?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,500 - $ 3,500
ZERO (HANS SCHLEGER, 1898-1976) THESE MEN USE SHELL / YOU CAN BE SURE OF SHELL. 1938. 29 3/4x44 3/4 inches, 75 1/2x113 1/2 cm. Condition A-: minor restoration at edges; abrasions in image. Schleger lived and worked in both Berlin and New York before settling in London in 1932. He was a pioneer of modernism and the concept of corporate identity. In Britain he worked for two of the most artistically progressive British companies: Shell and the London Underground. After the war in 1953, he opened his own agency, Hans Schleger & Associates. This Shell poster is one of the great applications of Surrealism to advertising art and is also one of the best in the extensive series of posters the company produced. Replete with strange and mysterious imagery, the head of an eye-less man emerges through a hole in a road of uncut newspaper, which recedes into the horizon. Next to the head an oversized pencil and behind him an undersized couple. The design is a tribute to the amount of artistic liberty that Jack Beddington, the publicity director at Shell, gave to the artists he commissioned. Shell 79, Games p. 49.
