White Rose Tea

I went to Brooklyn Newsstand to look for White Rose advertisements. Why not? In the 1930s they were plentiful. In the ’40s and ’50s, the brand appears mostly in supermarket advertisements — just a name and a price. As I’ve said in a previous post, White Rose was once ubiquitous in New York.

I see a strong modernist impulse in these seasonal ads:

[The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 9, 1934. Click for a larger view.]

The stylized server puts me in mind of the work of Otto Neurath and Rudolf Modley: see, for instance, Modley’s Handbook of Pictorial Symbols (1978). If you don’t have an Internet Archive account, take a look at The New York Primer (1939). Modley founded Pictorial Statistics Incorporated (what we might now call an infographics company) in 1934.

[Brooklyn Times-Union, January 21, 1935. Click for a larger view.]

I was startled to see this image: are those cheeks, or eyes? Either way, these home-bound pedestrians seem to have stepped from a page of Art Spiegelman’s Maus.

Related reading
All OCA tea posts (Pinboard) : A short history of White Rose, Inc. : White Rose pencils, from the collection of my late friend Sean Malone