Avant-garde's Letterhead

The following are from Elaine Lustig Cohen and Ellen Lupton's book Letters from the Avant Garde: Modern Graphic Design, most of which came from Elaine Lustig Cohen's personal collection. Elaine Lustig Cohen was an excellent artist/designer [more on that in a later post] who was married to the great Alvin Lustig. She and her second husband, author/publisher Arthur Cohen, began collecting letterhead in the 1970s for their Ex Libris gallery, but the letters rarely sold. Although collectors at the time tended to view them as unimportant, they offer an unique and personal perspective into many of the most important artistic movements of the early twentieth century.
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"A global network of avant-garde movements flourished during the first half of the twentieth century, connecting artist and designers across Europe and the United States. Written correspondence, presented on dramatically designed stationery, was a vital part of the infrastructure of this international community. Artist and designers translated concepts from painting, poetry, and architecture onto the commercial format of the letterhead, creating, in effect, ‘corporate identities’ for modernism. Stationery for Futurism, Dada, De Stijl, the Bauhaus, and other groups and institutions served as typographic manifestos for the avant-garde. Some of the works drew on the normative conventions of commercial stationery – often with a flash of irony – while others reflected new concepts of typographic rationality." - Ellen Lupton


Bruno Munari, Mazzotti. Italy, 1934


FT Martinetti, drawing by Giacomo Ball, Movimento Futurista. Rome, 1939


Fortunato Depero, Depero. Italy (Trentino), c. 1927 (Collection Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Santa Monica)


Anonymous, Fernando Cervelli. Rome, 1932 (Collection Getty Center for the History of Arts and the Humanities, Santa Monica)


Tristan Tzara, MoUvEmEnT DADA. Paris c. 1918


Johannes Baader and Raoul Hausmann, Club Dada postcard. Berlin, c. 1919


Anonymous, Cause Le Surréalism (a Surrealist association). Paris, 1940s


Benjamin Péret. Paris (Collection W Michael Sheehe, New York)


Alexander Rodchenko, Dobrolet State Merchant Air Service. Moscow, 1923


El Lissitzky. Moscow, 1924


El Lissitzky, Vesc/Object/Gegenstand. Berlin, 1922 (from the collection of Hans Berndt, Germany)


Theo Van Doesburg, De Stijl NB postcard. Netherlands (The Hague and Leiden), 1920


Piet Zwart, Wij Nu Experimenteel Tooneel. The Hague, 1925


Piet Zwart, Laga-Compangnie. The Hague, 1922


Thon De Does, Reclame Ontwerper. Rotterdam, 1930


Josef Peeters, Het Overzicht postcard. Antwerp, 1923


Kurt Schwitters, Merz Werbezentrale envelope. Hanover, 1924


Joost Schmidt, Das Bauhaus in Dessau postcard. Dessau, 1925-26


Herbert Bayer, Ernst Kraus Glasmaler Weimar. Weimar, 1924 (Collection W Michael Sheehe, New York)


E McKnight Kauffer, Lumium Limited. London, 1935 (Collection Cooper-Hewitt, Nat. Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution)

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all images from Elaine Lustig Cohen and Ellen Lupton's book Letters from the Avant Garde: Modern Graphic Design [link]
also see the blog Billheads & Receipts [link]
David A Bontrager has a remarkable collection of trucking company letterhead [link]
letterhead at amassblog [link]
Insurance Letterhead and Covers [link]

More from the 1905-1906 Russian Underground Press

A few months back I posted images from 1905-1906 Russian revolutionary periodicals that I found at Yale University’s digital library. Recently I (accidentally) came across a related book called Blood and Laughter: Caricatures from the 1905 Revolution that contains more illustrations of the 1905-1906 Russian underground press.


from Leshii (Woodgoblin) No. 2, 1906

"Sunday 9 January 1905: Hundreds of thousand of workers assemble in the streets of St Petersburg. They are in their Sunday best and accompanied by their elderly relatives and children. There are no banners or slogans though some carry icons or church emblems, for this is to be a peaceful demonstration led by an Orthodox priest, Father Gapon. They set off for the Winter Palace, bearing to the Tsar their petition for a constitution. ‘Sire!!’ it reads. ‘We workers have come to you to seek justice and protection. We are in great poverty, we are oppressed and weighed down with labors beyond our strength. We are insulted, we are not recognized as human beings…’

For two cold hours they stand waiting in the snow for Tsar Nicholas to appear and receive their petition. A shot rings out, and they stamp their feet. Another, and they laugh that it must be blanks. A third, and suddenly women and children slump lifeless int eh snow. Still they assure themselves that this must be a mistake, for the Tsar would not shoot down unarmed civilians. But now the gendarmes are galloping in the crowd, and the slaughter has begun. The shooting continues all day long. The dead are counted in the hundreds, the wounded in the thousands, their blood spilt on the Schlusselberg Highway, the Troitsky Bridge and the Nevsky Gates. But the police cart away the bodies so quickly that it is impossible to know the full toll.

Bloody Sunday killed superstition, the old faith in a just Tsar, and unleashed a tumultuous rage among the masses. Father Gapon was soon forgotten, ‘his priestly rode’, wrote Trotsky, ‘a mere prop in the drama whose true protagonist was the proletariat’. A huge wave of strikes swept the country, paralyzing more than 100 towns and drawing in a million men and women. Throughout the summer peasants rioted while terrorists struck at figures of authority.

Alongside the struggle in street and factory was the struggle for the free press. Ministers and clerics suffered assassination more by the pen than the bullet as the revolution strove for the expression of powerful emotions long suppressed. A flood of satirical journals poured from the presses, honouring the dead and vilifying the might. Drawings of frenzied immediacy and extraordinary technical virtuosity were combines with prose and verse written in a popular underground language, veiled in allegory, metaphor and reference to the past.

Russia had a rich history of satirical journalism. In the 1770s, in the reign of Katherine the Great, an elite of intellectuals close to the court developed a new ‘aesopian’ language – deeply subversive to the enlightened autocracy – to express their opposition to the old regime. The satire of the court flourished until the shadow of revolution in Europe drove the Empress to suppress it. Again in the 1860s highly popular satirical journals sprang up, drawing consciously on their courtly predecessors to curse the Crimean War and Tsar Alexander II’s empty promises of reform. While populist revolutionaries went ‘to the people’ to make common causes with the peasants, radical journalist set out to collect folk-stories, popular sayings, soldiers’ songs and workers’ ballads. The old allegorical vocabulary was joined to the language of popular satire. By the 1870s these journals has been closed down, but this language was now part of the everyday speech. Satirical writing returned to the underground, where it flourished, rooted in popular protest, until 1905. It was then that satire achieved its full power.

Fore a few brief months the journals spoke with a great and unprecedented rage that neither arrest nor exile could silence. At first their approach was oblique, their allusions veiled, and they often fell victim to the censor’s pencil. But people had suffered censorship for too long. Satirist constantly expanded their territory and their targets of attack, demolishing one obstacle after another as they went, thriving on censorship. The workers’ movement grew in boldness, culminating in the birth of the St Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, the people’s government. For fifty days the Tsar and his ministers were confronted by another power, another law. Journalist and printers seized the right to publish without submitting to the censor. The satirical journals then reached their apotheosis, until the revolution died as it had risen, bathed in blood.

More clearly than any party resolution or government proclamation, the caricatures of 1905 tell the story of that heroic failure – and they are a symptom of that failure too…they chronicle with incredible vividness that moment of the transition from Tsarist despotism to Bolshevik revolution." -by Cathy Porter, from Images of Revolution: Graphic Art from 1905 Russia


from K Svetu (Towards the Light) No. 3 1906


"In the State Duma. 'Interpellation'"by Alexander Kudinov. Leshii No. 1, 1906


from K Svetu (Towards the Light) No 2, 1906


Strana Mechty (Land of Dreams) No. 1, 1906


"The Moscow Vampire" - Volshebny Fonar No. 2, 1906 (depiction of Governor-General Fedor Vasilevich Dubasov)


from Kosa No. 4, 1906


from Pchela No. 3, 1906


from Zarnitsy No. 8, 1906 (Witte and Durnovo burning the books)


Krasny Smekh (Red Laughter) No. 2 1906, by Boris Kustodiev


Satiricheskoe Obozrenie (Satirical Review) No. 1, 1906


"The Triumphant Pig" - Maski (Masks) No. 8, 1906


"The Treacherous Neva Reflected Everything" - Volshebny Fonar (Magic Lantern). No. 1, 1906


"Christmas Tree" - Burelom (Storm-Wood), Christmas 1905


"31 December 1905" Burelom (Storm-Wood), Christmas 1905. Facing is Drubasov, the Governor-General of Moscow and organizer of the suppression of the Moscow uprising, and Prime Minister Witte is shown with his back turned, playing with death.


from Zarevo (Dawn) No. 3, 1906


from Zarnitsy (Summer Lightning) No. 1, 1906


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All of the images come from David King and Cathy Porter's Blood and Laughter : Caricatures From the 1905 Revolution [link]
I haven't yet got my hands on it but David King and Cathy Porter also published Images of Revolution: Graphic Art from 1905 Russia [link]
also, once again, see Yale University's collection at Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library [link]
my previous post on the subject [link]
see Trixie Treat's post on the journals [link]

Relating to Quacks, Quackery and Nostrums, Part 1

"Quack is a pejorative term, disparagingly, albeit sometimes defensively, applied by a member of the establishment, the orthodox, regular, professional, credentialed and accepted class to describe the unorthodox, unlicensed, disapproved member of a fringe or irregular group. It is a term of condemnation employed when one wants to belittle another. Above all, the term has become associated with the sellers of medicines and the marketers of medical systems, those with the "true" method of curing specific ills or, in an earlier day, all the ills of mankind.

While the origins of the term are obscure, the term "quack" probably came from the Dutch Quacksalber, a charlatan, mountebank, empiric or itinerant seller of medicine. It may also have been derived from the sounds made by a duck, the term applied to the hawker of nostrums whose excessive zeal in describing the merits of his or her cure may well have sounds similar to the squawking of a duck. The chatter of the quack, in most cases more like torrent s of words, would have been familiar to both town and rural populations even in the ancient periods, for quacks have long been well known in every society. Over the past four hundred years they have been representative figures in folktales, stories and especially in prints, drawings and political caricatures..." –William H. Helfand, from Quack Quack Quack


Detail from "Quid hic nobis lumine satium", c. 1670, Anonymous


Detail from advertisement for Dr. Rock's Tincture, 1738, Anonymous


"The Dance of Death: the Undertaker and the Quack." 1816, by Thomas Rowlandson (from Wellcome Library)


"Nancy Linton: A faithful representation of her actual appearance & condition after having been cured by the use of Swann's Panacea", c. 1833, by C Hullmandel (from a drawing by WH Kearney)


"Singular Effects of the Universal Vegetable Pills on a Green Crocer! A Fact!", 1841, by Charles Jameson Grant


Detail from "The Great Lozenge Maker", 1858, by John Leech - from Punch


"Dr S.B. Collins' Painless Opium Antidote" Advertisement, 1874


"Quackery - Medical Minstrel Performing for the Benefit of Their Former Patients - No other Dead-heads Admitted", 1879, by Joseph Keppler - from Puck


"Death's-Head Doctors - Many Paths to the Grave", 1881, by Joseph Keppler - from Puck


Detail of "Death's-Head Doctors - Many Paths to the Grave", 1881, by Joseph Keppler - from Puck


Detail of "Death's-Head Doctors - Many Paths to the Grave", 1881, by Joseph Keppler - from Puck


"Death in the Pestle", c. 1885, by Henry Nappenbach - from The Wasp


Detail of "Death in the Pestle", c. 1885, by Henry Nappenbach - from The Wasp


"The Travelling Quack", 1889, by Tom Merry


An itinerant medicine vendor known as Medicine Jack carrying his wares in a knapsack on his back. (from Wellcome Library)


"William Radam, Microbes and the Microbe Killer", 1890


"The Great American Fraud, an investigative article by Samuel Hopkins Adams", 1907


Quack advertisement for the cure of cancer, 1912 (from Wellcome Library)

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Unless noted all of these come from Quack, Quack, Quack: The Sellers of Nostrums in Prints, Posters, Ephemera, & Books by William Helfand - @ Open Library [link]
Wellcome Library has a good collection of quackery related images [link]
The excellent blog The Quack Doctor [link]
The Museum of Questionable Medical Devices [link]
see the blog Quack Cogitations [link]
Quack cartoons at cartoonstock [link]
BBC slideshow: Quacks and Cures [link]