Artsy Wednesday: Crate Art

Via Deep Glamour, I found this amazing resource for early and mid-20th century art - including piles of the stuff that covered the sides of crates carrying apples, oranges, asparagus, and whatever else.

Just look at this amazing apple art:

Kind of trippy and an indicator of what's to come in the sixties and seventies, but it still has that very wholesome midcentury vibe. I'd put this in my house in a second, and wouldn't even feel like it was too folksy.

You don't find things like that now. I just did a quick search for apple farms, trying to find some kind of corporate art, so I could compare them. The truth is, most supermarket apples are probably ultimately owned by a conglomerate with a logo that looks like a cross between Nike and a big six accounting firm.

But even the smaller, more apple-centric, farms end up with imagery that looks like this. If he only had a brain.

I feel a little whiny asking this, but where did the great commercial art go? I've worked at two ad agencies and worked on projects with probably a dozen others, and sometimes it feels like the art of the business has been pushed out in favor of the design. Not that those two things have to be - or should be - mutually exclusive. But sometimes they seem to be.

Between Mad Men and seeing imagery like this crate art, I'm feeling more than a little wistful, longing for the glamorous advertising of yore.