All aboard

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 18th February 2009

The Art of the Poster — A Century of Design
London Transport Museum, Covent Garden Piazza, WC2, until 31 March

The first thing to say is that this is not an exhibition of posters. It is, in fact, an exhibition of the original art works from which were made some of the last century’s best LT posters. There are more than 60 exhibits, and many of the finest were commissioned by Frank Pick (1878–1941), a founding member of the Design and Industries Association and managing director of LT. He was one of those enormously influential background figures — like Jack Beddington at Shell — who was responsible for LT’s publicity from 1908, and aimed to sell the Underground through its destinations, its urban and green-belt attractions. Nikolaus Pevsner called Pick ‘a modern Medici’, and his work as a patron of contemporary artists was indeed outstanding. LT has attempted to continue this tradition since Pick’s golden age, with rather mixed results.

Although the visitor has to endure the intrusive cacophony of competing soundtracks in the museum itself to get to this exhibition, the display is in a relatively peaceful self-contained mezzanine gallery. The show starts with a 1908 gouache by John Hassall entitled ‘No need to ask a p’liceman’, with a caped bobby gesturing to the Tube map behind him. This is the first pictorial poster commissioned by Pick and what a distance has been travelled when one compares it to the design nearby for Tom Eckersley’s Cup Final poster for 1938, with its modernist simplifications and streamlined effects. On the opposite wall are more recent works, such as R.B. Kitaj’s 1992 oil ‘Find Michelangelo at the V&A’, a Howard Hodgkin gouache of Highgate Ponds and Ruskin Spear’s barmaid pulling a pint above collaged pages from that quintessential London paper, the Evening Standard.

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