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Priester Poster

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Saved by johnny de courcy
on October 12, 2009 at 6:08:49 pm
 

 

 

 

 

The Priester poster was designed by Lucian Bernhard in 1906 for a poster competition sponsored by Berlin's Priester Matches Company. The poster won first prize, and at the age of 18 Bernhard had created the first Sachplakat, or object poster, which spawned the movement Plakatstil (poster style). This new style would revolutionize the advertising world by utilizing bold colour, stark imagery and minimal lettering, a drastic change from that era's visually complex style of Art Nouveau.

 

 

History

 

Bernhard's first sketch was typically art nouveau, or Judgenstil in German, and it included two matches, a cigar and ashtray on a checkered table cloth with two dancing women forming out of the tobacco smoke. A friend made a comment that it was a nice cigar poster. This misconception prompted Bernhard to drastically modify the poster by removing everything except for the two matches, which he colored red with yellow tips, and the hand lettered block-style Priester logo.

 

The entry was quickly dismissed at the competition for being "too sparse" and was discarded into a trash can by the judges. Ernst Growald, influential sales manager of the Hollerbaum undo Schmidt Lithography firm, arrived late for the judging. After looking around the room at the other entries he pulled Bernhard's poster from the trash and announced "This is my first prize, this is genius!". Not only did Bernhard receive two hundred marks and publicity for his poster, but he began relationship with Growald as his agent and broker.

 

Lucian Bernhard

 

Lucian Bernhard was born Emil Kahn in 1883 in Stuggart, Germany and changed his name in 1905. Bernhard was influenced strongly by an interior design exhibition in Munich when he was 15. This inspired him so much that when his parents were on vacation he painted almost everything in the house with very bright colours. When they returned, his father punished him severely for his efforts which lead him to leave his family home. He ran away to the streets of Berlin where he was taken in by a local artist. Bernhard then spent almost all of his time refining his creative voice in his mentor's studio, designing at an astonishing pace. It was during this time that he found out about the poster competition and started working on what was to be the first Sachplakat, which would spark a huge shift in German graphic design. After the success of the Priester poster, Bernhard became part of a group of graphic designers that submitted posters regularly to the printers Hollerbaum & Schmidt. He created posters for companies such as Steinway Pianos, Stiller Shoes, Bosch and Manoli Cigarettes, But none of them matched the impact of the Priester Poster. Bernhard was employed by the German government during the First World War to produce propaganda and recruitment posters. For these he returned to earlier German gothic style.

 

Lucian Bernhard never had a formal college education or even a high school diploma, but after the war was made the first professor of poster design at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. In 1923 Bernhard moved to New York, focusing on creating scripts and typefaces for the American Type Foundry. He died in New York in 1972.

 

"Bernhard" One of 35 typefaces designed by Bernhard.

  

 

People

 

Peter Birkhauser, born in 1911, was a Swiss poster artist from Basel. Although much younger than Bernhard, he was still strongly influenced by Plakatstil. He wanted to become a painter when he was very young and left grammar school early to study at an art school under Niklaus Stoecklin. Birkhauser was best known for interpreting his dreams and painting the imagery from them in an analytical form, but he also designed posters for commercial products.

 

 

Birkhauser's PKZ button poster is one of the best representations of the object poster to date. The logo is the only text on the poster along with a very large illustration of a button. It won first prize in the 1934 PKZ competition, beating out his teacher Nikalaus Stoeklin's entry.

 

Ludwig Hohlwein was born in Germany in 1874. in 1906, after working as an architect, he started afresh in the field of poster design and quickly definined himself as one of the premier poster artists in Germany. Hohlwein's posters differed from Bernhard's and Birkhausers, in that the images were more detailed and his use of interlocking shapes made his style immediately recognizable. During the First World War he worked for the German government producing Nazi propaganda posters. Ludwig Hohlwein died in 1939.

 

Style

 

 

Posters started to rise in popularity in the form of advertisements in the late 19th century in Germany. The style of these posters had become very detailed and complex from mimicking the art academy posters. This style may have worked in those situations, but it was quickly learned that in the advertising world, the werent efficient.

 

Plakatstil design can be indentified by these characteristics: minimal imagery (only the product), a large bold type that was typically hand-lettered in  block letters and bold color. Plakatstil used color combinations that werent seen in other styles, it distanced itself from the ornamental and visually demanding style of art nouveau. People say that simplicity was Lucian Bernhard's trademark, and its possible to say that this style wouldnt not have existed without him.

 

Bernhard and Hohlwein were strongly influenced by the Beggarstaff Brothers (Willliam Nicholson and James Pryde). Nicholson and Pryde developed an experimental style of woodcutting in poster design. One of their better known works is a collage poster advertising the play 'Don Quixote' in 1895.

 

In the early 20th century the advent of multi color lithography had become hugely popular which was utilized widely by Plakastil artists including Bernhard, Hohlwein and Birkhauser. This allowed them to print more colors then they were previously able to, which was also a big asset in being able to reproduce the posters in large numbers.

 

 

 

Influence of the movement

 

The world was changing rapidly in the late 19th and early 20th century. The Industrial revolution was in full swing and everything was becoming bigger and faster very quickly. There were more automobiles on the road, cites were growing and the First World War was in its early stages. The Art Nouveau style could no longer compete with the new "faster" lifestyle. People didn't have the time for busy detailed ads filled with lots of type and complex images. The object poster provided only the necessary information to the consumer, yet still achieving a memorable campaign.

 

The word was a very powerful tool of influence, and when combined in close proximity with a large bold graphic, the result was hard to ignore. Plakastil became the norm in advertising from 1906 until 1914, when the great war had adopted it for recruitment and propaganda posters and to sell patriotism instead of products. The sachplakat influenced these type of posters for countries all over the world.

 

James Montgomery - U.S.

John Heartfield - Germany (anti-nazi)

Alfred leete - England

 

Plakatstil changed graphic design forever, and as it continues to change, the style keeps returning in one form or another.

 

References

 

 

 

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