This design is titled, “The Christmas Spirit;” and the designer, Marcel Vertes (among other things an Academy Award winner for art and costume design), has excitingly introduced with it a fascinating preoccupation to be found in the work of a great number of graphics exponents.
As the woman infiltrating a Christmas tree, and the woman above, simulating the spinnaker of a sailboat (and also simulating a perfume), imply, the commotion here is about a perceived high-level involvement of humans in the processes of nature.
Vertes, again, having the sky itself pronouncedly distributed by one’s level of dash (here a level of darkness as to the War).
A.M. Cassandre, now, also in that Surrealist vein. The designer ups the easily read sense of journalists’ newsprint covering world events. Here the optics imply that the human presence is instrumental in the advent of the world being written about.
The caller, this sightline implies, calls the shots (somewhat) for the poles of the conversation.
Here Cassandre has the woman taking creative possession of her nest (and every twig) to stress her stake in the destructiveness of the onrushing War.
To indicate how compelling this vision of reciprocal productivity has been within graphic art, we close with two non-avant-garde instances. The quite straightforward tableau manages to meld the woman with the landscape.
In this pochoir, the cosmos is not merely a decorative touch, but a mapping of the ranges of love.
