Herbert Matter posters

His first known poster, for his home town of Engelberg, dates from 1925. In 1928, he created two more posters, one for Engelberg' summer season and the other for the famous Zurich department store PKZ (September 1928). He did not yet use photomontage in these early works, which were influenced by art deco and cubism.

After working with A.M. Cassandre and Le Corbusier in Paris, Herbert Matter returned to Switzerland in 1932. He initially worked as a photographer. It was at this time that the town of Engelberg commissioned him the production of several advertising brochures.

Matter was also influenced by Russian constructivist artists, in particular the photomontages of El Lissitzky (e.g. "The Constructor", 1924), the experimental films of the Bauhaus and the surrealism of Man Ray. This influence can be seen in his leaflets and posters from the 1930s onwards. Herbert Matter mixes photographs, photographic cut-outs and typographic elements. His colour palette is minimal, favouring plain white backgrounds, black/white or sepia photographs. The skies take an intense blue and touches of red are added, particularly to typographic elements.

In 1933, the magazine "Typographische Monatsblätter" asked him to design the cover of issue no. 5; he also designed the cover of issue no. 10 in 1934.

The PKZ department store and the tourist resorts of Interlaken, Andermatt and Davos also asked him to design their advertising leaflets.

His posters for the SNTO ("Vacances hivernales : vacances idéales", "En route pour la Suisse", "Venez en Suisse par avion") mix photographs of the Alps, portraits of young people, Swiss symbols and typographic elements.

Matter plays with perspective, contrasts of light and a minimal colour palette. His posters are dynamic, modern and cheerful. Thanks to the photomontage technique, viewers can identify with the character depicted.

Herbert Matter changed the tourist poster forever. He was one of the first to successfully combine photography and typography. Thanks to his photomontages, overprints and use of negatives, he revolutionised advertising graphic design.

In his work, he creates a sensation of speed through the use of arrows, and straight and oblique lines. There are no superfluous elements, he goes for the essential, the message is immediately legible.

The first poster for the Engelberg ski resort in 1925 follows the codes of Swiss tourism posters of the time: a view of the mountains bathed in sunlight, the valley relegated to a shadowy background, an elegantly dressed skier admiring the landscape in the foreground, and a detailed text at the bottom of the poster. Matter is already playing with light and shadow. He divides the poster neatly into three zones, as if each part had its own identity: the bright foreground with the skier and the text, the contrasting dark middle ground, the sunny mountain and a plain blue sky in the background. This tripartite structure hints at his future posters, notably "En route pour la Suisse" (1935).

The second poster for Engelberg in summer (1928) further highlights this tripartite division by using large areas of solid colours. Perspective is cancelled out and everything seems closer together. Matter plays with typography, the text Engelberg in white letters (without any other indication) seems "joyful" and twirls like the giant butterfly with wings of the same colour. Nature is in the foreground, the presence of man only appearing in the background with the cable car. The mountain itself stands out against the plain blue background, its bright yellow colour resembling gold. Matter highlights the beauty of natural elements that coexist with a modern world. The cable car near Engelberg, between Gerschnialp and the Trübsee lake, was built in 1927. It was the first permanent cable car in Switzerland.

In September 1928, Matter designed an elegant cubist poster for PKZ department stores. Totally geometric, this poster uses the typical colour tones of the cubist palette (brown, beige). A single oblique line appears in this composition, created by the torso of the groom admiring the brown coat to his left: this alone gives the poster an impression of movement and texture.

A string of children's faces follow the movement of the railway tracks. Herbert Matter uses only photos of the faces and two locomotives to create his photomontage on a plain white background. The message is immediately clear: train travel for children. There are no superfluous elements or landscapes.

At the top of the poster, the number 14 printed in large type is a reminder of the age limit of the railway's offer. Drawn rails, a bridge and a tunnel form the basis of the poster. The only coloured element is the sloping red text, which stands out clearly against the grey-green/sepia tones of the photographs.

This poster was printed in French and German, in two colours, grey-green and sepia.

Following the success of his avant-garde brochure designs, the Swiss National Tourist Office (SNTO), founded in 1917 to promote Switzerland as a travel, holiday and conference destination, commissioned Matter to create a series of tourist brochures and posters.

"Finally, I had the pleasure of working for the Swiss National Tourist Office, who commissioned a sixty-four page summer brochure, a winter brochure and several posters. You may have seen the ones entitled "En route to Switzerland" (and) "Come to Switzerland by plane".
Herbert Matter, interview on 15 February 1936 for Arts et Métiers Graphiques, issue 51.

The use of photomontage, the work on the greys and light of the photographs used, and the dynamic composition present the image of a modern Switzerland. In the leaflet "La Suisse sous la neige", Matter juxtaposed the face of a smiling young woman, his model Trudi Hess, with skiers crossing the Swiss flag, elements he would use again in the poster "Vacances hivernales : vacances idéales" of 1934.

In his first poster for the Swiss National Tourist Office (SNTO), Herbert Matter mixes several elements. On the one hand, a close-up, low-angle portrait of his favourite model, Trudi Hess; on the other, miniature photographs of seven skiers hurtling down a slope as if emerging from the mountain. The poster is crossed by diagonal white lines. This cross-hatched surface links the different elements together, creating an impression of movement from the top - of the mountain and the poster - to the bottom.

With her youthful profile, bright smile, blue eyes and trendy visor cap, Trudi Hess conveys a vision of Switzerland that is modern, sporty and dynamic. Her warm, tanned face suggests the presence of a radiant sun without it actually appearing on the poster. The effect is reinforced by the diagonal lines that suggest the sun's rays.

This optimistic, cheerful Switzerland and this glowing, healthy young woman perfectly convey the message of the German version of the poster: "Schweiz - Winterferien - doppelte Ferien" (In Switzerland, winter holidays count double).

Against a snowy mountain backdrop, the seven skiers slalom across the poster. One of them seems to emerge from inside the Swiss cross, while the tips of another's skis pass in front of the cap's visor. The fourth skier (from the top) springs up inside the poster, his skis remaining partially outside the frame, while the last skier, at the bottom of the poster, slides out of it.

In the composition of this photomontage, Herbert Matter also pays attention to small details that add to the overall dynamism, such as the bottom of the letters "Z" in Schweiz and "E" in Suisse, which is slightly cropped. In addition, the text is angled in the direction of the young woman's gaze, crossing the trajectories of the skiers and the diagonal lines.

For its first campaign to promote car tourism in Switzerland, the Swiss National Tourist Office made a bold choice with this avant-garde poster.

A cobbled road is the star of the poster. It rushes towards the Alps. Its vanishing point, like a target, directs the viewer's gaze towards the twists and turns of the Gotthard Pass, the only way to reach the summits.

As well as a montage of several iconic photographs, this image captures the very essence of Herbert Matter's style: a dynamic composition built around a vanishing point and broad diagonal lines, a sloping text with a clean typography, variations in grey and the interplay of light. The colours are kept to a minimum, with the intense blue of the sky and the red text adding a touch of warmth to the image.

Printed in heliography (tiefdruck), this poster was translated into seven languages and distributed throughout Europe and the United States:

Für schöne Autofahrten die Schweiz (D)
En route pour la Suisse (Fr)
Suvvia ! verso la pittoresca Svizzera (It)
All roads lead to Switzerland (En)
En camino de Suiza (Esp)
Op weg naar Zwitserland (Nld)
Bila till Schweiz (Sv)

It has entered the collections of many museums, including the MOMA in New York.

Some variants have silk-screen overprints with various promotional texts.

A brand new airliner photographed in a low-angle shot dominates a spectacular view of Piz Palü in the Bernina Massif, suggesting a Switzerland between innovation and tradition. In 1935, Swiss Air Lines introduced the Douglas DC-2, then at the cutting edge of technology, and inaugurated the Zurich-London route.

The variations in grey and white of the metal cabin resonate with the play of light and shadow that underlines the reliefs of the sunlit mountain. In the immensity of this imposing landscape, man finds his place at the very bottom of the poster, represented by two roped parties of skiers on the glacier.

Paris-Basel in 1h40

Paris-Zurich in 2h20

Printed in 1981 to mark the 50th anniversary of Swissair, the Swiss airline.

A pair of glacier goggles and a Tyrolean felt hat resting on an ice axe in the centre of the image: in the poster for the summer season in Pontresina, Herbert Matter does not depict any living being, even if the presence of man remains the main subject.

In the middle of a high-altitude meadow, a small lake reflects the Morteratsch glacier of the Bernina massif in the background. This landscape is made up of two photos, linked by a painted area, blurred like fog, which masks the cut-outs.

It's easy to imagine oneself having a siesta in the sun, lying on the grass beside a small mountain lake...

Herbert Matter's style is stripped down to the bare essentials: a young man's face photographed from a low-angle takes up almost the entire poster. The landscape barely appears, relegated to the bottom left of the background, with the silhouette of a single skier running through it.

This sculptural face is reminiscent of the Renaissance David, a symbol of strength and independence, a perfect image of youth and beauty. His eyes protected by a pair of futuristic glacier goggles, he gazes up at the sky reflected in one of the lenses of his glasses.

As in the "Winter holidays: ideal holidays" poster (SNTO, 1934), the tanned face suggests the presence of the sun, which illuminates the entire poster. Similarly, Pontresina as a ski resort is represented only by the tiny figure of the skier and the mountains in the background.

The composition based on different intersecting oblique lines (the face, the skier, the letters of Pontresina) creates a poster of extraordinary dynamism.

The two colours used for the name "engelberg" emphasise its meaning, "engel" in white for angel and "berg" in reddish-brown for mountain: "the mountain of the angel". The letters for Trübsee, the Trüb lake, appear in blue.

Presumably for aesthetic and graphic reasons, Herbert Matter broke an important grammatical rule by writing "engelberg" and "trübsee" without capitals.

In this poster, Matter again plays with the dynamics of the composition: the graphic of Engelberg tilted slightly to the right contrasts with the almost vertical lines created by the redesigned cables of the cable car, while the diagonal position of the three stars contrasts with the verticality of the gloved hand.

A number of changes have been made to this second edition: the photographs and colours are more contrasting; the three stars have been removed; Engelberg and Trübsee have their capitals back; the clouds surrounding the cable car have been removed and the sky is a deep blue.

We do not know whether these changes were approved by the artist, who was on his way to the United States in 1936.

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This bucolic landscape of the Glarus region and Lake Walen is composed of a montage of several photographs, juxtaposed in very distinct shots on large diagonals that create a mountainous and patriotic atmosphere.

For this poster, Herbert Matter assembled a series of iconic subjects close to his heart. In the foreground, an old mountain guide with weathered features, wearing his Tyrolean hat and a pair of glacier goggles, seems to embody a lifetime of experience and wisdom in contact with the summits. Further on, we see a shepherd and his cows in a pasture as green as it is breathtaking, adorned with colourful alpine flowers and cooled by the spray of a large waterfall. In the background, the highest mountain in the canton of Glarus, the Tödi, sits majestically under an immaculate sky in which the handwritten text stands out clearly.

Poster by Melchior Imboden for the Exhibition of Swiss Tourist Posters at the Swiss Museum of Transport in Lucerne (Verkehrshaus) in 2015 and at the Design Center in Seoul, Korea.

"I designed this poster as a tribute to Herbert Matter. I used to live near him. He designed the famous poster for Engelberg with a photo of his girlfriend as the central subject. Like him, I used an old photo of my girlfriend. So this poster is a collage of different photographs, old and new."
Melchior Imboden

In 1936, Matter moved to the United States where he continued his career as a graphic designer and photographer.

He created one of his most famous American posters in 1941 for the Office of Emergency Management's information division, calling on the American people to join civil defence. Matter used a photograph by Arthur H. Fisher of a bald eagle taken at the National Zoological Park in Washington D.C. A symbol of the American nation, strength and freedom, this fierce-looking eagle dives with determination like a fighter plane. The colours of the American flag are echoed in the typography and on a series of oblique lines, reinforcing the impression of dizzying speed.

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