Posters – Power, Presentation, and Propaganda – Part 1

Can you remember the first poster you owned, that you put up in your childhood or teenage bedroom? Was it a photographic image of a celebrity or sports hero?

For centuries, posters have been used to market people, products, and services. They can impact culture, express design, and can become historical documents – they can influence, anger and captivate.

Consider this early German “Wanted” poster. The individual is front and centre, and presented without stylistic elaboration given the context of its message. Given the historical nature of this work, once you take in the text it carries a powerful message.

In the period known as the ‘Belle Epoque’ or the ‘Beautiful Era’ (1890-1900) young
artists in Europe were using the poster as a means of communication to advertise
theatre, and other forms of art. These images were primarily hand pulled prints such as lithographs.

Of these artists Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was perhaps the best known. Lautrec was an excellent painter and printmaker, who had the financial means to create four colour lithographs; a tedious, expensive, and exacting process.

His flat four colour poster created for the Moulin Rouge uses the three primary colours and black to bring us into the performance of the renowned can-can dancer La Goulue positioned at centre of the image and the space. She is lit by gaslight, the concertmaster in a light grey silhouette is in the foreground, while the audience in black silhouette circumvents the live entertainment.

Working in Austria in the same period, designer Julius Klinger dramatically captures commercial visual culture through his simple but effective advertising posters.

Like Lautrec’s work the line between art and commerce is blurred in the posters of Klinger; what is fascinating is that both of their posters were originally put up in the streets. Today they are worth thousands of dollars.

Working in the UK, the Macdonald sisters worked to eliminate the superficial distinction between so-called “fine art” and “craft,” and to integrate art with life as it had been in the pre-modern period. These multi talented practitioners of the Arts and Crafts movement created a poster focused more so on style, typography and form, rather than a sexualized female figure.

Posters pandered the art of persuasion. The entire Modernist movement was about seeing old things in new ways. For railway companies, shipping lines, and later airlines, posters helped market travel to as wide an audience as possible. Commercial artists used posters to promote fast and efficient modern travel; Canada was presented both as a place to see and be seen.

If truth is the first casualty of war, propaganda posters represent perhaps the strongest body of work the war has left behind. In spite of and perhaps due to the vastly different approaches in technique, style, message, and design, they graphically reveal and reinforce the severity and depth of their mission.

With the onset of mass media, something the poster helped to advertise, posters began a slow and calculated decline.

Next month we’ll look at the various kinds of posters that heralded the post war period.