If you like billboards you are not artistic. Take it or leave it. That’s
the criterion. It’s not my verdict. Ask those who know, the literary
clubs, the art clubs and our distinguished guests from Europe. I can
remember away back when Pierre Loti visited this country and was so
shocked at the glaring billboards that marred the beauty of New York
harbor and blinded his continental eyes with their gaudy colors.
Now, I would like to be both artistic and fond of billboards. I can’t be
both. So I choose--billboards. Everyone who reads these words must make
his choice.
I not only enjoy them; I think they are beautiful. A lovely splash of
color in the grayness of the city, a sincere expression of American
life, so sincere that the critics who take their opinions from Europe
never have been able to sneer us out of them.
We must admit, those of us who admire billboards, that the critics had
their justification in the early days. We have not forgotten the days
when mortgaged farmers prostituted their barns by selling advertising
rights to Hood’s Sarsaparilla and Carter’s Little Liver Pills and to
Lydia Pinkham, and when Bull Durham marred every green meadow from
Boston to Washington. Billboards were an unsavory addition to the
landscape then. But the modern art of bill posting is quite a different
thing and in California it has reached its highest development.
Segregated spots of color in the dun cities, surrounded by well
manicured lawns, supported by classic figures in white and lighted by
dainty top lights. And out along the boulevards, how lovely they are at
night, luminous breaks along the dark highways, suggesting so tactfully
the kind of tire to use or the sort of mattress to lie upon.
The critic has had his mission. He has forced the Poster man.
Fortunately though young America has not taken him seriously. If he
had this country would have missed some of its most distinctive
contributions to Art. The electric sign for instance. That was condemned
as vigorously as the billboard. And today, tell me, anybody, anywhere
what is more beautiful in all the world than the dancing lights of
Market Street at night. In what a unique and vital way they express the
life of the great modern city.
And anything that expresses Life, whether that life be mediaeval or the
life of the machine age, that is Art. There.
How pleased everyone is to know that the pretty Palmolive girl who “kept
her girl complexion” is married and has a sweet little daughter who has
inherited her mother’s skin.
I don’t always take the posters seriously. Now, I don’t believe that
that man “would walk a mile for a Camel.” He’d borrow one first. And
“contented cows.” Cows are always contented. All I’ve known. But they
may have had bolshevikish notions recently, cud strikes, perhaps. Hence
the accent on “contented cows,” to reassure us that there is no “Red”
propaganda in the milk. Then, there is the parrot; what a long time it
takes to teach him to say “Gear-ardelly.” And that sentimental touch,
“If pipes could talk.” They do.
Sometimes, in an absent-minded way, I get them confused, movies and
merchandise, and find myself wondering who’s starring in “Nucoa.” Then
there’s that ecclesiastical looking party, the patron of Bromo-Quinine,
whom I always take for some bearded movie star.
But to return to their artistic merits, they are artistic. Take those
same “contented cows.” What could be more futurist than the coal black
sky under which they so contentedly graze? Or the henna hills so
far away, or the purple grass they chew. Matisse and Picasso, great
modernists, could not out-do those cows.
The cigarette men are particularly interesting. A bit over done. One
cannot help wonder what enthusiasm they would have left for a gorgeous
sunset having spent so much on, a cigarette. But I expect they are good
men at heart and not so sensuous as they appear. There’s that jolly old
boy who hasn’t had such a good smoke in sixty years. One wonders if his
teeth are his own. They all have teeth. Everyone has teeth these days.
It would be a change to see someone on a billboard with his mouth shut.