Peter Strausfeld, the Movie-Poster Master
Some deserving names, though, are still obscure, and that is why an exhibition at Poster House, on West Twenty-third Street, running until April 12th, is to be welcomed with gusto. Here, in the first American museum that is dedicated solely to the art of the poster, is your chance to inspect the output of a master. The show bears the title, “Art for Art House: The Posters of Peter Strausfeld,” to which most people will respond, “Peter who?”
Strausfeld was born in Cologne, Germany, in 1910. Nourished on a love of Expressionist art, and having designed work that was critical of Nazism, he left his native land in 1938. Safe in the haven of Britain, he found himself interned, in the early nineteen-forties, as an “enemy alien”—a term applied to almost anyone, including Jewish refugees, who had fled from countries with which Britain was then at war. Strausfeld, like many internees, was taken to the Isle of Man, off the northwest coast of England. The communities that arose there became, to a near-comical degree, temporary cultural strongholds, crammed with artists, musicians, medics, and academics. Among them was Kurt Schwitters, one of the great collagists of the century.
It was on the Isle of Man that Strausfeld met an Austrian film producer and director named George Hoellering—a fruitful encounter, by any standard. Once released, the two men made animated films for the British war effort (so much for being enemies, or aliens), and then, in 1944, Hoellering took charge of the Academy, a cinema on London’s Oxford Street. A movie theatre—or, at any rate, an arena for the viewing of projected images—had existed on the site since 1906, under a variety of names, with an increasing emphasis on European fare throughout the nineteen-thirties. That reputation was fortified during Hoellering’s reign, which lasted until his death, in 1980, and crystallized by an unforgettable series of posters. They were displayed not just outside the cinema but around London, not least in Underground stations, and they confirmed the Academy’s status as a mecca for the adventurous moviegoer. The posters were the work of Strausfeld.
The Poster House show is founded on the private collection of Michael Lellouche, who, in his introduction to the accompanying book, points out an extraordinary symbiosis. “Hoellering never produced a poster without Strausfeld,” Lellouche writes, “and Strausfeld never designed a poster for anyone but Hoellering.” No Renaissance Pope could command such exclusive loyalty. Strausfeld did teach at Brighton College of Art (later part of Brighton Polytechnic), on the south coast of England, for many years, but the fruits of his labors for the Academy are the cause of his meticulous appeal.
Photographic imagery forms no part of a typical Strausfeld poster, even though he often based his designs on production stills. His medium was the linocut print—clean, strong, and scornful of embellishment. Every edge is hard, every shadow is hatched; colors are kept to a minimum, but those which are deployed make a formidable impact. There is none of the delicate feathering of a drypoint etching, and, because linoleum is bereft of knots and rings, there is no grain, such as you might expect in a woodcut. Information is delivered with a shock. Consider the 1973 poster for Claude Chabrol’s “Red Wedding,” which consists of two staring figures and three hues: black, white, and blood. Above the title are the words “Academy Cinema Two, Oxford Street – 437 5129.” Offhand, how many works of art do you know that give a phone number? Imagine Edward Hopper adding a Zip Code to “Nighthawks,” for anyone who couldn’t sleep, wanted a cup of coffee, and didn’t know where to go.
If poster art is a mass medium, here is the punchy exception: images made by one person, for one movie, at one cinema. That’s not unique—starting in 1918, Josef Fenneker designed posters for the Marmorhaus, in Berlin, some of them frighteningly stark—but it’s uncommon, and it means that most people who visit the show at the Poster House will be heading into unknown territory. Print lovers, I suspect, will be more at home than movie buffs; the graphic confidence of Strausfeld, at once forthright and haunting, suggests nothing so much as “Intimacies,” the wonderful sequence of ten woodcuts that was produced by Félix Vallotton in 1897-98. Each of those has a title (“The Lie,” “Five O’Clock,” “Money,” and so forth), and together they fuse into an early graphic novel, taut with frustration and desire. From there to the Strausfeld poster for Chabrol’s “The Butcher,” in which an exhausted couple lean on each other with closed eyes, or for Luis Buñuel’s “Tristana,” which sets the profile of Catherine Deneuve sharply against a flat plane of grass green, is really not much of a leap.
