citizen. Instead he did a variety of menial jobs while waiting for painting
commissions to come along.
At this time Kauffer met John Hassall, a leading English poster
artist, which led to a meeting with Frank Pick, the publicity manager for
the London Underground Electric Railways. Pick was responsible for the
most progressive advertising campaign and corporate identity program in
England. He had the vision to both unify the Underground’s graphic
system and diversify its publicity, thus making it more efficient and
appealing. He commissioned Edward Johnston to design an exclusive sans-
serif typeface and logo for the Underground (both are still in use) as well as
England’s finest artists to design posters for its stations. Kauffer’s first
Underground posters, produced in late 1915 , were landscapes rendered in
gouache or poster paints advertising picturesque locales. These and his 140
subsequent Underground posters, spanning twenty-five years, evidence
Kauffer’s evolution towards modernism.
During his first year in England, Kauffer became a member of the
London Group, a society of adventuresome painters who embraced cubism.
He refused to abandon painting for his new advertising career, but rather
questioned the growing schism between fine and applied art. “He could see
no reason for conflict between good art work and good salesmanship,”
wrote Frank Zachary in Portfolio# 1. In fact, he was dismayed by the
inferior quality of English advertising compared to work being done on the
continent. During the 1890 s there had been a period in which the “art
poster” flourished in England, exemplified by Pride and Nicholson (known
as the Beggarstaff Brothers), yet this flicker of progressivism was soon
snuffed out by nostalgic fashions. Although Kauffer’s earliest posters were
picturesque, they were hardly sentimental; he intuitively found the right
balance between narrative and symbolic depiction in prefigurations of his
later abstract images.
It is likely that Kauffer saw the first exhibit of the vorticists in
1916 , and that this avant-garde movement of British futurists, who
worshipped the machine, had an impact on his own work.Flight,in its
minimalism and dynamism, echoed the vorticist’s obsession with speed as a
metaphor for the machine age. This is “Kauffer’s major work,” wrote
Kauffer biographer Hayward Haworth-Booth, “[and] also the finest
invention of his entire career.” The image departed just enough from direct
quotation of cubist form as to become the basis for a personal visual
language. “He had a child-like wonder and admiration for nature,”
continued Haworth-Booth referring to how Kauffer based this image not
on imagination, but his first-hand observation of birds in flight. However,
Flightmight not have become an icon of modern graphic design if Kauffer
tuis.
(Tuis.)
#1