For the People's Good: Hans Schleger (1898–1976), Poster Design and British National Identity, 1935–60

Abstract

This essay explores the impact on British visual culture during the period c. 1935–47 of modernist graphic designer Hans Schleger (1898–1976), born Hans Schlesinger, who adopted the pseudonym ‘Zero’ in the mid-1920s. Comment is offered on the complex nature of Schleger's German-Jewish-Polish background and his Anglophilia, which can be dated to a period he spent working in advertising in New York (1924–9). Attention is focused on the accomplished design work he produced after he emigrated to Britain in 1932 for British companies and institutions such as Shell-Mex BP Ltd, the London Passenger Transport Board (London Underground), the General Post Office, the Ministry of Transport, Ministry of Food, ICI, British Coal, the British Sugar Corporation and British Railways. Particular comment is made on the importance to the artist of the British and especially the English countryside of the Home Counties and the significance of his experiences in London during the Second World War in moulding his understanding of what he found attractive, admirable and praiseworthy about the British ‘character’ under duress. The essay concludes that it was Schleger's very ‘foreign-ness’, however skilfully camouflaged, which allowed him to study the British with an unusually forensic and revealing gaze. Since the publication in 2001 of a memoir on him by his widow, Schleger's work has featured prominently in a series of high-profile exhibitions held at: the Imperial War Museum, London; the Victoria and Albert Museum; the London Transport Museum; the Ben Uri Gallery, the London Jewish Museum of Art.