The Armchair Skier

There’s only one reason that a dedicated skier would forsake the snowy villages of Zermatt or Aspen in midwinter and fly to London or New York. And that would be to bid on vintage ski posters at the annual winter sales at Christie’s in South Kensington and at Swann Galleries in Manhattan, a competition that can be as furious as any NASTAR race on the slopes. “It’s a purchase of passion, as most art buying is,” says Nicholas Lowry, president, principal auctioneer, and director of the poster department of Swann Galleries as well as a familiar face from PBS’s Antiques Roadshow. “They buy for the destination, the artist, and the design.”

With their vibrant colors and bold graphics, classic ski posters from 1910 to about 1960 served to both entice and educate the public about an emerging and exotic winter sport. The best examples are sizable pieces of ephemeral art, designed to catch your eye when you were rushing down the stairs of the metro in Paris or awaiting a tram in Berlin. They were meant to transport you from your gloomy northern European city to a perpetually sunny mountaintop in the Alps, where beautiful, stylish, incredibly fit young people were flirting, adjusting their gear, and occasionally even skiing. “Ski posters combine travel, sports, and fashion, and that’s a very powerful combination,” says Jim Lapides, president of the International Poster Gallery in Boston and a longtime dealer in the field.

But it’s the artistry that distinguishes the stellar examples. You’d be hard pressed to think of another sport that has been the subject of work by such high‑caliber graphic artists as Herbert Bayer, Herbert Matter, Roger Broders, and Emil Cardinaux. The best pieces are textbook examples of Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Jugendstil, Wiener Werkstatte, and even Surrealism. The earliest ones date back to the 1890s, when Jules-Abel Faivre created “Sports D’Hiver Chamonix (Mont-Blanc),” depicting a young woman in a long dress descending a slope on skis using a single steering pole. The Swiss artist Cardinaux worked around the turn of the century, making iconic, moody images of the Matterhorn for Zermatt. Broders designed classics in the 1920s and early 1930s, honing an exuberant Art Deco style. And Herbert Leupin added Swiss whimsy to the genre in the 1940s.

But photomontage was where the artists made their boldest moves. Bayer, a Bauhaus member, used it to great effect in the 1940s when he turned his attention to Aspen, integrating iconic images of aspen leaves with bold graphics and photomontage. And the most striking was arguably Matter, whose collaged images, incorporating a pretty face, a ski glove, or a tram, seem to jump out at you.

Clever design is rampant in ski posters, and tram cars, backpacks, leather ski boots, ski poles, and skis stuck in the snow abound. Glamour is big, smiles predominate, and many images are borderline camp. There are fewer action shots than you might imagine. Sometimes posters capture a moment before or after the act of skiing (like sex), as in Erich Hermes’s image of a handsome guy smoking a cigarette in a folding chair, his face bronzing in the Swiss sun and mountain glare. In Sascha Maurer’s poster of a young woman waving while riding a lift and wearing wooden Flexible Flyer skis, sex appeal and technology intertwine. These posters allow you to follow fashion through the years, see when stretch pants were introduced (the 1930s), watch ski boots evolve (good-bye, leather!), and celebrate the wintry decades before global warming.

One of the great images is Carl Kunst’s “Bazar Nürnberg” from 1912, a favorite of Lapides’s. “This is a totally quiet poster,” he says of the elegiac image of a skier adjusting his bindings in the forest. “He’s out there, the way you are in the morning, adjusting your skis in the middle of nowhere amid nature. It’s what posters are about. They can transport you to a place you want to go.”

With a head start on skiing, Europeans were also way ahead of Americans when it came to ski posters. France, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, and Italy produced hundreds of striking images, especially during the golden era of poster design, from about 1925 to 1955. Posters for North American resorts began to appear in the mid‑1930s, when Smugglers’ Notch and Sun Valley opened. In time, the New Haven, Union Pacific, and Canadian Pacific railroads produced posters, offering to take travelers to such “faraway” ski retreats as Vermont and the Rockies. Ski hotels like Seiler Hotels in Zermatt employed posters to attract guests, as did the Hannes Schneider Ski School in North Conway and ski manufacturers like Northland.