• Format: Commerical advertising poster, 83,5 x 52,4 cm
• Artist: Julius Klinger, Austrian graphic artist 1876–1942
• Published: 1919
• Image copied from the online collections of The Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection: https://digital.wolfsonian.org/WOLF007478

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Public domain (no known copyright restrictions)

• Read more: Posterhouse.org: Julius Klinger – Posters for a Modern Age – March 4–August 15, 2021:

In the 1920s, text-only posters became increasingly prominent in Berlin, a trend that Klinger embraced in many of his later designs for Tabu.

For Tabu’s graphic identity, Klinger devised a striking trademark of stylized letterforms that also suggest

an iconic face, possibly inspired by the sculptures of Easter Island or Japanese Noh theater masks.

It is hard to imagine that Klinger was not consciously linking the brand to Sigmund Freud’s controversial book Totem and Taboo, published in Vienna in 1913. In it, Freud addresses the roles of totems and animism in early human societies, the ancient taboo of incest, the dawn of monotheistic religion, and their relationship to modern sexual neuroses. It was widely-read and would have been known by most educated and intellectual members of society.