“ Pennell, in his little book to which we have already referred, has claimed all notable productions in decorative art through the ages as posters, and would bid us look on the frieze of the Parthenon as an excellent piece of Greek poster art. It is a wild application, not to be taken too seriously. Modern art is not necessarily a development from the art of other ages; and even where the form is comparable, the purpose is widely divergent. For a vital modern art is for ever the expression of a new spirit, the revelation of a fresh aspect of life, another facet of a many-sided jewel ”

“ Activity in poster production was not confined to Great Britain. France, as in all matters where [Pg 2] Art is concerned, triumphantly took the field, and soon had hoardings covered with posters, many of which will take a lasting place in the history of Art. Germany and Austria, from the very outset of the War, seized upon the poster as the most powerful and speedy method of swaying popular opinion. Even before the War, we had much to learn from the concentrated power, the force of design, the economy of means, which made German posters sing out from a wall like a defiant blare of trumpets. ”

“ They may not have the craftsmanship to make the poster all that—viewed as a complete artistic production—it should be; but there is “punch” in their sure and speedy way of conveying a message, in the pithiness and wit of their legends. Above all, they possess a great humanity—that sense of human suffering to be relieved, human wrongs to be righted, which kept the United States a beneficent neutral so long, and at length called her into the War. ”

“ V.—UNITED STATES OF AMERICA It is a commonplace to say that America is the true home of the advertisement agent; but in considering the history of poster art in the United States, one is surprised to find that so small a proportion of work done in the past shows any striking originality or real grip. In a country whose special capacity has seemed to consist in beating a very large drum repeatedly, often without much provocation, it was to be expected that the very bones and sinews of a poster should be understood, and that results of the highest order should have been obtained. ”

“ The best poster artists—and here again we may instance Steinlen, Brangwyn and Pryse—are generally craftsmen of the highest order, having a very true sense of the historical development, and a perfect acquaintance with the mechanism and technique, of their art. This knowledge counts enormously, and is visible in the whole structure of the work produced. The bureaucrat who sits in his office conducting a hurried campaign on the telephone, and patronising art when at length it proves necessary to the community, fails on account of his ignorance of the real roots of the matter. ”

“ While the British poster must see everything in the round, must try to reproduce all that is intensely obvious in the varied texture and material pageantry and inexhaustible colouring of life, Germany is rightly content to be deliberately abstract, to seek the common factors from what is large and general, and to endeavour to find symbols to express ideas. ”

“ A strong, impulsive design does not depend entirely upon size for the force of its appeal, nor does it change in character from being reduced; but a poster badly designed, though passable on a large scale, may be an unintelligible jumble in a small illustration. In many cases a design is knit together by its reduction, and so viewed as a whole more compactly. ”

“ In connection with the War Savings Campaign the Ministry had the excellent idea of using as a poster Whistler’s famous masterpiece—his “Portrait of the Artist’s Mother,” now in the Louvre. Nothing could have been better: but then they got someone to write across the beautiful background, in paltry lettering, “Old age must come.” There could be no better example of our British idea of enforcing a moral. It was an act of vandalism—impossible in France—almost as cruel as the firing of a shell into Rheims Cathedral. ”

“ They seldom realise that poster [Pg 8] art and pictorial art have essentially different aims. If a British firm wishes to advertise beer, it insists on an artist producing a picture of a publican’s brawny and veined arm holding out a pot of beer during closed hours to a policeman; or a Gargantuan bottle towering above the houses and dense crowds of a market-place; or a fox-terrier climbing on to a table and wondering what it is “master likes so much”—all in posters produced at great expense with an enormous range of colour. ”

“ While we have had individual poster artists, such as Nicholson, Pryde, and Beardsley, whose work has touched perhaps a higher level than has ever been reached on the Continent, our general conception of what is good and valuable in a poster has been almost entirely wrong. The advertising agent and the business firm rarely get away from the popular idea that a poster must be a picture, and that the purpose of every picture is to “point a moral and adorn a tale.” ”

“ But anxious as one is to consider in a favourable light whatever artistic creation emanates from the land which inspired and nourished Western art in its infancy, it is impossible to regard their war posters with anything more than an indulgent eye. ”

“ The famous sentence from the Academy discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds, which is inscribed as a motto over the entrance to the Victoria and Albert Museum—a sentence much quoted during the Victorian era, but in these latter days perhaps little regarded—may be applied to the poster equally as to more durable and delightful works: “The excellence of every art must consist in the complete accomplishment of its purpose.” If the poster which accomplishes its purpose is indeed the most “artistic,” then Germany excels in the artistic poster. ”

“ But while this has its admirable side in the mechanical things of life, imitation in the processes of art proves altogether a failure. The old Japanese spirit has departed. One is tempted to think that the Japanese understanding of their native art is on the wane. For their posters very little can be said. The curse of European influence is apparent in the modern cheap lithographs, crude in colour and design, which they have produced. We have not been fortunate in finding one that would worthily serve the purpose of an illustration. ”

“ When we pass to the pictorial posters of Germany and Austro-Hungary, we find that the Central Empires, like ourselves and our Allies, found the necessity for a constant stream of posters appealing to their peoples for aid in men and money for the prosecution of the War and for stimulating love of country as expressed in the resolution and determination to hold out to the last. ”

“ Even about the best of our war posters one feels that they are too often enlarged drawings, excellent as lithographs to preserve in a collector’s portfolio, but ineffective when valued in relation to [Pg 9] the essential services that a poster is required to render. We must regretfully admit that when it comes to choosing illustrations for a volume such as this on their merits as posters, not as pictures, it is difficult not to give a totally disproportionate space to posters made in Germany. ”

“ The Japanese have proved themselves a wonderfully adaptable race: they have utilised our modern engines of war with an amazing application, and avoided errors, not always obvious, into which other nations have fallen. ”

“ For its maximum influence the poster must be designed by a skilled lithographic artist (if lithography should be the medium chosen) , executed upon stone by him, and printed either by him or under his direct supervision. It is the failure to appreciate this which has marred so many of the United States posters, and made them of little importance. Anyone who could draw has been considered suitable for the task of designing; anyone who could print has been considered equal to printing their posters. ”

“ Roll, the more complete artist, versatile and subtle in his work, master of many styles, proved that he, too, could design an appealing poster, as the fifth plate in this book testifies.
The poster artists of France were not to the same degree overshadowed by one great executant as were those of England by Brangwyn. But for all that, a [Pg 20] figure stands out before the rest, both by his power as a craftsman and the weight and strength of his individual characteristics. ”

“ The writing of an elaborate treatise on a single war poster may seem at first sight to be giving altogether disproportionate importance even to an admirable example of this type of art, and it is in danger of placing the exponent under the accusation of appreciating his own labours at an excessively high value. ”

“ The United States—we say it with all respect—has a [Pg 30] keener eye for advertisement than any other nation. Let the American loose on a “whirlwind campaign”—whether in aid of church funds, an enormous commercial enterprise, or a world war—and he is in his element. All the possibilities of sign-boards, hoardings, flashlights, and every novelty and contrivance for catching the public eye, have been carried to their farthest limit, either of invention or of human endurance, on the other side of the Atlantic ”

“ Europe, a sad and worn woman, stands with a youth before an idol which bears the name “Anglia”; below is the inscription, in Russian characters: “How much longer shall we sacrifice our sons to this accursed idol?” It is at best a poor thing, and, if German, most carefully designed to bear the impress of a Russian product.
[Pg 42] A series of six eminently successful posters was issued as an appeal to the Czecho-Slovak people in the United States. For consistent merit, alike in design, colour, and general conception, they take a high place among the posters of the War. ”

“ It may be brutal, it may be ugly, it may even shock and repel; but there is always in the best examples, instinct in their very conception, a definite purpose which gains full expression, because the artist has been trained to limit himself to what he has to say, and to say that with all his might. ”

“ For obvious reasons only a limited number of the posters could be reproduced in colour, the main portion of the plates in the book being in black and white. But since the primary element counting for success in the poster is design, it follows that excellent colouring will not save a badly-designed poster from failure, however much it enhances the power [Pg 6] of one already successful. Indeed, we may go further and claim that ineffective or quite bad colouring often fails to mar entirely the success of a good design. ”

“ The passer in the street may be unaware of the causes of his admiration or sympathy, but the effects upon him have been proved times without number.
Necessarily, however, there are many exceptions to this general failure in craftsmanship, cases in which artists triumphed over all mechanical obstacles, and instances of great lithographic firms, with contracts from the Government, who were skilled in poster production and able to act in genuine consonance with the designers. ”

“ Among those who have done the most distinguished work the artists named above have contributed a large proportion. Jules Abel Faivre, whose “Sauvons-les” has already been referred to at length, has perhaps earned more individual fame by his designs than any other French poster artist during the War. Several of his lithographs approach greatness, and two—the “Sauvons-les” and “On les aura!” ”

“ The illustrations to this volume include work by several of the German poster artists, which, symptomatic of the whole, will serve to illustrate the foregoing remarks. Mention has already been made in the section dealing with British posters of the strong, rugged simplicity of Louis Oppenheim’s [Pg 26] “Hindenburg.” The artist has in this most successfully imposed upon the spectator, not the bolstered-up individual of real life, but the strong, massive calm we seek for in the ideal leader, the man in whom we can place entire confidence. ”