Lucian Bernhard (1883-1972)

My admiration for the radical and pioneering poster work produced by Lucian Bernhard in the early years of the last century, knows no bounds.  His invention of the sachplakat where the advertiser’s message is reduced to a single, starkly simplified rendering of the product carefully positioned on a flat colour ground together with the product name was an amazing step forward in the evolution of the modern style. It marked a decisive break with prose heavy graphics laden with testimonials and descriptive copy.  Bernhard acknowledged his debt to the Beggarstaff Brothers (William Nicholson and James Pryde) for the elegant and spare distillation of complex forms in their fin-de-siècle theatrical poster designs. But the impact of his bold colour choices and taut compositions was all his own work.

It’s always been a puzzle that no monograph devoted to his work existed. After all, his great Munich-based rival, Ludwig Hohlwein (whose instincts were much more conservative) was the subject of a major survey by H K Frenzel (editor of Gebrauchsgraphik) in 1926 as well as several post-war exhibition catalogues. Steven Heller has long been the major online cheerleader for Bernhard with a series of well researched postings of which this is one from 2012. Anyway, the wait is over - in 2024 Christopher Long’s monograph was published by KANT in Prague (ISBN: 97880 743 74135). The long absence of a monograph is well explained by the author in his introduction where he describes all the fabrications and misinformation he had to sift through. Much of it was created by Bernhard himself - he changed his name (from Emil Kahn), created false chronologies and circulated endless falsehoods about his career. It’s hard to detect a purpose behind the mendacity - perhaps a desire to embellish his reputation or, more simply, an appetite for mischief-making. It seems that Bernhard was something of an unknowable character - despite his gregarious personality, he had few, if any, close friends and his womanising ways and long absences placed enormous strain on his wife and family.

The sachplakat era began in 1903 with the first reductive poster designs for the Priester match company that limited the elements to the company name and two stylised matches. The writer has untangled the evolution of the Priester variants and concludes that the most celebrated version, usually dated between 1904 to 1906, was actually created more than a decade later. Bernhard quickly acquired prestigious clients - Adler typewriters, Stiller shoes, Osram lightbulbs, Kaffee Hag, Manoli cigarettes and most lucrative of all, Bosch electricals, whose booming business was powered by Bernhard’s explosive spark-plug in all its variations.  This period of expansion came to an end with the outbreak of war in 1914 and Long has a detailed account of Bernhard’s brief service and his subsequent deployment on propaganda duties that utilised his many talents from cartooning to typography. After the war he continued to serve the new Socialist government designing banknotes and party political posters. Alongside this he expanded his advertising business to the point where some 24 staff were employed in his city centre office and studios. Throughout the 1920s Bosch continued to be his best client.

In 1923 Bernhard was invited to New York for a lecture tour arranged by a printer and Modernism enthusiast, Roy Latham whose intention was to galvanise the city’s admen to adopt a more adventurous European approach. Bernhard was captivated by the city, extended his stay and began a period of 4 years dividing his time between Berlin and New York. The Berlin office carried on in his absences under the management of his deputy, Fritz Rosen although the output began to lose its radical edge. In New York Bernhard found the innate conservatism of the locals made it difficult to find work.  Assiduous cultivation of personal contacts eventually paid off - notably with Amoco and REM  cough medicines. Faint echoes of the sachplakat could be detected in the REM and Amoco posters and a possible awareness of Dorothy and Otis Shepard’s designs for Wrigley. Amoco was still offering him work as late as the 1950s but his last 20 years were a sad postscript of semi-retirement. Bernhard laboured long and hard to adapt his European subtleties to the prevailing visual vulgarity but his heart was never really in it. All of this and much more in this generously illustrated and superbly researched survey - the author has tracked down every archival reference and available source to describe the twists and turns of a long career that began in Stuttgart, flourished in Berlin and languished in a long, slow decline in New York.

 

Punch Almanack 1925 - the World of Advertising

Looking back one hundred years when mass circulation printed journals were still expanding their sales and the advertising industry was dependent upon them to an extent inconceivable today. Every year Punch magazine published three special issues that since 1924 had include colour pages of cartoons and advertising - this is a selection of pages from the winter almanack for 2025. Punch was a humorous weekly magazine first published in 1841, founded by Henry Mayhew and Ebenezer Landells. At the time, Mayhew was a prominent playwright and journalist with progressive instincts and an interest in social research.  Ten years on his magnum opus, London Labour and the London Poor (1851) was published, going on become a pioneering landmark in the development of social studies. By contrast Punch was a persistently reactionary publication, patriotic to a fault, obsessed with the empire, the landed gentry and country pursuits.

 

A reason for publishing the winter almanack was to attract Christmas advertising revenue including premium slots in colour. By 1925 advertising-led consumerism was already flourishing, although only a minority of advertisers were willing to experiment and escape the prevailing preference for verbose text and conservative design and illustration. A rare exception pops up in this issue with E McKnight Kauffer’s salute to the bracing powers of Eno’s Fruit Salt - a singular burst of visual energy in a sea of torpidity.  Harry Rountree does his best to inject some vitality on behalf of Sharp’s Super-Kreem Toffees but most of the featured illustrators strike a decorous note, powerless to resist the copywriters’ insertion of blocks of stodgy text that few would ever read. R T Cooper is worth a mention for his radically simplified limited colour image of a cavalry officer in the service of Gilbey’s whiskey.  The ads for Ovaltine and Mackintosh's Toffee show inventive use of pen and ink. Remarkably, six of these brands are still available in 2025.

 

Punch Almanack 1925 - the World of Cartooning

The Punch Almanack for 1925 offers a snapshot from 100 years ago of a long defunct popular humorous magazine.   Contributors had a long tradition of expressing offence at the vagaries of fashion in the broadest sense - anything novel or remotely faddish was a subject for mockery.  Less attractive was the tendency to direct their scorn downwards towards the poor and ill-educated as well as those with the misfortune not to have been born British. Non-white  imperial subjects were an especially favoured target for ridicule. Resistance to change was an enduring topic - defence of the vanishing countryside and assault on the tyranny of Modernism and its Cubist sideshow.  Turning to the colour cartoons of 1925, Frank Reynolds was the cover artist, not really at his best with this sombre image of Mr. Punch on horseback but fully compliant with the magazine’s veneration of fox-hunting.  HM Bateman was in an uncharacteristic mellow mood, his habitual malice under restraint. The dancing girl with her legion of admirers is relatively benign while the Plumber’s Paradise in its ramshackle complexity is a nod to W Heath Robinson. Kenneth Bird (1887-1965) signed his distinctive work as Fougasse - his simple style was instantly recognisable and first appeared in Punch in 1916. In 1949 he became the first cartoonist to occupy the editor’s chair at Punch having previously served as art editor since 1937.  Rugby Across the Ages is a product of his lifelong obsession with rugby - speculative projections from the present to the long distant past was a Punch staple. In a sceptical look at modern media Through the Seasons with the Magazine Cover he makes fun of reliance on cliché.  There’s an excellent anthology of Punch cartooning in colour, Best of Punch Cartoons in Colour (2012) edited by Helen Walasek - very easy to find on sale online.

 

Past and Present No. 13 - Axminster

Axminster is a small market town in East Devon with a long association with carpet making. Close to the centre of town, at the foot of Castle Hill is a former mill building that, by the time this postcard was produced (c.1915), had been repurposed as a factory operated by James Coate, manufacturer of tooth, nail and hairbrushes. Coate (a native of the nearby Devon village of Membury) had established the business in London in 1847 and began transferring manufacturing to the West Country around 1865, starting with a factory near Chard in Somerset.  In 1882, Coate leased a mill in Axminster and expanded production on a site alongside the southern rail route from London to Exeter with easy access to water from the River Axe just beyond. Around the same time another London  brush manufacturer, Bidwell Brothers, moved into the still surviving castellated building part of which is visible to the right. Competitors of Coate, their business moved elsewhere in 1889 and collapsed in 1893. When the brothers relaunched their business they returned to Axminster and would carry on making fine tooth brushes until 1955. Meanwhile, Coate went out of business in 1935 after which it all gets a little vague about what was happening in the Old Brush Works. But in the 1970s Jaffé Feathers moved in and remain in business to the present day. Founded in 1946, they are wholesalers of bulk consignments of feathers and manufacturers of feather products. Around 40 years ago I recall a sign proclaiming them to be Suppliers of Feather Articles to the Royal Navy - the sign is no more and the Navy must have found a way to protect the nation without a regular supply of feathers.

 

High Level Bridge over the Tyne

The ensemble of bridges old and new that cross the River Tyne between Newcastle and Gateshead offers an unusually varied assortment of types for the connoisseur of all things pontine. The best views of this can be seen from the High Level Bridge, a double decker construction where trains run over the top while road traffic and pedestrians share the lower deck. Victorian railway development reached a frenzied climax in the mid 19th. century and the origins of this bridge lie in the protracted conflicts between rival promoters in a saga too tedious to repeat here. When the dust settled, the chosen design was the work of Robert Stephenson (son of the famous railway pioneer, George Stephenson). Wrought iron construction and a bow-string structure were specified. Building began in 1847 and all was complete in time for Queen Victoria to perform the opening ceremony in September 1849. Walking over the bridge is an exhilarating experience - trains still pass overhead but road traffic is restricted to southbound buses and taxis, the views downstream are spectacular and the curiously deserted roadway encased in structural steel has an unsettling quality.  Historic England has the bridge listed at Grade 1.

 

East Midland Arcades

The East Midlands cities of Nottingham and Derby both have vintage shopping arcades from very different eras. The Strand Arcade in Derby dates from 1881 and pre-dates the Council House Arcade (1928) in Nottingham by about 47 years. They also differ in scale - the Derby arcade is a conventional Victorian design, comparable with many other examples in cities such as Cardiff, Birmingham, Bournemouth and Hull with ground floor shops and first floor accommodation.  Unlike others in Norwich, Newcastle or Leeds that dazzle the eye with ceramic splendour, the internal decoration is modest and the walkway, which connects The Strand with Sadler Gate to the north, is relatively intimate in scale.  The Strand itself has a fine continuous Neo-classical 3 and 4 storey frontage and the entrance to the arcade is included in Historic England’s Grade II listing. Rescued from dilapidation in 2006, it seems in good shape with an eclectic range of shops, no empty premises and a decent footfall.

In Nottingham the grand and spacious shopping arcade is part of the city's Council House and dates from 1928. The Council House was designed by the City Architect (T Cecil Howitt) to meet the need for a city hall and council chamber with the addition of a T-shaped shopping arcade inspired by the spectacular  Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan. What came to be built was a much reduced version of the Galleria with clean lines and restrained decoration. Not without its own sense of grandeur, I suspect an association with the architecture of privilege has deterred major retailers. Footfall seems light - it offers only minor advantages to pedestrians in search of a short cut. Nonetheless it survives as a destination for patrons of specialist traders in high value goods and an art dealer.

 

Postcard Disasters - Messina 1908

For a while in the early decades of the postcard, publishers would dispatch their camera crews to record the aftermath of any manmade or natural disaster.  Copies were printed overnight and dispatched to street vendors and kiosks the next day. Editorial selection showed little regard for the sensibilities of victims or their friends and families. Images of the dead struck a morbid note but were not uncommon. A catastrophic earthquake struck the Sicilian port city of Messina in December 1908 - the epicentre was in the centre of the Strait of Messina and the mainland city of Reggio Calabria was equally devastated, first by the quake, then by a series of tsunamis. In Messina there were 75,000 fatalities (almost half the population), in Reggio 25,000 lives were lost.  Some 90% of Messina’s buildings were destroyed or seriously damaged despite which the postcard photographers got to work.  The event is unsurpassed as the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Europe. As recently as 2021 it was reported that some citizens of Messina were still housed in some of the temporary barrack-like buildings that went up in the early phase of rebuilding.  Restoration work went on for decades but no postcard photographers were on hand to record the process.  The last two images offer a moving reflection on the toll of human life.