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The French poster school of Cassandre, Carlu, and Sauvignac turned to suggestions of the “arty” world of fine art and quickly identifiable images. Posters from this school often play with collage, cubist, and surrealist techniques. Air France and Pan Am both used posters from these artists. Cassandre is best known for his earlier Art Deco style advertising posters of the prow of the cruise ship Normandie and the kind of Art Deco design still seen copied in the opening and closing credits of such programs as PBS’s Hercule Poirot TV series.
Stan Galli, a wildlife artist who designed many U.S. wildlife postage stamps, turned to generic outdoor scenes where only the airline’s name has any presence—the jet itself has disappeared. Galli avoided sterile modern technology. Pigeons and peace doves served both Galli and David Klein.
Just as Galli and Klein avoided technology, so did other artists by joining circular themes with folk images. BOAC for instance depicted stylized ancient bird symbols whose two birds form a circle in the same way that Klein shows doves circling in a TWA poster for Los Angeles. The doves fly up from an old California mission to merge with a circular sun.
Air India’s flight from technology featured a cartoon character in most of its posters to create a safe, warm image at the same time the artificial magic kingdom of Disneyland was coming on line as a favorite pictorial destination. When Air India’s mascot (sort of a smiling, turbaned, mustachioed Keebler Cookie Man) flew to magic lands, he flew on a magic carpet rather than a jet.
Much of the poster art of this period picked up on the emerging youth cult and aesthetic movements of the time. That included everything from op-art techniques to suggestions of psychedelic, rock, hippie, hallucinogenic, dayglo-ink/black-light techniques. An example would be David Klein’s African poster featuring black-and-white zebra stripes to confound the eye, or Western Airline’s series of dayglo posters featuring Acapulco go-go dancers or Vegas show girls. Also felt were the influences of Peter Max (who wanted to redecorate the whole world in solids), Victor Moscoso, Richard Avedon ((John Lennon poster) and Milton Glaser (medusa-haired Bob Dylan poster) using almost assaulting colors or color blocks. Continental Airline issued a series of posters using bright, almost cartoon-strip solid blocks of colors, where Hawaiian waves do resemble the stylized rendering of Bob Dylan’s poster hair. The airline advertising poster now had to compete with posters from other areas: pure art, social reform, rock album covers, and the personality cult to name a few. Rare suggestions of graphic photojournalistic duo-tone techniques also crept in, but again the hard edge was softened by presenting a beautiful woman’s face.
When the age was over, perhaps a great jetting age of graphic design, the camera would rule all
(see Figure 6). The color and variety of posters of the 1950s and 1960s would be reduced to a largely standardized photo depiction of some contemporary destination scene where, even then, the jet would be a small thing indeed.
Due to the difficulty in accessing vintage airline posters, a special thanks goes to Don Thomas, who gave permission for use of examples from his Poster Art of the Airlines. This study surveyed the hundreds of posters in Thomas’s several books on airline advertising memorabilia, the author’s own collection, and the collections of Michael Maslan, and Charles Ramsey.
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