It would be a mistake to assume that this account of the work of one of the 20th century’s most celebrated designers (a familiar name to many for his London Underground and Shell posters of the Twenties and Thirties) is a book to be bought chiefly for its illustrations, splendid though they are. The text is certainly scholarly, and there is talk of printing processes and type-faces, but it’s not just for the specialist. It is free from jargon and wide-ranging in its references to contemporary art and literature as well as to what you might call the cultural aspirations of the time: the anticipation of social revolution after the Great War, and the idealistic expectations of the part to be played in it by both art and mass-communication. Kauffer was a close friend of T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Marianne Moore and John Betjeman as well as of enlightened patrons such as Frank Pick the publicity manager of London Underground, Jack Beddington of Shell, and Peter Gregory of Lund Humphries, all of whose pioneering work is described here. He designed a desk bristling with (unwanted) gadgets for Arnold Bennett and collaborated with Man Ray. There are glimpses of the always entertaining battle between the champions of modern art and a steadfastly Philistine public, and of the interaction between art and commercial art.
And then there is the uniquely glamorous, much-loved and ultimately tragic figure of Kauffer hmself — elegant, gentle, immensely thin, deeply serious, obsessively neat, and a man whose charm was felt by all. Born in Montana in 1890, he arrived in England via Paris in 1914 and after the shortest possible spell of dish-washing designed his first Underground poster in 1915.
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