Legacy 5- Kauffer

POSTER ART MODERNIST STYLE

Dec 30, '11 10:10 AM for everyone

I suppose the blog is a bit like the number 9 bus- you wait years for a posting them two come in (relatively) quick succession.   This would have been quicker if other things hadn’t got in the way- like Christmas- and the exhibition it relates to is now finished so I can’t hope to get extra trade for the Estorick gallery by posting it, which is a pity.

At first, or even second, sight it seems a bit odd for a gallery which specialises in 20^th century Italian art to host an exhibition of poster art by a man whose Italian connections were tenuous in the extreme- Edward McKnight Kauffer.    I’m not even sure Kauffer (the “McKnight” was a taken name, adopted to honour an early benefactor) ever set foot in Italy; he certainly didn’t have any very obvious links with the place.   You can establish linkages but it takes a bit of intellectual effort and they’re rather second hand, going through Britain’s short-lived younger sibling of Futurism, Vorticism.   Kauffer doesn’t seem to have exhibited in either of the two Vorticist exhibitions (at least I don’t recall any of his work turning up in the show dedicated to the movement which Tate Britain put on earlier this year- though the image at the top of this entry ought to have been as perhaps the most accessible summation of how Vorticism was meant to work available), and he wasn’t a paid up (or more accurately homage giving) member of the group but he was clearly very aware of it and knew its leading lights.   Like Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound he was a transplanted North American who had come to Europe to pick up on modern art (in his case after a very disrupted childhood and an artistic career which started as a theatrical scenery set painter) and chose to stay. He seems to have had the sense to avoid the more personality cult aspects of Vorticism, which to an even greater extent than Futurism was very much the emanation of one oversized ego- Percy Wyndham Lewis was arguably an even bigger egomaniac than FT Marinetti and the schism between the movement owed far more to the inability of either man to accept an equal than any very profound differences of artistic approach or style.

In fact, he found his niche as a creator of advertising posters.   His earliest work was for the London Underground, whose legendary head Frank Pick was a long term source of commissions throughout his time in Britain.   It’s intriguing that he started doing work for the Underground in 1915, with the First World War in full swing- intriguing both because of his nationality (it’s easy to imagine a quasi-public body being criticised for giving an American a foot in the door while his British contemporaries were off at the front) and because there clearly was little of the “is your journey really necessary?” attitude of the Second World War in publicity campaigns aimed at persuading Londoners to go for days out in the suburban countryside.   After the War, Kauffer seems to have had no trouble finding commissions.   In addition to his work for London Underground/London Transport he worked with a variety of companies and institutions ranging from department stores to the Natural History Museum.   Perhaps predictably his commercial commissions came from companies in “modernist” lines of business- he had a long term business relationship with the Shell oil company, for instance.  He became something of a guru on the theory and practice of advertising.   He was also a noted figure on the London cultural scene, doing book illustrations for writers like Arnold Bennett and TS Eliot (yet another American transplant- they were often mistaken for brothers, it seems) and theatre designs.  

Looking at his work in the Estorick show, the most striking feature was the sheer variety of styles he used.   The early Underground posters are fairly “conventional” images of recognisable places-albeit in brighter colours and with cleaner and slightly more simplified lines than anywhere could ever be in messy real life.   Intriguingly he was inclined to use “vortexey” images when selling the idea that the Underground was the best way to get to the January sales- Kauffer seems to have enjoyed windy wintry weather, at least from an artistic point of view.   Various forms of Cubism and Abstraction and neo-Classicism followed.  His posters for Shell eventually embraced highly abstract forms alongside slogans which stated that a given trade “prefers Shell   You can be sure of Shell!”.   The sense of surrealism comes from the trades selected; while one could jut about see that an explorer might be concerned about oil quality, it’s less obvious why this was deemed crucial by magicians or musicians- or actors….

The overall impression is of a man who was very well aware of what was going on in the “high art” world of his time and could adapt developments to advertising purposes in convincing ways.  The show’s curation tried very hard to argue that there was an underlying consistency (and thereby acquit him of the charge of being a kind of artistic chameleon with no style of his own) though I didn’t find that entirely persuasive.   It is intriguing that when creating art for himself and not working on other people’s commissions he adopted a style very like his early Underground posters, in a kind of slightly modernist English ruralist mode- perhaps at heart Kauffer was rather less of a modernist than his work for others suggested (the picture below was apparently such a piece, though it usually gets tagged as an Underground poster on web sites) 

That said, his advertising work, whatever its style, never feels like pastiche or play acting.   Perhaps we just have to accept that Kauffer was an artist with an ability to work in multiple styles as required.  The exhibition didn’t get into the issue of who decided what style he should work in for each commission (I’m pretty sure Frank Pick would have had very clear ideas about how he wanted London Underground portrayed in its posters, for instance)- or indeed whether Shell’s consciously “arty” advertising actually sold more oil and petrol than its competitors managed.   It did however make the entirely valid point that a Kauffer poster would have been seen by tens if not hundreds of thousands more people than would ever have come across the works of a Wyndham Lewis and that Kauffer’s work was probably the way that the mass of the inter-war British public outside metropolitan cultural elite circles first came across developments in modern art.    This role of culturla mediation isn't one to be sneezed (or sneered) at.

There is a kind of dying fall about Kauffer’s later years.   In 1940 he went back to America (a country he hadn’t seen in nearly thirty years).  The impression given by the show was that this was a big mistake and that he ended up rather isolated and lonely, unable to re-create the web of connections in different fields (art, advertising, literature and so on) which had made life in London congenial to him.  On the other hand, though obviously he was a smaller fish in a much bigger pool and one wonders how far his British reputation cut much ice in American circles, he did clearly get work there (particularly in the post-war period for the airline business- if you Google his name and look at the pictures on offer a lot come from this period).  Although he lived on to 1954, he never came back across the Atlantic. 

It’s not clear exactly what was going on here.  It might be something crassly simple, like that the collection which had lent materials for the show was very light on his American period and the curator felt obliged to skip over it in consequence.  This decision did however leave the impression- however unfairly- that there was an issue which was being evaded.    The catalogue was curiously oblique about his decision to leave London in 1940.   The “official” line was that he felt commissions would dry up in time of war.   This doesn’t hold water; if commercial advertising was well down, the Government in its various arms took up a lot of the slack.  Kauffer himself had dabbled in this field in the immediate pre-war period doing posters for the recruitment of Air Raid Wardens.   Perhaps he was concerned that, as an American citizen, he might have issues over rationing and the like.    Perhaps he was a bit worried about some of his associations.   To the extent that one can guess Kauffer’s politics, they seem to have lain to the left- the Vorticist birds up top were used by the “Daily Herald”, which served as a quasi-official newspaper  for the Labour Party , and he did some theatre work for left-aligned and pacifist groups.   On the other hand, his old Vorticist friend Wyndham Lewis had initially been a warm admirer of Hitler before becoming disillusioned with him while Ezra Pound’s manic anti-Semitism would see him broadcasting propaganda on behalf of Mussolini’s Italy.  In 1939, after the Ribbentrop/Molotov Pact, the line between left pacificism and right appeasement became very blurry (far more blurry than adherents to the former liked admitting after the Operation Barbarossa made bellicose hyper-patriotism de rigeur on the fellow travelling left).   It’s possible Kauffer got lost in those troubled waters, fled to a still-isolationist USA (like WH Auden) and (unlike Auden) didn’t feel he could return.   Or perhaps he was just afraid- he had after all fled France in 1914 to avoid one war.   Or perhaps I’m just over-interpreting….

I hope everybody who reads this has a wonderful 2012- and had a great Christmas as well.   I’m not going to say much about mine, except that it was very difficult due to my mother’s declining health and the worries that brings.