Eric Fraser at the Seaside

Eric Fraser designed and illustrated this ad for Guinness for publication in the summer of 1951 - the year of the Festival of Britain on London’s South Bank. A gallery of Victorian seaside characters has been assembled in a nostalgic exercise, celebrating the past.  A curiosity of the Festival iconography is the prevalence of Victorian associations and imagery in an exercise designed to embrace the excitement of the future. Most of these stereotypes have long receded into history but the Masher is still with us, though he has swapped the promenade for the manosphere and the dating app. The Punch and Judy Man and the Pierrot were key players in the world of seaside entertainment - a major activity in the first half of the last century, rapidly moving towards extinction by 1951. The concealed charms of the Bathing Belle had given way to a new era of exposure and the prudish Bathing Machine (beach hut on wheels, usually horse-drawn) had long since performed its final trundle along the English foreshore. Producers of vintage postcards captured all these characters at the height of their powers - some examples are posted below. Often they are incidental captures, minor parts of a much broader picture but occasionally a more imaginative photographer will focus on the documentary detail. The Masher was a figure of fun and more likely to turn up on hand drawn illustration postcards. This selection starts at Hastings with a Punch and Judy show of modest dimensions, then moves on to Scarborough, Millport, Clacton and other resorts where Pierrots and Minstrels take to the stage, to be followed by some more generic examples. In another post, the Masher and the Bathing Belle will be considered.

 

Advertising Art in Russia (2007)

There’s a generally accepted view that Russian Twentieth Century graphics can be exclusively defined by the post-revolutionary creative explosion of Constructivism-inspired book and poster designs that went on to influence designers around the world.  This fascinating book, Advertising Art in Russia (Moscow, 2007, ISBN: 9785 903406 012) includes some of the Avant-garde pioneers (mostly Rodchenko) but the principal focus is on illustration for Russian consumer advertising between 1880 and 1970. Included are 4 brief essays in both Russian and English and over 240 pages of full colour illustrations. While the state controlled almost all production in the Soviet era, consumer products were marketed and promoted to the public in visual formats that paralleled those of their western counterparts. It may have been illusory but it created the impression of a world of infinite consumer choice that looked familiar to the citizens of capitalist economies.  The influence of western practitioners such as Leonetto Cappiello, Marcello Dudovich, Ludwig Hohlwein, Joseph Binder etc. is easily detected, suggesting that Russian artists and designers had easy access to a wide range of international design periodicals and consumer magazines.  

Moscow’s design studios must have been lined with shelves holding volumes of Das Plakat, Gebrauchsgraphik, Graphis, Commercial Art, Art and Industry et al. Some of the largest state monopolies, such as Tabaktrest (based at the Petrograd tobacco factories) had their own studios and printing facilities for producing posters. In 1935 Stalin made a major speech in which he declared “Life’s become better, comrades, life’s become merrier!” A sentiment that would sound hollow to the victims of the great wave of purges and show trials that got underway in 1937. Despite this the production of consumer goods was accelerating and in 1936 a state advertising agency was established. Posters in every market sector projected an aura of sunny optimism and consumer satisfaction. A regiment of happy smiling faces stood in contradiction to the western stereotype of the downtrodden Soviet citizen forever trapped in a drab colourless world of material shortages and state surveillance.

 

Imperial Hotel Tokyo Brochures

A brief follow-up to last year’s post on the centenary of Frank Lloyd Wright’s legendary Tokyo hotel, now rapidly receding in first-hand recollection. Two brochures extolling the merits of a stay in the Imperial Hotel. No evidence to date them but the conservative graphic style suggests the immediate post-war decade before the hotel’s decline as the fabric decayed. The images, hand-drawn and photographic, indicate the grand scale of Wright’s public spaces and help to explain why the lost building still commands a retrospective glow in the collective consciousness of architectural fandom. A mark of its enduring reputation is its inclusion in the premium-priced Lego Architecture range. Now out of production but second-hand examples can be found online starting at about £150.

 

Guinness Scrapbook 1937

We like to think of embarrassment as a uniquely British thing but the concept is present in every known language. It’s especially prevalent among the English thanks to the local tradition of invented codes of behaviour, vocabulary, idioms, pronunciations - all designed to divide outsiders from insiders and perpetuate class distinctions.  Cartoonist H M Bateman arrived in England from South Africa with a readymade chip resting on his shoulder, a grumpy disposition and a casual fluency in drawing social tableaus. Ideally qualified to explore the English world of embarrassment and unwitting social transgression, he took pleasure in distorting the human features to convey all the nuances of social terror and personal humiliation - hair that quivers as it uplifts from the scalp, eyes on the verge of exploding from their sockets, lips that tremble and splutter, bodies that vibrate with shame.  A new genre was created in which the discomfort of disgraced victims was mercilessly exposed for the entertainment of all. When he wasn’t working much of his time was spent in protracted and ultimately unsuccessful disputation with tax authorities having conceived an obsessive aversion to all forms of taxation.

The Guinness offer to the nation’s doctors for 1937 was a collection of literary and visual tributes to the virtues of the famous stout presented the reader as if pasted into a scrapbook with a cover design by Antony Groves-Raines, many if not all of them were extracted from previous advertising campaigns. The page sequence was broken up with full page colour cartoons drawn by Bateman, themed around the worlds of golf, cricket and performance, relatively gentle in tone. Several of these had already featured in press and magazine ads. The choice of subjects reveals an assumption that the medical profession of the day was exclusively male - not really unsafe for 1937. For another selection of Bateman’s work for Guinness, please follow this link.  As for the product, Guinness has never been more popular with a new generation falling for its distinctive charms to the point where the brewers were declaring a shortage late last year which had the desired effect of boosting sales even further as consumers rushed to stockpile.  Diageo (corporate owners of the brand) responded to their good fortune, not as you might expect by expanding production but by considering selling the company to take advantage of its increase in value.  Must be what they teach in business school.