The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
A. M. Cassandre · colour lithograph poster, an upright sheet, printed in Paris in 1935 in more than one size and with its lettering varied for more than one market · a liner seen bow on from very low, almost at the waterline, the hull rising to fill nearly the whole height of the sheet as a vast dark wedge, the white superstructure reduced to a few planes at the top, a band of sea at the foot, a scatter of tiny white birds at the bow and a block of lettering beneath naming the ship, the line and the route · made for the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, the French Line, to announce its new liner Normandie, whose maiden voyage from Le Havre to New York was in late May 1935 · the unit scored is the design as one work, the image as printed in the edition of 1935; its sizes, languages and later printings are versions of the one design, and their differences of lettering are context
Mode
The French advertising poster of the 1930s at its barest: the product presented as a reduced, heroic object, without narrative and without persuasion in words; the fullest statement of the maker’s manner
Mythos
The liner as the colossus of the modern world, the cathedral of the machine age, the prow as the nation going out across the ocean; the facade or the idol in the frontal symmetry, the cliff or the leviathan in the scale; summoned more than built
Phase
Made in 1935 for the maiden voyage of that year; the ship lost in 1942, the poster outliving it by more than eighty years
Presentation
Colour lithograph on an upright sheet in more than one size; few colours, the hull modelled in smooth graded tone and everything else flat; the lettering drawn to the image
Register
Awe; a sublime of power, slightly dreadful, held as a single impression
Scale
One ship, seen as its forward hull and upper works; one band of sea; one flock of small birds; one block of lettering; no human figure
Governing Proposition
A liner is seen from the water, bow on, from almost at the waterline. Its hull rises through nearly the whole height of an upright sheet as a single dark wedge, modelled in smooth graded tone, with the white superstructure reduced to a few planes at the summit. A band of sea runs across the foot, a few tiny white birds turn at the prow, and the ship’s name is lettered beneath the hull as the ground it stands on. There are no passengers, no deck, no luxury and no human figure. The wager of the poster is that a ship can be sold by its scale alone, the viewer placed as small as the birds, and that a machine of the age can be shown not as a vessel one boards but as a presence one stands under.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
A. M. Cassandre, born Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron (1901 to 1968), designed Normandie in 1935 for the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, the French Line, to announce its new liner, the Normandie, which made her maiden voyage from Le Havre to New York in late May of that year. It is a colour lithograph, printed in Paris, on an upright sheet. It was printed in more than one size and with its lettering varied for more than one market, and it was reprinted after the first run. The unit scored is the design as one work: the image as printed, in the edition of 1935. The sizes, the languages and the later printings are versions of the one design, and their differences of lettering are context.
The ship is seen bow on and from very low, almost at the waterline. The hull rises to fill nearly the whole height of the sheet, widening as it nears the viewer, so that the prow is a vast dark wedge. The white superstructure and the line of the decks are reduced to a few planes at the top. A band of sea runs across the foot. At the bow a scatter of tiny white birds is the one measure of scale. Beneath, a block of lettering names the ship and the line, with the route. The hull is modelled in smooth graded tone, done with airbrush or spray in the drawing and carried into the lithographic stones, so that the steel reads as a single lit volume; everything else is flat. There is no human figure.
Judged element by element, the sheet resists subtraction almost everywhere. Without the birds the ship has no size. Without the sea the hull floats in a void and loses its thrust from the water. Without the lettering the poster loses its office, which is to name a ship and a route, and the hull loses the ground it stands on. The upper works are already as few as a liner can be drawn in; fewer, and the ship would be a wedge and not a liner. What yields is what the commission required rather than the image: the route line and the line’s name, which change from version to version without loss. It is one of the barest images of its kind, and its bareness is compelled by its argument, which is scale.
Movement II
The viewpoint is the knowledge. Ships were usually drawn in profile, and in profile a liner is long, elegant and passing, a thing seen from the quay. Here the profile is refused. The viewer is put in the water below the bow, as small as the birds, and the ship is tall, advancing and overwhelming, a thing undergone. The upright sheet, taller than it is wide, takes the shape of the bow, so that the format of the poster and the form of the ship coincide. A photograph from the same place could say some of this, the scale of modern industry, if less completely; that is what holds the form below the top of its kind.
The elevation is the oldest kind there is: grandeur through scale, the mass that exceeds the eye. The low viewpoint makes the viewer look up, and the hull widens toward the viewer as if about to pass over. The graded black of the bow against the light gives the steel a gravity that flat colour would not, and the small white of the superstructure at the summit is the release. It is a sublime of power, slightly dreadful, and at poster size it works on the street at a distance and again close to. It rises once, in one impression, and does not rise again. There is one summit and it is the whole work, which is the nature of the form.
One law governs the sheet: reduction to geometric planes, with modelling kept for the one thing that must have mass. The hull is the only body in a world of planes. The letters are planes; the birds, small flat flecks, are planes again; sea, sky, ship, birds and name are drawn under the same rule of simplification and the same frontal symmetry. Nothing belongs to another manner. The making is equal to the law. The graded tone of the hull carries from the drawing through the stones without banding; the colours are few and exact; the perspective of the bow is forced to the edge of the plausible and held there, so that the hull looms without toppling. The cost is range: one object, few colours, no figure, and no passage of touch over a large field.
Movement III
The birds are the smallest things on the sheet and the ones on which it turns. They are placed at the bow, where the eye arrives, and they are the one unit by which the hull is measured; without them it is a shape, with them it is a cliff. They make nature the measure of the machine. Beneath the hull the name of the ship is lettered as a plinth, and the ship stands on it: the nation is the base. The orders the sheet holds, industry, the nation, commerce and travel, the sea and the birds, and the human scale present only as the viewer’s own smallness, are bound together by these two placings. The passengers, the crew and the builders are nowhere, and neither are labour, the family, history or the sacred.
What the sheet discloses can be stated. The machine of the age is shown as a thing larger than those who made it and those who use it: not a vessel one boards but a presence one stands under. That is a true account of how the industrial colossus was felt in the 1930s, and the poster makes it visible without a word. It also shows what the line believed its passengers wanted, for it sells by awe rather than by comfort. But it states these as one overwhelming impression, and it does not turn the awe on itself. The sharper truths of the liner, the class decks, the emigrants, the state subsidy and the war that would take the ship, are brought to it from outside.
The particular ship becomes a type: the liner as the colossus of the modern world, the cathedral of the machine age, the prow as the nation going out across the ocean. The frontal symmetry is that of a facade or an idol, and the scale makes the hull a natural feature, a cliff or a leviathan. The ship stays particular; it is this ship, named at its foot. But the old pattern that would make the liner a figure of passage, the voyage, the crossing, the arrival, is named in the route line and not built into the image, and the colossus stands without a counterpart. The myth the sheet carries is the age’s myth about itself, and the sheet shares it rather than shaping it.
Movement IV
Behind the sheet stands the maker’s own work. In 1931, four years earlier, his L’Atlantique had already made a liner a monumental hull, rising over a tiny tug. His railway posters of 1927, Étoile du Nord and Nord Express, and the earlier woodcut-like Au Bûcheron of 1923, had made the poster a field of geometric planes, graded tone and integrated lettering. By 1935 he was the leading poster designer in France, and the line came to him for this sheet. The turn against the advertising poster at large is real: no picture of the ship at sea, no deck, no passengers, no luxury, only the hull as an abstract wedge, from an angle the photography and the cinema of the period knew. Against his own path it is not a turn. It is the fullest statement of a manner, a wager on a proven way.
The same holds for what the sheet did to its field. It fixes, at its fullest, a way of making the advertising image a monument: the product as a reduced, heroic object, with no narrative and no persuasion in words. The image became the emblem of the ocean liner and of the Art Deco travel poster, and the low bow-on hull has been repeated in travel and shipping posters and in pastiche ever since. Much of that reach belongs to the maker’s body of work rather than to this sheet, and much of its presence is reproduction. It is strong in its field and narrow beyond it.
This is what holds the work below Tier IV. Its necessity, its making and its inner law stand high, and its survival is whole; but the axes of consequence stand in the sevens. Its disclosure is a single impression shared with its age, its archetype summoned rather than built, its swerve the fullest statement of a manner already made, and its reach as much the maker’s as the sheet’s. Its return is long attention more than discovery, and among the twelve only the world it holds stands lower. Mucha’s Gismonda (7.6), the nearest poster, stands three tenths below it: higher on the swerve and on reach, level on survival, lower on every other axis, its manner having moved its field more while this is the barer and the more elevated image. Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare (8.1), an image of the same decade, stands two tenths above it, carried by return, by reach and by a form that is its knowledge.
Movement V
The ship did not last. She was seized in New York in 1941, burned at her pier in February 1942 while being converted for war service, capsized, and was scrapped after the war. The poster has outlived its subject by more than eighty years. Its surface is fixed to its moment by its office, an advertisement for the sailings of a ship that burned seven years after the first of them, and that is a charge against it. It is answered by the best evidence there is: the design, made to be pasted up and replaced, has outlasted the thing it sold, whole.
It survives in original lithographs from the first and the later printings, and the image is intact in every respect that makes it. Paper and lithographic ink are perishable sheet by sheet, but the design is multiplied and does not hang on any one sheet. Its presence has been continuous and very wide: it is among the most reproduced posters of the century, sold as prints and on objects, and that kind of fame counts for little. It has been studied for about ninety years in the history of graphic design, in exhibitions of the poster and of Art Deco, and in writing on the liner as an image of modernity. The attention keeps returning to the same things, the viewpoint, the birds, the graded tone, the lettering, the fate of the ship; the sheet is made to be grasped at once, and it is.
Since 1942 it has carried a meaning it was not made with: an elegy for a world that did not last, the colossus gone within seven years. That meaning is history’s, not the sheet’s. Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster (7.3), a poster of 2008, stands six tenths below it. Singin’ in the Rain (7.9) stands level with it, higher on elevation and on reach, lower on making and on necessity, and so does the Glass House (7.9), which takes disclosure, myth, swerve, return and reach where the poster takes making and necessity. In the image the ship has not burned. It is still coming on out of the sheet, bow first, the birds still turning at the prow, the name still under it.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged element by element, the sheet resists subtraction almost everywhere. Take away the birds and the ship has no size: they are the one unit by which the hull becomes colossal, placed at the bow, where the eye arrives. Take away the band of sea and the hull floats in a void and loses its thrust from the water. Take away the lettering and the poster loses its office, which is to name a ship and a route; and the lettering is set as a plinth, so that the hull stands on the name. The upper works are already reduced to a few planes. What yields is small: the route line and the line’s name are required by the commission rather than by the image, and in the versions they vary without loss.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Something can be stated. The machine of the age is shown as a thing larger than its makers and its users: the viewer is placed in the water, below the bow, as small as the birds, and the ship is not a vessel one boards but a presence one stands under. That is a true account of how the industrial colossus was felt in the 1930s, made visible without a word. A second meaning is plain: the poster sells by awe rather than by comfort, which shows what the line believed its passengers wanted. But the sheet states these as one overwhelming impression and does not turn the awe on itself. The sharper truths of the liner, its class decks, its emigrants, its subsidy, its war, are brought to it, not disclosed by it.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The elevation is real, and it is the oldest kind: grandeur through scale, the mass that exceeds the eye. The low viewpoint makes the viewer look up, and the hull widens toward the viewer as if about to pass over; the birds turn the ship into a cliff. The graded black of the bow against the light gives the steel a gravity flat colour would not, and the small white of the superstructure at the summit is the release. It is a sublime of power, slightly dreadful, and at poster size it works on the street at a distance and again up close. What holds it below the top is frequency: the sheet rises once, in one impression, and does not rise again. That is the form’s nature, and it is not charged as a fault.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The particular ship becomes a type: the liner as the colossus of the modern world, the cathedral of the machine age, the prow as the nation going out across the ocean. The image is built toward that. The frontal symmetry is the symmetry of a facade or an idol, and the scale set by the birds makes the hull a natural feature, a cliff or a leviathan, rather than a made thing; the particular is kept, for it is this ship, named at its foot. But the archetype is summoned more than constructed. The colossus has no counterpart, the sea is a band rather than an element in play, and the voyage, the crossing and the arrival are named in the route line and not built into the image. The sheet shares its age’s myth of itself rather than shaping it.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The turn is real in the field of the advertising poster: no picture of the ship at sea, no deck scene, no passengers, no luxury, only the hull as an abstract wedge, seen from an angle drawn from the photography and the cinema of the period and from the geometry of the avant-garde. But the stake was largely placed earlier. The maker had made the liner a monumental hull four years before in L’Atlantique, and had made the poster a field of geometric planes, graded tone and integrated lettering across the 1920s; by 1935 he was the leading poster designer in France, and this was a commission from a client who had chosen him. The low frontal view of a ship had currency in the photography of the decade. This is the fullest statement of a manner, not its departure.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Change the form and what the work knows goes with it. Seen in profile, as ships were usually drawn, the liner would be long, elegant and passing, a thing seen; seen bow on from the water it is tall, advancing and overwhelming, a thing undergone. The viewpoint is the knowledge. The upright sheet, taller than it is wide, is made into the shape of the bow, so that the format of the poster and the form of the ship coincide; the graded tone gives volume to the one object and leaves everything else flat, so that the hull is the only body in a world of planes. The lettering beneath makes the name the ground the ship stands on. Held below the top because the form is that of a single impression, and a photograph from the same viewpoint could say some of it.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The evidence is of long attention rather than deep return. The sheet has been studied for about ninety years in the history of graphic design, in exhibitions of the poster and of Art Deco, and in writing on the liner as an image of modernity, and it is one of the canonical examples in teaching. But the attention returns to the same things: the viewpoint, the birds, the graded tone, the lettering, the ship’s fate. A poster is made to be grasped at once, and this one is; returning confirms more than it discovers. Some formal depth repays looking: the play of flat and modelled, the near symmetry broken by the slight angle of the bow, the placing of the birds. Its later meaning, an elegy for a colossus lost within seven years, is supplied by history, not by the sheet.
Score: 7.2 / 10
The field is the French poster, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the sheet fixes, in its fullest form, a way of making the advertising image a monument, the product as a reduced, heroic object without narrative or persuasion in words, which the maker’s practice had put into the French poster across a decade. As one work its own reorganisation of possibility is modest beyond his earlier sheets. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the image became the emblem of the ocean liner and of the Art Deco travel poster, and the low bow-on hull has been repeated in travel and shipping posters and in pastiche ever since. Much of that reach belongs to the maker’s body rather than to this sheet, and much of its presence is reproduction, which is counted under survival. Strong in its field, narrow beyond it.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at ninety-one years. Form: whole. The design survives in original lithographs from the first and later printings, and the image is intact in every respect that makes it. Presence: continuous and very wide, among the most reproduced posters of the century, sold as prints and on objects; reproduction and fame earn at most a tenth, and are counted at most. Fabric: paper and lithographic ink, perishable sheet by sheet but multiplied, so that the design’s survival does not hang on one object. Against it, the surface is fixed to its moment by its office, an advertisement for the sailings of a ship that burned in 1942. That it has long outlived its subject is the axis’s best evidence, and charge and evidence meet at the usual figure for the span.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged to the same anchors as a painting, the command of the medium is very high and load-bearing. The graded tone of the hull, carried from the drawing through the lithographic stones without banding, makes the steel a lit volume against flat planes. The colours are few and exact. The drawing of the bow’s widening, its perspective forced to the edge of the plausible, is controlled so that the hull looms without toppling. The birds are placed with a precision that sets the scale of the whole, and the lettering is drawn to the image, not added to it. Every effect the poster has is made in the making. Held below the top because the means are narrow by design: one object, few colours, no figure, and no passage of colour or touch held over a large field.
Score: 8.8 / 10
One law governs the sheet: reduction to geometric planes, with modelling reserved for the one thing that must have mass. Take the two most distant elements, the graded black volume of the hull and the flat letterforms at the foot, and they obey it: the letters are planes, the hull is the one body, and the birds, small flat flecks, are planes again. Sea, sky, ship, birds and name are drawn under the same rule of simplification and the same frontal symmetry, and nothing in the sheet belongs to another manner. Within its range the coherence is complete. It is held below the upper band because the range the law covers is narrow, one object, one moment, one register, and narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The sheet holds more than its single object suggests: industry and engineering; the nation, in a ship of French prestige named for a French province; commerce and travel; the natural order, in the sea and the birds; and the human scale, present only by its absence and by the viewer’s placed position below the bow. They are integrated, not listed: the birds make nature the measure of the machine, and the name makes the nation its base. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the person, labour, the family, history and the sacred. The passengers, the crew and the builders are nowhere. A poster cannot hold what a large painting holds, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 6.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, then The Made at 8.8 and The Inner Law at 8.5. A design that has outlived the ship it advertised by more than eighty years, whole in its original lithographs and multiplied beyond any single sheet; a command of lithography in which graded tone, forced perspective, a few exact colours and the placing of the birds carry every effect; and one law of geometric planes, with modelling kept for the hull alone, under which hull, sea, birds and lettering all take part.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.4: industry, the nation, commerce, travel and the natural order are held in one image, with the human scale present only as the viewer’s smallness; the person, labour, the family, history and the sacred are absent. Next above it, The Bottomless Well at 7.2: long attention that returns to the same things, the later meaning supplied by history. Then The Swerve at 7.4: the fullest statement of a manner the maker had already made, at a proven stake. Then The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep at 7.6: the machine of the age felt as a colossus, stated as one impression, and the liner as colossus summoned rather than built.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.3, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 9.0 clears the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 7.8, The Unconcealment at 7.6, The Archetypal Deep at 7.6 and The Swerve at 7.4 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Swerve, 7.4, and The Bottomless Well, 7.2, both below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.4. Three of the five summit conditions are met, the Necessity Cap, the Coherence Floor and the Megethos Floor. The twelve sum to 95.3, an average of 7.94 that displays 7.9. The work stands where its aggregate places it: in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the poster as an image and as a historical object, not from a sheet in hand: well for the image, as one of the most reproduced posters of the century, and for its place in the maker’s work and in the history of the French poster; thinly for its printing history, its editions and the sheets now held, so that where a judgment turns on those it is held more loosely. The work scored is the design as one work, the colour lithograph as printed in 1935, with no single sheet the work. Its sizes, its versions for other markets and its later printings bear on survival only, and their differences of lettering are context. The maker’s L’Atlantique (1931), Étoile du Nord and Nord Express (1927) and Au Bûcheron (1923) are context and are not scored. No words are quoted except the title, Normandie, lettered on the sheet; no statement of the maker’s, the line’s or any critic’s is quoted. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the printing house, the exact sheet sizes and proportions of each format, which languages the versions were lettered in, the exact wording of every version, the number of colours, the printer’s line, the size of the first run, which public collections hold original sheets, and which later designers came out of the maker’s studio.