Friday’s ad is for Ballantine Ale and features everybody’s favorite humorist and cowboy, Will Rogers, who once said “he never met a man he didn’t like.” Perhaps the ad is trying to suggest he’d never met a beer he didn’t like either. I’m not sure when the ad is from, but Rogers passed away in 1935.
Tuesday’s ad is from 1953 and is for Ballantine. It features someone in a captain’s hat looking lovingly at a very large beer glass, with the tagline “Expect something wonderfully different in Ballantine Ale.”
Thursday’s ad is another early ad for Ballantine, done by a cartoon artist depicting three well-heeled gentlemen sitting and talking while they enjoy their Ballantine Ale. It uses the tagline “Moving in the Best Circles …”
Wednesday’s ad is an early ad for Ballantine, one of the first to use their iconic three-rings of “body,” “purity” and “flavor.” Unfortunately, it also features an ugly, frightening clown — but then I hate clowns.
Thursday’s ad is for Ballantine Ales from 1953. It’s set on a rooftop bowling alley. It reminds me of the book from a few years ago, Bowling Alone, about how society’s more fractured now and has lost its sense of community. The bowlers in the ad certainly look like they’re having a good time.
Friday’s ad is for Ballantine Ale, from 1954, with the slogan “Where hospitality is a fine art, It’s Ballantine Ale 4 to 1.” I love that they’re trying to position it as classy compared to lagers. Even the tagline at the bottom is priceless. “The light ale millions prefer to beer.” Lager is for the hoi polloi, ale is for connoisseurs. Nice.
I found today’s work of art wandering around the National Gallery of Art in D.C. this afternoon, taking a day to recover from SAVOR before heading to Philly Beer Week. The second artwork that I featured in this series was by the same artist, Jasper Johns, a sculpture of two Ballantine Ale cans bronzed over, called Painted Bronze. This work, entitled Field Painting, was completed about four years after Painted Bronze, in 1964.
It may be difficult to see, but the work includes many elements Johns used in his art, including a can of Ballantine Ale. You can see it more clearly in the detail below.
Here’s what the National Gallery has to say about Field Painting.
Field Painting, for example, pivots references both to art-making and Johns’ own career. The primary colors red, yellow, and blue are spelled out in letters hinged perpendicularly to the canvas, where they also appear in stencil-like doubles. Attached to them are various studio tools. The Savarin coffee tin and Ballantine beer can both allude to Johns’ studio paraphernalia and to his appropriation of them as motifs in his work. Passages of smeared and dripped paint, a footprint, light switch, and a neon “R” collude with other visual codes to multiply the possibility of associations.
Actually, the best way to see this painting is from an angle, on the side, where its three dimensions are more obvious.
To learn more about Jasper Johns, Wikipedia has a good overview of Jasper johns, as does Answers.com. Also, the overview at Area of Design includes a few of his representative works throughout his career.
Friday’s ad is for Ballantine Ale from — I’m just guessing — the 1950s, and is attempting to show the beer as high class, upscale even with the cocktail dress and morning coat. The slogan, “Ballantine Ale begins where other brews leave off … in flavor … in satisfaction!,” is one they used frequently. There’s another one, down below that’s pretty interesting. Just above the bottle and can, it reads. “The LIGHT ale that’s strong on flavor.” Obviously, that was before low-calorie light beers. It most likely was to combat competition from lighter color lagers.
Monday’s ad finds us at the beach with Ballantine Ale, probably from the late 50s, early 60s. The slogan “Try it for a change … and you’ll never change back!” is pretty interesting, though I’ve no idea what it has to do with being at the shore. The other text, “Ballantine Ale begins where other brews leaves off … in flavor … in satisfaction” is likewise great adspeak.
Tuesday’s ad ran in Life magazine in 1957. It’s odd to see them mention a hop variety by name in an ad in the 1950s, though they don’t actually identify it as such. The slogan, “Only Ballantine Ale brews Brewer’s Gold into Genuine Golden Ale Flavor,” further suggests they were the only American brewer using it.
