Flight^277
E. McKnight KaufferEdward (“Ted”) McKnight
Kauffer ( 1890 – 1954 ) was one
of Europe’s most prolific
and influential advertising
artists of the 1920 s and
1930 s, certainly as innovative
as his more celebrated
French counterpart, A. M.
Cassandre. In England,
where he lived and worked,
Kauffer brought advertising
art into the twentieth
century, yet in America only
a few knew of the Montana-born expatriate’s achievements.
Kauffer was sent abroad at the behest of Professor Joseph
McKnight (the young man’s mentor from whom he took his middle name).
If he had not gone he might never have become a poster artist and graphic
designer, and if he had not been introduced to Ludwig Hohlwein’s poster
masterpieces in Munich and attended the Academie Moderne in Paris, his
life would have taken a much different turn. Before crossing the Atlantic he
stopped in Chicago where he was profoundly influenced by the Armory
Show, the landmark exhibit that gave Americans their first exposure to the
burgeoning European avant-garde—it had opened first in New York and
then Chicago to critical, if not dismissive, reviews. Kauffer didn’t know
what to make of the unprecedented Picassos, Cézannes, Duchamps, and
Matisses on view: “I didn’t understand it. But I certainly couldn’t dismiss
it,” he wrote some years later. Eventually, these paintings would inspire his
own benchmark work entitled Flight( 1916 ), which in 1919 was adapted as a
poster for the London Daily Heraldwith the title Soaring to Success! The
Early Bird,the first cubist advertising poster published in England.
The art capitals of Europe beckoned, but the clouds of war
loomed, and in 1914 Kauffer became a refugee with just enough money in
his pocket to return to America. Instead of sailing straight home, however,
he discovered England, and with it a tranquillity he had not experienced in
America. “I felt at home for the first time,” he wrote. Kauffer volunteered
to serve in the British army but was ineligible because he was an American