PKZ Brand
| Creator | Otto Baumberger |
|---|---|
| Printing year | 1923 |
| Printing technique | Lithography |
| Printer | Wolfsberg |
| Condition | |
| Asking price (CHF): | |
| Sheet size (cm) | |
| Categories | Fashion | Beauty | Health, PKZ |
1 in stock
Once upon a time, the avant-garde artists Mart Stam and El Lissitzky scored a classic own goal when they wrote a short essay on posters in 1924, published in the Swiss magazine «ABC – Beiträge zum Bauen,» which dealt with design in all its facets. To summarize their argument: in view of busy and hurried passers-by, a poster had to show the product as it is: truthfully. Therefore, a photomechanical reproduction of the product was to be preferred to any drawn interpretation that deceived the viewer.
As an example of such a successful product poster, Stam and Lissitzky chose a motif designed by Otto Baumberger, which shows a detail of a coat and which he created in 1923 for the Swiss men's outfitter PKZ.
Only: Baumberger had drawn this poster on lithographic stones. Both Baumberger and the printers at the Lithographic Establishment of J. E. Wolfensberger, however, produced such outstanding work that they—unintentionally—led the two exponents of modernism astray, even if one must assume that Stam and El Lissitzky merely saw a black-and-white reproduction of the poster rather than the print itself.
Either way, with this poster Baumberger anticipated the era of the Swiss objective poster and, in particular, of Magic Realism. Not because he wanted to launch a new movement, but because in this case it seemed appropriate to him to make the quality and workmanship of the coat almost tangibly experienceable.
One might now object that Baumberger's top hat for the Baumann hat store was already created in 1919 and is thus quite a bit earlier than the PKZ coat. Well, yes, that has some merit. Nevertheless, given the degree of precision, the number of colors (and thus also the stones), and therefore the overall complexity, worlds still lie between these two motifs.
The first Swiss poster that actually incorporated a photographic element into the design was (at first) Walter Cyliax’s in 1929. The artist in charge of the printing company of the Fretz brothers, from Germany, created it, thematically very appropriately, for Koch, the Zurich-based optician and manufacturer of lenses. Although Cyliax undoubtedly was deeply impressed by El Lissitzky’s poster designed in the same year for the «Russian Exhibition» at the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Zurich: