Early Travel Posters from Austria, Czeckoslovakia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and other European Countries as a collective entity. The posters are compiled in Book form (.pdf Files)
and each one can be printed and bound easily as a Book.
The posters in landscape-format are gathered toghether in separate books for the most, but there are fewer of these in proportion to posters which are higher than they’re long. The total numbers for posters inclusive of both formats is aproximate:
Austria (64), Czeckoslovakia (64), Denmark (65),
Finland (13), Germany (144), Greece (27), Hungary (33),
Italy (266), Norway (45), Poland (24), Russia (165), Spain (159),
Sweden (36), Switzerland (400), and other
European Countries (29).
The baseline is pre-camera, certainly pre-video. No glass eyes yet except here and there, but they were coming. The EU,
and the larger Global Partnership Areas, whatever embryonic or pre-embryonic
forms they had, were conceived on the
pattern of ugly, formless, soviet, communist Russia, but it was the images of the nation states and their unique personalities that travel agents were selling and reinforcing.
Pictures equal a thousand words
images or language? which?
You can imagine a practical Travel Salesman asking his design man to go grab some pretty pictures typifying the country and say Come! Visit! Welcome! and the like in fine big-letters.
That must have been design policy at an early period but then as the message was so simple the designers got a handle on it and got the pictures to talk. So they internalised in the poster all the potent images that would cross the synapses of indecisive punters and focus them on their product. Art Deco is immediate form and colours, though as yet this poster advertising was done by men and not machines it came the nearest ever, in modern times in any case, to being a visual language when these poster artists made their magic----and besides being absolutely felicitous in themselves in this period of advertising, poster art including tourist posters had a benign effect on many lesser and dispassionate graphics people.
Instant coffee, instant tea, instant message for distracted mind
recognition is instant
verbal economy, no verbosity, no superfluity
National identity, ethnocentric: nationalism was in the ascendancy then, but now people in public life have been told not to talk up national sovereignty. Don’t you wish they’d all get in their spaceships and go back to their own planets.
On this planet in the period from the turn of the last century up to say 1960 we all celebrated our national identities and Travel Agents exploited the curiosity of one sovereign nation about another nation and its strange ways. Of course they sold holidays too to those seeking adventure or sea, sun and beautiful girls or food and drink if they saw them as worth targeting in their advertisements but sometimes you have to wonder about their savvy. or you just have to plain wonder. Anyway each picture needs to be read but some are less instant. In the early posters, exemplified particularly in the French ‘affiches’. the style is not just classic but they apparently targeted a wealthy educated clientele, a class with refined tastes, susceptible to the fine arts; they would go to see for themselves the places that artists like Turner had painted. Later the styles went through changes: the progression was something like Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Modernism etc. but I view the period 1920-1940 which I refer to here as the Art Deco period as the good ground, the fecund period, the golden era.
Art Deco was the great daring
The New Birth, Rebirth, Renaissance
The sheer impudence!
yet chaste as a colonic cleansing followed by smoothies at dawn
in a new elegant body dressed to match
days when Art had a pulse, was impulsive, devil may care
fast cars, fast women, dizzy social life, ‘carpe diem’, snatch the hour and the day
what an incredibly long time a minute was! imagine wasting just one minute of a whole lifelong hour! a mortal sin!
dowdy colours were for indoors folk, at-home grannies, these were the young ones, dressed to the nines and out to dazzle, cutting a figure in the big wide world
outfits fitted perfectly, not large, medium and small but sizes 2 to 20 in even numbers
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no fancy friends for you if your clothes didn’t fit without effort
answers never questioned, night-time revels, frothy drinks in clinging glasses, glancing amours full of promise, nothing explicit
gravity be damned! they were electric, immaculately conceived without sin
not just instant communication but at its best an epigram, an aphorism, a rebranding of a jaded cliché,
a rude busting in on the aesthetic hush
spirited, on its feet, and the levity is no cheap thrill.
New poster colours for the poster artists, Chinese white is mixed with every other color
Simple decoration by a drastic excision of ornate traditions. The younger artists plain ignored them. They would make their own when it suited them.
airbrush gradients , simple motifs, waves, parallel lines, sunbursts and what have you? floral motifs got dumped for the most, what else?
Well on the level of communication, it needed to be instant, equal to language itself and not different to it. Language was becoming a graphic ingredient just as all the graphic ingredients were becoming language.
There were cynical people too, whatever destructive urges and demons possessed them, who would reduce it all to a formula, a brand, as few as possible lines and brushstrokes. cut out the anarchic artist middleman! This became the modernist style which superseded Art Deco time-wise though there was overlap at the beginning, and some were ok but it was bad seed, infecund, no future, the flowers were faded, the stem was wooden and the seeds did not germinate.
Gallery owners would invent any new Art movement to sell their stuff and these ‘movements‘ followed on the heels of each other. Banks, Institutes, Corporations bought them thereby giving them value and once they had been given that the value was securitised and derivatives created on the basis of their notional value as fine art. There is a big market in Travel Posters today. What are in this compilation are copies. they have no monetary value. They are as anonymous as they were when birthed, no name, no monetary value, full of promise but no guarantee, expecting to be loved and to belong; that’s why I add no descriptions nor date, nor name of artist. Those details are a trader’s inventory.
Describe them yourself, describe life yourself. Use brush or pencil or pen or whatever comes to hand.
Art Deco is a stylistic connotation; it passed into the lexicon, but it was also a period, a period of great freedom for the visual arts; for a brief while it seems these were loosing themselves from some restraints; freedom is incredibly exciting!, but the formularists who love nouns and hate verbs wanted to define and restrain what not many of the artists would have subscribed to, i.e. that their designs and however they thought of them belonged to some prescribed school of design called Art Deco for example. They appear rather to have been revelling in their freedom. The admen, publicists and dealers, whether they were street dealers or institutions or municipal art galleries, described a style and intellectualised it, in effect put the dancing butterfly in a chloroform jar, then pinned it to a board in a glass frame and charged the public an entrance fee to look at the display as the guide explained to them what it was that they were looking at. sigh! sigh! poor butterfly! I tell you it was once wild!
Sometimes Art Deco is so beautiful your feelings collapse in an incoherent heap beside you. You’re beside yourself to behold such drop-dead gorgeous marriages of everything that is good and beautiful with everything that is strong, daring and reckless---and remember! it was made by the human hand, real human fingers, following a human eye---ARTISTS! artists were scientist and engineer in one; beauty was truth and not separable from truth
artists were the ones who had divine inspiration, to whom you went in humility to seek knowledge. What is the meaning of life? Ask the storyteller and the artist. Sure! they had nightly visitations of angels. There is no ART certainly none with capital letters, there is only artists, small letters, illustrators, too busy working to have delusions of power and grandness.
Some of these posters are photographic, they are not exclusive to just my personal taste; the compilations are inclusive and reasonably comprehensive.
The FocalFactory motto is ‘How and what eyes b4 glass eyes saw we compile 4u!’ |
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