CLARENCE COLE PHILLIPS LIGHT CONSUMES COAL. Circa 1918. 28x20 1/2 inches. Edwards & Deutsch, Chicago. Condition B+: minor restoration and repaired tears in corners and in image. In what is, perhaps, the most "artistic" of the American World War I posters, Phillips unites the bold, direct elements of German object posters with the intricate swirls and patterns of American Art Nouveau, in the style of William Bradley. Walton Rawls writes in Wake Up America<> that with the exception of Phillips, "in the work of the majority of American artists who contributed posters to the war effort, there is little evidence of direct inspiration from European precedents" (p. 20). Interestingly, while it may be echoing the work of European artists (Rawls points specifically to a 1907 image by Peter Behrens<> featuring a light bulb) the poster represents a drastic divergence from Phillips' usual style. He was nationally known for his "fade-a-way girls", which graced the covers of Life<> magazine from 1908 onwards. In these images, which stylistically seemed to borrow from both the Beggarstaff Brothers and Ludwig Hohlwein, Phillips featured attractive young women whose clothing was colored identically as the background in such a way that the viewer needed to complete the image in their imagination. This is his only known poster. ref: Wake Up America<>, by Walton Rawls, Abbeville Press, New York, 1988, p. 20, The Modern American Poster<>, by J. Stewart Johnson, MOMA New York, MOMA Kyoto, 1983, no. 28.
