Parsenn Klosters

Attentive readers of German and Swiss newspapers and magazines repeatedly came across Karl Straub (1900-1997) in the 1930s, who primarily designed advertisements for a whole series of spa and holiday resorts as well as established brand products. The skilful combination of drawing and photography lent his works a certain distinctiveness and thus ample attention.
He designed his most famous poster in 1927 on the occasion of the opening of the Stuttgart Weissenhofsiedlung, conceived by the German Werkbund as a building exhibition, probably the most important testimony to Neues Bauen.

On the original poster offered here, designed in 1933, he placed a female skier drawn in the Art Deco style in front of a photograph of the area around the Parsennhütte built under the Totalp-Schwarzhorn, at that time without any ski lifts. Accordingly, skiing pretty much always and everywhere meant rather: at least 95 percent of the time for the ascent, at most 5 percent for the descent. However, the fact that from the end of 1932 the Parsennbahn brought skiers from Davos up to the Weissfluhjoch may have prompted the tourist office of neighbouring Klosters to commission this poster (and to try to lure at least some of the enthusiastic skiers from Davos to Klosters). Klosters did not get its own connection to the heights until 1950 with the Gotschnabahn.