Empire Marketing Board Posters: Manchester Art Gallery (4-Fold Series)
This is a very interesting booklet about the work of the Empire Marketing Board (EMB) which produced posters in the 1920s and 1930s encouraging Britons to "buy British" or "buy Empire".
What is interesting is the long view the booklet is able to take on the EMB's work. There is a lot in common with the highly acclaimed posters produced in the same period for London Underground, with striking images created by leading artists. However the messages in the EMB's posters are more difficult to relate to than London Underground's fairly uncontroversial desire to see more people tavel by tube.
The booklet asks the questions about how we value the artistic merit of the posters when the messages they are trying to convey are often racist. The racism of the EMB is not a hate filled racism, but it is no less powerful or damaging. In a strange way the EMB's racism is based on a sort of idea of "love" - in the posters it paints a picture of the Empire as a family in which Britain as the parents and the Colonies as the children. While the parents are in charge, parents also have responsibilities to the childern, and the posters tell the British consumer that they can play the part of the good parent by buying goods from the Colonies and so help the children to grow. What in most troubling about the posters is in fact how successful they are, they are subtle and attractive and so it is hard to spot the powerful propaganda message they contain.
One of the posters in the booklet has been used for the cover of a collection of George Orwell's Essays and not knowing the origin of the image I assumed it came from some socialist background, it has the feel of a lot of Soviet art work, and that seemed to sort of fit - although not quite - with Orwell. Now finding it is a detail of an EMB poster it seem rather less appropriate and while the book cover does credit the image to the EMB as well as the artist I wonder how much the person who selected the image knew of the background of its creation?
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