Engelberg Trübsee

The Engelberg artist, photographer and graphic designer Herbert Matter is regarded as the actual founder of the modern photographic poster in Switzerland. He was in the mid-1930s the first to convincingly integrate the medium of photography into the previously graphic advertising graphics. His thorough training as a painter, which he completed at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Geneva before training under Fernand Léger in Paris, helped him with these commissions. His poster with the Norwegian glove is undoubtedly the most famous of those he designed for his home town in the canton of Obwalden.

This is a copy from the second print run, issued in 1936, which is best recognized by the new spelling of Engelberg and Trübsee with capital letters compared to the first edition in 1935. We can only speculate as to the reasons for this change, which may not have been approved by Herbert Matter at all – possibly the original spelling, which goes back to Max Bill, was simply too modern for those responsible or simply seemed wrong to them.