Aspen | 1968

Aspen, 1968, by Thomas W. Benton

A skier is caught mid-air, body tucked and leaning hard into the fall line, poles trailing behind in a spray of black marks suggesting disturbed snow. The figure is rendered entirely in flat black — no shading, no detail — against a cream ground, the silkscreen technique reducing the form to a stark, high-contrast shape. Behind and slightly above the skier, a large red circle sits solid and flat: a sun, or perhaps simply a red disc, functioning as both compositional anchor and burst of colour in an otherwise two-tone image. At the bottom, "aspen" is set in bold black lowercase type.

Auction records show this poster signed and dated 1968 by Benton at lower right, making it among his earliest known graphic works for Aspen, produced in the period just before his output turned almost entirely toward political causes. It is a rare example of Benton working in the idiom of the classic ski resort poster — a genre well established in Europe since the 1930s — and applying his silkscreen directness to it. The red disc is the same device he would soon adapt for peace and protest imagery; here it is simply solar, giving the composition a warmth and energy that straightforward ski photography of the era rarely achieved.

Benton (1930–2007) moved to Aspen in 1963 and quickly became involved in local politics, drawn to the rhetorical potential of combining text and image to convey political messages, and created his first anti-war poster in 1965. He is best known for his collaboration with Hunter S. Thompson — the Aspen Wall Posters and the Thompson for Sheriff campaign of 1970 — but his ski posters predate that work and show the graphic vocabulary he had already developed: flat colour, bold silhouette, minimal type.