CHRISTIE’S
ALL IMAGES CHRISTIE’SAbove left: ‘Every
Girl Pulling For
Victory’, sold for
£1,188. Clockwise
from above, top:
£12,500 for a
1928 US Lines
poster by AM
Cassandre;
German Lloyd
line sold for
£825; Bridlington
(£625); regatta
poster, £7,500CLASSIC BOAT OCTOBER 2016 39Saleroom
DAVE SELBY
A pioneering poster collector who
recognised the artistic merit of what
most others saw as throwaway
billboard bunting found an
unwelcome admirer when the Nazis
knocked on his door in Berlin in
1938 and seized his collection.
Although Dr Hans Sachs, a Jewish
dentist, escaped to America where
the sale of a roll of Toulouse-Lautrec
posters smuggled in by a friend
helped feed his family, he never saw
his looted posters again. For the rest
of his life he believed they had been
destroyed. But in 2005 descendants
discovered the stolen lithographs in
the vaults of Berlin’s Deutsches
Historisches Museum and after a
seven-year court battle a landmark
Nazi loot comes
to light in London
ruling returned them to the family.
What emerged at a Christie’s sale in
London was a unique collection
of the golden age of commercial art
amassed by a visionary connoisseur
who, before the war, was
instrumental in bringing graphic art
to wider recognition by establishing
the first poster collecting society and
founding an international magazine.
At Christie’s all 100 of the works,
many of which were extremely rare
and some possibly unique, sold to
realise a total of £338,000. Top seller
was an 1899 German Art Nouveau
that made £30,000. The collection
also featured ocean liner adverts
from an age when crossing the
Atlantic with pace and elegance was
a matter of national pride. Top price
of these was £12,500 for a 1928US Lines poster by AM Cassandre,
the acknowledged master of liner
graphic art. By contrast a 1932 image
for the German Lloyd line seemed a
relative bargain at £825.
How Dr Sachs came across a
poster for Bridlington (£625) we’ll
never know, but the 1920s railway
ad must surely have tempted pasty
northerners to frolic on the sun-
drenched ‘costa del Yorkshire’.
One image that stood out was
‘Every Girl Pulling For Victory’, a
World War I propaganda poster that
puts Swallows & Amazons to a
wartime backdrop – stirring stuff,
and it sold for £1,188.
Just a couple of years before that
image was published, the world had
time for leisure, as expressed by a
vibrant German regatta lithograph
that illustrates how cutting edge
poster design was. The 1912 image
made £7,500.
Hans Sachs never saw his posters
again, but for us his visionary
collection provides a poignant
snapshot of sunny days gone by, and
the darker times that followed.