Soaring to Success! Daily Herald – the Early Bird

Why it works

Britain's landmark modernist poster began life as an orphan. E. McKnight Kauffer, a young American in London, made a woodcut of birds in flight in 1916, derived from a Japanese print and broken into Vorticist geometry, and in January 1917 offered a poster version through Colour magazine's showcase for unpublished commercial art. In 1919 Francis Meynell bought it to launch the Labour newspaper the Daily Herald on 31 March, and wrote the caption himself. A flock of angular birds, half nature and half machine, wheels across a field of bright yellow. It is studied as proof that abstract avant-garde art could work on a commercial hoarding: Kauffer called it the first and only Cubist poster in England, and the V&A calls it a masterpiece of progressive poster design. Winston Churchill, then at the War Office, reportedly asked to see Kauffer about designing an RAF flag. The V&A's rare complete copy came from the archive of S.H. Benson, the agency that ran the campaign.