Tag: poster art

Designer Desire: Tomi Ungererer

Montage of Tomi Ungererer illustrations

Tomi Ungererer (1931–2019) was a French born illustrator of children’s books (and some for adults) and posters. His first book was The Mellops Go Flying, about an adventurous family of pigs. The follow-up was entitled The Mellops Go Diving for Treasure, after which more were added to the series.

After leaving his homeland, he has travelled and lived all around the world. He moved to New York in the 1950s where he created work for publications such as The New York Times, Village Voice, Life and Esquire. In 1971, he and his 3rd wife emigrated to rural Nova Scotia, Canada where he became a farmer. In the mid-1970s, they moved again, this time to West Cork in Ireland; they divided their time between here and Strasbourg until his death in 2019.

Much as I love his children’s book illustrations, it’s his hard-hitting political posters that really grab my attention. In his own words:

Posters for me are the most challenging and gratifying exercise. A poster has to act by impact, to catch the eye of a passerby within a few seconds. I would say the poster is more of an art form than most other kinds of advertising.
In the 1960’s I started to make political posters. Two subjects sparked my revulsion and my anger: racial segregation and the War on Vietnam. Later I did posters for other causes such as Amnesty International, liberty of the press, animal rights, ecology, nuclear disarmament and so on.

In 2007, the Tomi Ungerer Museum in his home-town of Strasbourg first opened its doors. Back in 1975, he’d donated a large part of his work and currently, the museum’s collection includes 11,000 of his drawings, as well as 6,500 toys from his personal collection.

As well as being an illustrator, he was a sculptor and architect. He designed a kindergarten in Karlsruhe, Germany which is uniquely shaped like a reclining cat. The front door is its mouth and its tail is a silver slide through which the children can exit.

Portrait of Tomi Ungererercredit

Additional image credits:
Phaidon | Tomi Ungererer

Designer Desire: Dorrit Dekk

Montage of Dorrit Dekk designs

Dorrit Dekk (1917-2014) – born Dorothy Karoline Fuhrmann – was an accomplished graphic designer and artist. Born in the former Czechoslovakia, she moved as a young child with her mother and brother to Austria where, between 1936 and 1938, she attended University of Applied Arts Vienna. In 1938, with the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany she fled to London.

Other than a year of living in South Africa, Dorrit settled in Airlie Gardens, in Kensington, London from the 1960s until her death in 2014.

Between 1946 and 1948 she worked for the Central Office of Information, creating posters publicising messages such as “Coughs and sneezes spread diseases” and “Bones are still needed to make glue” for the Ministry of Labour and National Service.

As part of the 1951 Festival of Britain’s Land Travelling Exhibition, she created the mural “People at Play”. She worked extensively creating posters for the like of Air France, London Transport, British Rail, Trust House Forte, Schweppes and the Post Office Savings Bank. She produced covers and illustrations for publishers such as Penguin Books (where she designed the cover for Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome) and Tatler magazine. She created menu card designs for P&O cruise ships in the 1950s, 60s & 70s a few of which are currently for sale on eBay.

She gained her “Dorrit” nickname during childhood from her mother who was a fan of Charles Dickens. A printer once recommended to her that she should sign her work however, she realised that both her maiden name and married name (Klatzow) would be difficult to recognise in Britain, so he suggested that she use her initials: DKK, but with the inclusion of an “e”. Thus, her professional name became “Dekk”.

Portrait of Dorrit Dekkcredit

Additional image credits:
Kensington Magazine | Postal Museum

Designer Desire: Emory Douglas

Montage of Emory Douglas poster designsall image credits: Emory Douglas

With the current resurgent interest in the Black Lives Matter movement. There’s been a lot of coverage of Black history and arts across the media. We caught a really interesting television documentary programme about the Black Panthers and it featured the poster art of Emory Douglas.

Douglas (b. 1943) was tasked with being ‘Revolutionary Artist’ and Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party from 1967 until its dissolution in the 1980s. He created the artworks in the party’s Black Panther which, at one point, was the most widely read Black newspaper in the United States, boasting a weekly circulation of more than 300,000.

In addition to the newspaper, he created posters, postcards and flyers using his signature style – bold, black graphics, limited colour palette, moving slogans and often collage.

He’s the person that’s often credited with popularising the moniker ‘pigs’ for corrupt police officers:

In American culture, pigs are animals wallowing in filth and dirty. So I took that thought and applied it to the pig drawing itself. Then once I put the pig on two legs, gave it a badge and had the flies flying around, it transcended the boundaries of the African-American community and became an international icon that everybody identified with as a symbol of oppression by government and the police. NY Times

He has exhibited his work internationally, in museums & galleries such as Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007), Urbis, Manchester (2008) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2009).

Douglas received the 2015 medal from the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) – in recognition of “his fearless and powerful use of graphic design in the Black Panther party’s struggle for civil rights and against racism, oppression, and social injustice.”

There’s a book about the art of Emory Douglas that’s sometimes available on Amazon and Abe Books.

Check out the interview with Douglas at the bottom of this post which puts his work into historical and social context.

Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas

Portrait of Emory Douglascredit

Emory Douglas: The Art of The Black Panthers from Dress Code on Vimeo.

Designer Desire: Paul Peter Piech

Mosaic of Paul Peter Piech artworks | H is for Home

A week or so ago, we were in an antique shop in Aberystwyth when a framed, limited-edition, lino-cut print poster hanging on the wall caught our eye; it was signed, ‘Paul Peter Piech’. We’d never heard of the artist, so I made a note of the name to check him out when we returned home.

Paul Peter Piech (1920-1996) was a Brooklyn-born artist of Ukrainian parentage. As a GI during the 2nd World War, he’d been posted to Cardiff. Whilst there, he met his future wife, Irene Tompkins. She didn’t fancy the idea of moving to the US, so they remained in the UK, eventually settling in Wales.

Piech’s posters were often on the subjects of equality, justice, human rights, anti-war, anti-racism, the environment and jazz. His artworks were regularly set with quotes from pre-eminent poets and orators such as Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, John F. Kennedy, Harri Webb and Walt Whitman.

In 1959, Piech founded the Taurus Press of Willow Dene in Bushey Heath, Hertfordshire. It printed limited-edition books on poetry by the likes of William Blake, Hugo Manning, John Donne, John Cotton, Neil Spratling and Graham Searle. He provided the accompanying illustrations for these publications.

In the 1980s, Piech donated in excess of 2,500 prints and posters to the V&A’s permanent collection. After his death, his family donated an extensive portfolio of his later work to the Regional Print Centre and Art & Design department at Yale College, Wrexham.

Because of his abundance of production (and despite the small print runs), his works are fairly easy to come by; original prints and posters can be found at auction or on eBay and Etsy. Books by and about him can be found on Amazon and Hive.

I’ve been called a Fascist. I’ve been called a Communist. I’ve been called a racist. I’ve been called everything after any of my shows happen because of certain posters, you see. But they can’t pin me down to any ‘isms… I just look at humanity the way it is and then I make a graphic expression of it. The purpose of graphic expression is to realize some truth that they’re missing and to do something about it… I don’t want to sit around and be silent.

Paul Peter Piech

Portrait of Paul Peter Piechcredit