Ringling Barnum ELEPHANT & KITTY CLARK (1941) One Sheet Flat

Ringling Barnum ELEPHANT & KITTY CLARK (1941) One Sheet Flat, originally uploaded by bucklesw1. From Chris Berry As mentioned earlier, 1941 was a watershed year for Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey. John and Henry Ringling North were in charge and coming off of the best season that the circus had seen since 1929. In addition, the Depression was no longer dragging down box office receipts. During the 55 performances at Madison Square Garden in 1941, 600,000 paid an average of $2.00 each to attend. Straw houses were becoming the rule. 60,000 packed the big top during four performances in Cleveland. Another 120,000 saw the show during the run in Los Angeles (incidentally, the last time that Ringling-Barnum would play LA until 1948). The signature of designer Norman Bel Geddes was everywhere in 1941, from the bright colors of the midway, a blue big top, a red menagerie tent and even brightly colored sawdust (reddish pink in rings one and three, white in the middle - and blue on the hippodrome track). As you have seen over the past few days, the posters from the 1941 season were also a departure from the circus of the past. This particular design is no exception and was produced in both an upright and flat format. This poster was used with variations over the next ten years, but this is the original with the original font and Bel Geddes studios logo printed between the elephant's hind legs. The Bel Geddes design was lifted from a photograph and is the first of three posters that featured the image of Ms. Clark - the other two from 1944 (Bill Bailey's "Panto's Paradise" spec poster and Maxwell Frederic Coplan's photograph of her with a white horse and a pink background). A rehash of this basic design was also used on the Ringling-Barnum program of 1964.