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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Italian Posters - Irony, Imagination and Eroticism

     Silvana Editoriale, 2011, ISBN 9788836622528

This is just one of a series of volumes published by Milan based Silvana Editoriale that cover a variety of advertising topics including food and drink, motor cars, fashion and travel.  Inside images of posters are arranged by subject and placed on the page to let them speak for themselves in the absence of designer conceits. The selection is brilliant - most of the images were things I saw for the first time.  The archive of Italian graphics must run very deep. Consumer society may have been late in arriving in Italy but once established the originality and ingenuity of the local advertising art was quickly apparent.  This was accompanied by a wave of industrial and product design, from typewriters to cars, from fashion to luxury goods that established a global reputation for formal elegance, innovation and attention to detail.  Swiss and German designers searched for perfection of form via a rigorous reductive process to eliminate the superfluous with impressive, if sometimes impersonal results. In Italy, design traditions were less rigid with results that made space for character and personality without sacrificing refinement. Olivetti and Fiat were pioneers of this approach.

When drawing upon familiar stylistic genres, Italian graphic artists seemed more alert than any other nationality to the humorous potential in their source of inspiration.  Even the geometric proprieties of Modernism were subverted in Italy thanks to the national passion for visual wit deployed with a lightness of touch rarely achieved elsewhere. Likewise the seductive rhythms of Art Nouveau lent themselves to a playful jollity that would have been heretical in Munich or Vienna. This involved a high degree of graphic absurdity, of inventive formal repurposing as much as setting up a comic situation. A favourite strategy of Italian illustrators was to personalise the product with characteristics drawn from the natural world. These excesses of the imagination include an owl with searchlight eyes, a tiger clawing its way into a jar of meat extract, a cockerel in evening dress, a weeping pig, an infant suspended from a clothes line, and irradiated infant buttocks.  What might look coarse and vulgar elsewhere is made acceptable thanks to the Italian lightness of touch and (mostly) gentle humour. This book is a treasure box of the most wonderful delights for the eye and a tribute to the imaginative powers of generations of Italian poster artists.

Previous posts on Italian Graphics can be seen here and here.