| Creator | Otto Baumberger |
| Printing year | 1923 |
| Sheet size (cm) | 127.5×90 |
| Printing technique | Lithograph |
| Printer | Wolfsberg |
| Condition | B |
| Asking price | 5'300 CHF |
| Categories | Fashion | Beauty | Health, PKZ |
Once upon a time, the avant-garde designers Mart Stam and El Lissitzky scored a classic own goal when, in 1924, they wrote a short essay on posters, published in the Swiss magazine «ABC – Beiträge zum Bauen» (Contributions to Building), which dealt with design in all its facets. Their argument, in short: Given the busy and hurried nature of passersby, a poster must show the product as it is: truthfully. Therefore, a photomechanical reproduction of the product was preferable to any drawn interpretation that might mislead the viewer.
As an example of such a successful product poster, Stam and Lissitzky chose a design by Otto Baumberger, depicting a section of a coat, which he had created in 1923 for the Swiss men’s outfitter PKZ.
However: Baumberger had drawn this poster on lithographic stones. Both Baumberger and the printers at the J. E. Wolfensberger printing house did such outstanding work that they – unintentionally – misled the two leading figures of modernism (although one must assume that Stam and Lissitzky only saw a black-and-white reproduction of the poster, not the poster itself).
In any case, with this poster, Baumberger anticipated the era of the Swiss Sachplakat (Object Poster) and, in particular, Magic Realism. Not because he wanted to launch a new movement, but because, in this instance, it seemed appropriate to him to make the quality and craftsmanship of the coat almost tangible.
One might object that Baumberger’s top hat for the Baumann hat shop was created as early as 1919, and thus considerably earlier than the PKZ coat. Yes, well, that’s a point. Nevertheless, given the degree of precision, the number of colors (and thus also of stones), and therefore the overall complexity, there is a world of difference between these two designs.
The first Swiss Poster to actually incorporate a photographic element to some extent into its design was (only) in 1929, that of Walter Cyliax, the German-born artistic director of the Fretz Brothers printing company. Undoubtedly deeply impressed by El Lissitzky’s poster designed that same year for the «Russian Exhibition» at the Museum of Applied Arts in Zurich, Cyliax created it thematically very fitting for Koch, the Zurich optician and lens manufacturer.
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