“Jefferson Airplane"
Poster
Large Size
(Smaller Size Sold Out)
A Spectacular Poster
1960s Psychedelic Rock Poster
Published by Esoteric Posters 1967
See Our Many Other Drug & Rock Poster Listings
From the Original Publishers Collection
Red & Green Colors
Screen Printed
100% Original Poster from 1967
Vintage Inventory
From Original Publisher’s Collection
Small Number of these Left
28" x 22"
Please Look at Our Other Posters
Dope, Love-in, Rock n’ Roll
Psychedelic Poster
“Esoteric Posters 1967” at bottom
Designed by Robert Wendell
Published by Esoteric Posters in 1967
These Posters Have Been Properly Stored Since Printed
Stored Flat & Out of the Light
Excellent Condition
Large Poster
Shipped Priority Mail in Sturdy New 4" Diameter Tube for
$15.50 in U.S.A.
Purchase Multiple Posters for a Single Shipping Fee
We Ship Direct to Canada, Europe and U.K. for $28.50
Please Ask for Quote to Other Countries
Can be Shipped e-Bay Global Shipping or Direct
Esoteric Rock n’ Roll Posters:
The Esoteric Rock n’ Roll posters were all designed by
Robert “Bob” Wendell, who Howard Morseburg, the publisher, began working with
in the 1950s, when he sold s his figurative drawings and paintings. Wendell designed these in 1967 and they were
printed that year under Wendell’s supervision at different small printing
shops, fly-by-night serigraphers and some of them were even hand-pulled by
Wendell and some of his students. That
is why the printing legend in the margin may say “Esoteric,” “Gawdawful
Graphics,” or “Wendell Ltd.” on our different Esoteric Posters. They were not well distributed in the 1960s
and different collections of them - old unsold or unclaimed inventory - ended up in San Francisco and Southern
California and were later sold by different dealers. Most of our posters were printed in two colors,
others three with some tiny runs in alternative combinations.
Our Other Esoteric Rock & Roll Posters:
The Doors (22” 14”)
The Buffalo Springfield (22” x 14”) Green on Red
The Mamas and the Papas (20” x 13”)
The Peanut Butter Conspiracy (22 1/2” x 14 1/1”) (Orange
Stock) Silk Screen
The Peanut Butter Conspiracy (22 ½” x 14 ½”) (Blue Stock)
Silk Screen (SOLD OUT!)
The Seeds (Blue Stock) (20” x 13”) Silk Screen: (SOLD OUT!)
The Seeds (Yellow Stock) (20” x 13”) Silk Screen
The Turtles (20” x 13”)
Paul Revere and the Raiders (22” x 14”) Silk Screen:
The Buckinghams (20” x 13”) Three Color
The Electric Prunes (20” x 13”) Three Color
(SOLD OUT)
Jefferson Airplane – Large (28” x 22”) Silk Screen
Jefferson Airplane – Small (20” x 13”) Silk Screen
(SOLD OUT!)
A Brief History of the Esoteric Poster Company
(1959-Present)
Howard
Morseburg (1924-2012) began his career in the art business in the 1950s. He was
a World War II veteran who had served in the Merchant Marine and later worked
in the book and magazine business. As a young officer during the war, Morseburg
was on the “Murmansk Run” to the Soviet Union and other perilous wartime
voyages through the submarine-infested North Atlantic. It was one of
Morseburg’s friends from this time, a young skipper named Jim Greenberg, who
was to introduce him to the art business. After the war, this friend became a
ship’s captain on the Atlantic route, and began importing paintings by European
artists to the United States. In Europe, which was still suffering from the
economic aftereffects of the war, there was no appreciable market for these
artists’ work. During the 1950s Greenberg began selling the paintings he
imported to galleries, furniture stores and interior designers who
were then developing a wider consumer market for art than had existed before
the war. From his base in Seattle, where he and his young family were then
living, Howard Morseburg followed suit, and he began selling paintings imported
from Europe throughout the western United States.
In
addition to the European paintings he received, Morseburg began representing young
American artists. He also became involved in the West Coast printmaking
movement. In the late 1950s and early 1960s he started to represent young
artists like Wayne Thiebaud, Elton Bennett and Mel Ramos, who created their own
hand-pulled prints. It was this interest in printmaking that helped lead to his
next venture.
The
Beatnik Posters
About
1960, Morseburg became interested in creating humorous and satirical posters.
At this time, the “beatnik” movement was in full swing and coffeehouses and
jazz clubs were full of beatniks spouting free-form poetry to the beat of bongo
drums. To Morseburg, the beatnik movement found in Greenwich Village, Seattle,
San Francisco and the East Bay was ripe for satire. He met a talented young
Disney artist and Imagineer named Roland Crump at a gift shop in the San
Fernando Valley, just north of Los Angeles. Crump was a brilliant and eccentric
young artist and designer who became one of the most important Disney
“Imagineers.” Crump was already producing some hand-pulled beatnik
posters before he met Morseburg, but once the association began, Morseburg had
larger quantities of some of the posters published using the photo-offset
process. Crump designed a series of images that satirized the
drug culture that was developing among the Beats, which Morseburg took on the
road, traveling down the coast from Seattle to San Diego. In that era, drug use
was not widespread and they were chiefly popular with musicians and beatnik
hipsters. So, Esoteric Poster’s first releases were “Smoke Marijuana,” “Fly
High, Fly Heroin Airlines” “Cocaine” and “Opium.”
The
next posters were “The Green Gasser,” which poked fun at a Beatnik club, and
“Big Liz,” which was a colorful poster of a Beatnik princess. Those 30″ x 24″
posters were silk screened in three colors and for posterity’s sake they cost
$0.50 to produce, were sold to bookstores for only $1.00 and retailed for
$1.95.
In
the course of his frequent sales trips to visit art galleries, Morseburg
personally distributed Esoteric’s posters. His primary outlets for
the posters were the bookstores along the west coast that catered to college
students in Berkeley, Stanford, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco and San Diego.
Morseburg realized that students were the ideal consumers for posters because
of their frequent moves and limited budgets that would not allow them to
purchase more expensive items. When he began selling to bookstores, none of the
bookstores were actually selling posters, and Morseburg showed them how they
could display posters by stringing clotheslines along the walls and hanging the
posters with clothespins. He also sold his posters to stores on upper Grant
Street in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, at the Farmer’s Market in
Los Angeles, and later at the Seattle World’s Fair where the Beatnik posters
went home with foreign visitors. Morseburg has long felt that his early
designs, which were displayed in venues popular with artistic young people,
influenced other artists and contributed to the creativity that was seen in the
poster designs of the psychedelic movement later in the 1960′s.
The
Cold War Posters
The
next series of Esoteric’s posters were political in nature and reflected
Morseburg’s firmly held belief in freedom and human rights. As a young man,
Morseburg was one of the few Americans to visit the Soviet Union during the
Second World War. As a young officer, Morseburg met a Polish
survivor of Stalin’s gulags and a female translator who predicted that she
would be sent to a Gulag or executed because her liaison work with the British
and Americans had exposed her to western ideas. He lost any
false illusions he may have had about the benefits of the Soviet
system. Serving in Europe and meeting those who survived the Nazi
regime turned Morseburg into an opponent of all totalitarian systems that
denied freedom to their citizens.
These
experiences gave Morseburg and Roland Crump the impetus to begin a series of
posters satirizing life in the Soviet Union and Castro’s adoption of Soviet
methods in post-revolutionary Cuba. These satirical political posters sold well
in college bookstores, until, ironically, those bearing the images
of totalitarian leaders like Ho Chi Minh, Mao and Lenin replaced
them! In Berkeley, Mario Salvio and the perhaps no-so-well-named “Free Speech
Movement” demanded that the Berkeley Bookstore (still located across from
Sproul Hall) stop selling the Esoteric line of posters. It was a matter of
“free speech for me, but not for thee.” The sixties were a time of
excess and radicalism and no place embodied the sixties ethos more than
Berkley. However sadly, the Berkeley Bookstore complied with Salvio’s
censorship request and discontinued the sale of Esoteric’s Posters, much to the
dismay of a faction of students.
As
interest in his satirical posters waned due to changing times, Morseburg worked
hard to develop his art gallery and kept working as an artist’s agent, selling
paintings to galleries in seven western states. The gallery’s initial Los
Angeles location was in the old Westlake Park neighborhood, just one block from
the venerable Chouinard Art School and a few blocks from the Otis Art
Institute. These were the major art schools in Los Angeles, and the young art
students — such as the future psychedelic start Rick Griffin — often came by
the gallery to look at the work of established artists.
Esoteric’s
Rock & Roll and Psychedelic Posters
As
the sixties gathered steam, Morseburg began to collaborate with Robert Wendell,
a talented young graphic artist and poster designer. Wendell was a gifted
printmaker, and in 1967 he designed several posters and updated some of Crump’s
earlier designs. Some of these later posters were published by Esoteric Poster
Company and printed using the silkscreen process, hence the names “Saladin”
“Gawdawful Graphics” or “Blue Light Press” that often appeared on the
individual posters with the Esoteric name.
During
the 1960s, one of Howard Morseburg’s gallery accounts was the Moore Gallery on
Sutter Street in San Francisco. The famous “Joint Show” was held at the Moore
Gallery in July of 1967. The “Joint Show” was a group exhibition of work by the
five most famous San Francisco poster artists, including Alton Kelley, Stanly
Mouse, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin and Wes Wilson. Morseburg viewed the
exhibition and in lieu of the money that Moore owed him, Morseburg accepted a
selection of the Joint Show posters, which were eventually stored with his
own remaining inventory.
Unfortunately,
Esoteric’s psychedelic poster business was not a financial success. The company
did not have a highly evolved method of distribution (like Chet Helm’s Family
Dog or Bill Graham’s Fillmore). Furthermore, the silkscreen method of printing
is a fine arts process, which is slow and costly and does not lend itself to
producing large quantities of prints. Esoteric Poster’s rock and roll and
satirical drug posters never received the mainstream distribution or the
recognition that they deserved. By 1968, the poster venture was finished and
the remaining stock ended up in Morseburg’s basement on Wilshire Boulevard.
Eventually,
Howard Morseburg gave the poster inventory to his three children with the idea
that they might eventually find a market for them. In the 1970s, Jeffrey
Morseburg carefully packaged all of the remaining posters as he began to
realize that there was a collector market for these vestiges of the psychedelic
era. The Morseburg family remained active in the fine art business, but had
neither an efficient means of distributing its remaining inventory of posters
nor the time to invest in the selling of them. It is only now, with the direct
access that the web affords, that it has become possible for sellers and
collectors to find each other in an inexpensive and efficient way. And so we
are pleased to bring to you these rare, original examples of 1960s’ psychedelic
posters.