popular prints

popular prints. A term used in the context of 20th-century culture to describe mass-produced and mass-marketed coloured reproductions that are generally bought as items of furnishing by people who otherwise demonstrate no interest in art. This kind of print was pioneered by the American firm of Currier & Ives, which operated in New York from 1857 to 1907, and in the 20th century many specialist firms have catered for the market: Frost & Reed and the Medici Society in Britain, for example, the New York Graphic Society in the USA, and Hanfstaengl in Germany. The subject has been given little serious attention, but Christine Lindey devotes an illuminating chapter to it in her book Art in the Cold War: From Vladivostok to Kalamazoo, 1945–1962 (1990). She writes: ‘Popular prints provided an ideal world: one in which fruits are unblemished, flowers never fade, and snow is never slushy … Landscapes are peaceful and unscarred, animals roam free, children never grow up and work is virtually non-existent … Popular prints often echoed the outlooks as well as the looks of the mass-media imagery which conditioned daily life. As in the films and magazines, women were eternally glamorous and unharassed, foreigners quaint and Highland lakes ever misty. Christ, his saints, presidents and monarchs were invariably Caucasian and mostly Aryan. Nudes were coy and sex was never directly mentioned, though frequently alluded to in pounding waves on lonely rocks or in the abandoned dance of a billowing ballerina … The ubiquity of popular prints stemmed partly from the manner in which they were marketed and used. They were often sold by mail-order catalogue or in department stores. They were sold alongside household goods … [and] Populist advice on the choosing and hanging of pictures often suggested the suitability of particular subjects for specific rooms … taken overall, popular taste remained conservative. In the mid-fifties, the prints buyer from Sears, Roebuck, the biggest retailer in the world, regretted that: “Rembrandt, Renoir and Van Gogh don't sell … Our best seller is called Fiery Peaks. It's a picture of the Cascade Mountains either at sunset or sunrise, you can't tell which” … Although some Old and Modern Masters did reach a wide audience, the contemporary vanguard never reached wide popularity, and the majority of prints which were truly popular, in that they sold vast quantities, were traditional in style and content … the artists who fulfilled this demand mostly worked in a manner considered anachronistic or devoid of aesthetic merit by contemporary arbiters of taste.’

Few of these artists are well known by name, although Maxfield Parrish was famous in the USA for many years and Sir Gerald Kelly was once prominent in the field, his picture of a Burmese girl entitled Saw Ohn Nyun achieving enormous sales: Lindey writes that ‘In 1961, when the leading British print publishers jointly prepared a poll of best-selling prints, Sir Gerald's was the winner', but she points out that another industry source claims the bestseller for the period 1959–61 was Rodrigues Clemente's Red Skirt (the picture that hangs on the living-room wall of Jack and Vera Duckworth in the television soap opera Coronation Street). The other artists who have achieved large sales of popular prints include the British marine painter Montague Dawson and the Russian-born, South African-domiciled Vladimir Tretchikoff, probably the most financially successful specialist in the market; The Chinese Girl (1952), the most famous of his exotic beauties, is said to have sold more than half a million copies in large format. Among ‘serious’ artists whose work has achieved success in popular print form are Salvador Dal’ (notably with Christ of St John of the Cross) and Andrew Wyeth (notably with Christina's World).