American Streamline Lite

Four examples of magazine advertising from Alcoa Aluminum in the pages of Fortune in the 1930s. Fortune was printed on heavyweight coated paper stock and was able to offer advertisers like Alcoa the facility to use metallic-finish printing inks. Although the typical Fortune reader would be seated at an outsize desk in a plush executive suite there was an editorial assumption that the executive pulse beat faster when presented with industrial imagery in the form of gas tankers, suspension bridges and urban transport. Alcoa’s graphic designers constructed their layouts on conventional rectilinear grids while allowing for the occasional acute angle to suggest some gentle visual dynamism. Fortune’s page designers favoured an even less flexible grid in their efforts to convey a sense of gravitas and self-importance. Thus although the Alcoa ads may seem rather timid in their departures from convention, in the context of the editorial content, they have the impact of a comic strip.

Distillers of Venom

France in the inter-war years had more than its share of vociferous extremists of the right fanatically dedicated to the destruction of the Third Republic and to violent anti-Semitism. Many of them were collaborators in waiting whose day finally dawned in July 1940 when France was occupied by the Wehrmacht. Industrial unrest in the Thirties led to obsessive anti-Communism in the French business community and many of them gave generous financial support to fascist groups. Carmen Callil, in her book, Bad Faith, names three in particular who went further than others in their devotion to the cause. All remain active today as global brands and it’s the brand that most assiduously promotes itself to the public that has the most to answer for. It is little comfort to know that we can continue to enjoy all these wonderful products despite the deep stain that saturates their hidden history.

What unites these three businesses, other than politics, is a shared dependence on the process of distillation. One was a producer of alcoholic drinks (Taittinger champagne) and two were producers of perfume and cosmetics (Coty and l’Oréal). Their political vision was one of distilled hatred and each contributed to the legacy of murder and betrayal that post-war France has had to painfully come to terms with.

Eugène Schueller (1881-1957) was the founder of the l’Oréal empire and sponsored the activities of a thuggish offshoot from Action Francaise by the name of La Cagoule. This notoriously violent group carried out political assassinations, bombing campaigns and sabotage. Former cagoulards were to find employment with l’Oréal after the war. This tale of infamy is well researched and told in detail in the book, Bitter Scent written by Michael Bar-Zohar. The name of l’Oréal is paraded before the consumer with insulting regularity. The plan is to persuade us to choose from their extensive range of products designed to conceal blemishes and imperfections. The misfortune of l’Oréal is that none of their products could in a million years remove the shame and misery that followed from the activities of their founder.

François Coty (1874-1934) was a pioneering creator of mass-market fragrances and by nature, reclusive. His passion for right wing politics and anti-Semitism had a less pleasant odour and in 1933 he founded a paramilitary organisation, Solidarité Francaise. The group looked to the Nazis and Hitler for its inspiration and was an active participant in the attempted overthrow of the Third Republic in February 1934. Coty Inc. is today a German owned business and the world’s largest fragrance company.

Champagne Taittinger is one of France’s most exclusive brands and the founder of the business, Pierre Taittinger (1887-1965), was yet another extremist of the right. He created his own group of fascist street fighters in 1924, Jeunesses Patriotes, and became an elected politician. During the Occupation he exploited his political power to extract for himself a generous slice of the proceeds of Aryanisation of Jewish owned property. Amazingly as Paris fell to the Allies in 1944, Taittinger successfully reinvented himself as a member of the resistance and was never held to account for his sordid past.

Three contaminated brands, three hidden histories, three reasons to think before you buy.

Darquier de Bellenoix

The adjective egregious is extremely useful when describing something surpassingly unpleasant but it’s pitifully inadequate when it comes to describing Louis Darquier, fascist rabble-rouser, professional anti-Semite and enthusiastic deporter of Jews from Vichy France. Carmen Callil, in her grimly fascinating book, Bad Faith (2007) paints a portrait of a man in possession of every known defect of character and totally devoid of human decency. Darquier’s progress from drunken, lecherous, homeless scrounger to a senior position in the bureaucratic machine for the elimination of French Jewry, in the pay of both the Nazis and the Vichy government is set out in great detail by Callil. The misadventures of his Australian wife and the damage they collectively inflicted on their abandoned daughter form another strand in the book. One of Darquier’s distinguishing characteristics was his absurd personal vanity and self regard. This inspired him to add the suffix, de Pellepoix, to his name to elevate himself into the nobility and by doing so provided his critics in the Left wing press with a wonderful opportunity to remix his name for comic effect. Carmen Callil listed a selection of them for our enjoyment. Even to an English ear they have a splendid ring to them.

Darquier de CarQuoi
Barbier de Pellepoix
Darquier de Pelleharicots
Darquier de Pellepouah
Darquier von Pellepoix
Darquoi de Quel Pied
Carquoi de Quelpied
Cartier de Petitpois
Darquoy de Pelletier
Darquier de Montcuq

It would have been a fine thing if the combatants in France’s culture wars could have confined their activities to the exchange of inventive insults, but sadly this was not to be the case.

Postcard of the Day No. 31, Traction Terminal, Indianapolis

This postcard was selected by the Danish-born photographer, Peter Sekaer, to send to his friend and colleague, Walker Evans. The card is postmarked in September 1936, less than 6 months after Sekaer completed an extended tour of the southern states, accompanying Evans on an FSA assignment. In that time spent together, Sekaer had clearly developed a good understanding of the type of vernacular imagery that appealed to Evans. The photographs that Sekaer took certainly bear comparison with Evans; they are technically competent and selected and composed with an educated eye. But even when the two men photographed the same location there is a quality of gravitas and evidence of an intensely self-critical faculty in Evans’s work that can’t be detected in Sekaer’s. This is what makes Evans a great photographer.

As for the Traction Terminal, it was built in 1904 and with nine tracks, it was the largest in the world. Electric streetcars ran through the streets of Indianapolis from 1890 to 1953. Plans are under development for the reintroduction of streetcars into the city. To read more about this, please follow the link.

Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle

The church of Notre Dame de Bonne-Nouvelle has given its name to a long defunct department store, a boulevard and a Métro station. By the time that the young Richard Cobb (future historian and writer on all things French) arrived in Paris in 1935, the Bazar Bonne-Nouvelle had been destroyed by fire (in 1930) but much more remained to delight the ever observant Cobb as he commenced his travels around the city that inspired his best writing. Cobb’s first home in Paris was at 26 boulevard Bonne Nouvelle (he wrote extensively about the other inhabitants of the building) and the image above is the view he would have seen every day as he set out on his exploration of the city. This exploration studiously ignored the famous and celebrated in favour of the unfashionable and overlooked. The Métro entrance was right outside his front door and Cobb was an inveterate user of public transport but he also had an instinctive understanding of the need to travel on foot to have any chance of acquiring some understanding of new and unexplored territory.

Kleindeutschland - Little Germany

According to Asa Briggs (in Victorian Cities) Bradford's 19th. century trading community was more cosmopolitan than Leeds and by 1861 there were 65 foreign worsted merchants active in the city. The majority were of German origin and between 1855 and 1890 they developed an area of substantial warehouses and office blocks that became known as Little Germany. A compact area of land on a steeply sloping site close to the Cathedral to the east of the city centre was chosen for its proximity to the city’s main railway stations. Many of the buildings, which typically have 4 or 5 storeys, were designed by local architect, Eli Milnes (1830-1899). 85 of the original buildings survive, of which 55 are now listed. The entire district has been regenerated over the last decade with cleaning and restoration of all the major buildings. The density and mass of the development combined with the sloping site and the modified grid plan make for some interesting perspectives. There is a coherence about the layout and a consistency of scale and design details that give a Germanic feel to the district, despite being mostly designed by Yorkshire architects. Overcast and wet conditions contributed to the quality of the experience and the soft uniform light disclosed many details that on a sunny day would be concealed by shadows.

Along the Right-of-Way

In the September 1950 issue of Fortune magazine, Walker Evans published a portfolio of seven photographs (of which 4 were in colour) taken through the window of a moving train, under the title, Along the Right-of-Way. It’s a classic example of the extent to which Evans was permitted to explore his personal projects in the pages of America’s foremost business magazine. To view the Evans photo-essay, please follow this link to the Visual Telling of Stories. Evans was fascinated by the uncomposed and arbitrary images that resulted. The railroad tracks carved a channel through a largely unseen and unrecorded American vernacular. The mixture of banality and squalor was inspirational to Evans.


These photos were taken last week from a TGV en-route from Milan to Paris and form a modest tribute to Evans. The train emerges from the Tunnel de Fréjus in the French town of Modane and passes through some sublime Alpine scenery glimpsed through a rich variety of line-side clutter. The foreground is littered with signal gantries, overhead cable supports, footbridges and security fencing that passes for the most part in a motion blur. The middle ground consists of freight sidings, small factories, scrap-yards, cement works, car parks, auto-routes and re-cycling facilities all framed by the geologic splendour of the mountainous backdrop. Another layer of interest is supplied by the reflected light from within the train superimposed on the landscape view. The resulting images gain their narrative power from the random and artless quality of composition.