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Otto Neilsen turned to a series of expressionistic color posters featuring animals as did Klein at times. Neilsen’s prints became instantly popular as art in their own right. That a small airplane logo appeared was barely noticeable in his prints. Like beautiful women, wildlife seemed a Romantic safe substitute for jets.
The jet age did not herald peace and harmony. In fact to accommodate the longer jet runways and noise, airports became located farther from cities and had their own congestion and commuting problems, so that sometimes for every hour spent in a jet, hours were added fighting problems on the ground. Jets suffered the same limitations as other means of travel—plus people now flew so high, intimate contact with ground scenery was lost. The only sights stressed now in poster art were landmarks at the end of the journey. Sites seen on the rest of the trip amounted to mostly plastic and upholstery inside the aircraft. Window seats lost much of the allure to aisle seats for quick ins and outs.
On the one hand, thanks to the jet, the expansion of routes increased awareness of the world and other cultures. Each month seemed to bring some new opportunity, some new destination, a 1960s kaleidoscope of people and cultures. On the other hand, beauty was needed to take people’s minds off maps and airplanes looking increasingly red, either due to the spread of Communism or due to the series of disastrous jet crashes that plagued early commercial jet development, such as seen in the British Comet. So the jet disappeared.
Taking the jet’s place came Pan Am’s most popular poster campaign, its “beautiful women series.” Women were featured in often rich, elaborate, ethnic, native, or national dress (see Figure 4). One could fly anywhere and have everything for only the price of a ticket. Pan Am insiders say that the women who posed for these posters were New York models and most shooting was done in New York. Most large carriers followed suit with their own beautiful women series—something safe for the time and piggy-backing in a more conservative way on the Playboy images and bicultural, shrinking world interest of the 1960s.
Sometimes the beautiful women series went too far, as in a revealing Pan Am poster of Rio (see Figure 5). This controversial poster featured three dancers wearing the skimpiest of costumes in provocative poses. This poster was quickly pulled after the mayor of Rio stated that these dancers represented another region of Brazil, but not Rio. He feared tourism might be hurt. In the process he created an instant collectible. While one airline advertised sexually suggestive “Fly Me” ads picturing flight attendants, most posters of the period focused on beautiful “native” women awaiting the traveler at the destination.
The ethnic or folk tendencies often appear too in the art work of David Klein. Klein combined the folk with national historical associations. Usually his posters show someone dressed in traditional dress alongside a famous national monument or icon for which the nation is known: Big Ben, pyramids, windmills. They usually are depicted against a blank background—even the sky is no longer there. Just as jets disappear, so does the element in which they fly. Land icons become the focus. Another way perhaps to interpret the lack of background or space rather than sky appearing on most of these posters is to say that this is what Sputnik did: turn our attention to space rather than the medium in which jets fly.
Other graphic artists favored a vivid image suspended in white space. The same change could be seen in house design at the time: “spaces” rather than rooms were discussed in home magazines. Poster images began to pick up on circular images, like the earth or a planet in space, or a circular model of atoms so popular in design at the time. Though Pan Am had its photographic beautiful women series, most posters of the time were of graphic rather than photographic design in a retreat from photographic realism of technology and the jet. The human imprint on the poster was needed.
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