?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 4,000
EDWARD MCKNIGHT KAUFFER (1890-1954) FROM WINTERS GLOOM TO SUMMERS JOY. 1927. 38 1/2x24 3/8 inches. Vincent Brooks Day & Son, London. Condition B+: extensive overpainting in bottom; restored losses in top corners; repaired tears in margins. Frank Pick pioneered advertising in Britain. For over thirty years he was in charge of the London Underground's ad campaigns, serving as a great artistic patron to the graphic arts. He commissioned hundreds of young designers to promote the subways and buses of London. In 1915 he gave McKnight Kauffer his first commission. Over the next 20 years Kauffer designed 141 posters for the company as well as undertaking the redesign of subway stations, installation of murals and much more. This poster, a pure example of Kauffer's genius, is an extraordinary composition that is both extremely sophisticated yet perfectly readable. Mixing supple lines with Cubist forms and employing a warm, vibrating palette of colors, Kauffer displays his mastery of sensitive Art Deco. This is in direct contrast to Cassandre, who was the master of mechanization with a cold geometric approach to design. One of Frank Pick's ideas was to give his artists complete graphic freedom in their work for the underground. That pracitice bears fruit here, with Kauffer not mentioning the Underground anywhere, not even incorporating its logo into the design. Curiously he doesn't even include the apostrophes in "winter's" and "summer's." This rare poster by Kauffer belongs in any serious collection of the artist's work. Kauffer frontispiece and 112.
