warhol un-original

by Art Chantry:

one of my ‘holy grails’. i know i’ll never even get to touch one of these things. but, i’d sure give a lot to get this old showcard poster. i collect old showcards. (most of the newbies still call them ‘boxing posters’ – a terrible term that is painfully, embarrassingly wrong.)

i also know that most people think this as an ‘andy warhol original’ (because of their ignorance). so, just for that fact alone, this is priced through the stratosphere. but, he never touched it. it’s actually done by some anonymous poster person (maybe connected with the club. but, more likely a guy who worked at a poster shop pasting up). i think the research needed to actually document the person who did this poster would be fairly easy.

—the lettering look also looks a lot like like the nyc ‘folkie scene’ lettering style and also looks a lot like FLUXUS lettering of george macunias and the ‘semina’ graphic style of the early california ‘beatnik” scene. so, this look is a lost bohemian look that has gone fairly undocumented in detail and depth. but, a book on this style would be massively cool. such wonderful work was done with this look.—AC

i love the early LA ‘freak’ lettering (pre-psych styling). i also love the use of the old campbell’s soup twins in the corner. most of us tend to forget that back in the early early days of psychedelic posters, the campbell’s soup kids were as popular a pop icon to use as batman, the zig-zag man, silent movie stars and american indian warriors. for some reason, the soup twins disappeared very soon. too bad. they’re such a twisted image. monsters.

…AC:and i think most of this was done with early presstype (transfer ‘rub down’ lettering). i think it hit the market for the first time a couple years earlier. everybody went mad with it. the typeface selection was very limited and resultingly everybody used the same fonts. this looks like frank zappa’s work, as well and the greenwich village scene. it was everywhere – the original “hipster’ lettering style.

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