another hankie question - do you recognize this signature or know this series?

M

mercyonthesubway

Registered Guest
Here's my next subject of study, and I have a couple of questions that are more about the production of this hankie, than the scene on it.


I think the picture itself, a little Keefe/Prichard-esque as it is, is much more dependent on the standard fantasy 'Eastern' destination floating around in contemporary novelty prints (background here: http://vintagevoyager.blogspot.com/2010_04_07_archive.html)



But the signature - does anyone know it? The style of this is a bit different from the other Swiss Air souvenir hankies I've seen on Ebay. Does anyone know about the date range of their production? The sticker on this suggests the company was 'Mavir Zurich', but I know next to nothing about them...

Thanks for any thoughts on this!
 
I am wondering if this could be based on Mughal Indian art - they were also famous for minis. The horses really remind me of stuff I was looking at yesterday when I was googling for your scarf.
 
Def was thinking more based upon the idea rather than a specific print or piece of work. I did some more looking - the style of the horses is very interesting.

Can't make out designer name to save my life!

When searching for this, I ended bidding on a cute little Swissair scarf on ebay. It has two bagpipers on it I believe (was a few minutes ago so now I can hardly remember!). I will blame you if I get the bug! :)

Good luck.
 
What a cool find - sorry I didn't see this post earlier! It reminds me of the graphics on some of the old Swissair posters - they did some really cool stuff!

Here's a page from the book from the Airworld exhibition that was done by the Vitra Design Museum a few years ago.
posters.jpg


That logo is absolutely fine, it is the "real thing". As you can see, it has been in use since at least 1950 - up unto 1978, when it was changed again. Before this one, they had an old-fashioned, swirly script dating back to the 30s.

Swissair memorabilia is still quite sought after here in Switzerland, so you certainly made a good find! The name Mavir doesn't ring a bell with me - and I couldn't find anything on Google either, just a company called Mavir that has been liquidated, but nothing about it. That company though was located in Dübendorf, which was the original "home" of Swissair (and was then used by our airforce), before the airport here in Zurich was built (1946-48). Dübendorf isn't far from here.

The designer, I think, is Fritz Butz - I did find some auction results by googling Butz and Swissair here: http://www.artnet.de/artist/589204/fritz-butz.html . Click on the green poster, and you can just make out a fuzzy signature in the left bottom corner, that looks like the one on your hankie. I've never heard of him before, I admit, but judging from the signature, the name had to be Butz or Lutz. Looks like he did both original paintings, illustrations for children's books and artwork for advertisements.
I found a PDF document that give a short view of his career - too bad I couldn't find much else, he lived to 80 after all!
It says he studied at the arts school in Stuttgart (Germany) from 1929 and moved to Zurich in 1931 where he opened his own atelier for graphics. He was a successful painter of ads, stage decorations and as an illustrator. He designed stage decorations for the "Cabaret Cornichon", which is was a famous cabaret or theater here in Zurich 1934-51 - they did comedy, but more of the political sort I think. It also says his landscape paintings concentraded more on "southern landscapes". I also found his name in the archives of the Salzburg Festival, for a theater piece from 1965, listing his name as desginer for stage decoration and costumes. I guess it's very well possible that this was the same guy. He was born in Wasseralfingen in Southern Germany in 1909 and died in Schwerzenbach (which incidentally is the next town to Dübendorf) in 1989.

Karin
 
WOW Karin, that is a seriously brilliant array of research, thank you so much for providing all this information for me. I must admit, I couldn't make head or tail of the signature and was lately thinking along the lines of Curtz or Curtiz... But you're right, the one in the corner of that poster looks the same. I would never have got there on my own.

And this serves me right for thinking of the image as somehow mostly derivative of Keefe. It is fundamentally different in that Keefe uses simplified and only slightly adapted figural motifs from original Persian paintings in fairly decorative patterns. This, I think, is much more of an independent scene with some Middle Eastern stylistic influences woven in.

I must see if I can look up more of his designs off the web, as the results online aren't too extensive. This is what I love about pursuing some kind of weirdly narrow theme (the Persian art thing) - it ends up opening up so many different stories and things of which I was previously completely ignorant.

Totally chuffed with being able to bring these designs here, talk about them, and have so much added to the picture. L
 
Glad to help :duh: . I'm learning loads too here - and I can understand why you want to pursue things.

I've spent a few nights doing endless internet searches too... for painters/paintings. One of a painting my best friend bought here (turns out it was painted by a Swiss aeronautical pioneer!), other times regarding two paintings that my grandparents were given by their neighbour for my mum's birth... one turned out to be a copy after an old master, the other one in the style of an old master. Let's just say that the chief paintings of that neighbour's collection can be seen in Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum these days... It's incredible what you learn and find sometimes through these internet searches!

Artnet.de is a nice page, it shows past auction results. The trouble is just, to really use it, one needs a membership, and that of course is not free... I actually found my friend's painting there too, as it had been in an auction before, but didn't sell.

Karin
 
I *finally* managed to write something up on this, in the context of comparing it to roughly contemporary Keefe designs - I'm provisionally pegging this to around 1957, but always happy to find any context which corrects that:

http://vintagevoyager.blogspot.com/2010/08/very-late-to-tammis-keefes-party-her.html

With extensive thanks to everyone who participated in this discussion, especially to Karin's peerless research skills, and valuable artnet.de subscription, without which I would have been absolutely clueless. I'm not sure I'm doing Butz justice in this post, as I should have done some library searches for his other work, but lack of time... well, it's a start, at least...

And yes, research is addictive - it's amazing what you find when you start digging. Letters and off-line archives are my favourite, but alas trickier to get to than the online variety.
 
Forgot to mention - you have a good point there about Swissair's route Zurich-Athens-Karachi-Bombay-Manila-Tokyo from 1957 which was their longest flight to that date and their first Far East route - maybe your hankie has something to do with that... I never thought about that before, I admit. So far I don't know if they flew anywhere in the Near East before that (though that could well be possible). Hmmm... thinking if it might be worth asking my pal who worked from Swissair's technics department (on-board electronics instructor). Or maybe he knows where to look this up...

Karin
 
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