Wednesday 3 March 2010

Masters of the Poster


This is a page from Posters & Publicity 1928 and caught my eye as it shows two poster designers from very different traditions, Leonetto Cappiello and McKnight Kauffer, working for the same client in the same year. Belle Époque and Cubism employed in tandem. Neither artist seems to be at the top of their game here. The Cappiello flair for the dynamic vortex is rather underemployed in these uncharacteristically limp compositions while Kauffer’s geometric lattices rarely look their best when applied to heritage subject matter. The upper right example portraying a printing press carries a lot more conviction than the image of a coaching inn below. Any Cappiello anoraks out there may wish to note that these examples of his work do not appear in Jack Rennert’s magisterial book, The Posters of Leonetto Cappiello (2004).

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