In a 1924 essay on the evolution of the modern poster, R. A. Stephens drew a functional distinction between ‘poster designing’ and ‘pure painting’. A painting, he argued,
can no more substitute a poster than a poster can substitute a painting. They use similar mediums and means, but the difference of their ultimate function is so great that the colour, as well as design, must be used differently, and consequently its conception itself is different. This makes poster-designing an entirely separate branch of art which possesses its own laws and purposes.76
75 The Editor, ‘Our Philosophy’, p. 1.
76 R. A. Stephens, ‘I. Origin and Evolution’, in The Art of the Poster: Its Origin, Evolution & Purpose, ed. by Edward McKnight Kauffer (London: Cecil Palmer, 1924), pp. 1-30 (p. 5).
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For Stephens, a painting cannot replace a poster, and vice versa, not because the latter is less valuable or interesting than the other, but because each form aims to fulfil different functions. Similarly, McKnight Kauffer saw the difference between painting and designing as functional, not essential or qualitative:
Undeniably, the art of the Poster is quite different from the art of painting pictures, and until this distinction is made apparent there is likely to be a continued compromise between the two arts. […] The Artist, as Poster Designer, must bear in mind that the aim of the Poster should be to present a summary of the set of facts to be advertised and to group and interpret them in such a manner that they will be quickly grasped by the spectator and remain impressed upon his memory.77
Here, McKnight Kauffer places an emphasis on function:78 a poster, unlike a painting, must communicate a specific ‘set of facts’ to the ‘spectator’. Whereas many of those writing in
Commercial Art sought to downplay differences between art and poster design, or at least to
emphasise their inherent compatibility, McKnight Kauffer and Stephens both emphasised differences between art and poster design – not because they saw poster design as
‘inartistic’ or worthless, but rather because they viewed it as a valuable discipline in its own right. McKnight Kauffer’s book can be read as a plea for recognition: a plea for posters to be judged not according to solely aesthetic criteria but rather by new criteria which
acknowledged the very different functions which posters had to perform. McKnight Kauffer and Stephens’s philosophy can thus be encapsulated in the phrase ‘separate but equal’. Poster painting is distinct from pure painting, but the relationship between the two is not the vertical one described by the high/low divide. Poster design is not inferior to painting; it is rather ‘an entirely separate branch of art which possesses its own laws and purposes’. The relationship between painting and designing is thus horizontal, not vertical. Each branch has its own language and characteristics, dictated largely by the functions which each work is expected to perform.
77 Edward McKnight Kauffer, ‘Introduction’, in The Art of the Poster, pp. ix-xi (p. ix).
78 It is important to distinguish here between the terms function, functional and Functionalism, especially with a capital F. Following Louis Sullivan’s coining of the phrase ‘form ever follows function’ in 1896, the phrase, albeit minus the qualifier, became a rallying cry for many modernists, especially architects such as Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier. McKnight Kauffer’s insistence on the importance of function may therefore align him more with the avant-garde than many of his designer colleagues. Yet the notion of functionalism was also important to those in the field of graphic design: a glance at the pages of Penrose Annual in the 1930s shows the number of articles dedicated to, or at least discussing, the subject. See, for instance, Frederick A. Horn, ‘After
Functionalism — Surréalism? [sic]’, Penrose Annual, 38, 1936, pp. 48-51; Herbert Read, ‘A Choice of Extremes’, Penrose Annual, 39, 1937, pp. 21-24; and Howard Wadman, ‘Mechanism or humanism? Current design in publicity printing’, Penrose Annual, 38, 1936, pp. 40-43. I return to the importance of function and functionalism in more detail in Chapter 4.
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Accordingly, this horizontal relationship has none of the qualitative connotations associated with a vertical divide. Yet a divide remained nonetheless: a divide that is problematic when one is attempting to show that art and commerce were not mutually exclusive. If we view ‘pure painting’ and ‘poster designing’ as representatives of art and commerce more broadly, an opposition remained: the relationship between painting and design (or art and commerce, or high and low) was characterised more by difference than by shared values. This relationship was not strictly mutually exclusive – McKnight Kauffer suggests that an Artist could also be a Poster Designer – but, according to the designer Horace Taylor, it was ‘extremely unlikely’ that ‘an artist who has been working for years at one aspect of painting will produce a successful [poster] design’. Taylor believed that the ‘most important qualities in designing posters’, namely a ‘sense of decoration, originality in design and a bold use of colour’, could well be absent from a ‘successful portrait or even landscape painter’.79
For Taylor, the differences between pure painting and poster design were so marked that the two disciplines were, in effect, mutually exclusive: practitioners could only work – or excel – in one field or the other. Writing a decade later, Frederick A. Horn made the memorable observation that the ‘commercial typographer should be a business man who stoops to art to gain his effects, rather than an artist who stoops to business to gain his bread’.80
For him, the division between art and commerce (or the artist and the typographer) was an essential, ontological one: the use of the verb ‘stoops’ suggests not only a sense of lowering oneself but also the action of reaching for something outside of oneself. In this formulation, business is something entirely separate and distinct from art. This division was not only pronounced but highly desirable: according to him, artists doing typography ‘result[ed] in the many beautiful but dumb settings that are seen every day’.81 Exactly what constituted a ‘dumb setting’ is uncertain, but Horn’s position is unequivocal: the artist had no place in the field of design.
Behind both Horn’s and Taylor’s rejection of artists in the field of design lies the assumption that artists are concerned only with the aesthetic. Horn, in particular, assumes that the artist has no common or business sense; while they might create ‘beautiful’ settings, they are unable to think beyond the aesthetic to more practical considerations. Horn’s assumption is the inverse of the modernist position: here, unusually, art is the one being
79 Horace Taylor, ‘The Poster Revival. I: Mr. E. McKnight Kauffer’, Studio, 79, 1920, pp. 140-147 (p. 143). 80 Horn, ‘After Functionalism’, p. 51.
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devalued, but the design critique of the art world is no different to the modernist critique of advertising: the other camp is always without sense, either artistic sensibility or business acumen. In Chapter 1, we observed how the Great Divide was characterised by a ‘them’ and ‘us’ mentality; this divide between artists and designers has the same tenor. There were exceptions to this binary thinking – McKnight Kauffer’s and Stephens’s functional
approaches, for instance – but the majority of writing from this period tends to assume that practitioners privileged either the aesthetic function or the publicity function. There are no overlaps between the two; we could think of Keep the Aspidistra Flying’s Gordon Comstock, for instance, who is forced to drop his epic poem London Pleasures into the drain when he takes up a job at the New Albion advertising agency, or New Grub Street’s Edwin Reardon, who sacrifices everything – financial security, his marriage, his child – to pursue his literary ambitions. In Chapter 2, we saw how Hoffman, Allen and Ulrich defined ‘little’ magazines as being ‘noncommercial by intent’: a ‘little magazine is a magazine designed to print artistic work which for reasons of commercial expediency is not acceptable to the money-minded periodicals or presses.’82
Hoffman, Allen and Ulrich’s overgeneralised equation of ‘little’ magazines with the ‘noncommercial’ has, and continues to be, repudiated (not least in the present study), but it is nonetheless a useful reminder of the rhetorical nature of the binary divide between the artistic and the commercial which persisted from 1890 to at least the 1950s. For many modernists living through the Battle of the Brows, an ‘artistic’ work which could also make money was ontologically impossible, if only in their rhetorical writings on literature and art. In the art world, Eric Gill drew a similarly absolute distinction between the artistic and the commercial, arguing that machine caused ‘the immediate destruction of the essence of the thing called art.’83
This destruction occurred because the origins of the machine ‘were neither humanitarian or artistic, but purely commercial.’84
As explored
above, Gill’s concern was, like Ruskin, less for the machine itself and more for its effect upon the maker: the machine was dangerous because it dehumanised workers, turning them and their bodies into mere cogs. Nevertheless, Gill draws an explicit distinction between commercialism and the demise of all other functions, whether ‘humanitarian or artistic’: in
Christianity and the Machine Age, he argues that ‘the spirit which has animated merchants and
industrialists and financiers from the beginning of the Machine Age, whether in big business
82 Frederick J. Hoffman, Charles Allen, Carolyn F. Ulrich, The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1946), p. 2.
83 Gill, ‘Art and a Changing Civilization’, p. 219. 84 Gill, ‘Art and a Changing Civilization’, p. 222.
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or small, is not the provision of social amenity or the relief of suffering, but the
aggrandizement of themselves.’85 Gill’s account, like Hoffman, Allen and Ulrich’s may be oversimplified, but that is precisely the point: their tirades against the commercial system are blunt instruments, created to make a point, not to reflect the complexities of the actual interplay between aesthetic (or humanitarian) and commercial functions in fields such as advertising and graphic design. In these examples, not only art and commerce but artistic and commercial functions are assumed to be antithetical and mutually exclusive.
Yet saying that a cultural object is not a work of art is not the same as saying that it is not artistic. I completely agree with The Lay Figure and Thorp above, who express their frustration at the ‘misuse’ of the term ‘art’: posters are not works of Art with a capital A. Posters and paintings are designed to do different things and should not be judged according to the same criteria. But just because a poster – or indeed any text – aims to make money does not also mean that it cannot also possess aesthetic value, or attempt to fulfil an
aesthetic function. There is a logical link between the aesthetic and art – as Mukařovský puts it, art is the ‘province of phenomena which are per se aesthetic’86
– but the aesthetic is not
only found in the work of art. To describe a painting’s only function as aesthetic, or a
poster’s only function as pecuniary,87
is an oversimplification. When outlining his theory of ‘aesthetic function’, Mukařovský insisted that ‘there are many gradations of the aesthetic function and it is rarely possible to determine the complete absence of even the weakest aesthetic residue’ (p. 4). ‘There are no objects or actions’, he wrote, ‘which, by virtue of their essence or organization would, regardless of time, place or the person evaluating them, possess an aesthetic function and others which, again by their very nature, would be necessarily immune to the aesthetic function’ (p. 2). The division of art and commerce cannot, then, be reduced to a simple distinction between the presence and the absence of the aesthetic function. According to his model, both apparently contradictory impulses could be present in any single text. Indeed, Mukařovský struggles to find any art form which does not display at least two competing functions. In architecture there is ‘competition
85 Gill, ‘Christianity and the Machine Age’, p. 235.
86 Jan Mukařovský, Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts, trans. by Mark E. Suino (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), p. 8. All further references are to this edition and are included parenthetically in the text.
87 I have used the term ‘pecuniary’ here in an attempt to emphasise the distinction between commerce as a category and the pecuniary or selling function. The linguistic and ontological difference between art and the aesthetic is perhaps easier to determine than commerce and the commercial; hence, for want of a better term, I have here opted for ‘pecuniary’ to denote anything relating to sales or the generation of money. Below, I follow Mukařovský in using ‘publicity’, but here ‘publicity’ appears a little too specific and not quite money- oriented enough.
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between aesthetic and practical functions’; in literature, the ‘competition is between the aesthetic and communicative functions’ (p. 9). Drama ‘oscillates between art and
propaganda’ and photography ‘alternates between self-orientation and communication’ (p. 10, 13). Even in painting and music one can ‘find cases in which the aesthetic function is only an accompanying function and not a dominant one’; specifically, he cites Constructivist architecture and Surrealism as contemporary movements which subordinate the aesthetic to the scientific or sociological (pp. 10-11, 19).
Such categorisations are highly idiosyncratic: they reveal more about Mukařovský’s particular temporal and geographic context – Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s – than they do about the ‘nature’ of these particular types of art. But his primary point, that the ‘reign of the aesthetic function is not absolute in any type of art’ (p. 10), still stands. There will always be more than one function present in a work; moreover, these functions are themselves subject to constant change. The ‘aesthetic function manifests itself only under certain conditions, i.e. a certain social context’ (p. 3). Here we begin to see the relationship
between the aesthetic norm as outlined in Chapter 2 and the aesthetic function: whether a work performs an aesthetic function depends largely on how it interacts with the prevailing aesthetic norm. Consequently, whether or not a work displays a (dominant) aesthetic function depends largely on the context in which it is viewed. As Mukařovský writes, the ‘aesthetic is, in itself, neither a real property of an object nor is it explicitly connected to some of its properties’ (p. 18). Even a work designed to perform an aesthetic function may not be viewed as a work of art if conceptions of art change; conversely, works with a subordinate aesthetic function may later be viewed as works of art as tastes change or their other functions diminish. This, incidentally, is the case for travel posters: as their
communicative and publicity functions have waned, their aesthetic function has blossomed, to the extent that they are regularly displayed in museums and galleries and hung in private homes.88
Accordingly, when ‘separating the aesthetic from the extra-aesthetic’, Mukařovský warns, we ‘must always bear in mind that we are not dealing with precisely defined and
88 That is not to say, however, that posters have only recently begun to be displayed in the museum or at home. This practice was widespread even in the early 1920s. In his rebuff to S. T. James’s article ‘The Art of the Railway Poster’ discussed below, Norman Wilkinson wrote that his poster for the ‘L. & N.W. Railway’ sold in excess of 3,000 copies. [Norman Wilkinson, ‘The Art of the Railway Poster: A Reply’, Commercial Art, 4.1, November 1924, pp. 1-2 (pp. 1-2). In her essay on transport posters, Teri Edelstein describes how the Underground, LMS and LNER all had shops in which they sold their posters. See Teri Edelstein, ‘The Art of Posters: Strategies and Debates’, in Art for All: British Posters for Transport, ed. by Teri Edelstein (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 17-42 (p. 22).
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mutually exclusive areas. Both are in a constant, mutual contact which can be described as a dialectical antinomy’ (p. 5). This statement seems to perfectly describe the relationship between art and commerce. Firstly, it acknowledges, as noted above, that the aesthetic and extra-aesthetic are not fixed categories but are rather fluid and open to influence and change. Secondly, and most importantly, the two categories are not mutually exclusive but rather in a state of ‘mutual contact’. That is not to say that the relationship is without
conflict: art and commerce exist in a ‘dialectical antinomy’ in which both categories compete for supremacy. For Mukařovský, there is a division between art and commerce, but this division is determined less by the absence or presence of the aesthetic function and more by the ‘relative importance of the aesthetic function compared to other functions’ (p. 5). In art,
the aesthetic function is the dominant function, while outside of art, even if it is present, it occupies a secondary position. […] The predominance of some extra-aesthetic function is a rather frequent phenomenon in the history of art; but the dominance of the aesthetic function is always felt as fundamental, “unmarked,” while dominance by another function is considered “marked,” i.e. as a violation of the normal condition (p. 7).
Mukařovský’s use of the terms unmarked/marked recalls our discussion of high and low as unmarked and marked irreversible binomials in Chapter 1. Here, the terms apply not only to high and low (or art and commerce) as cultural categories but also to the functions within them. There is an incontrovertible, logical link between the aesthetic function and art: it is defined by the presence of the aesthetic function, to the extent that its absence (or subordination) appears exceptional. The opposite is the case for commerce: any text which displays a dominant aesthetic function would become marked, an exception to the norm.
How, then, does Mukařovský’s conception of aesthetic function aid our understanding of the relationship between art and commerce? True, he states that the relationship
between the aesthetic and extra-aesthetic is not mutually exclusive, but the relationship is still hierarchical and oppositional. There is a discernible divide between art and non-art, even if this divide is transitory and malleable. From the outside, there does not seem to be a big difference between defining art as the presence of aesthetic function or as the dominance of aesthetic function. Yet while the difference is not big, it is crucial. The acknowledgment that different or even opposing functions can be present within a single text, even if one of these functions is more dominant than the other, explodes the structural myth that texts produced for the mass commercial market could not be artistic (or rather, more accurately, that such texts did not possess an aesthetic function). In this formulation, art does not
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possess sole custody of the aesthetic. Art must necessarily possess some aesthetic function, but that does not preclude the existence of the aesthetic in apparently extra-aesthetic texts.
It is this awareness of both sameness and difference between two halves of a
dichotomy that is particularly useful when studying ‘borderline’ texts such as mass-market travel posters.89
The aim is not to efface difference or to elevate posters and classify them as works of art. Rather, the aim is to do the opposite: to reaffirm their status as posters, and to consider what it is that makes them different. What functions do travel posters possess,