'Artists Prefer Shell!': Shell-Mex and BP Limited’s patronage of the British avant garde in the 1930s

This paper discusses Shell-Mex and BP Limited’s advertising campaign from the 1930s to reveal how the development of the petroleum business in the United Kingdom was encouraged using the visual language of modernism and vice versa. Facilitating works by leading proponents of the British avant-garde – including Ben Nicholson, Paul Nash, Vanessa Bell, John Piper, and Graham Sutherland – an ambitious promotional strategy centred on artist commissions was spearheaded by the marketing executive Jack Beddington, who oversaw the establishment of a joint publicity venture between the two corporations. My analysis will explore how the promotional success of these advertisements hinged on how they collectively brought together British avant-garde movements including Surrealism and NeoRomanticism to construct an idealised image of the company as being both progressive and traditional that appealed to their broad middle-class consumer base