The advertising art seemed to magically appear – again. Two weeks before, one of my favorite auction houses had propped stacks of the illustrations on racks against a wall.
A white guy raising a glass of beer. White hands hoisting a tray with two glasses of beer. White men inside the frame of a house promoting beer-drinking at home. A white man in Pilgrim and Santa hats smiling broadly in a Schmidt ad.
The auction house had described them as “1940’s & 1960’s original oil on canvas & pastel on board beer advertising campaign designs, from the Weiller Company, Philadelphia.” The artwork not only included beer advertising, but also ads for ice cream and other products.
The art was obviously dated, because there wasn’t a black person in sight. Until a week later when I came across what looked like more advertising art that the auction h0use had placed conspicuously high on the racks so we all could see it (and bump up the bidding on it). There were four illustrations/drawings with African American faces. I was pleasantly surprised to see them.
One was a man playing ping pong, and the others were African American couples drinking wine. There was another drawing – the others were in color and this one was in black and white – of a black couple that was signed by someone named Rod Ivey. It seemed to be out of place among the advertising art, so I don’t think it was an illustration. All of the artwork seemed to be from the 1960s and 1970s based on the afros and clothes.
Did the illustrations come from Weiller? I wondered because they had been placed next to several lots of illustrations from the company. These new groupings, unlike the ones from two weeks before, were for non-beer-related advertising campaigns.
The Weiller Co. was a major advertising agency in Philadelphia, the auctioneer had said at the first auction. I could not find out much about it by Googling, but it seemed to have thrived during the first half of the 20th century (I found a company with the same name still operating).
On the web, I found a site that had acquired some designs for a Weiller advertising sign for Stegmaier’s beer. The Smithsonian Institution has the collection of a man named Albert W. Hampson, an artist who apparently worked on campaigns for Weiller in the 1940s. Hampson was very much a fine artist (some of the illustration art I’ve come across at auction would fall in that category); he got his break in Nov. 30, 1935, when the Saturday Evening Post used one of his drawings on its cover.
At the more recent auction, I decided to bid on the lot of four illustrations with the African American images. How often, I wondered, would I come across any of those again. Probably not likely.
As usual – and because of the subject matter – I wasn’t the only one. One other bidder matched me bid-for-bid and he was relentless. I dropped out at $15, when it became obvious that he was not going to stop. I don’t think he ever took his hand down, indicating that he would challenge my every bid. When I dropped out, someone else stepped in and the man got the pieces for $30.
“He frames them and sells them,” a man standing next to me said, referring to the illustration art.
Said he’d bidded against the relentless bidder before and had learned to just walk away. The man knows what he wants, bids high and usually gets it. The relentless bidder owns a shop and sells a lot of books, he said. Then he told a story of having seen the man pull up with his van filled with books at a flea market in Lambertville, NJ, and lay them out on several tables. “He sold them for 25 cents each and he sold out in two hours,” he said.
I didn’t think books sold very well. Apparently, they do.
As we talked, the bidding for the Weiller illustrations was proceeding. The relentless bidder who snatched the black illustrations from my clutches was still at it. I believe he got every stack of the advertising art. They sold for $14 to $40 per stack, and there were at least six to eight drawings in each stack.
Standing there later, I was approached by another auction-goer who asked how much the black illustrations sold for. I told him.
“Black advertising art is selling,” he said. “It’s rare.”
Don’t I know it. That revelation smacks me in the face every time I try for a piece of black artwork or other memorabilia at auction.
