Function and Abstraction in Poster Design

In 1936 Alfred Barr opened his book Cubism and Abstract Art with a comparison of two posters. Both were produced to advertise the 1928 international exhibition of printing held in Cologne. Barr’s purpose was to draw attention to the contrast between the ‘fairly realistic poster style common to mediocre travel posters the world over’, of the one, and the ‘simplicity and abstraction’ of the other.1 Here, the ‘natural objects are reduced to flat, almost geometric forms arranged on a strongly diagonal axis under the influence of Russian Suprematism’. The reason that two different posters were produced was that they were intended for different markets: one for the Anglo-American, ‘accustomed to an overcrowded and banally realistic style’, the other for the German public, which, ‘through the activity of its museums and progressive commercial artists was quite used to an abstract style’. For Barr, the superiority of the formal, abstract poster was self-evident. He ends his comment by saying: ‘Today, times have changed. The style of the abstract poster, which is just beginning to interest our American advertiser, is now discouraged in Germany.’ Later in the book he comments on the political cause of this discouragement, the rise of National Socialism.2

Certain assumptions in Barr’s pictorial preface are worth spelling out. Firstly, the status of the poster: it is treated not as a secondary art but as an art form in its own right, like painting, photography, theatre, film. In his catalogue of the exhibition that the book accompanied he lists the category as ‘typography and posters’. Secondly, there is the implication that, while the simplicity of the abstract poster was good in itself, it was particularly good in a poster where the need for simplicity had long been recognised as intrinsic. The question might arise as to whether an abstract poster is necessarily simpler than a figurative one – look at the radical simplifications of the Beggarstaffs (the pseudonym used by British artists William Nicholson and James Pryde), for example. The difference here is that the simplicity of Barr’s poster is based upon abstract geometrical principles independent of the subject depicted, and the complex of ideas underlying Barr’s prejudice will be examined in detail later. He implies that the more abstract design is more functionally effective than the other. Because the result of the abstraction in this case is to focus attention on the typography, it is of course especially apt, given that the poster is advertising an exhibition of modern printing. But Barr would clearly favour an abstract design, whatever was being advertised. When he uses the term ‘abstraction’, in this case, he does not in fact mean total nonfiguration. Although it is doubtful whether an Anglo-American audience would recognise in the triangular shapes a ‘reduction’ or ‘abstraction’ of Cologne cathedral’s twin towers, the fact remains that these geometrical shapes retain an element of figuration, however reduced, which has the function of keeping them distinct from the typography. But many posters in the 1920s and 1930s did use totally non-figurative designs. Does this mean that the poster image as distinct from its typography ceased to function? In other words, that in so far as it was abstract it became simply an adjunct to the typographical message?

I would like to look at the question of function and abstraction in poster design in the first three decades of the twentieth century, and to consider the ways in which the main movements within modernism influenced and absorbed the poster, and reciprocally to what extent they fed off it. To focus on these questions and narrow my argument to those

2 Barr discusses the contradictory ways in which abstract art became involved in politics, with, for example, the Nazis suppressing abstract art and international style architecture while fascist Italy welcomed them. A footnote was added, as the book was going to press, on the refusal of us customs to allow in, as art, 19 pieces of sculpture that were to be in the exhibition, because they did not represent a human or animal: ‘This essay and exhibition might well be dedicated to those painters of squares and circles… who have suffered at the hands of philistines with political power.’

114 function and abstraction in poster design posters directly or indirectly connected with modernism and its roots is, obviously, to look at only a tiny fraction of the total poster production of this period. Whole areas have to be excluded, including historical and political events that spawned innumerable poster campaigns such as the two world wars. However, the inquiry will necessarily involve sociopolitical and historical issues given the interdependence of the poster and society. Why, for example, was the Anglo-American market, as Barr describes it, resistant to or ignorant of abstract design? What contributed to its success in Europe? Barr’s optimism about the arrival of an abstract style in American advertising was to be short-lived. The Second World War brought to an abrupt end experimental graphic design and before the war, in Germany, the Nazis had condemned modern typography and returned to black letter gothic. On both sides, Axis and Allies alike, a conservative realism (which had of course always coexisted) swept across the entire field of poster production and more or less eliminated the abstract-constructivist style. It is, incidentally, a significant comment on the divided nature of poster studies that the literature on Second World War posters often entirely ignores this remarkable fact, leaving out the way a poster looks altogether. Although the poster has its own history and conditions, it tends to be treated in different ways according to the discipline involved: as an illustration of social or political history, as an aspect of the history of marketing and advertising, as a branch of art and design.

The poster had, during the period I want to discuss, a spectacular energy, and this energy has never really been recovered since the Second World War. Its conditions had changed for good. The poster belongs to a specific phase in the age of mechanical reproduction: for 70 or 80 years it was the most conspicuous, accessible and familiar form of pictorial production. After the First World War it was joined by the film and the illustrated weekly paper, which had, in El Lissitzky’s opinion, triumphed over the easel picture. ‘The invention of easel pictures produced great works of art, but their effectiveness has been lost. The cinema and the illustrated weekly magazine have triumphed.’3 For a while the poster was the ally and support of the cinema. But it was eventually displaced by

3 ‘Our book’ (1926), in Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky, Thames & Hudson, London, 1968, p.361.

336 top: Max Ernst

Lesson in Automatic Drawing (The Magnet is Close No Doubt), c.1923

Pen and ink on paper

17.3 × 169 cm | 6¾ × 66½ in bottom:

Max Ernst

Lesson in Automatic Drawing, c.1923

Pen and ink on paper

17.3 × 169 cm | 6¾ × 66½ in

337 different methods, equivalent on the one hand to automatic writing – ‘the Surrealist method’, on the other to the ‘récit de rêve’, the dream narrative. In the untitled drawing, there is a freedom in the line, which wanders or jerks across the paper, sometimes resolving into the image of a person or thing but often remaining just a mark, while in L’aimant est proche a succession of images unrolls, leading from one to another in an unexpected and irrational way which is more like the progress of a dream. If this is the case – and it is only a supposition – the difference would be that these images pre-exist, and the drawing is intended to make them visible. The first, untitled, drawing is closer to André Masson’s automatic drawings, one of which was reproduced in the first issue of La Révolution surréaliste. Both Masson and Ernst allude to time through the process of drawing, making the progression of line and its metamorphosis very visible. The difference between these and L’aimant est proche is illuminating for the problem of Surrealism and the visual arts as Morise saw it. Masson’s drawing begins without a consciously preconceived subject, and allows any external references to emerge as the lines suggest them (if they do). In other words while Masson’s drawing follows the free play of thought, Ernst’s L’aimant est proche (if it is following a dream) is trying to capture images from memory. Given the nature of his argument it is striking that the automatic drawing Morise chooses to illustrate his article is one of the most abstract Masson ever made.

Breton took control of La Révolution surréaliste in July 1925 and started to publish his essays on Surrealism and painting, which were a response to Morise and to the even more negative position of Pierre Naville who denied there could be any such thing as ‘surrealist painting’. 24 Breton mentions and then glides over the controversy about the incompatibility of painting dreams, in which the image pre-exists, and the ‘Surrealist method’ of automatism, simply fastening on the ancient need to ‘fix’ images. ‘The need to fix visual images, whether or not these images preexist, has manifested itself throughout time and has led to the formation of a real language which seems to me no more artificial than the other one…’25 Painting was thus re-established as an echt (real) Surrealist activity, though no rules were laid down.

24 Pierre Naville, ‘Beaux-Arts’, La révolution surréaliste, no.3, April 1925, p.27; ‘Everyone knows now that there is no such thing as surrealist painting.’

338 dreams in surrealist discourse

The debates culminating in Breton’s ‘Surrealism and Painting’ were the background to Photo. Though there is no doubt that Miró took his own route, he was aware of the rich Surrealist discourse around the problem of translating into visual terms dreams, daydreams, and unconscious thought. Morise had begun to question the problem of the ‘dream image’, which was essentially still considered in terms of rather than opposed to automatism. Much later, in ‘Artistic Genesis and Perspective of Surrealism’ (1941), Breton contrasted the (still essential) automatism with the ‘other road available to surrealism… the stabilizing of dream images in the kind of still-life deception known as trompe l’oeil (and the very word “deception” betrays the weakness of the process), has been proved by experience to be far less reliable and even presents very real risks of the traveller losing his way altogether.’26 The ‘dream painting’, in 1925, was not yet the popular metaphor for visual Surrealism.

In 1925 Miró began the series of paintings on a blue ground, so blue as ‘the colour of my dreams’ is also the colour of his paintings. He did not otherwise add words to his ‘blue’ paintings. Blue seems to have a natural affinity with dreams: the ‘blue sun of dreams’ as Aragon said.

The writing on the canvas in Photo: ceci est la couleur de mes rêves is more carefully lettered than in any of the other ‘poem-pictures’, which has the paradoxical effect of on the one hand underlining their graphic nature and on the other the divorce between line/word and colour. It is as though Miró is meditating on the Surrealist tendency to give the word primacy over the image. In ‘Une Vague de rêves’ Aragon describes the ‘nature of the troubled mental states brought on by Surrealism, by mental fatigue, by narcotics, and the way these resembled dreams and mystical visions together with the semiology of mental illness’ which ‘led us to evolve this proposition which, alone, can explain and link all these factors: the existence of a mental substance.’ Eventually, he says, ‘it gradually dawned on us that the mental substance described above was, in fact, vocabulary itself. There is no thought outside words: the whole surrealist experience evidences this proposition…’27

25 Breton, ‘Le surréalisme et la peinture’, La révolution surréaliste, no.4, Paris, 16 July 1925, p.26; Breton’s articles on Surrealism and painting were published as a book Le Surréalisme et la peinture, nrf, Paris, 1928.

26 Breton, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, Gallimard, Paris, 1965, p.70.

27 Aragon, op. cit., p.7.