Title: KLM: To Holland and the Olympic Games
Artist: Charles C. Dickson
Year of Publication: 1928
Publisher:
Language: English
Size: 36" x 24"
Index Number: 00312

Description:

In 1928 the Summer Olympic Games were held in Amsterdam. This poster from KLM, released in advance of the opening ceremony on May 17, 1928 advertises service to Amsterdam for the games. The 1928 games lasted throughout the summer and closed on August 12. Notably, in 1928 corporate sponsorship for events like the Olympic Games didn’t exist as it does today. While KLM wasn’t an official sponsor as they would likely be today, they might as well have been, as they served as the primary air transport provider to Amsterdam for the games. Unofficially, however, Dutch citizens made a strong cultural connection between KLM and the summer games. The 1928 games saw the inauguration of the now-signature “Olympic Flame.” As the flame burned for the first time atop Amsterdam’s “Marathon Tower,” adjacent to the newly built Olympisch Stadion, Amsterdammers referred to the bowl cradling the flame as “the ashtray of KLM pilots.”

Both the poster’s publication in English and its design by the British artist Charles C. Dickson, identify it as a specific advertisement for KLM’s service from Holland to London and Manchester. KLM, short for Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij, was founded in 1919, initially to satisfy “the natural desire of the Dutch to provide a link between their distant empire and the homeland.” In addition to being the unofficial, but predominant carrier for the 1928 Olympic Games as advertised in this poster, 1928 was an overall significant year for KLM and its new Fokker F.VIII. Using the same Fokker F.VIII depicted in the poster, KLM ran its first three trial flights to its distant colony Batavia (today known as Djakarta, Indonesia). These three flights broke international records by inaugurating the world’s longest journey, at an astonishing 8,540 miles. After these successful trials in 1928, KLM officially began service to the South Pacific colony in September 12, 1929.

During this period KLM’s regional routes throughout Europe abounded. In 1920 – a full half-decade before the British carrier Imperial Airways was founded – KLM began offering service between Amsterdam and London on Fokker F.II planes. On May 17, 1920, KLM flew its first official flight to the British capital and launched a regular schedule with thrice-weekly service between Amsterdam and London. From the inaugural flight, the route’s popularity rapidly exploded: within the month first month, KLM increased service 433% flying the Amsterdam-London route twice daily just to meet demand. By 1923, the demand for the British routes had not only sustained, but increased. In order to meet demand, KLM added regular service between Amsterdam and Manchester and between Rotterdam and London. Fares between the UK and Holland ranged between four to six GBP (British currency) or 48-75 DFI (Dutch currency) each way.

By 1928 service for these routes, as advertised in this KLM poster, was carried out in Fokker 15-passenger airplanes. Dickson depicts the aircraft at a sweeping angle, cropping its wings at the edge of the composition. This creates a snap-shot effect, as though Dickson has captured this graceful, rapid flight in a lucky instant. The poster’s Fokker F.VIII soars over a romanticized portrait of the Dutch landscape, evoking the iconic imagery of Jacob van Ruysdael’s1670 painting, View of Haarlem. In contrast to the poster’s idealized imagery, a circa 1928 photograph of the same airplane model, a Fokker F.VIII taken from the KLM archives, documents the Dutch countryside “as is” – as a plain, geometric division of property lots and roads.

While the landscape imagery of the poster is highly stylized, the aircraft is not. Details such as the airplane’s body, registration number, and two Bristol Jupiter engines all stay true to form. These carefully rendered details make the aircraft immediately recognizable as a Fokker F.VIII. This new aircraft, the latest in the Fokker F-series, was introduced into service in 1927. The Fokker F.VIII was designed to meet increased customer demand, and accommodated fifteen passengers per flight. It was also the largest Fokker aircraft to date – weighting 12,128 lbs. and the fastest – achieving speeds of 105 mph.

The Fokker models were the mainstay of KLM’s fleet, all designed domestically by the Dutchman Anthony Herman Gerard “Tony” Fokker. Notably, it was Fokker himself who demonstrated the Fokker F.II to the press on KLM’s inaugural May 17, 1920 flight. Both KLM and Fokker flourished in this partnership throughout the 1920’s and within nine years, KLM had expanded at a staggering rate to include a fleet of 20 aircraft – all Fokkers.
Also notable in the poster’s imagery is the predominance of the KLM logo on the lower-left. As London’s Henrion Design
Associates would assert 36 years after this poster’s publication, the KLM logo was one of the earliest (and most successful) examples of airline branding. Its trademark evoked a global “calling-card” of sorts, “immediately identifying the air carrier commercially and nationally in each of its far-flung ports of call. Resonating with the ideological relationship between KLM and the 1928 Olympic games in the Dutch cultural conscious, they assert that “to the national, [the logo] becomes a symbol of pride, identifying him with his homeland.”

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