Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February 1962 | Volume 13, Issue 2
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February 1962 | Volume 13, Issue 2
“Is there anything under the sun which people will not collect?” the famous French novelist Balzac once asked. “They collect buttons, walking sticks, fans, political pamphlets and newspapers. One day,” he added contemptuously, “they may even collect posters.”
And so, inevitably, it came to pass. By 1890, forty years after Balzac’s death, poster designing was very much an art, and poster collecting a mania. In Paris, where the fad originated, spirited, gaily colored posters could be seen all over the city, advertising everything from art exhibits and little magazines to the lighthearted pleasures of the music hall. Products of art nouveau —that widespread rebellion against the confines of the sentimental naturalism of the late nineteenth century—many of these posters were done by artists of real greatness like Toulouse-Lautrec and Henri Bonnard, or lesser figures like Jules Chéret (who had been inspired by American circus posters). The demand for them was at times overwhelming. People tried to steal posters or to bribe workers employed to paste them up, and art dealers found them a lucrative sideline.
Soon the “poster craze,” as the phenomenon was known, had crossed the Atlantic and had America in its grip. There were poster exhibits everywhere. A bicycle manufacturer organized a mammoth competition, which brought in close to a thousand entries. Poster dealers set themselves up in almost all the major cities. Periodicals kept collectors informed on the latest poster developments. In Chicago, people gave parties at which the ladies dressed as poster figures, leaving the gentlemen to guess at their identity. In Boston, young people in love sent each other symbolic posters.
It was not that posters were new to America; the novelty was rather the poster as an art form. Since the mid-nineteenth century, posters were a common enough sight, plastered on board fences, brick walls, country barns, and covered bridges. Produced by large lithographing firms, they were the unsigned work of craftsmen who were less concerned with aesthetic theories than with the exact rendering of whatever image a client called for—whether a patent medicine remedy, a tearful scene from an Uncle Tom show, or the one and only living giraffe in America.
An exception to the rule were the posters issued by magazines in the 1880’s to announce their holiday numbers. These were done by the magazines’ illustrators, who traditionally signed their work. Small in format and intended for shop-window display, they were of no great value as works of art, being usually an enlarged illustration, fuzzily designed and overburdened with décor. Uninspired as they may have been, however, they did at least set a precedent, and gave publishers the idea of importing posters designed by leading European graphic artists of the day.
Harper’s, in 1889, was the first to make the experiment, commissioning a Christmas poster by Eugene Grasset, a Swiss whose work reflected modern tastes but was not so avant-garde as to offend the magazine’s conservative public. It was not, however, until the