Thursday, November 10, 2022 – THE ART OF TRAVEL POSTERS IS SOMETHING WE RARELY SEE THESE DAYS

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FROM THE ARCHIVES

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 10,  2022


ISSUE # 830

Rare & Important Travel Posters

FROM
SWANN AUCTION GALLERIES

Raphael, son of the French painter Theodore Roussel, designed posters for the British steamship lines P&O and RSMP promoting travel to such foreign destinations as Australia and Sudan. He also designed dioramas for the British Empire Exhibition in 1926. “Another avenue for poster artists was the desire, on behalf of both the Commonwealth of Australia and the shipping lines, to lure immigrants to Australia. [Roussel’s poster] is a classic image with a lightly tanned farmer beckoning Britons to a land bathed in sunshine” (Trading Places p. 4). Trading Places p. 5.

Brondy was one of several classically trained painters who designed travel posters during the 1930s. “He produced a number of splendid posters for Meknes and was head of the city’s tourist office in the 1930s” (Orientalist p. 73). Moulay-Idriss is a holy city in northern Morocco. Orientalist p. 72.

In 1900, an electric funicular railway operated by the Societa Sicula Tramways Omnibus was opened. It connected Palermo to Monreale, able to climb the 184 meters between the Piazza Bologni in Palermo and the terminus in Rocca di Monreale. It ran until 1946. Visible here is the stunning elevated view in Monreale, the Benedictine Cloisters connected to the Monreale cathedral and a vista of the port of Palermo with the imposing Mount Pellegrino behind it.

L’Étoile du Nord was an absolute revolution in advertising when it first appeared in 1927. Although advertising a Pullman train, it was startlingly new to have a travel poster that depicted no landscape, no destination, and no train. The pure and powerful image is a tribute to the dramatic use of perspective, with the train represented metaphorically by the star dancing on the horizon where many rails converge in the distance. To keep the image as clean and unobstructed as possible, Cassandre corrals the typography at the very bottom of the composition and then organizes it in a neat and structured frame around the border. Here, he also develops one of his signature design elements: viewing an object from a low angle to make it seem larger than life and more impressive, a technique he perfected in his 1935 poster for the Normandie. Through his association with Maurice Moyrand, who was the agent for the printer L. Danel, (and with whom he would form the Alliance Graphique in 1930), Cassandre was commissioned to create two posters for the Chemins de fer du Nord in 1927.

A very early ocean liner poster for the Red Star Line, featuring the Westernland. Built in 1883, the ship was the company’s first with a steel hull, first with two funnels and first with three different classes of passenger accommodation. From 1883-1901, she sailed the route between Antwerp and Philadelphia, seen here sailing into New York, past the Statue of Liberty (officially opened in October 1886) and heading towards the Brooklyn Bridge (opened in May 1883). Passenger Ships 17.

An optimistic post-war image depicting North America as the proverbial “City in the Clouds.” Note the subtle depiction of the stars and stripes. Air France p. 72.

http://This, the Southern Pacific’s “first streamliner poster . . . emphasized the distinctive “armor yellow” color and automotive profile of the new City of San Francisco. The artists communicated modernity and speed by rendering the train in a seamless watercolor wash, removing all traces of rivets and vestibules” (Zega p. 111). Rare. We could find only one other copy at auction. Zega 140.

This poster reflects the novelty, energy and brightness of the many electrical and neon displays which were utilized throughout the Chicago World’s Fair. Born in Hungary, Katz was a prominent Jewish artist who worked extensively on WPA projects including murals, illustrations and stained glass. This is the rare small format. World of Tomorrow p. 14.

“A colorful bird’s-eye view of the Theme Center . . . [showing] fairgoers entering the Perisphere from the Trylon and leaving by the Helicline” (World of Tomorrow p. 195). This poster was published two years prior to the fair, when the plans for the Trylon and Perisphere were first released to the press. It was not part of the later poster design competition to promote the fair, won by Joseph Binder. Nembhard N. Culin was an architect who worked with Frost, Frost & Fenner, a firm that designed several pavilions for the fair. This “nighttime aerial view captures the fair’s dramatic, otherworldly nature, and [Culin’s] airbrushing creates an appropriate machine-like surface” (Resnick p, 56). This is the rare large format. World of Tomorrow p. 194, Resnick 26, Taschen p. 323.

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Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff

All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated

Sources

SWANN AUCTION GALLERIES

THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.

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