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Kauffer, E(dward Leland) McKnight  

Mark Haworth-Booth

(b Great Falls, MT, Dec 14, 1890; d New York, Oct 22, 1954).

American designer and painter, active in England. He studied painting first, at evening classes at the Mark Hopkins Institute, San Francisco (1910–12), at the Art Institute of Chicago, with lettering (1912), and in Paris at the Académie Moderne (1913–14). In 1912 he adopted the name of an early patron, Professor Joseph McKnight (1865–1942), as a gesture of gratitude. In 1914 he settled in Britain.

From 1915 McKnight Kauffer designed posters for companies such as London Underground Railways (1915–40), Shell UK Ltd, the Daily Herald and British Petroleum (1934–6). One of his master works, Soaring to Success! Daily Herald—The Early Bird (1919; see Haworth-Booth, fig.), was derived from Japanese prints and from Vorticism. In 1920 he was a founder-member of Group R with Wyndham Lewis and others. McKnight Kauffer’s designs included illustrations for T. S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems...

Article

Šíma, Josef  

Jan Rous

(b Jaroměř, March 19, 1891; d Paris, July 24, 1971).

Czech painter and illustrator. Although he was resident in France from 1921, he remained in close contact with contemporary Czech art, especially Surrealism, and with Czech poetry. He participated in a number of exhibitions in Czechoslovakia (e.g. of the Devětsil Union of Artists, and the international exhibition Poetry 1932 in Prague). Šíma’s affinity with Surrealism had a cosmological dimension, which resulted after World War II in works that approached lyrical abstraction. He was especially concerned with rendering the relations between man and the cosmos, and the unity of the universe was a major theme. His work, and his ‘poetic’ approach in particular, had brought him close to the poets René Daumal (1908–44), Roger Vailland and Roger Gilbert-Lecomte (1907–43), with whom he founded the group Le Grand Jeu in Paris in 1927. His continued interest in poetry and cosmological concerns underpinned the iconography of his painting and of his illustrations. Throughout the period between the two World Wars he was concerned primarily with the poetic vision of landscape (e.g. ...