Above: 1919 Swedish poster for Out West (Roscoe "Fatty” Arbuckle, USA, 1918). Design by Eric Rohman.
I’ve recently come across a little known, rather brief but quite extraordinary chapter in illustrated movie poster history, thanks to the poster department of Heritage Auctions. Just over one hundred years ago in Sweden, one distribution company or state agency seems to have commissioned an astonishing series of posters for imported American silent films that to today’s eyes seem both retro and modern at the same time (some of them could be mistaken for Mondo designs). They have been popping up for auction at Heritage over the past few years, reaching prices as high as $4,320 for Out West (above) and as low as $73 for the lovely Kingdom of Youth seen below. In fact there are a number coming up for auction next month and bidding begins next week.
The posters are all 2- or 3-color linocut designs and the Deco-influenced artwork would have been partially dictated by the printing technique, a variant of woodcut printing in which, as Heritage describes it, “a sheet of linoleum (sometimes mounted on a wooden block) is used for the relief surface. A design is cut into the linoleum surface and the sheet is inked with a roller called a brayer, and then impressed onto paper.” Heritage goes on to explain that “although linoleum as a floor covering dates to the 1860s, the linocut printing technique was used first by the artists of Die Brücke in Germany between 1905 and 1913 where it had been similarly used for wallpaper printing. They initially described these prints as woodcuts, which sounded more respectable.”
Linocut printing favored flat planes of color rather than texture and detail and so the artists who created these posters focused on compositions of shapes reminiscent of contemporary vector illustration. Curves, no doubt much easier to cut into lino than wood, dominate almost all the designs; note how the only straight lines in Out West are in the squares of Fatty Arbuckle’s shirt and the lines of his pistol. The one other major aspect of the designs is negative space: most of the posters make great use of empty backgrounds against which these bold compositions stand out beautifully. American movie posters of the era are, by contrast, painterly and realistic, filling the sheet with color and detail. Compare the US one sheet for the 1918 Dorothy Gish vehicle Battling Jane with its much more stylized Swedish counterpart.
Nearly all the posters seen here seem to have been produced between 1919 and 1921 by “A.-B. Svenska Biografteaterns Filmsbyrå, Stockholm” or the Swedish Cinema Theatre’s Film Agency. Quite a number of them, including the two above, are signed by Eric Rohman (1891–1949), who was one of the greatest and most prolific of Swedish poster artists, and a couple are signed by other designers, but most are unattributed. That said, the designs are remarkably cohesive, as if Svenska Biografteaterns Filmsbyrå had a clearly defined house style.
I’ve selected thirty (I couldn’t narrow it down to fewer) of the most striking of these ingenious designs, every one a beauty. If anyone knows more about their history please let me know in the comments below.
Above: Swedish poster for The Water Nymph (Mack Sennett, USA, 1912).
Above: 1918 Swedish poster for Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, USA, 1915). Design by Österberg.
Above: Swedish poster for He Comes Up Smiling (Allan Dwan, USA, 1918).
Above: 1919 Swedish poster for In Again, Out Again (John Emerson, USA, 1917). Design by Eric Rohman.
Above: Swedish poster for Two Gun Betty (Howard Hickman, USA, 1918).
Above: 1919 Swedish poster for Battling Jane (Elmer Clifton, USA, 1918). Design by Eric Rohman.
Above: 1919 Swedish poster for The Dawn Maker (William S. Hart, USA, 1916).
Above: Swedish poster for Hell-Roarin’ Reform (Edward LeSaint, USA, 1919).
Above: 1919 Swedish poster for The Kingdom of Youth (Clarence G. Badger, USA, 1918).
Above: Swedish poster for Shoulder Arms (Charles Chaplin, USA, 1918). Design by Eric Rohman.
Above: 1919 Swedish poster for The Sign Invisible (Edgar Lewis, USA, 1918). Design by Eric Rohman.
Above: 1919 Swedish poster for We Can’t Have Everything (Cecil B. DeMille, USA, 1918). Design by Eric Rohman.
Above: Swedish poster for Below the Surface (Irvin Willat, USA, 1920).
Above: 1920 Swedish poster for A Burlesque on Carmen (Charles Chaplin & Leo White, USA, 1915).
Above: Swedish poster for The Conversion of Frosty Blake (William S. Hart, USA, 1915). Design by Eric Rohman.
Above: 1920 Swedish poster for Don’t Change Your Husband (Cecil B. DeMille, USA, 1919).
Above: 1920 Swedish poster for Headin’ South (Allan Dwan & Arthur Rosson, USA, 1918).
Above: 1920 Swedish poster for I’ll Get Him Yet (Elmer Clifton, USA, 1919).
Above: 1920 Swedish poster for Josselyn’s Wife (Howard Hickman, USA, 1919).
Above: 1920 Swedish poster for The Marriage of Molly-O (Paul Powell, USA, 1916).
Above: 1920 Swedish poster for A Modern Musketeer (Allan Dwan, USA, 1917). Design by Helge Artelius.
Above: 1920 Swedish poster for Nugget Nell (Elmer Clifton, USA, 1919).
Above: 1920 Swedish poster for The Safety Curtain (Sidney Franklin, USA, 1918).
Above: 1920 Swedish poster for Say! Young Fellow (Joseph Henabery, USA, 1918).
Above: 1920 Swedish poster for The Sheriff (Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, USA, 1918).
Above: Swedish poster for The Slim Princess (Victor Schertzinger, USA, 1920).
Above: 1920 Swedish poster for The Stool Pigeon (Lon Chaney, USA, 1915).
Above: 1920 Swedish poster for Sunnyside (Charles Chaplin, USA, 1919).
Above: 1921 Swedish poster for Soldiers of Fortune (Allan Dwan, USA, 1919).
Many thanks to Heritage Auctions.