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Vote List 4 | Social Democrats

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SOLD

Creator Ernst Keller
Printing year 1933
Sheet size (cm) 127.5×90.5
Printing technique Linocut
Printer Genossenschaftsdruckerei Zürich
Condition A
Asking price 0 CHF
Categories Plebiscites & Campaigns, Zurich

Ernst Keller is nothing less than the father of Swiss graphic art – not so much because he created countless masterpieces, but because between 1918 and 1956, as a teacher of applied graphic art at the Zurich School of Applied Arts, he prepared the ground that made countless masterpieces possible in the first place.

Even before the First World War, he sensed that, just as the letter was once abstracted from pictorial symbols, painted works could also be radically stylized into symbols. At the same time, he placed writing at the center by using its pictorial quality. Above all, however, Keller (1891 – 1968) was convinced that each task required its own approach – which is why he avoided developing a “style”. With this modern understanding of visual design and commercial art, he influenced a number of students who would go down in the history of not only Swiss graphic design: Walter Käch, Richard Paul Lohse, Heinrich Steiner, Walter Herdeg, Josef Müller-Brockmann and Armin Hofmann, to name just a few who are (also) important for the evolution of the Swiss Poster.

Which is not to say that Keller did not also design several posters that remain: his “New Home” in 1926, for example, or the emblematic 4 for the Social Democrats in 1933 on the occasion of the city elections in Zurich – an epochal contest with great symbolism, by the way, which caused street battles in the run-up to the elections, particularly between the left and the frontists emboldened by Hitler’s rise. The Social Democrats were then able to defend the absolute majority they had won in parliament and the city government in 1931, something they were never able to do again, thanks in part to overcoming the global economic crisis.

As far as we know, this is the first time this poster has ever been on the market.

maybe of interest as well is the poster originally created in 1926, which Keller recomposed on the occasion of the competition resulting from this exhibition:

Furniture Competition – The New Home