St. Moritz

Original Vintage St. Moritz Winter Poster by Charles Kuhn from the Art Deco era, proving that it really is possible without the landscape, mountains and winter sports. Accordingly, the snowman playing the saxophone in a flurry of snow – wearing a bow tie and top hat as befits his status – stands out from the long series of posters commissioned by the St. Moritz Tourist Office. Did those responsible for the Engadin ski resort deliberately pursue a new approach, far removed from sun, skiing and sporting events? Either way, they were obviously very happy with the original approach and the message: Here, things are fresh and cheerful also at night – even jazz has arrived here!

Remarkable also that Kuhn only needed three colors for this gem – in other words, only three stones had to be prepared and therefore only three printing processes were necessary. A significant cost saving and a big difference to the much more elaborate painterly posters that were still common, especially before, but also partly parallel to the two-dimensional Art Deco style, which was much more suitable for posters.

That the black bar at the bottom looks somewhat unmotivated is due to the fact that the motif was originally designed for the Swiss world format (128×90.5 cm), which cannot be used abroad. Due to the different aspect ratios, it could not simply be adopted for printing in the tourist format (102×64 cm). However, blowing up the whole thing would have meant leaving out essentials, and so there was no choice but to make a block out of the black line, which initially only served as a narrow base.

Charles Kuhn (1903 – 1999) from Jura would hardly have liked this – but he certainly didn’t lose any sleep over it either, as he always saw himself as a commercial artist who put himself at the service of the commission; he never had any serious ambitions to be recognized as a visual artist (even if he did take part in a group exhibition in Lausanne in 1942). Contemporary sources are therefore practically impossible to find, and an actual biography has yet to be written. This has somewhat been Kuhn’s undoing in that, although he is by no means unknown in Swiss poster art, he has not received the recognition he deserves.

All that is known is that Kuhn began an apprenticeship as a lithographer in Lausanne at the age of 15 – probably at the Marsens printing company – and was hired by master Johann Edwin Wolfensberger in Zurich in 1922. Here he initially transferred other (commercial) artist’s designs onto the stones before designing around 80 posters from 1927 onwards, almost all of them for products (in any case, there are practically none of his landscapes), using few but bold colors. Whether he refined his understanding of abstraction, stylization and color theory after his apprenticeship abroad is unknown. In 1945, he became self-employed and concentrated mainly on wine labels.

maybe of interest as well:

St. Moritz