Edward McKnight Kauffer

Description	Graphic Poster Artist
Dates	1890-1954
Lived/Worked	Born USA; lived worked in the UK - 1914-1939, USA - 1939-1954

Best known for...

His essentially Modern poster style - with symbolic imagery and sparse selling copy.

Why is he important?

For elevating advertising to high art. Kauffer melded contemporary high art with the ephemeral world of advertising at a very high standard. As an American, his artistic interests were only satisfied in Europe when it was in the vangard of modern art in the first half of the C20. His work for the London Underground and in mainstream print publications gained him a wide audience. Today, we appreciate his work on many levels - as pure art, avant-garde advertising, colour and graphics.

Historical context

Kauffer studied art at night school in his native San Fancisco. He was urged to go abroad by is Professor Joseph McKnight in 1913. He travelled to Chicago on the way where he enrolled at the Art Institute. But it was his first exposure there to the European avant-garde at the Amory Show which caught his attention, although he later admitted that he did not understand it. In Germany he was introduced to the work of Ludwig Hohlwein in Munich, and in Paris he attended the Academie Moderne.

However, in 1914 Kauffer had to flee Europe and arrived in England as a refugee. Here he found a tranquility which he had not experienced in America. He met John Hassall, the English poster artist, who referred him to Frank Pick, the design director for the London Underground. Kauffer's first posters - landscapes - were produced in 1915, and were the first of around 140 produced for the Underground over 25 years (Source: Keith Murgatroyd's artice in Print magazine).

Kauffer had joined a group of Cubist painters called the London Group. He thought fine and applied art were compatible, hence the production of his most well-known 1916 work Flight, which was adapted as a poster for the Daily Herald newspaper. This was painted in the same year as the Vorticist Exibition, and shared their obsession with speed. Yet Kauffer imbued it with his admiration for nature. The optimism of his imagery was immensely popular after the War, and the national exposure given to Kaufer by the Herald's campaign brought him a wide range of new clients in the adverising world.

He tried to further post-Vorticist avant-garde art by founding his own X-Group, but when this failed he saw the futility of trying to paint and do advertising at the same time. He prospered due to his skill in matching abstract forms to everyday products. Awareness rather than deceipt was his belief and tool. He anticipated and moved with fashion, reworking traditional forms in an art-moderne style in the 1920's. His output spread across a beweildering array of media: books, rugs, office design, costumes and theatre sets, and into photo-montage being used by German and Russian advertising.

Kauffer was recognised throughout the 1930's in a series of exhibitions. Aldous Huxley praised him for avoiding the easy routes of using sex and money as his selling technique, preferring to use the symbolism of the product. He realised too late that this was the stiffling method used in America, where he had fled back to New York in 1939, unabe to be a burden on England durng WWII. He never fully recovered from a breakdown in 1941, although he greatly enjoyed a series for Amercan Airlines around 1950. He died in 1954.

How to see his work

Cooper Hewitt, USA National Design Museum’s Drue Heinz Study Center, 2 East 91st Street New York, NY 10128 | 212.849.8376

http://www.cooperhewitt.org/collections/drawings.asp

London Transport Museum, Covent Garden Piazza, London WC1

http://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/learning/online_resources/ecobus_omnibus/pg/1919a.htm

V&A Museum: Jobbing Print Collection

http://victoriaandalbert.london.museum/collections/prints_books/trade_catalogues/index.html