A stunning collection of paintings, sculpture and decorative art from the 13th century to the present day.
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A stunning collection of paintings, sculpture and decorative art from the 13th century to the present day.
Out of this World: the art of Josh Kirby
It is unsurprising that Kirby’s growing talent for encompassing the essence of a sprawling story within a single image brought him regular work with the expanding promotional side of the film industry. In the early part of his career he produced work for some of the main London-based design companies. These contacts brought him further film work into the 1970s and ‘80s, even when book cover work became his primary focus.
As a specific branch of commercial art, film work was not highly regarded and it is only in recent years that it has been significantly reappraised. Many of the poster artists remained anonymous.
Although not regarded as one of the legendary figures of film poster art, Kirby nonetheless carved a solid enough reputation in his years working for three of the leading firms: Downton Advertising, Pulford Publicity and Feref Associates. In his book British Film Posters: An Illustrated History (BFI Publishing, 2006) Sim Branaghan has clarified the complex arena within which Kirby and his contemporaries operated.
Kirby worked primarily as an illustrator. To establish the role of an artist like him, a simplification of the industry’s working process is helpful. The design and illustration of the posters, and sometimes the typography, were usually separate functions.
Whatever the company, the process of poster production was essentially the same. Following a film viewing and using reference material such as film stills, the studio’s designers (sometimes working competitively to win a job) would produce a rough layout. Once the preferred layout had been selected an illustrator would then be contracted to produce the finished artwork, following the layout’s ‘plan’. The illustrations would usually take around two days to complete.
By the early 1950s when Kirby entered the film poster industry the horizontal landscape ‘quad’ had been established for a decade as the UK’s preferred cinema poster format. Sized at 30” x 40” this versatile layout mirrored the 3:4 ratio of cinema screens. Such posters were displayed primarily on quad sites rented by the cinemas, on the London Underground and at local railway stations. Kirby certainly worked on many quads in the 1950s, ‘70s and ‘80s, but the true scale of his involvement, particularly in the 1960s, remains unclear.
Kirby is known to have worked for three main companies: Downton Advertising, Pulford Publicity and Feref Associates. Downton Advertising Ltd was an agency established in 1942. It handled film promotion accounts for the Rank-Odeon-Gaumont chain, United Artists and British Lion. Downton’s future was closely linked to that of another firm, Pulford Publicity. Pulford’s design studio was set up in the early 1940s in London by the artist Eric Pulford (1915-2005). He earned significant standing in the industry as an illustrator of film posters. Pulford’s was based on Fleet Street, above Express Dairies (and later, briefly, on Glasshouse St, Soho).
In the early days Pulford’s was funded through Downton’s but by the 1950s was self-sustaining and by 1963, employing over 40 artists and photographers, Pulford took over Downton’s. Trading as Downton’s it was Britain’s main film agency. Initial clients included Rank, Odeon, Universal and RKO but grew to include Columbia and Disney. As Eric Pulford’s own role with the company developed he turned his attention to design, employing illustrators to create the artwork. Josh Kirby was one of these.
In 1967 a financial crisis led to the takeover of Downton’s by Garland Compton UK, for whom Kirby undertook some food-related commercial artwork in 1973. In 1975, following several corporate changes, Downton’s was taken over by Saatchi & Saatchi.
Feref Associates Ltd was a design studio created in 1968 by a handful of disaffected Downton’s staff, including leading poster designer Eddie Paul. Feref operated from a string of London premises. Its original premises was on London’s Poland Street, above a hat shop. Josh Kirby was one of the illustrators employed by this specialist film-publicity design studio. (Sim Branaghan reports that Kirby’s nickname at Feref was apparently ‘Rip’, owing to his prowess at indoor cricket, the favourite office game.) Feref grew in strength, reputation and scope and is still in business today.
The volume of designs and illustrations produced by these companies was so high that in later years the artists could often not recall what they had worked on. Between 1972 and 1987 Kirby’s account books fortunately list a significant quantity of jobs for Feref for both UK and overseas film promotion. These include artwork for quads, video covers and ‘film tie-in’ record sleeves.
Prior to the period working for Feref, Kirby is known to have created artwork for a number of posters during the 1950s, probably Pulford Publicity work for Downton Advertising. These, shown on this page, follow the established convention of the period, showing realistic portraits of the films’ main stars against a significant backdrop scene from the film. The layouts were probably designed by Eric Pulford or Eddie Paul.
Sadly, the dispersal, undocumented, of some of Kirby’s earlier finished artwork for film posters means that our knowledge of the 1950s and ‘60s period remains patchy, and no archival records have so far been located.
Kirby is also known to have worked as a freelance artist on posters for a film company in Paris for up to a year in around 1950/51, but to there are no records of either the name of the company, or what posters he worked on. He was attracted to Paris by the city’s bohemian atmosphere and for its nurturing of artists, but returned to London on securing a larger studio in Bushey.
Kirby’s early film posters: (list compiled mostly from published sources; these do not appear in his invoice books)