National Tweed Day: Otto Baumberger

This PKZ (department store) poster typifies the "object poster" genre. The object to be marketed is presented in extreme close-up, either in photo-realistic or almost abstract fashion. Text is kept to a bare minimum, almost always limited to the company name or a single word attribute. A neutral background focuses attention on the product.

National Tweed Day, 3 April: art by Otto Baumberger (1889–1961, Switzerland)

Otto Baumberger was an important developer of the Swiss "object poster."

Otto Baumberger (1889–1961, Switzerland), Marque PKZ poster, 1923. Color lithograph on paper, 127.3 x 89.5 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2025 Estate of Otto Baumberger / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (MOMA-P1740bmbars)

The ancestor of the poster in Western art are handbills and small circulars starting in the 1700s, either hand-painted or, in printmaking medium, executed in the engraving, woodcut, or etching medium because of the ability to mass produce them. Such handbills disseminated a wide range of subjects, from religious ideas (such as Martin Luther's  95 theses nailed to the church door in 1517) to political protests (Paul Revere's "Boston Massacre" broadside engraving of 1770).

Printmaking processes were a natural and easier application for advertising such as business cards, advertisements in newspapers, and handbills. The invention of lithography in 1798, where in a design was reproduced from a drawing on a stone "plate," revolutionized the dissemination of information in public. So was born the poster.

Lithography was the first new printing process in the West since the invention of woodcut and intaglio processes. They immediately became popular for advertising and illustration because of the wide range of nuances possible. It was also an easier process to mass-produce images for magazines and books because it did not involve carving out the image from a plate.

The first color lithographs, resulting from printing the same image on multiple stones, each with a different color, began to evolve as early as the 1840s. The most sophisticated of color lithographs could use up to twelve stones. By the beginning of the 1900s, the genre of the "art poster," wherein classically trained artists designed posters for advertising, was a well-established tradition.

After color lithography had transformed French posters in the 1890s, the technique was soon adopted in Switzerland. It introduced what would become a rich genre of graphic design. The earliest Swiss posters of this renaissance were mostly travel and tourist-oriented works. Between the 1920s and 1940s, Swiss graphic designers developed what would become the dominant Swiss poster style, the "object poster." This was characterized by large, single images for products that were isolated on blank backgrounds.

Otto Baumberger was one of the earliest exploiters of the object poster style, setting very high standards for the genre. Born in Alstetten (Zurich), Baumberger mastered lithography at the School of Applied Arts (Gewerbeschule) in Zurich, and then studied design in the Munich Academy in 1908. He also studied painting, with which he always hoped to achieve acclaim. His true calling ended up being in graphic design.

Baumberger took a job with the design firm of J.E. Wolfensberger in Zurich, where, in 1911, he produced his first poster. His early poster designs were similar to the reductive forms of German and French posters of the period where people and objects were simplified to flat color shapes, an influence of Post-Impressionism. These simplified shape designs occurred intermittently throughout his career. By 1920, he combined his mastery of chromolithography and his interest in realist painting to produce some of the earliest object posters.

Correlation to Davis programs: Experience Art: Unit 8 Beauty, 8.3 – Traditions, Our Designed World, Information Design