Chances are you already have some inkling of the enticement powers inherent in much of the output by poster designers in the lithographic era (1890-1940). That appeal was clear to those first encountering this phenomenon, around 1890 in Paris. There were the aficionados of artists like Toulouse-Lautrec and Pierre Bonnard who trusted their heroes' decision to lighten up. But more importantly there were large numbers of viewers who had hitherto never thought of buying art, but who found the product and the price irresistible.

By the end of the 1890s there were dozens of retail outlets for posters. The trade depended upon the works' publishers agreeing to print a couple of hundred extra instances for the collectible market. By World War I, the boom in French poster collecting had come to an end. From then on the French experience would be more like that of other European countries, with a few devotees and a very few sources for purchase. The production advantages of cheap labor and materials and no real competition from other media, disappeared. Ambitiously-produced magazines and radio became very attractive advertising venues, while objections to posting on privately-owned walls became more forceful. With the onset of World War II, the métier dissolved to a shadow of its former self, as did the interest in collecting. With the Depression and the War and an increasing penchant for intellectual sobriety, the possibilities for collecting those designs were largely deprived of the wonderment earlier passers-by had more easily experienced.

Only much later, and on the margin of the vintage activity, in America, conditions for the revival of that wonderment became favorable.

One of the least heralded spinoffs of the rock and roll craze was its eliciting a remarkably astute recycling of vintage graphic art, particularly Art Nouveau poster design, in the form of psychedelic broadsheets for Bill Graham's Fillmore rock concerts series. Most people encountering this work had never considered posters as a source of excitement and fascination, let alone home decor. Rock posters fulfilled the same underappreciated revolutionary function performed by the lithographic gems of the Belle Epoque and Art Deco periods. As quick takes, they were more suited to a busy home environment than the objects of study constituted by fine art in its academic, museum orientation. The posters at both ends of the spectrum subtly confirmed a special validity about sensual public attitudes and inventive, audacious deluxe materials. As such they branded a domaine as forward-looking.

Getting down to the present state of affairs, the organization of our galleries indicates possible areas for collection and it displays relationships between specific items. With your collecting priorities as a point of departure, we could advise about complementary images, storage and investment strategies. As such we play our part in the upswing of a remarkable and still largely unsuspected history of graphic design.