Beschreibung:

EDWARD MCKNIGHT KAUFFER (1890-1954) SEE BRITAIN FIRST ON WINTER SHELL. Circa 1930. 29 7/8x44 3/8 inches. S. C. A. & Co., Ltd. Condition B+: repaired tears and restored losses in margins. Edward McKnight Kauffer was a multi-talented artist, whose work as a graphic designer, illustrator, painter and decorator was all exceptional. He was born in Montana, studied art in both Chicago and Paris and then moved to London in 1915. He returned to his native America in 1940, but his 25 years in Britain (the most creative of his career) produced a prodigious output of work including posters that alongside those of A. M. Cassandre, would become the best of the period. In contrast to Cassandre, who gave up graphic design for painting, Kauffer practiced both his whole life. He exhibited gouaches and watercolors in London in 1931 and 1933. When Jack Beddington commissioned Kauffer to design posters for Shell, he asked the artist for both his hard-edge graphic designs as well as his scenic, countryside ones. The New Forest is one of Kauffer's most impressive landscape posters. In a bold, dark, surrealist style he presents a fantastic, phantom-vision of the forest frozen at sunset. Shell p. 33, Kauffer p.131.