The Blue Elephant: Hugh Stevenson's Visit the Zoo Poster
The elephant faces you. Not in profile, the way animals are usually drawn, but head on, ears spread wide, trunk hanging straight down the center of the poster like a plumb line, two cream tusks curving out of the blue. It is less a picture of an elephant than the idea of one, and it is blue, a deep ultramarine blue, standing on a field of yellow green above the words VISIT THE ZOO.
This poster, dated 1936 to 1937, was designed by Hugh Stevenson for the Philadelphia workshop of the Federal Art Project, the WPA's art program. The Library of Congress copy carries the date stamp August 4, 1937 on its back. It belongs to the same Philadelphia Zoo series as the workshop's heron poster, and between the two of them you can see the whole range of what those poster artists could do.
From the Collection
1930's WPA Era Visit The Zoo Vintage Elephant Poster
Designed by Hugh Stevenson for the WPA's Philadelphia poster workshop, dated 1936 to 1937.
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A Designer Is Named
Most WPA posters are anonymous. The workshops were collectives, the designs were government work, and the credit line, when there was one, went to the Federal Art Project itself. The elephant is an exception: the record names its designer, Hugh Stevenson of Philadelphia, and catalogs of the WPA poster collection list it by his name.
Knowing a name changes how you look. The herons from the same workshop are carved woodblock, all craft and texture. Stevenson's elephant is the opposite approach, a piece of pure graphic design: flat color, hard edges, symmetry doing the work that detail does elsewhere. One workshop, two temperaments, and a zoo that got a small masterpiece out of each.
Symmetry as Subject
An elephant seen from the front is one of the few animals that is naturally symmetrical, and Stevenson builds the entire poster on that fact. The ears mirror each other, the tusks mirror each other, even the highlights on the forehead fall in pairs. The only asymmetries are the small flicks of lighter blue where the ears catch light, placed just unevenly enough to keep the image alive.
The color is the other bold decision. Elephants are grey, and a grey elephant on a poster in 1936 would have been respectable and forgettable. The blue makes it an emblem instead of a specimen, closer to a trademark than to a zoological plate. Paired with the sulphur yellow ground and the cream lettering on black, the poster reads across a street, which is what a poster is for.
The Zoo It Sold
The Philadelphia Zoo, chartered in 1859 and opened in 1874, was the first zoo in the United States, and in the Depression it competed for the public's scarce nickels with every other amusement in Fairmount Park. The Federal Art Project's poster division existed to publicize exactly this kind of civic institution, along with health clinics, concerts, exhibitions and national parks, and its Philadelphia office turned out a run of zoo posters that collectors now rank with the best American poster art of the century.
An elephant was the zoo's biggest draw in every sense, and the poster treats it that way, filling the sheet edge to edge. There is no landscape, no keeper, no bars: the animal is presented the way the zoo itself wanted to be seen, as a place where a city child could stand in front of the largest land animal on earth and look it in the eye. The poster simply does the same thing on paper.
One Animal, Whole Poster
It is worth pausing on how radical the cropping is. The elephant's body fills the sheet so completely that its edges nearly touch the poster's own, and there is no ground line, no suggestion of a zoo paddock, nothing to tell you how big the animal is except the assumption you bring with you. Stevenson trusts that assumption completely. The poster is less a scene than a confrontation, scaled so that a passerby on a Philadelphia street got, for a second, the experience the zoo was selling: standing in front of an elephant.
The device had a long poster pedigree by 1936. European masters of the object poster, the Sachplakat tradition, had shown since before the First World War that a single thing, drawn big and flat, outsells any amount of scenery. Stevenson's elephant is that lesson in American WPA dress, proof that the workshops were not provincial job programs but studios fully current with international design, applied here to the most un-European subject imaginable: a municipal zoo's star resident.
In the Record
The WPA poster program produced millions of prints, of which only a fraction survive; the Library of Congress holds the great reference collection, and Stevenson's elephant is cataloged there among the Pennsylvania designs. When the U.S. Postal Service honored WPA posters with a stamp booklet in 2016, a poster from this same zoo series made the selection, a late official word on what the workshops already knew in 1937: these were not throwaway advertisements. They were the public art of the Depression, and the blue elephant is one of its most confident performances.
