But when all that is said, one has to admit that the German, above all others, does grasp the essential value of the poster as a means to an end. He realises that in the best poster there must be something of what was aimed at in the Post-Impressionist movement in painting, a desire for summarised form, strong and simplified line, and the reduction of tones to an arbitrary convention. And though we have used the word "Post-Impressionism," we are only suggesting that the poster should accomplish what the stained-glass window at its best--with a religious instead of propagandist or commercial purpose--accomplished five hundred years ago. While the British poster must see everything in the round, must try to reproduce all that is intensely obvious in the varied texture and material pageantry and inexhaustible colouring of life, Germany is rightly content to be deliberately abstract, to seek the common factors from what is large and general, and to endeavour to find symbols to express ideas. She is not concerned with the pursuit of spiritual or physical beauty, but with a striking novelty or decorative composition. The colour schemes of the German posters are more curious and insistent than attractive, but they do possess that knock-down force which, after all, is the object of a poster. Its pictorial quality is a secondary matter; if it is a fine piece of wall decoration that one would like to live with, so much the better; but its function is to arrest and to make itself remembered. Indeed, the poster must be like a beacon set on a hill to which all eyes must go, all roads must seem inevitably to lead. The beacon is a flare in the night; the poster must act as a flare in the day.
The famous sentence from the Academy discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds, which is inscribed as a motto over the entrance to the Victoria and Albert Museum--a sentence much quoted during the Victorian era, but in these latter days perhaps little regarded--may be applied to the poster equally as to more durable and delightful works: "The excellence of every art must consist in the complete accomplishment of its purpose." If the poster which accomplishes its purpose is indeed the most "artistic," then Germany excels in the artistic poster. It may be brutal, it may be ugly, it may even shock and repel; but there is always in the best examples, instinct in their very conception, a definite purpose which gains full expression, because the artist has been trained to limit himself to what he has to say, and to say that with all his might.
