivety. The other current flows downwards and is usually called mass culture; it is commercial or political propaganda, generally pre-digested and made palatable for mass-consumption.'

pg. 184 - 'But whatever the nature of its sources, the poster in the popular idiom speaks the language of the mass of spectators - whether it contains the naivety of folk art or the pretentiousness of Kitsch.'

La Terrible Noche (1890)
Jose Guadalupe Posada

'The popular poster seems to have proceeded from one situation towards the other...we can begin to examine its history with the earliest pictorial designs, such as the nineteenth-century gallows literature, consisting of popular melodramatic material, which has its counterpart in lively circus, fairground and bullfight advertising.'

Posters and Comedy

pg. 204 - 'Its application is also universal, and light-hearted foolery, like the presence of a court jester, is a valuable outlet in a complicated world'

pg. 226 - 'During the 1920s and '30s, the comic strip and the movie cartoon became new influences in visual humour, and these two elements were apparent in poster design.'

'In 1927 Savignac produced his cartoon-like design, Mon Savon: the extrovert, simple idea of the image has been used ever since by designers wishing to produce a clear-cut expression to show surprise, delight, astonishment, happiness and so on.'

pg. 214 - 'A similar approach to humour was followed later by designers in England: the work of Tom Eckersley and Abram Games followed the same pattern'

The Exterminating Angel (1968)
Heinz Edelmann

'In the years following the war this type of design continued to represent the principal means of expressing a comic situation. But there was a sharp change in the nature of humour itself during the 1950s, which has continued to develop. This use of 'black' or 'sick' humour.'

pg. 215 - 'With the increased general interest in the bizarre, the images in posters during the 1960s became more far-fetched, and attempts to shock, or to reveal a lack of inhibition on the part of the advertiser or designer, left nothing to the imagination/'

pg. 216 - 'The Underground Press, with posters by artists like Martin Sharp, produced pornographic versions of vernacular humour, most of which took on exaggerated fantasy. Many of these posters are amateurish in appearance'

'A great deal of the humour in the Underground posters is playing on the contrast between this new alternative society and the Establishment - in order to show how unrestrained one side can be in contrast to the monstrous character of traditional social order.'

War is good business - invest your son (1968)

Seymour Chwast

Politics, Revolution and War

pg. 222 - '...Even until the 1950s, political posters could still appear to be orientated towards the idea that they are only part of commercial persuasion or an 'artistic' form of advertisement. Perhaps the anachronism is best illustrated in Seymour Chwast's satirical anti-war poster (above)'

'We are therefore faced with two distinct phases in the history of the ideological poster, the first from 1870 to 1919, when advertising for war was considered in terms of commercial advertising...'

'...and the second phase, from 1919 until the present, when the true political poster started to make its appearance.'

pg. 226 - 'In 1919 a new type of poster appeared there (Russia) which is said to have been the work originally of Mikhail Cheremnykh. It was known as the 'Satire window of the Russian Telegraph Agency' [usually abbreviated to ROSTA.]'

ROSTA Windows (1941)
Vladimir Mayakovsky

'The windows consisted of illustrations with captions that resemble the cinematic sequence of the comic strip. The most famous of these designs are those made by the poet Mayakovsky: some of them include up to fourteen narrative illustrations which captions like sub-titles...'

'...the influence of the sacred icon and the lubok (a Russian folk-art design, popular until the end of the nineteenth century)k with its combination of text and illustration'

pg. 231 - 'From this connection Mayakovsky, who had become associated with the renewed interest in native folk-art traditions, himself developed this remarkable combination of poetry and image.'

pg. 238 - 'The work of collective organisations in producing posters appeared again in Republican and Communist posters in Madrid and Barcelona during the Civil War in Spain. Posters during the Civil War demonstrated new techniques, such as photomontage.'

pg. 242 - 'Since 1945 a significant change in world opinion about war has caused a great deal of publicity to be given to anti-war posters.'

May 68: The Beginning of a Prolonged Struggle (1968)
Atelier Populaire

pg. 244 - 'The Paris rising in May 1968 was such an occasion, and after a hundred years of respectable development the poster suddenly appeared as a young, virile medium in the city where it had first been developed.'

'The posters have the character of hastily prepared broadsheets: they brought back a feeling of urgency to a medium that, for instant information, had been superseded by radio and television.

If coverage is not available on the complicated technical system of mass communications, then posters can have a strong effect - especially if they return to their primitive state instead of being the tasteful art works to which the public have become accustomed.'

pg. 245 - 'The posters of the Atelier Populaire had the direct impact of word and image; and the whole series maintains the traditions of good poster design - the popular sign and the broadsheet from which the medium grew.'

'By the end of the 1960s it became apparent that the development of poster design through the channels of commercialism had now found a strong alternative area of expression - in the posters of ideologies, whether these represented political ideologies or the ideals of a new generation.'

1. Day of Solidarity with Venezuela (1969) Faustino Perez
2. Disappearance of Ben Barka (1971) Antonio Fernandez

pg. 247 - 'The posters of the Cuban Revolution have become justly famous, and the most interesting aspect of this sudden flowering of talent lies precisely in the duality of posters that borrow their style from the West and their message from the East.'

'Cuban designers have been given much more freedom of expression than one has come to associate with a society based on Communism.'

'Their posters include frequent quotations from the commercial advertisement and from psychedelic, Pop Art, comic-strip and film posters of the United States consumer society.'

pg. 256 - 'Art of the people and art for the people may be two different areas of expression. The poster is the means of conveying both graphic messages; whatever its claims as art it must first speak to the people'