St. Moritz

Original St. Moritz poster by Charles Kuhn from the Art Déco era, which proves: it is indeed possible without landscapes, mountains, winter sports. Accordingly, the snowman playing the saxophone amid whirling snow – fittingly wearing a bow tie and top hat – stands out from the long series of posters commissioned by the St. Moritz tourist office. Did those responsible in the Engadin ski resort consciously pursue a new approach, far from sun, skis, and sporting events? Either way, they were evidently very pleased with both the original approach and the message: With us, things are lively and cheerful well into the night – even jazz has already arrived here!

It is also remarkable that Kuhn needed only three colors for this piece of jewelry—meaning that only three stones had to be prepared and thus only three printing runs were necessary. This represents a significant cost savings and a major difference from the much more elaborate pictorial posters that were common mainly before, but in some cases also parallel to, the flat Art Déco style, which was much more suited for posters.

The fact that the black bar at the bottom, by contrast, looks somewhat unmotivated is due to the circumstance that the motif was originally conceived for the Swiss world format (128 × 90.5 cm), which cannot be used abroad. For printing in the tourism format (102 × 64 cm), it could therefore not simply be adopted due to the different aspect ratios. However, blowing the whole thing up would have meant omitting essential elements, leaving no choice but to turn the black line, which actually served merely as a narrow base, into a block.

That probably wouldn't have pleased Charles Kuhn (1903 – 1999) from the Jura region, but he certainly didn't lose any sleep over it, as he always saw himself as a commercial artist who put himself at the service of the commission; he never had serious ambitions to be perceived as a fine artist either (even if he participated in a group exhibition in Lausanne in 1942). Contemporary sources are therefore virtually impossible to find, and an actual biography is still lacking. This has proved somewhat detrimental to Kuhn in that, while he is by no means unknown in Swiss poster design, he still does not receive the recognition he deserves.

It is only known that Kuhn began a lithography apprenticeship at the age of 15 in Lausanne—probably at the Marsens printing shop—and was hired in Zurich in 1922 by master printer Johann Edwin Wolfensberger. Here, he initially transferred other people's designs onto stones before designing around 80 posters starting in 1927, using few but vibrant colors, almost all of them for products—in any case, landscapes are practically nonexistent in his work. Whether he refined his understanding of abstraction, stylization, and color theory abroad after his apprenticeship remains unknown. In 1945, he went into business for himself and focused primarily on wine labels.

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St. Moritz