It sounds like a piece of ancient oriental wisdom or a quote from Shakespare, but it
turns out the expression 'a picture is worth a thousand words' was first coined by American
adman Frederick Barnard in 1921.
This doesn’t make it any less true and it goes a long way towards explaining the long
symbiotic relationship between advertising and illustration.
Its a relationship which has had its share of ups and downs but it's produced some of
the most compelling, attractive and amusing illustration of the last 200 years.
You can find examples of illustrated advertising from before the 19th century, but they are
invariably crudely rendered engravings, lacking any sign of creative imagination.
And it wasn't until the 1830s when more visually sophisticated ads such as this from French
engraver Tony Johannot - and this by fellow frenchman Honore Daumier started to appear.
But most posters and press advertising continued to be fairly pedestrian despite the direction
shown by these pioneers, and it took more than 30 years of mediocrity before yet another
French artist opened everyones eyes to the potential of illustrated advertising.
The remarkable posters of French artist Jules Cheret first appeared in Paris around 1870
and his mastery of the print process and ability to tastefully reconcile the image with the
text singled him out as the real progenitor of the modern poster.
And whatever Cheret was advertising he intuitively realised that you could always get the public's
full attention with a cheerfully provocative image of a pretty girl.
A generation later Alphonse Mucha developed what Cheret had begun and the fusion of figurative
and decorative elements in his work made his posters impossible to ignore.
Mucha was Czechoslovakian but he lived and worked in Paris, where he created the vast
number of posters which have become the very definition of the art nouveau style.
And just like Cheret he too exploited the power of female beauty in virtually all his
work.
The posters of Henri de Toulouse Lautrec were nothing like as commercially successful but
his less representational graphic approach was to prove equally influential on many who
followed.
Italian advertising in the late 1800s was dominated by german born Adolfo Hohenstein,
whose ornate baroque interpretation of art nouveau was much admired for its dramatic
lighting effects.
But in Britain the partnership of William Nicholson and James Pryde - known collectively
as the Beggarstaffs - had been unimpressed by the flowing complexities of art nouveau.
They had been far more influenced by Lautrec and Japanese woodblock prints and the posters
created by this partnership were revolutionary in their graphic simplicity and design
At the same time the posters of their more humorous contemporary Dudley Hardy made similar
creative use of bold outlines and large areas of flat colour.
In Germany and Austria illustrators had developed their own more minimal but still elegant version
of art nouveau which they called jugenstil, but the movement was to be only briefly popular.
In America poster artist Will Bradley and his contemporaries Edward Penfield and Louis
Rhead had been energised by these developments in Europe and each displayed particular stylistic
aspects of the influence in their work.
But in America and across Europe most of the advertising art produced was woefully lacking
in imagination, style or aesthetic appeal.
And thats how most of it has stayed.
Luckily not everyone was content with mediocrity.
Where Mucha and the continental Europeans had favoured the erotic and glamorous British
illustrator John Hassall used a more down to earth comical approach.
Others had done the same thing before him but Hassall became by far the most popular
comic posterist of the time.
His relentlessly cheerful illustrations were everywhere on the streets of British cities
and their popularity and power to sell demonstrated conclusively that humour was the second foolproof
weapon in the advertiser's armoury.
By this time in Germany and Austria jugenstil had already evolved into the art and design
movement known as the secession,which rejected what was considered to be unnecessary decoration.
The leading lights of the secession were Lucian Bernhard and Julius Klinger.
And the radically modernist and minimalist graphic principles they established in their
ads were quickly adopted and adapted by fellow German Ludwig Hohlwein, who went on to eclipse
them both as one of the most significant poster artists of the 20th century.
Generally flat colour - using unexpected combinations - along with dramatic composition were the
defining features of his work, and the popularity and influence of his posters spread quickly
throughout the rest of Europe as many others began working on similar lines.
When the great war of 1914 broke out advertising took a back seat for 4 years as many illustrators
either joined the armed forces or turned their talents toward propaganda.
By this time America had largely ignored the graphic minimalsim which had begun and ended
with Will Bradley and his colleagues in favour of representational illustration styles which
could only be reproduced by the new and expensive full colour process.
But the best of the American illustrators had by now developed their own design aesthetic
which when combined with the spectacularly skilful techniques of artists of the calibre
of Joseph Leyendecker were capable of creating posters of immense visual power and beauty.
And the precise glowing fantasy art of Maxfield Parrish was every bit as popular, using renaissance
oil painting techniques to create exquisitely detailed scenarios to sell everyday products.
And there were others, including the young Norman Rockwell who would keep this traditional
painted approach dominant in American advertising for decades to come.
But in continental Europe the shift to modernism was unstoppable and the fascination with abstraction
and geometric design coalesced into what would later become known as art deco.
And across Europe advertisers were keen to exploit the style for its association with
glamour and sophistication.
And illustrators such as Roger Broders were abandoning more painterly techniques and creating
dynamic graphic images with mostly flat colour,
The most significant posterist of the art deco movement was A. M. Cassandre.
His first poster appeared in Paris in1925 and all the work that followed demonstrated
geometrically precise composition and exuded the optimism and excitement of the new mechanised
age and all its possibilities for a suitably fashionable fast moving lifestyle.
And it wasn't just France which succumbed to the sleek appeal of modernism.
Spain's most successful poster artist at this time was Federico Ribas who created many stylish
ads which exhibited varying levels of art deco influence.
And Erberto Carboni had similar success in Italy with his radically abstracted poster
work and he would continue to be a highly influential illustrator and designer in the
following decades.
But in the 1930s Italian advertising was actually dominated by the more representational melodramatic
paintings of Gino Boccasile, which owed more to what was happening in America.
Britain had its fair share of converts to art deco such as the poorly remembered Frederick
Herrick but his contemporaries Frank Newbould and Tom Purvis were creating stylistic hybrids
which owed a lot to Ludwig Hohlwein.
But it was humour which continued to be Britain's definitive selling strategy and some of the
most successful advertising of the 30s such as this comical series of ads for petrol by
cartoonist Willuam Ridgewell were British advertising's stock in trade.
And starting in 1930 James Gillroys cheerfully absurd images were used extensively on posters
and press ads to promote the supposed virtues of drinking Guinness for over two decades,
and this campaign was instrumental in making Guinness a household name.
Predictably just as it had in the great war advertising in world war two faded into the
background while more pressing matters were dealt with.
And even when the war ended the devastation and food rationing throughout Europe didn't
make for particularly fertile ground for advertising.
The generally utilitarian post-deco styling of many of the wartime propaganda posters
extended into the 1950s and even the 60s. But it was somewhat generic and anonymous
in stylistic terms and only one or two such as Jaques Nathan Garamond in France and Abram
Games in Britain managed to be at least a little more distinctive and memorable than
most.
Unlike Europe the U.S.A. experienced no postwar austerity and the 1950s was a period of unprecedented
growth which the admen of Madison Avenue were only too happy to exploit.
A quarter of a century after his debut Norman Rockwell was still creating wholesome posters
and press ads for everyday products and Haddon Sundblom's hyoer-realistic manically upbeat
campaign work for Coca Cola seemed to be everywhere, setting the tone for a new American dream.
Others such as pinup artist Gil Elvgren were bombarded with commissions to portray every
aspirational aspect of that dream for posters and magazines.
By the mid 50s ads by slightly younger, more modernist illustrators started to nudge their
way in.
The work of Al Parker was clearly figurative but it wasn't overly concerned with painterly
realism. And Austin Briggs developed an expressionistic
technique of creating images which the likes of Rockwell and sSundblom would have considered
mere sketches.
The 1960s did produce some innovative and exciting illustration but it was largely confined
to posters for hippie rock concerts such as these by American Rick Griffin and Britain's
Martin Sharp.
But mainstream advertising didn't want to associate itself with drug culture so it remained
underground and what little illustration was being produced in advertising was extremely
dull.
Occasionally a decent campaign might surface briefly, such as Ronald Searle's spidery cartoons
for Lemon Hart rum or this cheerful abstracted Italian campaign by eErberto Carboni for Pirelli
but by now it was obvious that on both sides of the aAtlantic the camera had become advertising's
weapon of choice.
And it's relationship with illustration had become distant and disconnected.
Of course there are always exceptions to the rule and one such was the British ad campaign
for Heineken beer which first appeared in 1974 and ran for the next decade.
It was based on the slogan 'Heineken refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach'.
But what made this campaign unusual if not unique is that it deliberately used a wide
range of illustrative approaches, many of which were pastiches of earlier illustration
and art styles.
This was the polar opposite of earlier campaigns which had relied on their association with
a particular illustrator or style.
And the thinking behind this campaign seemed to filter through to others and by the turn
of the millennium quite a few ad agencies realised the public had become extremely visually
literate and they started to exploit the consumer's familiarity with every conceivable artistic
and illustrative style.
So now you could sell a car with a pastiche of a children's book or maybe a surrealist
painting.
Or advertise a yoghurt brand with parodies of victorian medical engraving.
Or associate a fizzy drink with 50s retro style hyper-realist nostalgia.
And around the same time advertising discovered the potential of the entirely new phenomenon
of digital painting and photo-manipulation, which in the right hands could create impossible
but absolutely believable and memorable images.
But it's unlikely this represents a true renaissance for illustration and photography's grip on
advertising won't be loosened any time soon.
Even so maybe these developments justify a small note of cautious optimism for the potential
future of what was once a perfect partnership.
It would be nice to think so.