"It's been a good summer for transport design wonks. First Yale's Center for British Art mounted a large exhibition of London subway posters called Art for All (a show sadly not accessible to me by subway). And now the Museum of Modern Art is displaying Underground Gallery: London Transport Posters 1920s-1940s, which features a thin but highly representative slice of the so-called 'golden age of London transport graphics,' culled from the museum's sizable holdings.
'No exhibition of modern painting, no lecturing, no school teaching,' argued the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner in 1942, 'can have anything like so wide an influence on the educationable masses as the unceasing production and display of London Underground posters over the years.' While transit posters are enjoying a bit of renaissance at auction houses, the MoMA show reminds us these were more than pretty pictures or clever visual jokes, but rather part of a sweeping and exceedingly well-thought-out branding campaign—encompassing everything from posters to station architecture to the design of garbage cans—that made the London Underground a model case for transit systems worldwide."
Open nostalgia in Slate? I'll take it. For they are absolutely right. I love illustration from that era.
No comments:
Post a Comment