Snake America Sixty Four
Snake is a bi-weekly email covering salable after-market goods. This week: A Big Mac safety poster and an old Cornell sweater. Reading online? Subscribe.
eBay: Rare alleged Peter Max McDonald's Big Mac safety poster: The seller says this poster, advertising McDonald's Big Mac and promoting concomitant safe eating habits, was of the Peter Max era. They said that in the title, and meant the poster was from an era parallel to Max's big-ticket psychedelic heyday of the late 1960s and 1970s. That era started after he drew the Yellow Submarine for The Beatles in 1968. Maybe before. For a ... decade the German-born artist designed album covers, made posters and collaborated on sneakers. He also was raised in Shanghai, Haifa and Bensonhurst. He licensed his art to General Motors (clocks, 1968), designed the Yes logo and a paint job for Dale Earnhardt (Black #3, Sr.), New York marathon posters, etc. I wrote about the plastic pillows he produced ... a few years later he was making stamps, art for banks and Sprite logos. I think he had another one for a beer brand ... by the time Bill Clinton entered federal office, Max was designing lobby art in Sweden. I'm not sure this poster is Max, who's a vegan. Was he vegan then? He says in an interview he went vegetarian in his 20s, so, before 1968. I wonder how many vegans there were back then in America. Maybe 1,000. In the mid-90s it was hard to buy refrigerated soy milk. One might think that Max's love of colors, America and Corvettes (separately and together), implies support of McDonald's, but that can't be right. Like much of Max's work, this is service art. It tells you how to avoid death when living--when eating a Big Mac. Dietary choices aside, I can't see Max allowing his art to be as bunched up as it is here, there are like four things on the bottom, the lines on George Washington are too tight, it doesn't make sense for Ronald McDonald to be set against a white background, or for there not to be rocket flourishes, or cloud-bursts, or chem-trails, coming out of the photo of the Big Mac. There are no borders either. I think this poster was done over a weekend. It's close, sure. But boy, it's far.
eBay: 1920s Cornell sweater: There is a real glut of garbage college gear, garbage sweaters. A sweater is a hard thing to search for. What do you call the pullovers that look made of insulation? No one knows. Those sweaters have flecks mixed in with the dominant color, though no searchable name. Brooks Brothers, for a couple decades, stocked them. If you weren't there and didn't buy then you missed out. The above-mentioned auction has some nice cuffing and color palette. I like the three stripes, which remind me of dead stock sport socks. But here the stripes don't make sense: on finery like a sweater, athletic flourishes can be puzzling. The genuses here is sports-wear, though, not finery. Pre-War athletic wear is very confusing. Professional and college athletes wore wool sweaters to games, sometimes during, and farmers wore cotton sweatshirts for warming up after taking their yearly baths. Duxbak, a hunting company, made sweatshirts, presumably for those purposes. Hunters wore boiled wool. Athletic wool sweaters are like 19th century dolls. They are scary and it's hard to believe they were designed for their intended purpose. Look at this thing:
Would you give that to a baby? It's so severe. I imagine a young Cornell student-athlete wearing the above-mentioned, after a game and before the Great Depression, his arms itching like crazy. "Why am I wearing a church sweater after this basketball game? Can't we use some of what that hunting party nearby is outfitted with?" "Because those are for farmers," is what he might hear. It's no way to live. Everything wearable was more or less better constructed back then, but not better thought out.
Thanks for reading. I can't walk.
Snake
Last Snake: 1940s moleskin coveralls, felt hats (sold; ended)
Snake Before That: WWII indigo smock, disco yacht shirt (sold; ended)