Nature and nakedness appeal most

Press, 7 December 1976, Page 25

Nature and nakedness appeal most

By

PALL MAJENDIE,

of Reuter,

through NZPA

The perfect formula for today’s ideal poster is a decorative couple of naked young lovers riding on horseback into a glorious sunset. That, at least, is how a French sociologist, Christine de Rendinger, sees it after studying the phenomenon that has, in a decade, transformed bedsitting rooms around the ■world with dazzling colours, acid humour, political messages, and pop culture.

Posters are big business today, with 15 million being sold a year in the United States alone. Christine de Rendinger, who studied at Strasbourg, Paris, and the University of Kansas, has produced a weighty thesis on the sub-

ject. It is heavily larded with sociological jargon, but it is also an entertaining review of the poster’s progress. She first traces the poster’s development from Aubrey Beardsley’s voluptuous offerings, through Toulouse-Lautrec’s famous cabaret figures, to Lord Kitchener’s accusing finger telling Britons in the First World War, “Your country needs you.” The big breakthrough for the poster came in the 1960 s when technological developments made production cheap. She dates the great “poster wave” from 1966 when the New York publisher. Martin Geisler, produced his first “personality poster” of a raincoated actor, Humphrey Bogart.

Then, two Swedish students, Betil Hjert and Goran Hultgren, produced the craggy lunar landscapes that made them millionaires. And the poster movement had been launched worldwide. Christine de Rendinger notes that at the start it was a market made up of intellectuals and artists. “But, now, the poster is available to everyone; it is being popularised. Mass tastes are simple and healthy so the poster follows suit.” The demand is for vivid colours, nature, and open air.

#he conducted a poll offering prospective

buvers 250 likely posters. Top of the pile emerged “Kitty,” a poster of a furry kitten. The sociologist surmised that adolescents chose it “because it helps to channel the surfeit of tenderness that young people have before acquiring the status of parents.”

“Che” Guevara, Bob Dylan, and Isadora Duncan came way down the popularity poll. Top were countryside posters, with wind and waves, clouds, and shadowy couples. Next in line were “gag posters” dealing with love, pollution, war and the United States.

On the last subject, she says, the French have a somewhat simplistic view

of the average American as a naive money-maker and sports fan who eats hamburgers all day. Reviewing her poll results, Christine de Rendinger writes: "It could be said that the ideal poster would be a naked couple on horseback at sunset. That would incorporate all the things those polled were looking for: the beauty of the couple, the horse and the countryside mixed with a dose of eroticism, poetry, and romanticism.”

For her, the ideal poster “has to be a kind of visual minirape: it should shock and jolt, whether it uses beauty, bold colours, biting humour, or an offbeat subject.”

Posters constantly appeal to adolescents because such subjects as motor-cycling and naked women cover the kind of dream world they long to inhabit, she writes. The future holds endless possibilities for the poster which, she says, could become inflatable, mobile, washable, and three dimensional.

Concluding with a multicoloured vision of the twenty-first century, de Rendinger asks: “Why couldn’t there be plastic posters especially adapted to fit the doors, roofs, and sides of cars? The sight of the motorway traffic jam would then become the biggest colour spectacle in the world.”