The Golden Age Of The Poster

The Golden Age of the Poster by Hayward Cirker and Blanche Cirker, published by Dover in 1971, is a glorious survey of the period when advertising posters were expected to do rather more than shout SALE in twelve-foot letters beside a photograph of somebody pretending to enjoy yoghurt.

This is the world of the great illustrated poster: bold colour, elaborate typography, theatrical composition, elegant women, heroic bicycles, absinthe, cabarets, railways, cigarettes, exhibitions and products which apparently became irresistible the moment somebody drew them properly.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a remarkable period for poster design. Improvements in colour lithography allowed artists to produce striking images on a large scale, and city streets became galleries whether anybody had asked for one or not.

The result was a golden age in which commercial art and fine art cheerfully overlapped.

Artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec, Jules Chéret, Alphonse Mucha and their contemporaries transformed the humble advertising bill into something people now frame, preserve and hang in museums, which must have been deeply confusing to anyone originally employed merely to sell theatre tickets or bicycles.

The posters reproduced here show just how sophisticated commercial imagery could be before marketing departments acquired spreadsheets.

A successful poster had to work quickly. It needed to catch the eye of somebody walking past in the street, communicate an idea almost instantly and remain memorable long enough for that person to consider buying whatever improbable thing was being promoted.

In other words, it was doing the same job as online advertising today, only with considerably better drawing.

There is particular pleasure in the sheer confidence of the designs. Colours are strong, figures are dramatic, lettering is part of the picture and subtlety is deployed only when absolutely necessary.

Some posters are elegant. Some are outrageous. Some seem to imply that purchasing a particular brand of soap will immediately improve one’s social standing and romantic prospects.

Advertising, apparently, has not changed quite as much as we like to think.

The book is also an excellent visual history of changing tastes. Fashion, transport, entertainment, tourism and consumer culture all appear in these images, often in idealised form.

Railway companies promised effortless journeys. Resorts promised eternal sunshine. Cabarets promised excitement. Manufacturers promised refinement, sophistication and possibly better hair.

Whether any of this was true is almost irrelevant. The posters looked magnificent.

Published by Dover, this volume belongs to that excellent tradition of affordable art books which allowed ordinary people to own collections of images without taking out a small mortgage.

It is a particularly useful book for graphic designers, illustrators, art students, collectors of advertising material and anyone interested in typography, printmaking or the visual culture of the Belle Époque and early twentieth century.

There is also a mildly ironic pleasure in the fact that many of these posters were originally ephemeral.

They were printed, pasted to walls, exposed to rain and intended to be replaced by the next campaign. Now surviving examples can command serious prices while modern advertising disappears from a screen the instant someone closes a browser tab.

So much for progress.

Condition: Fair. The book itself is in good overall condition, but the clear plastic coating/laminate over the covers is beginning to peel in places with age. The covers themselves remain sound; the issue is with the ageing outer plastic layer rather than major structural damage.

This is therefore one of those irritating cases where the book is actually better than the single-word condition grade suggests, but the laminate has decided after several decades that continued adhesion is optional.

ISBN: 0486227537.

A colourful and highly enjoyable collection of classic poster design from an age when advertising artists were allowed to be artists, lettering was part of the composition, and selling a bottle of something apparently required a woman in an elaborate dress surrounded by decorative foliage.

Sold by Crappy Old Books — where even the peeling plastic is vintage.

Keep browsing: See more Art books Other books by Hayward Cirker and Blanche Cirker