Advertising Outdoors: Watch This Space!

David Bernstein was Creative Director of three major international agencies before founding his own agency, The Creative Business. He has been awarded the Advertising Association's Mackintosh Medal for professional and public services to advertising.

Our cityscapes and highways are punctuated by billboards' big, splashy images and clever messages designed to sell everything from underwear to cigarettes, milk to athletic wear. Outdoor advertising has become a tradition, and Bernstein surveys this commercial art form from the late nineteenth century on in this colorful, high-energy volume. Being British, his focus is continental, but the U.S. naturally makes a strong showing, and the contrast in transatlantic styles is instructive. Bernstein's earliest examples include the brilliant illustrations and posters of artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec and Alphonse Mucha (see boxed review, p.761), who instigated a taste for strongly graphic compositions in outdoor advertising that lasted well into the 1930s and 1940s before the camera finally replaced the artist's hand as the primary medium. Many intriguing trends are traceable both in Bernstein's expert commentary and in contemplating the visual and linguistic puns of contemporary billboards, as images and words compete boisterously for our attention, and styles range from the elegant and soothing to the confrontational and provocative. Donna Seaman

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