Julius Klinger was born in Dornbach, near Vienna, in 1876, and moved to Berlin in 1897, at about twenty-one. From 1900 he worked for Hollerbaum & Schmidt, the printing house and advertising agency that helped lead poster design into the modern age. Klinger became well known by designing posters for that printer, and the work they did together earned him an international reputation.

The five works all come from his years as a working advertising designer, each made to sell something different. The first promoted a Berlin humour paper in 1901. Another advertised his own employer in 1910, a third invited visitors to the city's Zoological Gardens and its military band, and a fourth announced a theatre exhibition in the zoo's exhibition halls. The fifth carried a cigarette-paper campaign across Vienna in 1919, and museum records name the same Berlin printer for three of the posters.

How many Das kleine Witzblatt poster designs are known?

Das kleine Witzblatt was a Berlin humour paper, and around 1901, early in his years with the city's printers, Klinger designed a poster to promote it.

The Kunstbibliothek in Berlin records a lithograph with this title, printed in orange-red and black ink by Hollerbaum & Schmidt. The record shows the printer's part in advertising Klinger made in his first years in Berlin.

One title didn't mean one picture. The Poster House museum in New York exhibited at least two different Klinger designs for the publication in its retrospective Posters for a Modern Age, both dated around 1901. One shows a red-faced judge whose nose is pinched by a giant red crab. The other shows a large man who wears a top hat and carries a white cane, and that design is the one behind the reproduction we sell today. So a single title covered at least two distinct advertisements, and surviving sheets with the same name aren't all the same picture.

The sheets are now held in different collections. A sheet with this title is held in Berlin by the Kunstbibliothek, and the Albertina in Vienna records another print with the same title, also printed by Hollerbaum & Schmidt in Berlin. The Viennese record dates it to around 1901, though its attribution to Klinger isn't firm. If you ever meet two Das kleine Witzblatt posters side by side in different collections, they may be two versions of one commission rather than two copies of a single sheet.

How did Hollerbaum & Schmidt advertise its own posters?

In 1910 Klinger made an advertisement for the firm that employed him. Hollerbaum & Schmidt had printed his work since his early Berlin years, and now the firm itself became the subject of a poster. This advertisement for his own employer turns the usual arrangement around: the poster promotes the people who print posters.

The firm had been founded in Berlin in 1897 by Erich Gumprecht, and by 1910 it was one of the places where modern poster design was being worked out. Klinger worked there alongside other leading designers: Lucian Bernhard, Ernst Deutsch, Julius Gipkens and Paul Scheurich.

The post was full-time, and it didn't hold him back from other work. While employed by the firm he drew for magazines, wrote books on ornament and design and taught private students.

Commercial art, in his view, served a client's goals and messages, while fine art put self-expression first. By that rule this poster was commercial art, and here the client was the firm that paid his salary.

A copy belongs to The Wolfsonian-FIU in Miami Beach, in the Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection, and it later appeared in the museum's retrospective of Klinger's work shown there from 6 October 2017 to 1 April 2018. Among the other Klinger designs in that show were his posters for Lustige Blätter, Tabu and RAVAG.

What else did Zoologischer Garten advertise?

The flamingo advertised more than the zoo. The poster promoted Berlin's Zoological Gardens and, alongside the animals, a military band that performed there. This poster for the Berlin zoo was in effect a pair of invitations in one: come to the gardens, and hear the band while you're there.

Animals were among Klinger's favourite subjects for advertising, and here the animal was one visitors could actually see at the zoo. The poster shows a poised flamingo at the centre, with pink accents on the bird and Art Nouveau lettering around it.

The museum dates the poster to 1910 and records it as a colour lithograph printed in Berlin by Hollerbaum & Schmidt. The printer that had used Klinger's poster to advertise its own firm that year also printed this one.

An original is held by the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington, where it can be requested from the Prints & Drawings Study Room. A small detail survives with it: the record notes that the military band played daily. Because the band played every day, a visitor could plan a visit to hear it.

What exhibition did Theaterausstellung in den Ausstellungshallen am Zoo announce?

The Kunstbibliothek in Berlin records a 1911 lithograph by Klinger advertising a theatre exhibition in the city's Ausstellungshallen am Zoo. The record names the halls themselves as the organiser and Hollerbaum & Schmidt as the printer. This poster for a theatre exhibition therefore had the venue as its client and the familiar firm as its maker.

Costumed figures and animals, treated with wit, recur through his theatre, exhibition and product posters. This poster shows a tall, dark figure wrapped in broad red-and-black stripes, its face in profile, and it invited people to an exhibition about theatre rather than to a single performance.

A large German Theatre Exhibition, which no record ties to this poster, ran there from November 1910 to January 1911, organised by the Ausstellungshallen GmbH and the Gesellschaft für Theatergeschichte. It was limited to German-language theatre and combined a trade exhibition with a scholarly historical section.

That large show had been built on a Viennese predecessor of 1892, and the Berlin critics received it mostly badly. Their chief complaint was the historical section's many paper documents.

Today the lithograph sits in the Kunstbibliothek of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, which holds about 3,600 original posters from 1840 to 1914. This theatre poster is among the roughly 220 posters and poster designs by Klinger in that collection.

How did Tabu advertising reach across Vienna?

Dated 1919, the Tabu poster we reproduce advertised Tabu cigarette rolling papers. The campaign it belonged to had begun the year before and ran across Vienna. After years of drawing for Berlin clients, Klinger was now working on a brand that had to be recognised all over a single city.

Klinger planned Tabu as one strategy that ran from small newspaper advertisements all the way up to billboards. The Tabu name appeared both in what people read and in the streets.

Painted firewalls, construction-site fences and the winter panelling placed around Vienna's fountains supplied further sites for the campaign.

When The Wolfsonian-FIU looked back at one of his 1919 Tabu posters, it described Klinger's skill with graphic line as central to the identity of the cigarette-paper company. Our poster builds its stern, mask-like face and its blunt letterform from the same hard-edged shapes.

The museum holds two distinct Tabu posters dated 1919, and it included a Tabu work in its Klinger retrospective of 2017-18.

Did you know?

• In one poster for Hollerbaum & Schmidt, Klinger drew himself and the firm's other designers as cacti.
• His portfolio Poster Art in Vienna held forty designs, many of them by his students.
• He dreamed of America and hoped the portfolio would bring him to that country, which he hadn't yet visited.
• A Tabu poster was later reproduced in the portfolio Poster Art in Vienna, published in Chicago by Julius Wisotzki around 1923.
• Because he was Jewish, the Nazis persecuted him, and in 1942 he was deported to the extermination camp near Minsk.

Questions people ask about Klinger

Was Klinger trained in Vienna? He was. Klinger was born in Dornbach, near Vienna, on 22 May 1876, and he studied at the Technologisches Gewerbemuseum in Vienna. His first job came in 1895 at the Viennese fashion magazine Wiener Mode, where he met Koloman Moser, who later became his teacher.

What did Klinger make besides posters? From 1911 he taught design at the Berlin Reimann School.

Did his work reach America? His work was meant to reach American readers through the portfolio Poster Art in Vienna. Announced as appearing in Vienna and Chicago at the same time, it was in fact conceived, designed and made entirely in Austria.

What was Tabu, exactly? Tabu was a brand of cigarette rolling paper. One of the Wolfsonian-FIU's 1919 Tabu posters carries the name Tabu Antinicotin.

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About the author

Moryarty finds vintage posters in libraries, museums, online collections, private collections and markets, and restores every artwork by hand without changing its original design or colours. Moryarty was founded in 2015, and its collection now holds more than 2,000 vintage posters. Our reproductions are printed in our Barcelona workshop on museum-quality fine art paper with archival pigment inks.

Sources

• Theaterausstellung in den Ausstellungshallen am Zoo, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunstbibliothek
• Das kleine Witzblatt, Kunstbibliothek, museum-digital
• Das kleine Witzblatt, Albertina Sammlungen Online
• Zoologischer Garten, Victoria and Albert Museum
• Posters for a Modern Age, Poster House
• Klinger press release, The Wolfsonian-FIU
• Drawn to America: Klinger's Poster Art, Botstiber Institute
• Theatre Exhibitions, Models and the Quest for Anschauung, Theatre Research International
• Klinger, Wikipedia
• Klinger Tabu 1919, Wikimedia Commons
• Tabu Antinicotin poster, Getty Images
• Klinger, Julius, Vienna Secession