Noel Sickles AA Advertising Art

Here are 11 American Airlines ads by Noel Sickles from 1951 and 1953 issues of Fortune magazine.























Noel Sickles has been featured many times on Today's Inspiration. If you're interested in reading those posts, here are the links:

Noel Sickles (1910-1982)

"You have to understand the construction first."

"I decided just to try illustration"

Sickles' painting style

"You get bored doing a certain thing"

Noel Sickles Condensed

Scorchy Smith and the Art of Noel Sickles

Noel Sickles: Early Years

Noel Sickles and the Art of War

Alex Toth on Noel Sickles

Noel Sickles: an "inquisitive, restless genius"

Some Sickles for Readers to Digest

More Sickles for Readers to Digest

Noel Sickles: Condensed in '62

Noel Sickles: Artistic Integrity vs Selling Out

* The Noel Sickles book - a must read for any serious fan of illustration art - is available from IDW Publishing

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A Photo of Lucia Lerner!

I've been so busy at school this week with my involvement on the International Women's Day promotions committee that I didn't have time to put together Today's Inspiration. But when Steve Scott, who recently sent a couple of wonderful Lucia Lerner art scans, sent yet another small batch by the artist, I had to make sure I got them posted right away.

Not only did this latest gift from Steve contain another great Redbook cover by Lucia...



... it included a photo of the artist - wow! At long last, we now know what Lucia Lerner (whom her old co-worker Will Nelson described to me as "the queen" of the Stephens Biondi DiCicco art studio in 1950s Chicago) looked like.



Reading the brief description above about Lucia leaves me even more impressed than I've been since first beginning my research into Lucia's career. Lucia was a single mom raising a daughter on her own, a tremendously talented and successful illustrator and, from all accounts, a tough but fair business woman. All of which makes her exceptional for the times in which she lived.

What better person for a blog about mid-century illustration to celebrate during the week of International Woman's Day!



And speaking of International Women's Day, please take a moment to check out the work of my students in the Graphic Design program at Mohawk College. Each student designed and illustrated a poster of the woman of their choice and the top ten were selected by a jury of faculty members to be printed in multiples and displayed across all the Mohawk College campuses this week. You can see the top ten designs on our class blog.

* Thanks again to Steve Scott for his tremendous gift of these new scans, especially the rare glimpse of the artist.

* If you'd like to see many more examples of Lucia's work and read about her career, I've collected all my research on my Female Illustrators of the Mid-20th Century blog.

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How Lobbyists Used Propaganda to Shape a Nation

Fear is a powerful motivator - and a favourite tool of the propagandist.



The copy in this 1951 Fortune magazine ad (below) sponsored by the trucking company Trailmobile says as much:





But throughout the early '50s, Trailmobile itself sponsored a steady stream of ads in Fortune that used fear as a tactic to push the company's message that America needed more and better roads and highways.



Trailmobile, a trucking company dependent on government funding of road infrastructure for its success, understood the importance of persuading politicians, business people and individual tax payers to support its agenda.



So when in its ad copy, Trailmobile speaks of "certain interest groups" using fear-based "rabid propaganda" back in the 1800s to try to sway public opinion in Philadelphia...

... what do the company's ads say about Trailmobile?



The other day I presented this Trailmobile ad below.



The copy on this ad contains an equally interesting passage:

"These 5 million people ... are not particularly well organized nor are they represented in Washington or the State Capitals by strong aggressive lobbies."

Whether that was true or not, ads like Trailmobile's certainly represent a particularly effective form of lobbying. Influence enough people, especially those in positions of power, and you move your agenda into the spotlight and steer public policy.

I've shown just one example, but Fortune magazine was rife with advertising/propaganda/lobbying of this sort (there was a ton of it in consumer magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Life as well) by all industries. Take for instance, the oil industry.

The oil industry has always been extremely proactive in its use of pro-oil propaganda.



If you accept Richard Alan Nelson's definition of propaganda - "... a systematic form of purposeful persuasion that attempts to influence the emotions, attitudes, opinions, and actions of specified target audiences for ideological, political or commercial purposes through the controlled transmission of one-sided messages..." - then you'd have to say that ads like these from the early 1950s would qualify as pro-oil industry propaganda.



Here the message is certainly one-sided and attempts to influence attitudes and opinions.







But again, the use of scare tactics was also popular in attempting to influence emotions.



Cheap and plentiful oil, more and better roads... its not hard to see how the concerted efforts of different industries were influencing us all - from the individual consumer to the highest levels of government - and in doing so, industry propaganda was shaping our society.



Looks pretty idillic, doesn't it? A typical, prosperous small town somewhere in America. There's the barber shop and there's the five and dime and - oh, look! There's the GM auto dealer! As the ad says, "Right here on Main St."



We've certainly had a love affair with the car for a very, very long time. Getting out on the open road behind the wheel of a shiny new automobile isn't considered a privilege by most of us.



Its a right. Its a necessity.



The auto industry hasn't just been an important component of the North American economy during the last hundred years.



It's been the most important component. The catalyst for a thousand related industries!





And what made it all possible was oil.



Today, oil sells for over a hundred dollars a barrel. Experts predict it could reach $150 by this summer.

Back then, when industry was using propaganda to shape the future, I doubt anyone could have imagined the challenges we would face half a century later. Decaying infrastructure we can't afford to maintain, manufacturing that has migrated off the continent, environmental degradation and health-related consequences and the hollowing out of great cities by commuter populations that number in the millions...



And even if we could've anticipated the problems, I doubt if we'd have done things differently.

Where naysayers see pollution and massive urban sprawl, others see incredible wealth creation and employment for generations comprised of hundreds upon hundreds of millions of people.

I don't present any of this as an indictment of industry or of the propaganda it uses to influence society. We've all been willing participants in the greatest parade the world has ever seen.



I'm just saying it didn't happen by accident.

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Propaganda = ... Advertising?

The word 'propaganda' certainly carries a lot of negative connotations. I'd say that's thanks mostly to its use in association with any regime that we consider to be our enemy. "Nazi propaganda," "Communist propaganda" ; growing up, that's how I always heard the word being used.



But go back to the word's origins, "propagare - to propagate", and you discover its true intent was more benign (or at least neutral) than malicious. It related to the gardener's practice of propagating plants by cutting shoots and planting them. Spreading propaganda meant spreading information in the hopes of persuading a group of people to see things your way.



Richard Alan Nelson defines propaganda in this manner: "Propaganda is neutrally defined as a systematic form of purposeful persuasion that attempts to influence the emotions, attitudes, opinions, and actions of specified target audiences for ideological, political or commercial purposes through the controlled transmission of one-sided messages (which may or may not be factual) via mass and direct media channels. A propaganda organization employs propagandists who engage in propagandism—the applied creation and distribution of such forms of persuasion."

Its political (and mostly negative) connotations really only emerged during World War 1 (and were further refined during WWII).



Propagandists on all sides used 'purposeful persuasion' to target their audiences by focusing on some very specific themes: fear,



... patriotism,



... single-minded focus on a very specific goal,



... and a sense that power (and empowerment) is achieved through a united front.



Those same themes continued to be extremely popular with industrial advertisers of the 1950s hoping to 'purposefully persuade' their target audiences.



Above are some examples from early '50s issues of Fortune magazine. Advertising... propaganda... or both?

* All of these (and many others) are in my Industry Flickr set

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The Propaganda of Capitalism

Last week's series of American Legion magazine covers resulted in an interesting discussion in the comments section about Communism, Capitalism and the nature of propaganda. It got me thinking once again about how industry presented itself to the public through advertising during the mid-century. So I pulled out my stack of early 1950s Fortune magazines and found something very interesting.

The cover of the February 1953 issue of Fortune describes how this issue contains an in-depth look at the Soviet military/industrial complex.



Ironically, those 4 articles on Russia share space with an ad campaign unlike any I've ever seen - in Fortune or any other magazine.



General Electric chose that issue to present a multi-page ad campaign extolling their seemingly limitless accomplishments in industrial innovation.



The design esthetic GE employed for this campaign - a multitude of propaganda-style mini-posters - is so similar to that seen in Russian Constructivist art, one could easily imagine these posters being produced behind the Iron Curtain by some Soviet "Ministry of Machine Parts."



Sometimes the imagery (and the message) is fervently militaristic.





Sometimes it is aptly industrial.



Often it is remarkably pleasing, despite some really dull subject matter...



... and sometimes its amusingly obscure (to anyone but the hardcore technician, that is).



But what really impresses me is how consistently visually excellent it is. I could stare at these posters for hours. I could see hanging them on my walls!



Page after page after page of clean, colourful, simple, beautiful poster design - about subject matter I (and I'm guessing most other people) have absolutely no interest in!

These posters make the dull, utilitarian mechanisms of industry seem like something actually worth celebrating!



But then, isn't that the role of advertising... and propaganda?

* You'll find many more examples of mid-century 'industrial propaganda' in my Industry Flickr set.

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