Going Underground: Modern Art on the Tube

The storied London Underground has been many things to many riders over the years — a practical necessity, a wartime bomb shelter, a geographical puzzle, even a site of terrorist attacks. Yet one of its most striking distinctions is often overlooked: it was a showcase for some of the finest graphic art of the 20th century.

Starting in 1908, the Underground commissioned a stream of vibrant, original posters to adorn its trains and stations. Fundamentally they were highly effective advertisements, cajoling people to ride the Tube more often. But they were also much more. They celebrated the charms and attractions, the history and romance, of London itself. And they exposed passengers, almost without their noticing it, to the leading currents of artistic modernism. In 1928, the eminent critic Sir Lawrence Weaver compared the Underground to the city’s prestigious art galleries when he wrote that it “has provided the people of London with a picture gallery as fine in some ways … as the Tate or the National.”

(See pictures of London’s tube after midnight.)

A rich sampling of the best of these works is now on view at Yale University’s Center for British Art in New Haven, Conn. The exhibition, “Art for All: British Posters for Transport,” runs through Aug. 15, then transfers in October to the Musée de l’Imprimerie in Lyon, France. Curated by art historian Teri J. Edelstein, along with the Yale Center’s Scott Wilcox, the show is a revelation and a delight.

It also has an unseen hero. He is Frank Pick, the young solicitor who launched the poster campaign soon after going to work for the Underground and compulsively directed it until the day he retired as London Transport’s chief executive in 1940. Pick had no artistic training, but he had a passion to merge art and commerce, a sharp eye for talent and a distinctive stylistic vision. He chose London Transport’s iconic roundel logo and a clean, sans-serif typeface for its signs. He commissioned a consistent architectural style for its stations and a shapely map of its system that is still in use today. He even selected the textile designs for the trains’ seats.

(See pictures of the final night of drinking alcohol on London’s Underground.)

Pick’s top priority, however, remained the posters. Perhaps the most gifted artist he recruited was the American-born Edward McKnight Kauffer, and one of the knockout posters in the Yale exhibition is Kauffer’s Winter Sales Are Best Reached by the Underground (1922). A vortex of stippled blues, whites and grays represents storms of snow and wind, while within it five flat, almost abstract figures struggle against the elements. The main point is not portrayed but is powerfully conveyed nevertheless — that shoppers would be ever so much warmer and cozier in the Underground than on the streets.

Pick realized that what would lure passengers and build goodwill were the pleasures of the destinations — the shops, theaters, museums, zoos and country vistas that could be reached by Tube or bus. Hence, for example, the appeal of Margaret Calkin James’ Bluebell Time in Kew Gardens (1931). James was one of a surprisingly large number of women artists commissioned by Pick, though her poster promoting the annual bluebell time at Kew Gardens is anything but conventionally feminine. Flanked by muscular tree roots, rows of grass and flowers are arrayed symmetrically in sturdy geometric patterns. The effect is the opposite of flowery, yet the vitality of the design suggests the lively profusion of the gardens’ blossoms.

(See pictures of the Cold War’s influence on art.)

After Britain’s hodgepodge rail network was formed into four regional railways in 1923, they emulated the Underground campaign in order to promote their own destinations. On the whole the railway posters were not as groundbreaking as the Tube’s, but the exhibition offers several fine examples, including the saxophone-tooting fish in Frank Newbould’s East Coast Frolics, No. 6: “Those Drier Side Blues” (1933) and the hauntingly empty, surrealistic landscape in Kauffer’s Great Western to Devon’s Moors (1933).

See the Cartoons of the Week.

See the Cartoons of the Week.

The standout among all the railway artists was the Bristol-born Tom Purvis. His East Coast: The Adventuress (1928) exemplifies his minimalist yet high-impact style. The figure of a little girl blowing up water wings is drastically simplified into a few flat areas of color. Undulating strokes beneath her emerge as reflections, causing the viewer to perceive the entire white ground of the poster as sea and sky.

Innovative artists like Purvis were moving the poster away from its earlier static format in which typography merely accompanied a conventional illustration. London Transport — and especially the railways — continued to turn out such posters, of course. But the more advanced artists broke up the posters’ space more interestingly, creating dynamic relationships between the images and the words. Their drive was toward a bolder and more abstract style: in short, modernism. Their designs reflect many of the leading avant-garde movements of the era, among them Cubism, Surrealism and futurism.

(See pictures by Henri Matisse.)

Thus for passengers the posters proved to be highly educational. Says curator Edelstein: “If you could go back and see what the Royal Academy [of Arts] was hanging in any given year, and then look at the posters from the same year, you’d see that much of the poster work was far more radical — and it was aimed at a much larger and more varied audience.”

Although the poster campaign has continued in one form or another into the present — producing more than 5,000 posters to date — “Art for All” concentrates heavily on the early decades of the 20th century. That is when the freshness and ferment were strongest. The quality of the transport poster began to thin out after the 1950s. Perhaps it became too expensive, perhaps mass technology dulled its edge, perhaps the ad agencies and committees that were increasingly in charge lacked a zest for the new.

(See pictures: “London’s Gathering Storm.”)

Whatever the case, the exhibition fortunately displays some notable exceptions. Hans Unger, a German émigré who arrived in London in 1948, brought a witty, painterly approach to the city’s sights and monuments. His The Tower of London (1956) depicts Lady Jane Grey in front of the tower, evoking her beheading by running a dotted line through her neck and showing a pair of scissors with the words “Cut here.” Tom Eckersley, who started with London Transport in the 1930s, produced designs of undiminished vigor well into the ’70s, none better than his flatly stylized guardsman in 1976’s Ceremonial London.

The most popular poster ever published by London Transport — as measured by sales of reproductions — is also the most recent in the exhibition. It is the clever, punning Tate Gallery by Tube (1986) by David Booth, Malcolm Fowler and Nancy Fowler. The poster traces London Transport’s map in multicolored strands of oil paint, as if squeezed from a tube. It is both an homage to a glorious past and so up-to-date it looks like it was just laid on the canvas. Frank Pick would have loved it.

See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.

See the Cartoons of the Week.