Posters

I

Introduction

Posters, large sheets of paper printed with advertisements or announcements, mass-produced for public display. Posters usually consist of a colourful image and a brief text or identifying trademark. They usually have a commercial purpose—to advertise products or publicize events—but they also occasionally appear as public education announcements, instruments of propaganda, or pure works of art with no overt message.

Posters came into existence in the 15th century with the invention of the printing press. The earliest posters, which were usually not illustrated, carried announcements of royal proclamations, municipal decrees, fairs and markets, and occasionally advertisements for books. Small woodcut illustrations were used somewhat more frequently in later centuries, but they were relatively difficult to produce and were never common. Not until the 19th century did posters begin to assume their modern look.

II

Beginnings of the Modern Period

Two events, occurring about 1800, gave birth to the modern era of poster production. One was the beginning of large-scale industrialization, brought on by the Industrial Revolution, which created a need for extensive advertising. The other, in 1798, was the invention of lithography, a new printing method that made it much easier for posters to carry coloured illustrations. Poster production boomed throughout the first half of the 19th century, and posters were used to advertise an enormous range of goods and services. Also at this time, theatrical posters first appeared, often with realistic illustrations of scenes from the plays, operas, or burlesques that they advertised.

Most of these early posters were literal, straightforward, and relatively unimaginative. Not until 1867, when Frenchman Jules Chéret produced a poster announcing a theatrical performance by Sarah Bernhardt, did the art of the poster begin to realize its full potential. Chéret, the first of the great modern poster artists, revolutionized the look of posters. Whereas in earlier posters the illustrations were subordinate to the text, Chéret made the illustration the dominant feature of the poster and reduced the role of the text to a relatively minor, explanatory one. He also departed from a direct illustration of the text. Instead of realistic scenes, he drew idealized figures, emphasizing their prettiness, vitality, and movement. He specialized in theatrical posters, of which he produced nearly 1,000. A typical work of his might feature an effervescent young woman in ruffles and flounces, performing the cancan against a filmy, pastel background. The text was reduced to a minimum, usually consisting of no more than a few words at the top or bottom of the poster and simply announcing the name of the theatre and the attraction presented there.

Chéret’s methods spread quickly throughout Europe and America. Applied to posters for commercial products as well as theatrical events, they gave rise to a visually charming poster art that appealed directly to the senses and was also understandable to those who were illiterate.

This new vitality in poster art attracted many well-known painters and artists to the genre. The most important developments came in the 1890s, when the French painters Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Pierre Bonnard and various Art Nouveau artists made important innovations.

III

The 1890s

Toulouse-Lautrec, the supreme poster artist of the 19th century, made significant changes to both the content and the artistic style of posters. He abandoned the lyrical impressionism of earlier styles, and instead used large areas of flat colour, a technique borrowed from Japanese prints (see Japanese Art and Architecture). The idealized female figures of earlier posters were replaced with naturalistic, yet subtly stylized people and telling vignettes—a woman drinking at a bar, a gentleman kissing a woman at a table. In his work, the prominence given to the text steadily decreased as the artist concentrated the viewer’s attention on the poster’s pictorial aspect. In one of Toulouse-Lautrec’s last works, a poster entitled Jane Avril (1899), the text, except for the name of the entertainer herself, is eliminated entirely; it is the prototype of all modern, purely pictorial posters.

Art Nouveau artists introduced a pictorial style alternative to that of Toulouse-Lautrec. The flowing lines and elegant elongated forms of their poster art created exotic, stylized images. The most important Art Nouveau poster artists were Aubrey Beardsley, Alphonse Mucha, Henri van de Velde, Frances MacDonald and her sister Margaret MacDonald, Will Bradley, Gustav Klimt, and Jan Toorop. Van de Velde’s poster Tropon l’Aliment le Plus Concentré (1899, Museum of Modern Art, New York), for the food manufacturers Tropon, was a landmark in the development of poster art. In it, human figures are completely eliminated and an abstract design substituted; this created a whole new style of poster design.

Bonnard, although not a prolific poster artist, made one highly influential innovation. In a poster advertising the periodical La Revue Blanche that he produced in 1894, he used the text as an integral part of the illustration, intertwining the letters with the illustration and using words in small print as the background. This new style had an invigorating effect on subsequent poster design that lasted well into the 20th century.

IV

The 20th Century

With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, poster art underwent an abrupt change. Posters became instruments of propaganda and were also used to encourage enlistment in the army and to sell war bonds. Compared to previous styles, they were usually crude artistically and their message blunt. The most famous poster of the period in Britain was Your Country Needs You, urging volunteers to join the British Army; a stern Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, points a finger directly at the viewer. The image was replicated in the United States poster I Want You (1917), by James Montgomery Flagg, in which Uncle Sam points an identical finger. So arresting was the image that it has been used in peacetime for a range of advertising purposes.

During the 1920s and 1930s, posters reflected a multitude of influences, including those of Cubism, Surrealism, Dada, and Art Deco. Poster artists included the Frenchmen Cassandre (the professional name of Adolphe Mouron) and Jean Carlu, and the American E. McKnight Kauffer. The best-known works were Cassandre’s Art Deco advertisements for the French national railway network, such as Nord Express (1927), featuring trains and railway tracks portrayed in an elegant, semi-abstract, geometrical style.

During these years, two new types of poster—the film and travel poster—also became popular. Travel posters had been produced since 1908 by the London Transport Company; during the 1930s they began to be commissioned by all major transport companies. The popularity of silent films and, after 1929, sound films, led to an enormous boom in the production of the film posters (see Cinema, Early Development of).

Also important in the 1920s and 1930s were non-commercial posters produced by serious artists, especially in Germany and Russia. Dada artists in Berlin and Russia, notably John Heartfield, George Grosz, and El Lissitzky, experimented with photographic (rather than painted) posters, often assembling complex photomontages from pieces of several photographs. In Germany, the Bauhaus school of design pioneered modern forms of graphic art, making the text of the poster an integral part of the design and in some cases using the words or letters of the text to create the entire design. The work of the Austrian-born American artist Herbert Bayer carried graphic design in posters to a level of sophistication not equalled until the 1960s.

During World War II forceful propaganda posters were again produced, often by major artists such as the Russian-American Ben Shahn.

In posters of the post-war period, earlier trends were adapted and refined. Painters such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Henri Matisse, Max Bill, and Roy Lichtenstein all produced posters as did several American graphic artists, Peter Max, Milton Glaser, and Tomi Ungerer among them. The increasing sophistication of advertising posters towards the end of the century was particularly evident in those promoting cigarettes. Rising pressure from legislation restricting the advertising of tobacco in the interests of reducing smoking led to the development of a particular style of poster; they would often carry text and images that did not clearly reveal and merely hinted at the product being advertised.