“You do not sell a man tea,” he explained in Printer’s Ink in 1925, “but the magical spell which is brewed nowhere else but in a tea-pot.” While the teleology of commerce remained in force—sell the product—copywriters and artists, Wallen advised, should endow products and their process of manufacturing with an aura appropriate to the Machine Age. If you depict a foundry, he wrote, put “the wonderful miracle of industry” into the picture—not “the hardships of labor.” For Wallen, forsaking pictorial realism was a way not only to obscure the reality of alienation but also to enchant the
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