"Health for Sale' at the Art Museum

When one is selling, it helps to peddle a product that people actually want to buy. Who doesn't want to feel healthy? So you could say that the artists whose work is represented in "Health for Sale" had an easy job of it.

This still didn't prevent them from approaching their task with occasional flashes of genius. The posters in this exhibition range from the 1840s to the 1980s, although certain periods (Art Nouveau, Art Deco) are more strongly represented.

The posters themselves are international: The U.S., England, France, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Italy, Japan and China are all represented. In some cases you'll find an Italian artist working in France to produce a poster in Spanish for use in Latin America. The Age of Symbolism was the epoch in which the world began to become a smaller place.

But the art of the sell remained constant. Selling a cure for gout? Show a gleeful old geezer kicking up his heels; the folks on Main Street will get the message. Is your throat feeling sore? Pastilles au Miel are a veritable gift from the heavens showered upon suffers from an airship.

On the other hand, for that really nagging cough or sore throat, Pastilles Geraudel helped a pair of dapper-looking explorers make it all the way to the North Pole. Imagine what they'll do for you!

Tuberculosis as a spider

In certain cases the posters become a veritable seminar in international relations. For a campaign to eradicate tuberculosis, the Czechs produced a lovely pastoral containing "The Ten Commandments for Care Against Tuberculosis." The Italians conceived of the disease as a bloated spider ensnaring countless victims in its web.

For America, TB was an unwelcome guest being firmly shown the door by a sturdy father protecting his family. The French saw fit to use a simple symbol— a red double-barred cross— to sum up the need for a cure. These diverse images say more than more windy volumes on the differences in outlook between the nations.

Sometimes the posters score political points. Specifique Victorieux may well have been a sovereign remedy for corns, but a post-World War I poster for the product depicts a border crossing and clearly delights in contrasting the happy French soldiers— whose corns have healed— with the miserable German ones.

Huge staring eye

And did Queen Victoria really use Dr. Trabant's Supreme Pills to relieve her coughing spells? And did her enemy, Paul Kruger the Boer leader of the South African Republic, really offer them to her? I rather suspects that he'd have happily watched her choke.

I should point out that some of these posters are really magnificent works of art, all reasons for their existence aside. For the International Hygiene Exhibition held at Dresden in 1911, the German Art Nouveau master Franz von Struck contributed an amazing image of a huge staring eye guaranteed to stop anyone not half asleep in their tracks.

Adolphe Leon Willette's softly pastel Fer Bravis Against Anemia summed up in its imagery the weakness and lassitude of the ailment, while Leonetto Cappiello's ad for Cachou Lajuanie breath-freshening licorice pastelles depicts a modern (c. 1920) woman, cigarette in hand, exhaling a cloud of smoke while wearing a dress that looks like it's composed of tiny flames.

William Helfand has been collecting these posters for decades, and he has a fine eye for the beautiful and/or arresting image. But don't take my word for it— see "Selling Health" for yourself.