I have an appreciation for many different types of vintage commercial graphic art, and I haphazardly collect it at times. I enjoyed Ed Polish's presentation, and his treatment of vintage adwork. I tend to seek out material that predates most of the material he works with. A 'cinderella stamp' is any type of roughly stamp-sized printed label which was not an official postage stamp. They used to be used quite frequently for advertising, publicizing expositions and fairs, to show tax revenue had been paid, wartime propaganda, etc. This cinderella stamp is from my own meagre collection and apparently dates from around the time of WWI. It seems to be wartime propaganda, but it is unusual to me partly because of the treatment. Wartime propaganda is usually either unrelentingly grim, or unrelentingly heroic, but this one doesn't really fit the mold. It depicts a sombre, business-like crew of a German AAA gun standing guard on a map of Europe. The use of light pastel colors is fantastic. The overall visual effect is really quite lovely, and you can't always say that about military propaganda. I enjoy very much the enlarging of small printed halftone illustrations, so that you can really see the dots and be aware of the 'process'. Being an idealistic view of the German military, I am unclear on why the caption was printed in English, and not German.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
'cinderella stamp' from WWI
I have an appreciation for many different types of vintage commercial graphic art, and I haphazardly collect it at times. I enjoyed Ed Polish's presentation, and his treatment of vintage adwork. I tend to seek out material that predates most of the material he works with. A 'cinderella stamp' is any type of roughly stamp-sized printed label which was not an official postage stamp. They used to be used quite frequently for advertising, publicizing expositions and fairs, to show tax revenue had been paid, wartime propaganda, etc. This cinderella stamp is from my own meagre collection and apparently dates from around the time of WWI. It seems to be wartime propaganda, but it is unusual to me partly because of the treatment. Wartime propaganda is usually either unrelentingly grim, or unrelentingly heroic, but this one doesn't really fit the mold. It depicts a sombre, business-like crew of a German AAA gun standing guard on a map of Europe. The use of light pastel colors is fantastic. The overall visual effect is really quite lovely, and you can't always say that about military propaganda. I enjoy very much the enlarging of small printed halftone illustrations, so that you can really see the dots and be aware of the 'process'. Being an idealistic view of the German military, I am unclear on why the caption was printed in English, and not German.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment