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.

 

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.

 

Au Bûcheron

Au Bûcheron was a luxury Parisian furniture store with a wealthy clientele and a flair for publicity that led them to engage the services of the best of contemporary graphic artists including A M Cassandre, Rene Vincent and Paul Colin. The business name was lettered in a variety of Deco-style stencil fonts. Cassandre created a dynamic trademark in the form of a woodcutter wielding an axe on a falling tree, enclosed in an inverted triangle that was launched at the 1925 Exposition des Arts Decoratifs at which Au Bûcheron was an exhibitor. The activity of the lumberman was the start of a long process of refinement involving sawing, planing, assembly, veneering followed by buffing and polishing - all for the admiration of the incurably fashionable. Premises were on the prestigious rue de Rivoli but the company left their mark all over Paris in the form of oversized poster installations, large enough on occasion to all but obliterate the host building. Very much in a Parisian tradition of aggressive on-street advertising. The story is told in this magazine article from Commercial Art, No. 26, June 1929. 

Indian Graphics

Above are some Visit India poster designs featured in an advertising insert in Commercial Art magazine for June 1929 (Vol 6, No 36). On the reverse is a quartet of designs for well known European consumer products presented in an Asian context. It’s impossible to be certain (at this scale) but the hand of William Spencer Bagdatopoulos (WSB) (1888-1965) may be detected here. WSB was the master when it came to applying an Asian flavour and chromatic brilliance to unglamorous Western products – something we examined in a post dated March 2010. More background information has emerged in online sources – follow this link for a brief biography. It’s interesting to discover his Anglo-Greek parentage – in my ignorance I had convinced myself that he was of Indian origin and had invented this exotic name to advance his career.

The Billboard Cliché

Admen love nothing more than the comfort of a cliché. The tried and tested, the familiar and time-honoured bring reassurance to the exhausted imagination. The more inventive may attempt a little subversion to enhance or even undermine the original intentions but for the most part what we get is recycling pure and simple. Chris Mullen has curated more than 10,000 platitudinous examples to delight the eye and intellect at the Visual Primer of Advertising Clichés. Today we look at the billboard cliché – imagine the conversation. We take the product off the shelf and on to the great American Highway. We pass a billboard that displays an oversize ad for our product and we get two ads for the price of one and an amplified message even more difficult to ignore. Whether any research has been done to prove this, I’ve no idea. There is something in the idea of an ad embedded in another – an act of quotation. But it’s very hard to see how that would translate into additional sales.