Mounties and World War II at the Tweed Museum in Duluth

Written by Buck Frobisher Thursday, 19 May 2011 21:43

Duluth, MN.- "Working on the Homefront: Potlatch Royal Canadian Mounted Police Illustrations and World War II" is a new exhibition at the Tweed Museum of Art, University of Minnesota Duluth, featuring twenty paintings, four WW II posters and a selection of 1940s trade magazine ads, all focused around the regionally famous ad campaign of Northwest Paper/Potlatch Corporation. Now Sappi Paper, the Cloquet, Minnesota-based company pulled itself out of Depression-era obscurity by using the red-coated Canadian police officer as a brand for its fine printing papers. In the process, it commissioned 16 artists to produce an estimated 400 illustrations and paintings, over a 40-year period between 1930 and 1970. The collection outgrew their corporate offices, and in 1981 Potlatch Corporation (formerly Northwest Paper, now Sappi) donated it to the Tweed Museum at UMD. "Working on the Homefront" begins on May 24th and runs through September 4th.

The exhibition was developed by a group of Museum Interns under the direction of curator Peter Spooner. “The show draws parallels between the RCMP illustrations, actual advertising copy, and the World War II poster. This was such a long-running campaign that ad copy and images changed significantly with the times. During the war, the ads get very serious,” says Spooner. “Our students did a great job selecting key images and archive objects to compare. They made sure to include the ‘John Steele’ action figure doll, but I had to draw the line at the ‘Mountie Barbie.’ “That definitely belongs to the post-WW II phase,” Spooner added. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police or “Mountie” illustrations were originally the brainchild of Frank Cash, an astute ad man from Chicago, home of the country’s largest advertising agencies in the 1930s. Despite the lack of an advertising budget, Cash convinced the Northwest Paper Company of Cloquet, Minnesota (later renamed Potlatch Corporation) to brand their products with the trustworthy, red-coated Royal Canadian Mounted Police Officer.

It was a turning point in the company’s history. The ad campaign became one of the longest running and most effective in American advertising. It stabilized and increased the company’s sales of fine printing papers during the Depression, through World War II, and well beyond. With each of these events, the images and copy of the ads changed to deliver messages appropriate to their times.

With a permanent collection of over 6,000 art objects representing a range of cultures and periods of art history, the Tweed Museum of Art on the campus of the University of Minnesota Duluth is a major cultural and educational resource for the Upper Midwest. In the 1920s and early 1930s, George P. Tweed and his wife Alice began collecting 19th and early 20th century European and American painting, including examples of the French Barbizon School and Impressionist influenced American Landscape painting. After the death of Mr. Tweed in 1946, Mrs. Tweed saw the potential of the Tweed Collection as an educational resource for the community and the University. She generously developed the funding for the present building which was dedicated in 1958. In the year 2000, the Tweed Museum of Art celebrated its 50th anniversary. From the museum's core collection of 600 European and American works of art acquired by George P. Tweed (1871–1946) and donated to the University of Minnesota Duluth by his widow, Alice Tweed Tuohy between 1950 and 1973, collections at the Tweed Museum of Art now include over 6,000 works of art. . Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.d.umn.edu/tma

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