A very nice lithographic travel poster promoting Danish Air Lines.
This is one of last posters advertising the Danish Air Lines (or DDL in short for Det Danske Luftfartselskab) as the company joint in Scandinavian Airline System (SAS).
Danish Air Lines was founded in 1918, and was thus the first civil airline in Denmark. Some argue that DDL is the oldest airline in Europe as KLM was founded in 1919.
The first route went from Copenhagen via Malmö to Warnemünde in Germany. It was opened in August 1920, and was carried out with a Friedrichshafen FF49C (registered T-DABA) seaplane. There was only room for two pilots and two passengers.
The first land flight that the company flew was from Copenhagen to Hamburg. It became Indian on September 15, 1920, and flew with the De Havilland DH-9 and the engine biplane, with a pilot and room for three passengers. It ran from 1920, a total of 83 passengers and 80,000 letters were transported on this route.
When SAS was established in October 1950, DDL's activities were added to the joint Scandinavian airline, with DDL as one of the three owners of SAS. Today DDL is a just a secondary name within SAS Danmark A/S.
I believe the plane on the poster is a Vickers Type 628 with two Hercules 634 engines.
The artwork for this poster was created by the Danish cartoonist, graphical artist and architect Ib Andersen (1907 - 1969). This poster is probably Andersen's masterpiece. In the 1930s he was part of the juicy and powerful expression, where enthusiasm for the new currents grip on himself and how his own work reached absolute heights in both color palette and bold compositions. Nobody else in Denmark could draw the special Danish summer night sky, the yellow-green color, fade to light blue and color of the ivory black, with a dark wood in silhouette from the villa road gardens, sporadically lit by the road's street lights. Andersen is differently one of the greatest and influential graphical artist (and there are many) that Denmark ever mustered.
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Artist: Ib Andersen (signed and dated in print)
Print: Lithography
Dimensions: 24.4 x 39 in (62 x 100 cm)
Condition: Good condition - light handling signs, small ceases, adhesive tape in the bottom corners and center bottom (possibly homemade repairs), two tiny pinholes in the upper right corner, upper left corner i ripped, light wear on the edges and very small area exposed to moisture in the lower left side - please see pictures.
Country: Denmark
Thanks for watching and please let me know if you have any questions.
