Page 91 - Studio International - April 1968

\,\'ill E Bradley, poster Louis J l{head, Charles Ricketts
poster The TForld al . ·lurtion

Wilbur
Macey Stowe,
poster

amount of beauty and interest to a piece of goods which bicycle poster ever created, but that doesn't make
would, if produced in the ordinary way, have no beauty it a good poster. To know that, we would have to kno\\'
or artistic interest'. how Overman's sales figures were affected by it. As
Yes, but how much beauty, how much interest? it is, no matter how many aesthetes may have pinned
In principle, no doubt, purpose and beauty walk hand in it to their walls, we can only guess at hovv many were
V inspired to actually visit their neighbourhood cycle
ha But in practice there \- as-there still is-a
tug-of-war bet\veen the two. The sheep-and-goats stores?
category of'fine' and 'applied' may have vanished-but Wilbur Stowe seems to have been if anything even
only to reappear in the form which plagues us today: less concerned with results. Here, sense has been almost
the balancing of f unction with beauty in the design of wholly sacrificed on the altar of design. Did he give
the individual object. a moment's thought to the message he was
commissioned to communicate? He may have created
The art and rraft of the poster a thing of beauty: but as a poster it is a flop.
The dilemma is posed at its crudest by the poster­ In Louis Rhead's perfume advertisement, on the other
the art form in which, significantly, the art nouveau hand, style is perfectly wedded to purpose. But read
artist expressec! himself most el His reaction what The Studio says of his posters: 'They have tried
r to embody just as much of the spirit of pre-Raphaelite
against academic art drove him away f om the gallery art as the hoarding can bear.' What a give-away!
r
wall, away f om canvas altogether, to the hoarding The criterion was not how much perfume the poster
or the printed page. persuaded the public to buy, but how much art the
Today we arc apt to judge those nineties' posters solely designer was able to get a,vay with-much as one
as objects of art. It is easy to forget that the poster suspects, in our own day, that if there's any good design
is, by definition, essentially applied art. Only in a poster or press advertisement, it's what the
secondarily can it play the role of the poor art designer has been able to smuggle into his work when
its primary job is to persuade somebody to do
some If it fails in this, it fails as a poster. his client was looking the other way.
But don't let's blame ourselves too severely for losing
sight of this fact the artists themselves seem to have The book beautiful
forgotten it in the first place, and their critics neglected It's the same with book design. Here again the
to remind them. Take Will Bradley's bicycle poster standards applied are aesthetic rather than functional.
as an example. This is arguably the most beautiful When The Studio reviewed Charles Ricketts's designs
215