Edward McKnight Kauffer was born in Montana in 1890 and moved to London in 1914, where he spent most of his working life and became one of the defining figures of British graphic design.
His posters for London Underground, spanning 1915 to 1940, are among the finest examples of his work. He brought Vorticist and Cubist influences into commercial advertising at a moment when such ideas were entirely foreign to British commercial art.
He also worked extensively for Shell and the Empire Marketing Board, producing some of the best corporate advertising of the interwar period. Kauffer’s work proved that a modernist visual language could sell a bus ticket or a tin of oil just as persuasively as it could hang in a gallery. By the mid-1930s, his posters had become defining pieces of British modernism.
