Intelligent design | 12 November 2011

In 1935, Paul Nash observed that Edward McKnight Kauffer (1890–1954) was responsible for the change in attitude towards commercial art in this country. An American, Kauffer arrived in England in 1914 during a period of European study. He liked it and decided to stay, enabled to do so by his remarkable ability to design posters.

In 1915 Frank Pick commissioned him to produce the first of what became a remarkable stream of some 140 posters for London Transport. Hugely impressed by Vorticism, Kauffer became a friend and ally of Wyndham Lewis and introduced the Modernist sensibility into commercial art. Paul Nash commented, ‘It was the courage and aesthetic integrity shown in his early battles with the “plain business man” that made it possible for Kauffer to advance and eventually consolidate his position.’ Perhaps his outsider status as an American helped him to disregard established traditions and pursue a radical path; certainly he was responsible for some of the most powerful graphic design of the century.

Young Ted Kauffer of Great Falls, Montana, had established himself as a painter by the time he was 17, producing backdrops for a travelling theatre company, before going to work in a San Francisco bookshop. There he met Joseph E. McKnight, a professor at Utah University, who recognised his talent and paid for further studies in Paris. Kauffer adopted McKnight’s surname in grateful recognition, soaked up contemporary art in Chicago and Munich and was well on his way to becoming the innovative artist whom Wyndham Lewis christened ‘the poster king’.

In Gallery 1 of the Estorick’s enjoyable show, we see Kauffer’s early enthusiasm for Van Gogh and Fauvism in such poster images as the predominantly blue ‘In Watford’ and the brilliant red of ‘The Heaths, Surrey’.