What you should remember about the beginning of poster art is its connection to the arts politics of 19th century Europe, particularly Paris. Of course the coincidence of a growing industrial economy and a perfected color lithographic print technology accounted for the spectacle of large, colorful advertisements in the streets. But that convergence alone would never have sustained a serious collectible market more than 100 years after the first postings.
Poster commissions allowed painters, illustrators and other artisans to express in a tangible form misgivings about the validity of so-called fine art while reshaping the input of so-called decorative art. The apparently lightweight quality of the designs had something to do with the fact that in order to promote effectively a product or service the designer had to associate it with some widely comprehensible glimpse of the rewards of being alive. But it does not follow that their fun and ease of comprehension leave posters a party to the dumbing down of recent times. For the early dissidents of Montmartre and subsequent designers of Cubist, Constructivist and Bauhaus persuasions—amongst whom, notably, A.M. Cassandre—there were possibilities in the transaction between poster and viewer which fascinated and drove to startling effects.
Only those posterists with a talent (rarer than commonly supposed) for evoking delight managed to thrive in that industry and thereby provide us with collectibles whose beauty and diffidence speak to some of us with surprising impact. It is in the tossed-off aura of such presentations that posters become haunting for producer and consumer alike. For in that they approach something hitherto neglected by the long-established arts.
In addition to providing that surprising bonus along with encouragements to buy a product, the full-grown posters in question here deployed a physical resource which greatly enhanced their labors of attraction, namely, lithographic printing. Its hand-craft intensive preparation and harmonization of porous stone or metal sheets yielded up intensities and subtleties of color and line on a par with original drawing and painting. The upshot of this production method was seductive textural cuisine adding to our bemusement at being arrested in this way.
There is, to be sure, a more complex setting for the emergence of poster art than that paragraph suggests. In fact, the inspiration of Art Nouveau and Art Deco graphic design shares an impulse apparent in several art forms contemporaneous with the dates when the great posterists flourished. Impressionist painting embodied an urgency to do justice to a remarkable significance about moments of kinetic sensuousness piercing absorption in mundane tasks. (Impressionist music followed suit.) Art Nouveau and Art Deco architecture also aspired to such an outcome. Avant-garde and abstract art movements gravitated to such an effort to overthrow the canniness of the Western tradition. It is no mere coincidence that the Golden Age of the poster witnessed the emergence of dance as a self-assured art form. The improvisational character of jazz in marshalling haunting motifs and rhythms certainly has much to do with that tide of audacity seized upon by poster art to establish a desirability about commercial phenomena. While it is undeniable that the evocative intentions of vintage poster art are not exclusive to that metier, in many instances those intentions are uniquely concentrated due to its unusual interactivity, its not being encumbered by a tradition, with its antithetical expectations, and its enlisting exponents unintimidated by a seeming frivolity.
