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The posters in our collection are original vintage posters. That means they are antique posters, most of them in fact 70 or 80 years old, but many of them over 100 years of age. As antique posters, vintage posters perform the function of portal to ways of life once desirable and perhaps still so. They do this in the form of advertising posters, enticements towards taking up specific treasures gracing times and places now vanished. Advertising posters deserving to be described as vintage posters demonstrate not only a considerable age and corresponding hand-craft production style, but also coherent graphic design. Marshalling strengths in composition, color, modelling and typography constitutes a display of experience so enhanced as to merit purchase. Whereas in the the initial transaction between graphic design and viewer an object or service to purchase was at issue, in the transaction today the poster vehicle itself becomes the keeper of the flame.
Vintage graphic design was not, of course, confined to poster design, and so the following pages include other forms of graphic advertising promotion and illustration. Although in poster form the conveyances of vintage graphic design can circulate with special immediacy and force, there are unique rewards to be derived from graphic art as applied to such devices as books, journals, catalogues and advertising fans. Graphic artists, particularly in the art deco era seem to have been galvanized by the special poise involved in finely crafted items of modest function and size.
In addition, therefore, to major exponents of the French poster like Pal, Grun, Cappiello,Loupot and Broders, and poster artists from elsewhere, like Newbould, Boccasile, Morell, Baumberger and Ewart, our gallery highlights graphic artists whose commitment was to small format art deco renditions of fashion, automobiles, ocean liners, food and beverages and the lush life.Paul Iribe, Pico, George Barbier, Eduardo Benito, Mariette Lydis, to name but a few, distilled a vibrancy of great poster art into compact missives, and with levels of graphic subtlety reaching beyond the lightning effects of advertising by posters.
Of special interest amongst the non-poster vintage output is the pochoir print, which consisted of hand-colored multiples. In its fashion-promotion and decorative modes, the pochoir attracted commercial artists of remarkable stature. Like the great poster artists, leading exponents of the pochoir, notably, Georges Lepape, George Barbier, André Marty and
Eduardo Benito could consistently and prolifically turn out
depictions of excitements which prove irresistible to an attentive
viewer.
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