 Hi, welcome. I'm Ellen Lupton. I'm senior curator of contemporary design at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and I'm so delighted to have you here tonight. This program is presented by the Parsons School of Design and Cooper Hewitt MA program in the history of design and curatorial studies. And we have put together a series of four lectures called Graphic Design Histories, which is part of our spring graduate seminar. So welcome to my wonderful graduate students who are here as part of tonight's audience. This series celebrates the fantastic work being done by Cooper Hewitt's curators and community of scholars in the area of graphic design history and contemporary and modern media. This program features live captioning and thank you very much to Clara and Erin, our captioners. If you'd like to activate that please use the CC button at the bottom of your screen. You can adjust the size and put them anywhere on the screen you want for your convenience and pleasure. This amazing program is about E. McKnight Coffer, who is the subject of a major exhibition currently on view at Cooper Hewitt. And your last chance to see this stunning exhibition is April 10. So please come and see us. We love you. We love to welcome you to our beautiful home and share these works in person. If you can't come, check out the book. See it at your library or hold it in your hands. It is a beautiful work of graphic design in and of itself and spectacular scholarship by my beloved colleagues and curators who I'm about to introduce to you. Tonight speakers are Caitlin Condell, the associate curator and head of the department of drawings, prints and graphic design here at Cooper Hewitt, where she oversees a collection of nearly 147,000 works on paper, dating from the 14th century to the present. She has organized and contributed to numerous exhibitions and publications, including underground modernist E. McKnight Coffer currently on view, the modernist French garden which just closed an exquisite gem of an exhibition after icebergs. Coffer, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Triennial, fragile beasts, and a show that we worked on together in 2015, how posters work. She worked previously at the Museum of Modern Art in the department of prints and illustrated books. Her speaker is the equally outstanding Emily M. or the assistant curator of modern and contemporary American design here at Cooper Hewitt. She holds a PhD in the history of design from the Royal College of Art, Victorian Albert Museum. Her exhibitions include the spectacular coffer show botanical expressions and jazz age American style in the 1920s. She was formerly the Marsha Brady Tucker fellow in the American decorative arts department at the Yale University Art Gallery. She has written articles on a range of topics, and is the author of a truly fascinating book called designing the department store. I'm really excited to hear what they have to tell us and show us. And I'm going to pass the mic, so to speak, virtually over to my colleague Caitlin. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks so much, Ellen for inviting us to be a part of this wonderful series. Caitlin and I are thrilled to join you tonight to share a bit more about our recent research on the designer emick night calper. The subject of a recently released monograph last fall with Rizzoli you see here the opening spread emick night calper the artist and advertising. And as Ellen mentioned the focus of a major exhibition up right now at the museum underground modernist emick night calper. Calper's name may not be known to many today his work intersected with the lives of thousands over the course of his lifetime. Calper was a pioneer of commercial arts a profession known today as graphic design. And although he lived in London between the two world wars, and that is his best known period of work. He considered every poster to be an excuse for graphic innovation for stylistic experimentation. Here's a wonderful range of work that he did for the London underground from his first posters in 1916 through the early 30s. For calper he didn't stick to a single style and yet kept experimenting his real focus and strength drew from synthesizing the avant garde, bringing it into poster design and making it accessible for the masses. One of the primary places where this happened in the London and the London landscape was the London underground, where his posters papers the interiors of stations and platforms. And here calper very much believed that the underground was the art gallery for the people. And in this way he was a very much a populist. Calper's design I to a bit of everything from logos to the covers of magazines to costume design. And we wanted to share with you the quote from where we took the title of our book and very much encompasses the spirits of Calper's work. He wrote in 1938. The artist in advertising is a new kind of being his responsibilities are to my mind very considerable. His business constantly to correct values to establish new ones to stimulate advertising and help to make it something worthy of the civilization that needs it. He McKnight Calper was born in Great Falls Montana in 1890. He moved to Evansville as a young child with his mother and as an adolescent he left school and joined the Evansville Opera House where he began as a scene painter. Soon after he joined a traveling theater troop which moved throughout the Midwest in America, and this is a postcard one of the earliest works in Cooper Hewitt's collection that calper sent home to his parents, when he met with an x where he had, where he had signed his scene painting for the theatrical production. Calper spent several years with this traveling theater troop and eventually made his way to San Francisco, where he found a job first on a fruit ranch, and eventually in a premier bookshop Paul elder and company. It was in this bookshop that calper began a lifelong love of literature, and was also introduced to his very early works of art in the small gallery that Paul elder maintained within the bookstore. Calper was encouraged to study art and he took night classes at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art. You can see here, one of his earliest sketches, one from a class that he took at the school. Paul elder was very encouraging of the young calper and gave calper the first exhibition of the student drawings in the gallery. It was there that a professor named Joseph McKnight likely saw calper's work for the first time. McKnight was a professor who had come to the bookshop to purchase books for each class that he was teaching, and he offered calper the money to travel to Europe to study art. He was tremendously excited and initially wrote to his parents that he intended to go to Paris. But along the way he got a bit distracted and had a real adventure of a force of the first several years of his travels. He first went to Chicago, where he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago for several semesters, and he was there during the 1913 arm ratio, which was likely his first real exposure to European modernism. He went through Baltimore and Algiers, spent a bit of time in Italy, and several months in Munich where he was exposed to the German poster tradition there, before finally making his way to Paris. In Paris, he met a young concert pianist named Grace Ehrlich, and they fell in love and married. He also was American, but they continued their studies in Paris, and Calfer took trips to the south of France where he began painting landscapes, inspired by both Van Gogh and Cezanne. World War One broke out in France, and that young couple had no money to make it back entirely to America so they first stopped in Durham, England, where they had a friend, and here you can see Calfer painting the cottage that they lived in in Durham. They arrived in 1914. They found England to be hospitable, and they made their way to London the following year. Calfer wanted to work as a fine artist, but he understood early that he would need to make a living as a commercial artist, a term that is not commonly used today, but then referred to graphic design. He was fortunate to receive a very early commission of posters for the London Underground, which had the publicity manager Frank Pick operating the publicity program and commissioning many many posters for the London Underground. Calfer was a landscape artist, and you can see here in his early posters that his love of landscape translated extremely well into the mission to convince people that we're in the city to travel through these rural suburbs and think of the London Underground as an important transportation opportunity for them. Calfer adopted the flat planes of color that he had seen in the Munich School of poster art, but also it was inspired by Japanese prints that he was seeing, as well as the landscapes of his first love Cezanne and Van Gogh. During the war, it was very challenging for Calfer to make a living, but he was incredibly intrepid in exhibiting his artwork throughout London galleries. Here are three of his watercolors where he began to fuse forms of Cubism, along with his earlier landscape tradition. He made many watercolors, which was more affordable to him at this time. And they were exhibited alongside major influential modernist artists in England. Roger Fry, the famous British critic and artist was the first person to give Calfer a monographic show of his watercolors in 1917. Calfer appreciated himself with a very significant group of British modernists. Among them was Alvin Langton-Coburn, who was a well-known portrait photographer. Calfer and Coburn spent the summer together in Bluesbury, and it was there that Alvin Langton-Coburn made what are considered to be among the first abstract photographs, which were called border graphs after the British borderist movement. Calfer also found that he was interested in a new form of abstraction at this time, in part inspired by looking at the borderist prints of Edwards-Wadsworth, but still looking to Japanese prints during this period. And you can see here two of Calfer's earliest prints and experiments with this technique. Flight in particular became a very influential print for Calfer, and you'll see it reoccur in his commercial career a few years later. Calfer continued to paint as well, and this painting Sunflowers was what he believed to be his personal masterpiece. It was an incredibly important canvas to him. It remains in the UK government collection. And he exhibited it regularly from the moment he made it in 1917 for the next several years. His involvement with artist groups was quite influential at the time. He was a member of the London Group as well as the Camden Town Group, but the London Group was where Calfer became the secretary. Although we understand that his wife Grace Ehrlich did much of the labor of being the secretary for the group, Calfer had the opportunity to design graphics for the first time for someone that wasn't a commercial client. And you can see him beginning to develop a very distinctive graphics style here, and being incredibly playful with typography. Calfer's first true commercial commission during the war was for a Manchester based textile company for which he designed cotton bail labels. These labels were for Calfer many travel posters, and he had a wonderful time designing depicting the sunny locales of foreign places to which he had never traveled. But Calfer drew not only on photographic references, but also on a tradition of the German poster artists for whom he had been first exposed to in Munich. And in that group he found opportunities to draw on racialization, where he would find the exaggerated figures of people from Asia, Africa, and the Arab world. This largely seemed to come out of a lack of nuance and understanding for Calfer, but it's a notable part of these very influential early works. As the war came to an end, the commercial opportunities for Calfer grew, and one of his earliest commercial clients was the department store Darian Thompson. Here you can see two really stunning posters that Calfer designed to advertise their summer and winter sales. Calfer fused influences so he was adopting the sense of trying to create a form of movement that he adopted from the vortices, while also taking certain citations from Ludwig Holwein in particular, and looking at that German poster tradition. The Daily Herald poster was Calfer's magnum opus. In 1919, the original wood cut flight was transformed into this magnificent poster, which would stand multiple stories tall when people walked by it. Calfer had redesigned this work as a poster several years earlier, but it was only after the war that it was picked up by the editor Francis Maynell for the new Daily Herald newspaper. Here you can see an almost militaristic approach to the birds, where they're flying off into the distance, much like the airplanes would have during World War One, but the yellow penotes a real degree of optimism. Calfer had quite a bit of work as a commercial artist as the war came to an end, and not just in poster design. He designed a number of different advertisements for shell oil for newspapers and he did beautiful line work which was then reproduced in many of the daily papers. And he designed for a variety of other clients doing brochures and magazine covers, including for printers like Son and Graven Poe and Gerald Maynell and Westminster Press, as well as one off covers for people that he encountered in his social scene such as the fanfare musical magazine. He was very aware of his identity as an artist and he worked to cultivate that particular appearance and here you can see how for thinking through the way in which he was going to present himself, all done in 1920. In the early 1920s, the London Underground continued to be an important client for Calfer. And here we see how he takes the very simple message of encouraging writers to ride the tube during inclement weather and presents it in an extremely sophisticated way. This is one of his best known series winter sales are best reached by underground. This time other clients started to notice the new attention that the London Underground was receiving with Calfer's designs and also placed commissions with the artist. So he was lending his talents to everything from advertisements for silk and a dry cleaner to press and you know, spritz salt. One of his clients, Eastman and son the dry cleaners tried to placate a waiting public who could just not wait for the next Calfer designed with this paste up a new McKnight Calfer poster will appear here shortly. And this is saved in our archive at Cooper Hewitt and shows what great amount of anticipation there was about what Calfer would come out with next. Another best known series for the London Underground is this that encourages writers to reach cultural destinations Calfer chose an object from each of these museums collections to be the focus for the series. And he also designed some posters that advertise seasonal travel this one being a bit mysterious, showing us this beautiful transition through a series of cutouts from winter's gloom to summer's joy. At the same time Calfer also picked up new client work for organizations such as the Empire Marketing Board. That was a government organization founded to promote and publicize the products and services of the broad range of the British Empire, and to promote trade. Calfer was one of the modern designers hired by the Empire Marketing Board. And here we see how this imagery often furthered racial stereotypes here Calfer has rendered the bananas and the landscape and the bodies, all as commodities. And these posters appeared in very large custom frames built for them in London. He always maintained that it was very important to keep the role of the artist within the practice of poster design. And even while he was working for an advertising agency accounts tell us that Calfer stood proudly at an easel, working with artists tools that he had brought back from Germany to execute his designs very much in a fine art mode. And at the right, you see one of his posters that came out of his period when he was working part time for an advertising agency. In part due to Calfer's great promotion and work in the world of posters. This medium started to be exhibited much more in museums and galleries. And at the left, we can see a hang in place for British and foreign posters installation at the V&A in the early 30s. Also, the public was available to purchase these London Underground posters and at Calfer's suggestion one reader to an architectural magazine submitted this interior shot that we love showing how he's papered up his bathroom in London Underground posters. Calfer did not only design posters in the 1920s he continued to work in a huge variety of media. His love of theater which he had cherished early on as an adolescent continued when he arrived in London and in 1919 he joined an organization called the Arts League of Service which was a traveling theater that brought theater from the cities into rural England. Calfer designed for a range of productions both in and out of London. He designed costumes, he designed sets, he would design programs as well, and it continued to be a passion of his throughout his career. Calfer also designed for a variety of both theatrical and musical productions and his programs were both a sort of recognition of the type of events that Calfer would go to and the music that he was passionate about. He was very involved in being on the boards of theaters and musical organizations to help design their programs but also determine which productions they were going to put forward. One of the really fun things to learn about Calfer is that he was also an early member of the film society and he designed their logo and was an active participant in bringing early avant-garde film to London. He and his close friend Aldous Huxley gave notice in the papers that they were planning to make films together. Unfortunately, we have not been able to find any more record of that. But Calfer did dabble briefly in film and that was to design two posters for avant-garde films The Lodger by Alfred Hitchcock and Metropolis by Fritz Lang. But as you can see from this headline in the newspaper, the posters were deemed too good for the films and Calfer's posters were rejected by the distributor for being too expressive. These squashes remain in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Calfer did however manage to design the film titles for The Lodger, which you can see in our exhibition now. Book covers would become one of the most important parts of Calfer's career. There's a new book that's just come out about Calfer's covers. And we believe the earliest one to be designed was Look We Have Come Through for D.H. Lawrence's poems. Calfer designed for a real range of publishers, from mass market publishers to very small presses. He designed for poetry, for contemporary literature, for nonfiction, and he really relished the commissions that he received. One of his closest friends became T.S. Eliot, the famous poet who Calfer initially met as a member of the Art League of Service. And at one point, Eliot said that Calfer was the only illustrator that he could permit to illustrate his poems. He was the illustrator for all of the aerial poems that Eliot published in the early 1930s. And here you see a wonderful photo of them together in the 1940s. Very sweetly, Calfer and Eliot referred to each other by their birthplaces, Montana and Missouri. Calfer's social circle included many of the literary elite of London, including a number of very influential women, Blanche Knot, Mary Hutchinson, and Virginia, both among them. Calfer considered women to be his equals and treated them as such by all accounts, but is in literature that we find a few of Calfer's missteps, for he designed for two quite misogynistic texts during his lifetime, women of indication by Anthony Ludovici, and the world in 2030 AD by Frederick Evan Smith, which both discuss women as being relegated to roles of mother and a sole bearer of children, or require women to no longer be associated with childbearing entirely and to make an affair of the state. In the mid 1920s, there was a new market for illustrated editions of both classics and contemporary literature, and Calfer proposed the illustration of the anatomy of melancholy by Robert Burton, a book from 1621 that was reprinted in 1925 by the new publisher, None Such Press, founded by Calfer's good friend Francis Maynell. Calfer did this incredibly elaborate two volume special edition, which took a great deal of effort, he was late on many of his book commissions because he often undertook projects that turned out to be more laborious than he initially expected, and he was known to be a perfectionist among his circle. The Anatomy of Melancholy was Calfer's favorite book at the time and he frequently quoted it in letters, as well as his own publication, The Art of the Poster. Calfer subsequently designed illustrations for Don Quixote as well, and these classic literatures were major moments in his illustration career. Calfer was really involved in contemporary literature and he sometimes sought out contemporary authors and let them know that he would like the opportunity to illustrate their books. And that was the case for Elsie and the Child, which was written by Arnold Bennett, a writer that Calfer reached out to by correspondence and eventually became the neighbor of in a building that he ultimately designed interiors for. Elsie and the Child was published by Kerwin Press, and one of the really notable things about Calfer was his ability to work with printers. These illustrations were produced with post-schwar technique and executed by women at Kerwin Press, and the ability that Calfer had to learn new printing techniques, master them and create a vacuum of illustrations of them was one of his trademark. In some cases, contemporary writers were paired with Calfer by publishers, and that's the case by this particular book, which wound up being unpublished with these illustrations. Carl Van Vechten, a white author, published a book that features a racial slur with its title in 1926, and Alfred and Blanche not wanted to publish a special edition of this book in 1928 and 1929, and they decided to reach out to Calfer. Calfer was given this commission and met with Carl Van Vechten, despite the fact that the book was set in New York in the Harlem Renaissance, and Calfer really had no knowledge of that. He spent some time in Paris studying from life, and these are some of his early sketches for the project which resided in Cooper Hewitt's collection. Calfer was very late with the commission, and these works went unpublished, yet this was an influential moment in Calfer's relationship with race and one that would come back later in his career. Carl Van Vechten became a close friend with Calfer despite the fact that their collaboration didn't become published, and he was the person that encouraged Calfer to purchase a Leica camera, which Calfer would use to photograph many of the works that he was inspired by, to integrate photo montage into his works in the 1930s. A critical turning point came in Calfer's career when he met Marion Jordan, who is captured here in a photograph by Carl Van Vechten. She was also an American, they met first in the 1920s. She trained as a fine artist in Paris and San Francisco before making her way to London. And she, in London in the mid 1930s, established her own business, amazingly enough. Marion Jordan Limited, where she not only designed rocks and fabrics but also managed their placement into interior decoration and the production of this material. She became best known as the architect of floors because she designed remarkable floor coverings that corresponded to their architectural surroundings. So here we see her beautiful carpet in the lobby of Claridge's hotel, but not only lens style and eye appeal but also provides some practical wayfinding for visitors to navigate through the space. On the right we can see how her wonderfully textured curtains have a dialogue with this very stark, sleek, crisp architecture. So Doran translated her skills and fine arts to the patterns for textiles. And at the left we can see how that happened through the medium of silk screening. On the right we can see how her knowledge of weaving techniques primarily through her rug work also translated well to textiles. And here she embraces a motif, of course, also favored by Kaufer, a bird in flight. Doran also shared really important commissions from the late 1920s into the 1930s and beyond. And here we see how Doran was commissioned to do upholstery for the cars of London Underground trains. She was given the design brief to make the design bright and colorful but at the same time durable to withstand the numbers of commuters that would sit and pass by on a daily basis. Kaufer and Doran both approached the carpet as a medium for modern art. They designed carpets for friends and colleagues and their carpet designs also featured in London art galleries. They also shared clients of Fortnum and Mason and BBC. Kaufer did graphics for both organizations. Doran's scarves and rugs sold at Fortnum and Mason and Doran also contributed to the interiors for new offices for BBC in the 30s. Kaufer and Doran's circles also interlaced with the fields of architecture, interior design, and here fashion. You can see at right, the editor of British Vogue at the time, Dorothy Todd with her partner in that garland who were great supporters of Doran and Kaufer. Todd featured Kaufer and Doran's work in her very important book of the period, The New Interior Decoration. And here Kaufer's design for a mural forms the frontispiece. And Doran even designed a holiday card and monogram for Marge Garland. I can assure you that his holiday cards landed in the mailboxes of lots of those involved in arts and culture in the 1930s. And also in this period Kaufer expanded his practice to include large scale photo murals. So at the left you see one designed for a new entertainment center and Earl's Court. And at the right, a mural that greets visitors to the lobby of a modernist department building in Brighton that has recently been restored and one can visit today, and we'll show you how we reproduced it in our exhibition in a little bit. The London Underground continued to be Kaufer's major client over the course of his career he designed over 125 posters for the London Underground. He designed for a variety of themes but this is rather unique in that Kaufer is taking on the theme of power. So here you can see a really assertive masculinity and Kaufer's new approach to styling, one of his most influential and stunning posters. Kaufer also tried out new techniques you can see him using the airbrush technique and a number of posters from this period. Here he playfully designs for both the idea of playing between six and 10 the bright hours and shopping between 10 and four the quiet hours. Kaufer had designed for Shell Oil in the early 1920s briefly but in the late 1920s and early 1930s Shell Oil hired the publicity manager Jack Beddington, much inspired by the publicity campaign that the London Underground had undertaken. And Kaufer became one of their regular designers. He designed in a duplicity of style. He designed for their exhibitions, and he had his posters frequently shown on lorries or trucks rather than posted up in the underground so you'll see many of these posters are oriented in a horizontal or landscape format. Another major client for Kaufer during this period of the 1930s was Percy Lund Humphries. Percy Lund Humphries was a printing and publishing house small that had run out of Bradford and out of London in England, and Kaufer was hired as their creative director. He was run by EC Gregory, a close friend and a patron of modern art. And it was through this small organization that Kaufer had encountered a number of different artists writers and publishers. He designed programs and ephemera that were printed by the organization as well as books such as Art Now, which was written by Herbert Reed. There was a dark room with several surrealist artists, including Man Ray and Francis Brugier. He collaborated on commercial commissions with those artists, and he also organized small one person exhibitions of theirs in the gallery that the printing firm had in London. In the 1930s, Kaufer continued to uncritically promote the products of the British Empire products and services. Here we see two posters in his Outposts of Britain series for the General Post Office showing how the poster can reach all ends of the British Empire. And here we also see Kaufer's signature element of the space frame that gives a simulation of three dimensional space on a two dimensional surface. Tea, of course, being another important product of the Empire that Kaufer was keen to promote. And here, as Caitlin was saying, we can see the influence of photography on his work and not making its way into his poster design in this period. So in the late 1930s, Kaufer's work began to increasingly intersect with the world of politics and the years leading up to World War II. And while he was largely apolitical, in 1932, he did design the cover for Oswald Mosley's The Greater Britain, the Treatise for the British Union of Fascists. And this very much seems to be an outlier in his career because just a few years later he is staunchly anti-fascist promoting peace organizations and anti-fascist organizations, as well as doing covers for satires such as Quack Quack by Leonard Wolfe. His work reached an international stage when he designed costumes and sets for the ballet checkmate, promoted as Britain's first modernist display for ballet that appeared at the 1937 Paris Barrett and then on a European tour. And the star was also rising in New York when in 1937 he was granted a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. So here we know and see American audiences being introduced to his work for the first time, or for one of the first times. And Kaufer also designed the cover for his own catalog with a foreword by his friend Aldous Huxley. So in the later 1930s, as commissioned dwindled for Dornan Kaufer, they escaped the London City Centre to the countryside where they leased the White House at left. And during this period they very much lived off the land, Kaufer took up photography, and they reconnected with friends during ups and downs in their romantic relationships and to keep their circle of support strong. They connected with friends such as Aldous and Maria Huxley, as we can see at the right. So in 1940, Kaufer and Dorn received the news from the Embassy that they needed to leave London at very short notice with few belongings, very little money arrived in New York at the outbreak of war. And trying to find a footing relied on some of their previous contacts and previous talents. So Kaufer found work in publishing both in magazines and for museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art, this being the cover for the organic design and whom furnishings competition and exhibition of 1941. Kaufer kept his ties in the publishing industry, churning out promotions and covers for new paperbacks and hardbacks that were reaching American audiences. And he also found work in the way of political propaganda. We see his design for a gift for the Red Cross that we know was created in all sizes and shapes and produced in the millions from the size of a small postcard to a very large billboard and for this design he won an important award. On the other hand, found her footing much more easily in New York, while Kaufer struggled, her designs seem to connect more readily with American audiences. One journalist said that nature was Dorn's notebook. Here we can see the large scale florals that began to fill American homes. While she was doing well professionally in the fashion district of New York, attending exhibitions, gaining design inspiration and new clients, she was also struggling to give Kaufer the personal support that he needed as he struggled professionally. Kaufer finally married in 1950 but lived apart for much of their later years. Kaufer passes in 1954, Dorn 10 years later, she begins to travel in the mid 1950s abroad and lands in Tangier finds a community there of designers and artists who she can gain inspiration from and community from, and she finally passes from cancer in 1964. As Emily mentioned, Kaufer struggled in New York in the final years to find the kind of commissions that he had enjoyed in London and part of that was that the advertising agency system was very different than the individual publicity managers that Kaufer had often been able to work with. In publishing, he found more comfort and explored a variety of styles and techniques including typographic ones. And for most Americans, Kaufer is best known for his cover for Ulysses by James Joyce for the Modern Library. His relationship with Carl Van Vechten and the Knops meant that in the 1940s and 50s, Kaufer was hired to illustrate a number of different books focused on race in America. Most influential his invisible man cover for the first edition of Ralph Ellison's book, what remains reprinted to this day and is what well celebrated. But Langston Hughes for his book, Shakespeare and Harlem, a collection of poems had requested that one of two black artists be used to illustrate the book and Elmer Sims Campbell, or Roswell Ingram. Van Vechten and Blanche Knopp felt strongly that Kaufer should do it. Hughes and Kaufer never met, and Kaufer likely never knew that Hughes did not favorably think of his illustrations, although they have continued to be reprinted to this day. Kaufer did design a number of very significant and exciting posters during the rest of his career in New York. One of our personal favorites is for when he returned to his love of transportation, the subway, and here is one of his wonderful posters for the New York subway system. But it was a man named Bernard Waldman of Modern Merchandising Bureau who secured Kaufer's most influential commission and championed his work. This was for the major American Airlines campaign. And for this Kaufer traveled around America, seeing the country for the first time since he had been a young man for inspiration and producing dozens of posters promoting American Airlines and travel. He suffered from alcoholism and depression in his very last years. He continued to produce this gorgeous optimistic work right up until his death in 1954. We have these three women to thank for our wonderful Kaufer collection at Cooper Hewitt. Mary and Jordan at the left gave the critical mass of Kaufer's work in the 1960s. At the time unfortunately she did not give any of her own. And that was at the suggestion of the poet Mary and Moore, who Kaufer knew in his lifetime. And Mary and Moore had connected to a curator at Cooper Hewitt and then the donation was made at that time. The collection has grown since then in the 1990s due to the generosity of Grace Shulman, the daughter of Bernard Waldman, and she continues to be a friend and great supporter of the project. The archive takes us behind the scenes into Kaufer's world, one of the most prized possessions of the archive are these very brittle scrapbooks that we have now digitized. We have scribbles, letters, drawings, photo stats, a whole range of Kaufer's work. And one of our greatest joys was reading a lot of Kaufer's correspondence in the course of our research this being a letter to Kenneth Clark that Kaufer wrote after arriving in New York, lamenting that we have Fifth Avenue we have skyscrapers we have quick lunch counters and ice cream soda, we have streamlined everything we have artists but we have no artists now yet. What brought me back what strange attachment hindered me from giving my love and allegiance to England. We enjoyed seeing how first name and address change over the course of his correspondence and this really allowed us to get a handle on Kaufer personally and fill out our understanding of his great circle of friends and colleagues. We like to joke that Kaufer had a hand in everything, and a hand was not only one of his favorite motifs he in fact modeled this hand off of his own, but this aspect of his wide reach and work is one that we really tried to celebrate in both the book and the exhibition. Kaufer is well known to many in England, but widely not known in America, despite the fact that he was American and retained American citizenship throughout his life, although he remained conflicted about what his own identity really was. And here for the exhibition at Cooper Hewitt which you can see through a few installation shots we're going to share. We really wanted to be able to reintroduce Americans to Kaufer. We partnered with two design firms universal design in London and Lucen Roberts plus who did the 3D and 2D design of the exhibition, which is beautifully produced. And here you can see the sort of tunneling effect mimicking the London underground that takes you through the exhibition. The designers created a range of unique moments, both with color, graphics, and the physical space to give opportunities to explore Kaufer's work in an intimate setting. And they drew directly on Kaufer's images and motifs, as well as creating these wonderful three dimensional space frames out of Kaufer's two dimensional designs for them. And Jordan is also importantly featured in the exhibition. And we take a great moment to look at Kaufer's network and his impact with this marvelous network map in the center of the exhibition. His mural photo mural originally designed for Embassy Court has been recreated in the gallery. This will be a remarkable range of ephemera and posters lent by really dedicated lenders who have championed Kaufer's legacy. We also wanted to end by just giving you a preview of our publication, E. McKnight Kaufer, the artist in advertising, beautifully and thoughtfully designed by Lucinda Hitchcock who we worked very closely with on the process. Here's a flip through preview of the book whose cover opens up to be a poster itself. And with this book, Caitlin and I commissioned a series of essays around new areas of scholarship about Kaufer, one being illustrating race Kaufer and the African American connection and literature by James Smalls. These essays delve into Kaufer's relationship with MoMA, Kaufer as a fine artist, Kaufer and his representations of women, Kaufer and his work on interiors and architecture. So a whole range of areas to explore. And the book concludes with a really robust plate section that brings to life in full color, the greatest range of work in color that's ever been seen by Kaufer in a publication. So thanks so much for listening. This concludes our formal presentation and we really look forward to taking some of your questions. Thank you. That was amazing. Caitlin, would you like the slides? Yeah, why don't you put the slides up because we have some questions about specific works and it might be fun. You kind of go to the beginning, I'll try to do them a little bit in order. So we were really fascinated by the self portraits that he did in that one year in 1920. They represent, you know, a psyche with different sides, you know, this kind of dark and moody on the one hand but this, you know, beautiful dandy on the other. So what can you tell us about those portraits. And you said that he was very much thinking about his self presentation as an artist. So what does his portrait say to you about Kaufer as a person and as an artist. They're so stunning. Well, and how for had what I think people called at the time an artistic temperament, and he was very self aware of how he presented himself in the world. He endured quite a bit by the time that he was making these and sort of changed up his identity and his life quite a bit if you think about all the places that Kaufer had traveled coming from living in the Midwest in America, working on a farm working in the theater, working in a bookshop where he had been told he needed to correct his accent in order to be eligible for employment which meant to subvert his Midwestern accent. And as a foreigner in England as well as having been in France to a certain extent he he came to London as a refugee because he was stranded. And by the time that he's making these works in 1920, he's brought all of this life experience where he's really trying to identify himself as an innovator, but really capture I think the sort of moodiness that he felt. So anybody who believes that the anatomy of melancholy from 1621 is their favorite book must have a really rich interior life, I think. Absolutely. And we have a question from one of our graduate students about the early works and Zach Sauer is interested in the influence of Japanese prints and pointing out that many Japanese artists at that time, did their printmaking, drawing, carving and printing themselves. Was Kaufer influenced by that? Did he get involved in direct printing or was his work printed by technicians? Wonderful question. So Kaufer actually really was interested in printing technique. He rarely, if at all, did his own printing. Graham Twimlow has written extensively about this for those who are interested in reading more about Kaufer's experience of learning more about the lithographic process. Really early on when Kaufer didn't know very much about the process he made his maquettes, which were his preparatory materials, nearly exactly to scale as the furnished posters before finding out that that wasn't the saring he could work smaller. And over time he became really sophisticated in his understanding of how to be able to create a maquette that could be translated to a master printer, who would then actually do his printing. So the master printer essentially redraw the maquette? Yes, they would. And they would make like separate the color. How did that work? If you could maybe show us one of the posters that would have been translated that way. I'm going to go to his earliest underground posters. Here we go. Yeah, those are fascinating. Thank you. So you can see here that Kaufer tried a few different things in Watford. He likely he sort of captures this really beautiful watery effect, which he may or may not have had a full understanding of how that would be translated but they would have, Kaufer would have had to signal what colors he was looking for and of course to reduce the number of colors he was using to make it more affordable to print because each color would be printed at a separate moment. There is a wonderful series of examples that I don't have in my PowerPoint but are in the Victorian Albert Museum's collection where you can see one of Kaufer's London underground posters. Each color printed on a separate page. You can see how each one would have had to be layered up. So certainly Kaufer would have been inspired by looking at Japanese UPOA prints which are the woodblock prints are printed the same way. But Kaufer was not doing any kind of, he may have been carving his few lino cuts and wood cuts that he produced in the teens, but he would not have been translating his works to the stone for the lithography in these early years. I mentioned in some of the later pieces that he used Pouchoir for those illustrations what is that technique. Emily do you want me to go for it. Okay, so Pouchoir is a textbook. Maybe you could just flip forward to that. I'm going to ask you to go back to a few very specific questions here. I'm not making everyone. No, you did. Yeah, beautiful. I was fascinated by the sense of light in that image of the street and the apartment below the street. Yeah, so Pouchoir was a technique very popular in the 1920s in Paris in particular, where the, there's sort of a little pouch that contains the pigment, and it's pressed through a stencil and sort of pounded so that the Pouchoir sits on it because it has a very almost three dimensional feel to it. It's rich in texture and opacity, and how for would have tried to understand how that technique worked when he was doing these illustrations because he hadn't worked it himself. And one of the things that we know Paul Nash, who was another artist who worked for Kerwin press and we, Emily and I read some of Nash's letters in an archive in Cambridge, and found that he thought that he and Calfer to have been exceptional and what he was able to achieve through illustration in the Pouchoir technique. So his way of capturing light and you this is a very different illustrative approach to work that then Calfer had taken previously and it really seems to betray the fact that he was interested in this new printing medium. Thank you. It's really interesting and if you go back to that image of the posters in the bathroom. I had a question about Calfer being fascinated with fine art and graphic design and maintaining that connection to his identity as an artist. I was really interested that there was a market for people buying posters for the subway. I had no idea I thought they were strictly advertising. I didn't know about that. Was there a big market that a lot of people buy these as art for their homes. Emily, do you want to address this? Sure. I know that posters were certainly available for purchase and artists as popular as Calfer could be bought in a series and people could simulate the effect of the London Underground kind of cacophony of light and pattern and color in their own homes as we see here and very much like Calfer many of the artists that were designing the London Underground believe strongly that the poster was a way for their medium of fine art to reach the masses and for Calfer the medium of the poster was the primary way to open up modernism and make it accessible to the general public. One of my favorite Calfer fun facts is the reference in Brideshead revisited when the main character goes to college and hangs Calfer London Underground posters in his rooms and later he can afford different art that he can hang but this is of a certain class and a certain style and it was very common. So one of the funny things that for Emily and I about this poster or this particular picture of the bathroom is that it was very common for people to hang posters as art in their homes hang these underground posters. This was sort of a surprising exceptional example and Calfer was quite fascinated by it himself. It's really beautiful. I wish it still existed. We have a question from Sarah Lichtman who's the director of our graduate program. Fascinated that Mary Ann Dorn donated her husband's work but not her own. Where can her work be seen and does Cooper Hewitt have any of her work. In the course of our research and the building of the exhibition I'm pleased to share that Cooper Hewitt was able to make two new acquisitions of Doran's work. We now have a new tablecloth and printed textiles in the collection but it's true that Mary Ann Doran's work does not survive in very many American museum collections for the exhibition we largely loaned works from the Whitworth Art Gallery, which is in the master and that work was donated directly to the institution by the manufacturers themselves. The Victorian Albert Museum also has a large representation of Doran's work and the same. Much of that work came directly from the manufacturers at the time. This is deserving of much more research. There's been one major monograph written on Mary Ann Dorn by Christine Boydell called the architect of floors I cannot recommend it more strongly. It's an excellent resource and kind of the definitive go to on Dorn but there's. I'm fascinated that her rugs served as way find me. It's so cool and so modern and looking at it in that lobby where there must be elevators and different hallways and. There is help. Often broke up these very large public spaces so you picture a huge lounge on a cruise ship, or a lobby of a hotel or a big opening office space. People would even put them end to end side to side or they they served to kind of demarcate a sitting space from a dining space. It's so beautiful. We have two questions about kind of what happened what went wrong in America. And so Natasha, Poggio and another one of our wonderful graduate students Barbara Casimenicus. They're asking what why in America did he not find this success and was there some limitation in terms of American taste or. Or was it really just a different way that the industry was organized. I think it was all of those things and how far was falling a little bit out of favor in England in the years leading up to the war. Frank picked had sort of soured on his latest style, he had really returned to landscape to a certain extent. He was still one of the most influential and popular graphic designers there. In America, the advertising system, as I mentioned was maybe more bureaucratic and streamlined than it was in England but copper had also been a bit sort of grandfathered in there because he had developed such a diverse network of artists and friends. Often his commissioners were people who he had personal relationships as well and he and they really they trusted Cal for to make his aesthetic decisions. Things were sort of micromanage through the advertising system in America in a different way. And it was also demoralizing for Cal for who was the premier graphic designer in England to have to come with his portfolio in hand during the war when very few commissions were being given out and paid very little at all. And with that experience of going door to door to show his portfolio and he would get hired but he get hired for small spots and magazines, things that would have to be done a certain way with a certain type base and a lot of limitations on how he could be creative and really thrived when he could be innovative and creative without these sort of specific constraints. I think also what's interesting is in the mid 40s, there's such an influx of European avant-garde artists and designers who are doing commercial art to America. There's a real range of styles and Cal for is exhibiting alongside those people, such as Herbert fire in a number of different exhibitions in America, but he struggles to sort of maintain quite the same level of commissions as some of them. But one of my favorite things about Cal for doing this period is that he was somewhat of a sort of patriarchal figure in a positive way and people like young Paul Rand would look up to him. Paul Rand asked Cal for to do the introduction to his first edition of thoughts on design. So he was incredibly well respected in the graphic design community. But he had to work to earn a living and he had to churn out designs at such a rate that he rarely was very satisfied. And there really was a great deal of imposition on what he was allowed to do. Yeah, I think the graphic design community is one thing and the realities of the advertising world is something altogether different and he was kind of confronting that. We have another question from a graduate student and we're going to do two more questions. So this is one of them. So Scott Angel wants to know more about the set designs. So that's something that he did at the beginning of his career and then return to those spectacular, you know, color gradient. What was inspiring that that that particular production. This group of images speaks to Calhoun's work with the Arts League of Service, which was a group formed after World War Two to bring arts and culture from the city to the countryside. And Calhoun and Dorn as well as TS Eliot and a number of other really important figures of the period were all involved in this group. And so Calhoun and Dorn both design sets and costumes and this group would travel to a village each day to put on a performance and there are headlines that speak of these like audacious colors and shapes and lines that are being used. The rural areas had never been introduced to modern art on a stage like that before and this group performed both well known classics as well as modern theater. And so as you noted Alan theater continued to be an important part of Calhoun's career. And we talked a bit about checkmate that first modern British ballet. I know Scott's especially interested in this so great. So this is a very dramatic chess game, a playoff between love and death. And here we see a great costume drawing and Cooper Hewitt's collection with some annotations about color and fit. And at the rate is one of two backdrops that hung there's one that hung during the prologue and one throughout the course of this face off. And this is still performed today actually for the exhibition we've borrowed the costumes from the Sarasota ballet. And they continue to use these production elements Wow that's amazing. We actually have two more questions that's just too much fun. We have a question about nomenclature. And this is a few people are asking this, is he Cubist is he modern is he art deco is he more Munich School of, you know, object placate what would you, how do you classify this artist. I think he is beyond classification really why he was so successful. He didn't stick to one style. He was interested in sort of metabolizing almost everything he saw and finding a way to make it both unique but also palatable to the public he was really trying to educate the public about Cubism by constantly evolving. So, as you heard through we talked about the network. Sometimes he was called a cubist sometimes he was called a cubist in a positive way and sometimes he was called a negative way by the press, particularly in the 19 teams and 20s. But, you know, some people will look at his work and see very little cubism and the vast majority of it. I think Ellen you and I have also talked a little bit about commercial cubism, which is a bit of a different thing than cubism with a capital C, very different in art history. We've been discussing that my graduate class, actually. Okay, one more question we have a die hard researcher with the question. Victoria Olson is trying to do research in advertising in the 1920s and 50s through 50s, a lot of stuff is locked up in corporate archives. She can't get to see it. Do you have any recommendation for where a researcher can look at mid century American advertising in American advertising? I believe so. Yeah. That's a good question. I think one of the things that is a good place to start is to look at the trade publications from that time that were meant to be read by advertising executives and also by designers because it's a really useful way in to getting a better sense of that particular moment in time. And more and more of those publications are being digitized, which as we know during the pandemic is really important because it's hard to get into libraries. But looking at trade publications has been very helpful for Emily and I as we've tried to understand more about how Cal for was received by his peers, and by critics during that time. I can't speak off the top of my head to any particular publications but I think that would be a wonderful way into the research. And I've done some research in the Smithsonian American History Museum, which has an incredible collection of advertising and it's accessible to the public you have to make an appointment. But they have AT&T they have certain companies so it's not comprehensive. And Victoria you're getting some great suggestions in the chat so so check it out that it's there to be found. That's it. It was an incredible event. It's an incredible exhibition and a beautiful book. It's been really a joy to learn more about this artist. The next lecture in our series is on Bauhaus typography at 100. The presenter, and we're doing it in collaboration with the letter form archive, and doing a kind of virtual tour of their spectacular exhibition that's currently on view in San Francisco. And if you can't get to see it, come see the movie come see the talk. It's a really, it's a show full of things that you've seen before and that you have never seen and quite that way. We also have an event coming up on March 14 about coffers book cover designs and their legacy with Steve Heller and Gail Anderson so that that's super exciting too. And you can register for that and see us again. So thank you everyone. Thank you Parsons. Thank you to my beloved graduate students and above all to these spectacular curators. I appreciate what you've done. So good night, and to our captioners. Good night. Thank you. Thank you. Take care.