Saturday Evening Post

For seven decades this magazine was America’s greatest showcase for the art of illustration. The minutiae of daily life in town and country was transformed into an enduring mythology of a nation united in deeply rooted family values and comradely good fellowship by highly skilled cover artists who each week looked America in the eye and saw that it was good. J C Leyendecker, Stevan Dohanos, John Falter, Constantin Alajolov and the arch-sentimentalist, Norman Rockwell maintained an undeviating focus on the positive and excluded all but the most trivial of contemporary anxieties from their vision.

The Curtis Publishing Company in Philadelphia published, printed and dispatched this weekly ration of short stories, movie and sports celebrities, popular journalism, conservative politics and consumer advertising direct into millions of American homes. The multi-colour packaging, the magazine cover, was produced on the rotary presses shown in the above postcard. The card immediately below illustrates the colour press room of the Ladies’ Home Journal. Below that we have the Edwardian plush of the Women’s Rest Room and the subscription and sales departments.

Hydrocarbon Heaven

Butadiene is a petroleum by-product. In the 1940s the United States War Department constructed several large butadiene plants to produce synthetic rubber for the war effort of which this refinery in Port Neches, TX is one. It makes an unlikely postcard subject but such installations are not without their admirers. Their formal qualities were especially attractive to Precisionist painters and Charles Sheeler made many paintings of these distinctive industrial structures. Their potential for generating profits is very attractive to institutional investors for whom their aesthetic qualities are a matter of profound indifference. Upton Sinclair brought the pioneering days of the oil industry to life in fiction while Raymond Chandler escaped from the industry by writing short stories for Black Mask. The American economy has been driven by oil for almost a century so it is unsurprising to find it featuring as a postcard theme. This selection of cards includes a variety of approaches from the sublime celebration (Signal Hill at Night, Oil Well in Oklahoma) to the resolutely banal record (Pumping Station No. 2).

Lugano

Since 1886 this funicular railway (Funicolare Lugano-Stazione FFS) has connected the city centre of Lugano with the mainline train station. The insolent manner in which it penetrates the buildings in its path is remarkably uncompromising. There are three other funiculars in the Lugano area and the image below comes from the cover of a pamphlet publicising the Funicolare del Monte Brè that has been offering passengers a spectacular mountain climb since 1912.

Gas, Food and Lodging

John Baeder’s Gas, Food and Lodging has been a favourite book since it was first published in 1982. Since 1972 Baeder has been making paintings of American Diners and roadside eating places in a hyper-realist manner. Steven Heller wrote a fascinating account of Baeder’s single-minded pursuit of the American vernacular on Design Observer and discussed with him his passion for linen postcards. Baeder told Heller how he overcame an initial aversion to the linen finish which seemed to be a crude imitation of fine art canvas, when he began to appreciate how the extensive retouching created “a very surreal visual excitement”. Heller also uncovered Baeder’s intriguing interest in the work of Marcel Duchamp. The book was sub-titled A Postcard Odyssey and Baeder drew upon a wonderful collection of cards to bring his subject to life. What follows is a small selection from my modest group of postcards on this theme, none of which I regret to say have much of the graphic exuberance or documentary riches to be found in many of Baeder’s examples. John Baeder displays his paintings and photographs on his own website – his impressive photos from the 1960s could have been taken for the Farm Security Administration under the direction of Roy Stryker.

Rue de Rennes

When dreaming up new plans for Paris, Haussmann (described by Richard Cobb as the Alsatian Attila) was especially motivated by an obsessive desire to link all the mainline railway stations with central Paris by means of arrow-straight boulevards of the greatest possible width. The rue de Rennes was devised to connect Gare Montparnasse with the Left Bank and named in recognition of the fact that Montparnasse is the departure point for trains to Brittany. From 1853 the new road forced its way northward, crushing all in its path but would never reach its target. By the late 1860s it reached its fullest extent when it arrived at Boulevard Saint-Germain. The northward extension was blocked by the location of the Institut de France, the guardian of traditional French values, language and culture. Plans were prepared that would have left the Institut marooned on a large traffic island but highly placed opponents of the scheme ensured that approval was denied. City planners were extremely reluctant to concede defeat and the scheme would resurface every decade or so for more than a century until being finally abandoned in 1976.

For Richard Cobb, rue de Rennes is the most desolate, inhuman street in Paris and its existence continues to be greatly resented by those who bitterly regret the passing of medieval Paris. It is not blessed with architectural treasures (save one) and the southbound view is dominated by the 55 floors of the Tour Montparnasse from which the photograph at the top was taken. The single redeeming feature is the flamboyant department store at number 140 built in 1904 as part of the Félix Potin grocery empire. Designed by Paul Auscher under the influence of Art Nouveau, the undulating exterior was formed from moulded concrete casts. The moulds could not be reused and much time and expense was consumed in the manufacture of separate moulds for each section. The six storeys are crowned by a vast free-form bell tower embellished with three oculi bearing the name of the founding father. The flirtation with Art Nouveau was short lived and the next Potin store (rue Sébastopol) was built in 1910 in a Beaux-Arts Baroque manner. There is a sombre footnote – in September 1986 when the building was a Tati store, a terrorist bomb left 7 dead and over 60 injured.

My Gilbert & Sullivan

The illustrated booklet reproduced here was produced in 1961 by Guinness for distribution to general practitioners – one in a long series intended as an annual reminder of the medicinal virtues of stout. A Conservative government was presiding over a consumer boom and prosperity was on the rise. The Cold War and de-colonisation dominated foreign policy. The age of austerity had given way to an age of anxiety – the culture wars of the 1960s were just beginning. Amateur productions of Gilbert & Sullivan retained their appeal for the middle class – a respectable opportunity for exercising their choral skills and dressing-up in exotic costumes. These illustrations offer a visual equivalent to the comforting melodies and verbal wit for which the Savoy Operas were so highly valued. The sly intrusions of Guinness-related imagery add to the charm. Credit for these richly coloured illustrations goes to Antony Groves-Raines – a master of visual wit with a talent for combining his own magic realism and crisp contours with a jaunty amiability certain to please.

Good to the Last Drop

The slogan Good to the Last Drop has been in regular use since 1917 to promote what for many decades was America’s best-known and best-selling brand of coffee. These examples of mass circulation magazine advertising are from the 1940s and 1950s in an era when the company was resolutely exploiting the emerging potential of TV sponsorship and product placement. All these ads depend on illustration for their imagery but reveal a scattergun approach in terms of target audience. Each is aimed in a different direction and the social scale ranges from old money snobbery to the ruralist idyll via true romance, adventure on the high seas and metropolitan sophistication. Maxwell House is no longer America’s leading brand - that honour goes to Folgers but recent reports suggest that both brands are stagnating in today’s market.