EDWARD MCKNIGHT KAUFFER
1890-1954
Artista, grafico e illustratore,
Kauffer fu un americano che si stabilì in Inghilterra. Nel 1915 ricevette
l'incarico di realizzare un poster per I' Underground Railway Co. e nel
1921 egli abbandonò la pittura per dedicarsi all'arte commerciale. Iniziò
presto a lavorare per celebri aziende quali il LondonTransport Board,
la Shell, la BR
la Great Western
Railway, il General
Post Office e la Gas, Light & Coal Co. Membro del British Institute
of Industrial
Art e del Council for Art and Industry, Kauffer si sposò con la celebre
designer di tappeti Manon Dorn, un'altra americana trasferitasi in Inghilterra
nei primi anni Venti. I due coniugi esposero insieme in occasione di una
mostra svoltasi nel 1929.
(Hillier
Bevis, Escritt Stephen, Art Deco, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Milano
1997)
The
Essential Modernist by Steven Heller
Edward
("Ted") McKnight Kauffer (1890-1954) was one of Europe's most prolific
and influential advertising poster artists during the Twenties and Thirties, and
as innovative as his more celebrated French counterpart, A.M. Cassandre. In
England, where he lived and worked, Kauffer was hailed for elevating advertising
to high art, yet in America only the design cognoscenti knew of his achievements
when the Montana-born expatriate returned to New York City from London in
1940—after 25 years there. Kauffer had attempted repatriation once before in
1921, when he was invited to show his early posters at New York's Art and
Decoration Gallery; at that time he also attempted to find work with American
advertising agencies. Except for a few commissions to design theatre posters,
"America was not ready for him," wrote Frank Zachary in Portfolio
#1 (1949). "So, feeling a 'great rebuff,' he returned to England, where
he continued to pile up honors."
That Kauffer was still unappreciated in New York after his second return was
perplexing because only three years earlier, in 1937, The Museum of Modern Art
in New York (under Alfred H. Barr's direction) gave him a prestigious one-man
show. In America, however, the essential Modern poster with its symbolic imagery
and sparse selling copy, which Kauffer helped pioneer, was acceptable on a
museum wall, but not on the street. At that time most advertising agents blindly
adhered to copy-heavy, romantic imagery keeping all but a few progressive
designers from breaking the bonds of mediocrity. After that first disappointment,
Kauffer returned to his adopted country where his work was considered a national
treasure. After the outbreak of war in 1940, he believed that living and working
in London was no longer a viable option. Kauffer was prohibited, as an alien,
from contributing to England's war effort; feeling he was a liability, he and
Marion Dorn left the country on the last passenger ship to the United States (leaving
most of their belongings behind). Kauffer lived in New York for 14 years, until
his death in 1954. Though he worked for various clients during that times, he
was never given the same recognition he enjoyed in England. With a few notable
exceptions, the honors came posthumously. Indeed, only after 38 years is he
finally the recipient of an AIGA award.
The reason that Kauffer's career lost steam in America was not entirely because
colleagues and clients rejected him. In fact, some designers did their best to
help establish his reputation here, and as a freelancer he acquired some
significant accounts. Despite his adamant refusal to renounce his American
citizenship, after spending almost half a lifetime in England he felt like an
alien n his native land. Kauffer was adrift in a fast-paced, competitive New
York where he never satisfactorily developed the intimate artist/client
relationships that, in England, allowed him to push the conventions of
advertising. Anger and frustration took their toll not only on his work, but on
his health. The American period of his career, though by no means
undistinguished, ended in despair.
Yet if at 22 Ted Kauffer had not been sent abroad at the behest of Professor
Joseph McKnight (who was Kauffer's mentor during his formative years and from
whom he took his middle name), he might never have become a poster artist and
graphic designer. If Kauffer had not set sail in 1913 for Germany and France,
where he was 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. Prior to leaving San Francisco, where he worked during the day
in a bookstore and at night studying art at the Mark Hopkins Institute, he had a
small exhibit of paintings in which he showed real promise as a painter. Before
crossing the Atlantic he stopped in Chicago where he enrolled at the Art
Institute for six months. But he became increasingly bored with the academic
trends in American art. While in Chicago, however, Kauffer was profoundly
influenced by a major cultural event: The Amory Show, the legendary exhibit
offering Americans their first exposure to the burgeoning European avant-garde.
"I didn't understand it. But I certainly couldn't dismiss it," he told
Frank Zachary. Some years later these same paintings would inspire his own
benchmark work, "Flight" (1916), which in 1919 was adapted as a poster
for the London Daily Herald with the title, "Soaring to Success! The
Early Bird," and was 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 tranquility he had not experienced in America. "I felt at home
for the first time," he told Zachary. Kauffer volunteered to serve in the
British army but was ineligible as an American citizen. Instead he performed a
variety of menial jobs while waiting for painting commissions to come along.
It was during this time that Kauffer met John Hassall, a well-known English
advertising poster artist who referred him to 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
commissioned Edward Johnston to design an exclusive sans serif typeface and logo
for the Underground (both are still in use), as well as hire a number of
England's best artists to design beautiful posters for its stations. Kauffer's
first Underground posters produced in late 1915 were landscapes rendered in
goache which advertised picturesque locales. These and his 140 (according to
Keith Murgatroyd's article, "McKnight Kauffer: The Artist in the World of
Commerce," in Print magazine) subsequent Underground posters,
spanning 25 years, are evidence of Kauffer's profound creative 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; rather, he questioned the growing
schism between fine and applied art. "He could see no reason for conflict
between good art work and good salesmanship," wrote Zachary. In fact, he
was dismayed by the inferior quality of English advertising compared to work
being done on the continent. During the 1890s there was a period in which the
"art poster" flourished in England, exemplified by the Beggarstaff
Brothers, yet this brief 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 stark prefigurations of his later abstract
images.
In the biography E. McKnight Kauffer: A Designer and His Public (Gordon
Fraser, London, 1979), author Mark Haworth-Booth says that is likely that
Kauffer saw the first exhibit of the Vorticists in 1916, and that this
avant-garde movement of English abstractionists who worshipped the machine as an
icon and war as a cleansing ritual had an impact on his own work. Through its
minimalism and dynamism "Flight" echoes the Vorticists' obsession with
speed as a metaphor for the Machine Age. This is "Kauffer's major
work," writes Haworth-Booth, "?[and] also the finest invention of his
entire career." In fact the image departed enough from a direct Cubist
influence to become the basis for a distinctly personal visual language. "He
had a child-like wonder and admiration for nature," continues Haworth-Booth,
referring to how Kauffer based this image not on imagination but on his
first-hand observation of birds in flight. However, "Flight" might not
have become an icon of modern graphic design if Kauffer had not submitted it, in
1919, to Colour magazine, which regularly featured a "Poster
Page" where outstanding unpublished designs were reproduced free of charge
to encourage businessmen to employ talented poster artists as a means of helping
England get back on a sound commercial footing after the war. "Flight"
was bought by Francis Meynell, a well-known English book publisher and printer,
who organized a poster campaign for the Labour Party newspaper, The Daily
Herald. Meynell believed that the soaring birds represented hope, and the
unprecedented design somehow suggested renewal after the bloody world war. The
poster was ubiquitous and soared its maker into the public eye. Kauffer soon
received commissions to design campaigns for major English wine, clothing,
publishing, automobile and petroleum companies.
Even with a promising advertising career, Kauffer continued to think of himself
as a painter. He was the secretary of the London Group, responsible for mounting
and publicizing exhibits, and was a founding member of the X Group, which
promoted the post-Vorticist avant-garde. He was loosely connected to the
Bloomsbury Group of English writers and artists, and exhibited work at Roger
Fry's Omega Workshop. He ran an avant-garde film society that introduced
experimental cinema to London audiences. He joined the Arts League of Service
(ALS), which was comprised of various fine and applied artists whose mission was
to create work that would offset the destruction of the war. His career as a
painter was finished, however, when in 1920, the X Group failed due to its own
inertia, and he quit the London Group, too. "Gradually I saw the futility
of trying to paint and do advertising at the same time," wrote Kauffer in
the catalog to his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Haworth-Booth reports
that Kauffer then disappeared underground and the train station tunnels became
his primary gallery.
Kauffer was a good painter, but his real genius was in advertising art (and for
advocating the virtues of Modern art to business). His urbanity and intelligence
opened many executive office doors, and he became friends with many of these
business leaders. "Personal contact with the men requiring advertising art
in the exploitation of their products is an absolute necessity in obtaining good
results," he wrote to a colleague. But it was Kauffer's mastery of
synthesis—wedding abstract, dynamic form to everyday products—that made him
invaluable in the promotion of commercial enterprise. His posters and
advertisements were not motivated by the common tactic of deceiving a customer
into believing false claims, nor by appealing to their base instinct; rather he
wanted to encourage people to simply be aware of a product or message by piquing
their aesthetic sensitivities. Kauffer's strategy was consistent with the Modern
ideal that art and industry were not mutually exclusive.
Kauffer often argued that non-representational and geometrical pattern designs
"can effect a sledge hammer glow if handled by a sensitive designer
possessing a knowledge of the action of color on the average man or woman."
Nevertheless, even Kauffer had to lead clients by the hand: "In most cases,
it has not been possible to give me full freedom," he wrote in the Museum
of Modern art catalog, "and my clients have gone step-by-step rather than
by leaps, but by this slow process we have reached a synthesis, and it is
because of this mutual understanding that I confidently expect England to
progress to international distinction, not because of myself but through the new
talent that is making way in many directions?" His own productivity is
evidence that certain business men appreciated the communicative power of
unconventional form, but even in such a receptive milieu there were hostile
critics who referred to Kauffer's abstract designs as "McKnightmares."
Despite these occasional barbs, critics realized that Kauffer made significant
trends in the applied arts, first in the application of Cubist form, and then
after 1923, when he realized that Vorticism no longer offered viable commercial
responsibilities and entered his so-called "Jazz style," in which he
created colorful, art moderne interpretations of traditional form. Kauffer also
successfully engaged in a number of different disciplines during the
mid-Twenties. He designed scenery and costumes for the theatre starting in 1922;
authored The Art of the Poster in 1924; designed office spaces beginning
in 1925; illustrated books for the Nonesuch Press in 1926 (and illustrated poems
by his good friend T.S. Eliot); and also began designing rugs, sometimes in
concert with Marion Dorn, around 1929. In 1927 he took a three-day-a-week job at
Crawford's, the largest advertising agency in England; that lasted two years and
marked the end of his Jazz style and the move toward Modernist photomontage,
influenced by German and Russian advertising of the time. He expanded on this
revolutionary vocabulary, and in his own work replaced diagonal with rectilinear
layouts, crushed his type into parallelograms, used positive/negative lettering
frequently, and most important, took up the airbrush to achieve the streamlined
effect that characterized his work of the Thirties. In addition to montages for
ads and posters, Kauffer was involved with the popular new medium of photomurals,
and he developed the conceit of the "space frame" to give an illusion
of multiple vantage points on a single picture plane.
In a review of one of his frequent exhibitions during the Thirties, Kauffer was
referred to as the "Picasso of Advertising Design." Critic Anthony
Blount wrote: "Mr. McKnight Kauffer is an artist who makes one resent the
division of the arts into major and minor." And in the introduction to the
1937 Museum of Modern Art exhibition catalog, Aldous Huxley praises Kauffer's
primary contribution to modern design: "Most advertising artists spend
their time elaborating symbols that stand for something different from the
commodity they are advertising. Soap and refrigerators, scent and automobiles,
stockings, holiday resorts, sanitary plumbing? are advertised by means of
representations of young females disporting themselves in opulent surroundings.
Sex and money—these would seem to be the two main interests of civilized human
beings? McKnight Kauffer prefers the more difficult task of advertising products
in terms of forms that are symbolic only of these particular products. Thus,
forms symbolic of mechanical power are used to advertise powerful machines;
forms symbolic of space, loneliness and distance to advertise a holiday resort
where prospects are wide and houses are few. ?In this matter McKnight Kauffer
reveals his affinity with all artists who have ever aimed at expressiveness
through simplification, distortion and transportation."
In Kauffer's hands the poster (or the book jacket, which for him was a
mini-poster) was designed to be interpreted rather than accepted at face value.
In this regard he continually struggled with the paradox of how to meet his
creative needs, his clients' commercial interests and his viewers' aesthetic
preferences, all in a limited period of time. In a speech before the Royal
Society of Arts in 1938 (quoted by Keith Murgatroyd in Print) Kauffer
candidly explained his methodology and resultant angst: "When I leave my
client's office, I am no longer considering what form my design or my scheme
will take, but the urgent fact that I only have so much time in which to produce
the finished article. I find this irritating, and am often overcome by a feeling
of hopelessness about the whole business. ?On my way home I think? will my
client understand what I propose to do? Will he understand I may not give him an
obvious, logical answer to his problem? Does he suppose I have magical powers,
or does he believe that I can solve his sales problem as simply as one might add
two and two together and make four? ?I have now reached my studio. I pick up a
book. I lay it down. I look out of the window? I stare at a blank wall, I move
about? I go to my desk and gaze at a blank piece of paper. I write on it the
names of the product. I then paint it in some kind of lettering. I make it
larger—smaller—slanting—heavy—light? I make drawings of the object—in
outline, with shadow and color, large and then small—within the dimensions I
have now set myself?"
Kauffer's friends agree that he was restless long before he returned to America,
which may account for his frequent changes in graphic style and media. He could
be impetuous, yet also mercurial as evidenced in the description by
Haworth-Booth of Kauffer's office at Crawford's—painted in various shades of
gray to avoid the reflection of unwanted harsh light on his work. Kauffer was a
slave to his passions. When war came to Britain he felt so passionate about
turning his attention from commerce to public service that he decided to leave
rather than be a liability to England. He and Marion immediately packed up a few
belongings, left their car at the train station where they boarded a train to
Ireland, and departed for New York on the S.S. Washington without even
notifying their closest friends.
"It was a tragic mistake," says Haworth-Booth, who reprinted a letter
from Kauffer to a friend in England which revealed profound remorse: "No
day goes by—hardly an hour—the last thing at night—the first thing in the
morning—our thoughts are of England." Frank Zachary recalls that "Ted
was a lost soul. Here was the most civilized, urbane man I ever met, and the top
designer in England, unable to acclimatize himself to New York and American
advertising." In one of the many letter sent back home to friends, Kauffer
complains about the "big shots in New York designing and ?how they do not
design at all? It's a wonderful racket. I look on in rapt amazement. I now know
what's wrong with U.S. design." Although he was invited to show in a 1941
exhibition at New York's A-D Gallery, title "The Advance Guard of
Advertising Artists," he suffered a breakdown that year from which he never
totally recovered. Despite several poster commissions (usually from
institutional rather than commercial clients, i.e., War Relief, Red Cross,
Office of Civilian Defense, etc.) and many magazine covers, book jackets and
book illustrations, as well as jobs for Container Corporation, Barnum and Bailey
Circus and The New York Subways Advertising Company, he was not fulfilled.
"In the extreme competitiveness of New York advertising he found it
difficult to sell his work because he was no longer confident enough to sell
himself," concluded Haworth-Booth.
In 1947 Kauffer was discovered by Bernard Waldman, a young New York advertising
man who wanted to bring the European poster tradition in America. He
commissioned Kauffer to do a series for American Airlines promoting California,
Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico as sun countries, a trip which required him to
travel throughout these states. "Ted was in his proper environment. For
weeks, months and years he talked about the West, which to him was more America
than New York City, a place he called a 'depressing canyon of mortar, steel,
bricks and glass,'" wrote Waldman. The series of "lyrical landscapes"
that continued until 1953 represented some of Kauffer's best American work, and
helped him regain his confidence, albeit briefly. "After 1953, Kauffer's
interest in advertising was on the wane," recalls Zachary, who as art
director of Holiday magazine at that time had conceived a project for
Kauffer that would pair him and his old friend (and American expatriate) T.S.
Eliot on a riverboat journey down the Mississippi, during which time they would
record the trip in words an pictures. However, during the planning stage Ted
died. His friends say he killed himself with liquor.
In England Kauffer debunked the commonly held concept that if an artist was
involved in commerce it was because he was really a creative failure. Even in
America, despite its constricting conventions, Kauffer believed that art and
commerce were perfect bedfellows. During the course of his career Kauffer was
not only an original but also inspired originality in others, and his influence
was felt in England into the Fifties. He was not afraid to shock, but was always
responsible to his clients. And he never patronized his public. As Keith
Murgatroyd has written, Kauffer, with style, grace and intelligence "achieved
all those things which every deeply committed designer strives for: creative
vigor, originality, functional effectiveness, recognition by his fellow
practitioners and, of course, public acclaim."
Copyright
1992 by The American Institute of Graphic Arts.
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