To Conjure Up Audiences, Posters Were a Magic Wand

Siegfried and Roy and billboards notwithstanding, magicians historically have been an itinerant breed, relying on posters to sell their tickets. They might advertise--as, for instance, does a 1928 poster for the magician George--”a carload of scenic effects.”

That poster--one of 35 vintage magic-show posters on display through Aug. 22 at the Kissler-Painter Gallery here--happens to be Lonnie Painter’s favorite. “I like all the symbology, the sphinx and the pyramids, the devils,” says Painter, the gallery proprietor who has been collecting the posters for four years. “Owls are also associated with the occult.

Some people, Painter says, “used to think magic was a black art influenced by Satan. . . . The church frowned upon anybody doing anything [it] didn’t understand.

“Actually, magic is the oldest of the theatrical arts. Early priests and shamans would perform a little sleight of hand to mystify and amaze their followers. In the Middle Ages, magic began to be performed on street corners and in the taverns. Finally it ended up on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show.’ ”

That wasn’t the end of the story, of course. Now magicians have their own television specials. But there was a period between taverns and television--most notably the half-century from about 1875 to 1925 but extending well into the TV era--that was the posters’ golden age.

It was “the heyday of fine theatrical lithography, [which] coincided happily with the period of the great stage magic shows of Kellar, Houdini, Thurston, Carter and others,” according to Charles and Regina Reynolds’ “100 Years of Magic Posters” (Lee Jacobs Productions, Pomeroy, Ohio, 1976).

Painter has several Carter the Great posters for sale. “Carter Beats the Devil,” blares one; the act was billed as “a $50,000 circus” and seats cost from 20 to 40 cents. Another announces “the vanishing sacred elephant . . . Carter causes a real live ponderous elephant to instantly vanish before all beholders, an achievement bordering on the supernatural.” Bordering? “The acme of magical achievement, the summit of human effort.”

While original posters at the gallery start at around $100 (for examples from the 1950s), another Carter poster is the most expensive. It promises “a baffling Chinese mystery, the elongated maiden . . . a pretty Chinese girl tied to a torture rack without seeming discomfort apparently permits her head and limbs to be stretched yards away from their natural positions.” The poster is large, more than 3 by 6 feet and is priced at $2,100.

But there are larger examples in the shop, also for Carter the Great, stone lithographs 9 by 7 feet, intended for the sides of buildings.

According to Painter, the oldest poster in the gallery was printed in Brussels and dates from the late 1890s, possibly the early 1900s, and features “illusioniste moderne” P.H. Debischop. But you don’t have to be old to be obscure: There also is a poster for Dr. Zomb, a hypnotist who served as the live act before the midnight spook movie shows of the 1940s and ‘50s.

Better known to modern audiences is Blackstone, whose son Harry Blackstone Jr., also a magician, has kept the name in the public eye. A Blackstone poster hawks the “biggest necromantic exhibition on earth . . . a tenfold pageant of the east,” a spectacle rivaling the “splendor of Solomon’s court” with its “kaleidoscopic metamorphoses [and] corps of bewildering beautiful nautch girls”--whatever they are.

Painter says that he started collecting with any child’s enthusiasm for magic but that his “interest really came alive . . . when we were cleaning out our garage and my wife came across boxes of her dad’s stuff, including old magician magazines.” Conjurers’ Magazines dating to 1947 are now on display at the gallery but are not for sale.

“ ‘Didn’t I tell you my dad was an amateur magician?’ she said. We looked through all these magazines and old photographs and read about the magicians,” Painter continued. “Not too long after that, we went into a magic shop in Seattle and I bought an original poster. . . .”

One of the most striking designs in the gallery is of Alexander, The Man Who Knows, his face framed in a white turban forming a question mark on a dark background. Another simply features Alexander in his turban, also to great effect.

In 1926, the Internal Revenue Service apparently sued Alexander (real name Claude Alexander Conlin Sr.) for $130,000 in back taxes, but “the Great Seer” must have seen it coming: He reportedly went on making $3,000 a week with his show and more money privately advising the lonely and distraught. He retired to California in 1939.

Many Alexander posters indicate that they were printed in Bombay, but Painter says this probably was done to lend credibility to Alexander’s Eastern mysticism and that the posters almost certainly were printed in the U.S.

Although little flaming or winged devils are portrayed on many of the posters--standing on the shoulders, for instance, of “the great Dante”--others, like Alexander’s, “are very couched in . . . Eastern mysticism,” Painter said. “Americans dressing up like Chinese conjurers--people thought that was real mystical. Fu Manchu, his real name was Bamberg.”

Torture is another popular theme, which in turn plays on the larger theme of fear.

The Reynoldses’ book notes that “these magicians and their posters are out to scare us. . . . Witness, for instance, the poster for Houdini’s water torture cell act. It’s not enough to show Houdini drowning--a fanged evil-looking monster is holding the lid to be sure he never comes out alive!

“To complain that some of the effects performed on stage did not quite live up to the miracles so flamboyantly portrayed on the posters is perhaps to miss the point,” the book continues.

“The posters, today so fascinating as a type of vanishing folk art, originally had only one purpose--to draw people into the theater. Once there, it was the magicians’ job to entertain and mystify them with a complete show of conjuring. The great magicians did not disappoint.”

* The display of magic-show posters continues through Aug. 22 at the Kissler-Painter Gallery, 1031 S. Coast Highway, Laguna Beach. Wednesdays through Sundays, noon-6 p.m. Free. (714) 497-1746.