Ski & Art by Katie Bamber review: ‘novel takes on the skiing experience’
A new book suggests that ski art may finally have moved beyond the ‘vintage poster’ aesthetic, writes Roger Cox
Artistically-speaking, the sport of skiing sometimes feels as if it’s stuck in a time warp. Why? Because in the early days of ski tourism, designers hit upon a near-perfect formula for capturing the skiing experience – a visual language so effective that it’s still wildly popular a hundred years after it was first devised.
Back in the 1920s and 30s, as rapidly-growing ski resorts in the Alps and the railways that served them sought to market themselves to potential snow tourists, they employed leading graphic artists like Roger Broders of France and Carl Moos of Switzerland to design eye-catching posters. Informed by the clean lines and simplified geometry of Art Deco and Modernism, the images they produced proved hugely successful, attracting untold thousands of interwar fun-seekers to the mountains and helping to lay the foundations of the now-multi-billion dollar ski industry in the process.
For evidence of the enduring popularity of these posters, you only need to look at the vast quantities in a similar style now being sold in ski resorts around the world, or at the eye-watering amounts collectors and money-no-object ski enthusiasts are prepared to pay for originals. Lyon & Turnbull in Edinburgh will be holding their annual ski poster sale on 12 January, with estimates ranging from £300 up to £15,000.
It’s easy to see why the “vintage ski poster” look remains so well-loved: from a design point of view those clean lines still feel timelessly stylish, and for skiers sick of waiting in endless 21st century lift queues all those empty spaces also help conjure up daydreams of an Edenic past when the slopes were all-but deserted. However, the popularity of this aesthetic has also cast a long shadow over artists attempting to make ski-related work in more recent times. As a result, a significant amount of ski art being produced today looks a lot like the iconic ski posters being produced a century ago.
Exhibit A: a recently published book called Ski & Art by ski journalist Katie Bamber, which brings together work by 22 ski artists from all around the world alongside Q&A-style interviews. Some of the featured artists offer refreshingly novel takes on the skiing experience (we’ll come to these in a moment), but what’s immediately obvious flicking through its pages is how many stick to the tried and tested formula of simple shapes and bold colours first pioneered by Broders, Moos and the rest.
Based in the UK, Steve Ash specialises in designing posters of iconic ski lifts and, after looking at a few of his signature works – the big red tram at Jackson Hole, the red-orange-yellow bubbles at La Grave – it comes as zero surprise to learn that he has “always loved the look of vintage ski posters”. Similarly, Barcelona-based Thomas Danthony says he loves “early 20th century posters” and that love is very much in evidence in the way he builds up images with simple blocks of colour, artfully arranged. Other featured artists very clearly inspired by the stripped-back vintage ski poster aesthetic are Lisa Moes of New Zealand, Henry Rivers of the UK and Danny Touw, based in France. Each of them puts a distinctive spin on the tradition – Danthony, for example, achieves a pleasing, poetic minimalism – but there’s no mistaking the fact their inspiration is drawn from the same artistic well.
If this book is a roughly representative sample of what the world’s ski artists are up to, then, we might say that about a quarter of them are still busy riffing on 100 year-old poster art, which begs the question: what are the rest of them up to?
Well, a few are engaged in what we might describe as ski-cartooning or at least in making work that is cartoon-adjacent: Singapore-based illustrator Xin Li Lee states that Tintin was an early influence on her work, and the evidence of that is clear to see, while Swiss artist Simon Charrière says he is inspired by the bande dessinée traditions of France and Switzerland (although he evidently has a soft spot for Scandinavia too, because he isn’t above sneaking a few Moomins into his mountainscapes).
There’s another group, meanwhile, who are clearly having fun exploring the way the different textures of paint can capture the different textures of snow: Pete Caswell from the UK, Sandra Fransson of Sweden and Sangwon Lee of South Korea all seem to engage with the idea that painting and skiing are two sides of the same mark-making coin. Taking the idea one step further, Peppi Spiss of Austria describes how he once laid a 180-square metre canvas across a ski slope, then skied over it with friends, “letting our turns and edges mark the surface.”
The two most interesting artists in the book are also the most original: Czech artist Ondrej Mestek uses a restrained, Morandi-esque palette to conjure up sepia-tinged skiing memories while American Lamont Joseph White paints skiers of colour in mid-century gear, challenging ideas of who skiing is for. Vintage ski poster style isn’t going anywhere, but some ski artists, at least, have been able to move past it.
Ski & Art: Artists Inspired by Skiing, by Katie Bamber, Lannoo, £35. For more on the Lyon & Turnbull Ski Poster Sale on 12 January 2027, see www.lyonandturnbull.com
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