Aspen Ski School | 1960s

Aspen Ski School, c.1968–69, by Thomas W. Benton

A skier bears down toward the viewer, body low and committed to the turn, poles wide, snow spraying from the edges of the skis at the bottom of the frame. The figure is rendered in flat black silkscreen, the jacket and trousers broken up with white lines that suggest volume and movement without departing from the two-colour logic of the image. Behind and above, a bold blue field represents the sky, and a white mountain peak rises to the left — the whole upper composition divided cleanly between sky blue and the snow-white of the slope. At the bottom, a solid black band carries "aspen ski school" in large white lowercase letters.

Aspen's ski school had been operating since the resort's formal founding in 1946, established by the Austrian émigré Friedl Pfeifer, and by the late 1960s it was one of the most prestigious ski schools in North America. Benton moved to Aspen in 1963, built his own home, studio, and gallery there, and quickly became involved in local life as both an artist and an activist. Producing promotional material for local institutions — the ski school, the town itself — was a natural part of that involvement, and these early ski posters show him developing the silkscreen vocabulary he would soon put to far more combative use. The flat colour, bold shape, and clean typography here are entirely consistent with the formal language of his later political work; only the subject differs.

Benton taught himself the art of silkscreen printmaking and created his first anti-war peace poster in 1965, drifting gradually from architecture to focus entirely on his art. Starting in 1968 he created campaign posters for more than fifty political candidates, including presidential hopefuls George McGovern and Gary Hart as well as scores of local office-seekers in Aspen. The ski school poster predates or coincides with the beginning of that political output, making it an early example of the graphic style that would define his career — simple, high-contrast, and legible at a distance.