Going Underground: Modern Art on the Tube

TfL / London Transport Museum
Round London Sightseeing Tour , 1971, by Abram Games  and Winter Sales Are Best Reached by the Underground , 1922, by Edward McKnight Kauffer

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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.

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.

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.