Plastic Advertisements

Advertisement for Mennen's talcum powder: the statue of a small baby, squatting, pudgy and cheerful of countenance; toes curled; in marble, with pedestal de- scription.

Advertisement for Listerine shaving soap: bearded bust, staring with curiosity and disapproval upward, into an imaginary mirror.

Advertisement for Marlboro cigarets: statue of a tall, bronzed woman, smoking a Marlboro; at her left, a man stands with a cigaret of similar brand drooping between his fingers; in the day time, smoke, from an invisible source, curls from the mouths of both figures; by night, the ends of their cigarets glow with an electric fire.

Advertisement for autocars: a large skinny horse, sculptured as he stumbles slowly along a road; surmounted by the figure of a man carrying a banner on which, in gold lettering, is traced the name of a brand of automobile.

What are these? Mad notions sprung from the mind of some debauched com- mercial artist? To the layman, they may well be so conceived. To alert advertising agents, who have followed with interest and alarm the developments of plastic advertising, to residents of Southern Cali- fornia who are accustomed to seeing sculptured advertisements, they are well within the bounds of possibility. Plastic advertising, in its modern form, is credited to the brothers C. F. & F. G. Carling who, about two years ago, organ-ized a firm in Hollywood, Calif. To them it occurred that since famed artists are often employed to draw or paint pictures for advertising purposes, it might be equally astute to employ competent sculptors for similarly commercial purposes. Hence they engaged a sculptor, Finn Haakon Frolich, who made a statue of a bedraggled cow standing beside a woman and a child. This was used as an advertisement for a dairy. So productive was the group, fashioned from a material not unlike stucco, that other figures were con- structed. For gasoline selling stations Sculptor Frolich produced a small, stationary racing car, behind whose stiff wheel there sits a speed demon, his face always lit with eagerness for the wild pace which he will never attain. A rival to the brothers Carling, Sculptor Carlo Romanelli, designed a group of bathing girls to advertise a beach club. The Carling Co., incorporated under the perhaps preposterous title of The Art-vertising Corp., most recently produced an advertisement for itself. This is in the form of that ambiguous creature, a white elephant. Often, no doubt, motorists, reduced to apathetic melancholy by endlessly gaudy hedges of advertising billboards, each proclaiming the merits of some commercial product less convincingly than its' own ugliness, have wondered why the ingenuity which devised these signs has been unable to appreciate the grave limits set upon their effectuality. Does their distasteful and irritatingly insistent presence promise superiority in the merchandise which they represent.? Could not ingenuity, by devising a more inviting persuasion, discover a more persuasive invitation? Plastic advertising, in its originality would, for the present at least, command attention, while, if properly executed, it would always avoid the blatant indistinction of shoddy paper and painted boards. In Manhattan, sculpture for advertising purposes has taken another and possibly more extragavant form. The National Small Sculpture Committee announced last week the fourth U. S. soap sculpture contest, for which prizes amounting, in amateur and professional classes, to $1,600 are offered by Procter & Gamble, makers of Ivory Soap. Judges include famed Gutzon Borglum, Lorado Taft, Charles Dana Gibson; entries are received between Feb. i and May i. The sculptures entered for the contest must be made of soap, may represent anything in the world: fishes, white and slippery, are regarded as highly appropriate; towers and tiny castles, cool, perishable portraits, ladies whose blemishless beauty, whose 99 1/4/100 percent purity, one foreign tear would spoil--these are permissible models. Of the soap statues submitted, many will be exhibited in the warm days of June, at the Anderson Galleries.