A Century of Posters presents a pictorial record of the development of poster art and graphic design from 1880 to 1980. Comprising over 400 colour images, it features a wealth of well-known artists from Henri Toulouse-Lautrec to Jan Tschichold.
Film buffs, graphic designers, and art students will relish this beautifully produced and strikingly illustrated volume. Arranged in roughly chronological order, it brings together movie posters from around the world, starting with Charlie Chaplin film ads and the Russian Revolutionary movie posters of the 1910s, then spanning the century to show posters publicizing hits of the 1990s, including The Silence of the Lambs, Spike Lee films, and many more. The bookï¿1/2s sections focus on renowned individual designers, directors, movies, and genres. Important poster designers such as Saul Bass, Jan Lenica, and Juan Gatti receive particular attention, as do great directors who had strong opinions about how their films should be represented. Among the latter are Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard, and Otto Preminger. All major film genres are representedï¿1/2musicals, Kung Fu movies, films noir, westerns (including so-called ï¿1/2spaghetti westernsï¿1/2 filmed in Italy), science fiction classics, and others. Readers are treated to examples of movie posters not only from the United States, Britain, and France, but also to previously unpublished examples from countries as diverse as Poland, China, and Cuba. For instance, fans of Orson Welles might be surprised to see the previously unpublished Italian poster advertising Citizen Kane under its Italian title, Quarto Potere (The Fourth Estate). This handsome volume will be valued by graphic designers, poster collectors, and anyone sharing the popular passion for cinema.
Avidly collected and fetching high prices at auction, the Dartmouth Winter Carnival poster is a treasured and tangible artifact of one of the College's most cherished traditions. Here, presented for the first time, is Dartmouth College Library's definitive collection of Winter Carnival posters from 1911 to 2010, celebrating Dartmouth's seasonal bacchanal, sports fest, and social daze. In addition to their merit as markers of changing taste in graphic arts, the posters offer a fascinating glimpse into a century of intense cultural and institutional development. As a sustained collection the posters are nearly unrivaled, to the envy of ephemera collectors. Everything is here, from the high-end, design-informed style of the early years to the pop-culture and annual-theme inspired posters of more recent years. A constant element is the effervescence of those Dartmouth days, tinged with the glow of nostalgia: youth, energy, sex, sports, camaraderie, and dragons. This colorful and memory-evoking volume also includes a catalogue raisonn giving poster dimensions, artists' names, and other relevant information; charming artistic ephemera (dance cards and programs) from the missing (posterless?) years of 1912 to 1934; and rare photos of the poster selection process. In addition, the book includes an illustrated essay retelling the story of Budd Schulberg and F. Scott Fitzgerald's notorious trip to Winter Carnival; an essay about the art of the posters by noted graphic arts scholar Steven Heller; and a poignant piece by alumna and cultural observer Gina Barreca (class of '79) remembering the posters and the Winter Carnival experience from a student's point of view. This is a wonderful book for alumni, collectors of posters and ski posters, and anyone who has ever been touched by the magic of Winter Carnival.
As snapshots through time, Olympic posters provide a fascinating record of the world. This collection of images offers an intensely visual representation of the modern Games, and shows the evolution of the Olympic Games poster as well.
From band posters stapled to telephone poles to the advertisements hanging at bus shelters to the inspirational prints that adorn office walls, posters surround us everywhere—but do we know how they began? Telling the story of this ephemeral art form, Elizabeth E. Guffey reexamines the poster’s roots in the nineteenth century and explores the relevance they still possess in the age of digital media. Even in our world of social media and electronic devices, she argues, few forms of graphic design can rival posters for sheer spatial presence, and they provide new opportunities to communicate across public spaces in cities around the globe. Guffey charts the rise of the poster from the revolutionary lithographs that papered nineteenth-century London and Paris to twentieth-century works of propaganda, advertising, pop culture, and protest. Examining contemporary examples, she discusses Palestinian martyr posters and West African posters that describe voodoo activities or Internet con men, stopping along the way to uncover a rich variety of posters from the Soviet Union, China, the United States, and more. Featuring 150 stunning images, this illuminating book delivers a fresh look at the poster and offers revealing insights into the designs and practices of our twenty-first-century world.
The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860sÐ1900s is a cultural history that situates the poster at the crossroads of art, design, advertising, and collecting. Though international in scope, the book focuses especially on France and England. Ruth E. Iskin argues that the avant-garde poster and the original art print played an important role in the development of a modernist language of art in the 1890s, as well as in the adaptation of art to an era of mass media. She moreover contends that this new form of visual communication fundamentally redefined relations between word and image: poster designers embedded words within the graphic, rather than using images to illustrate a text. Posters had to function as effective advertising in the hectic environment of the urban street. Even though initially commissioned as advertisements, they were soon coveted by collectors. Iskin introduces readers to the late nineteenth-century ÒiconophileÓÑa new type of collector/curator/archivist who discovered in poster collecting an ephemeral archaeology of modernity. Bridging the separation between the fields of art, design, advertising, and collecting, IskinÕs insightful study proposes that the poster played a constitutive role in the modern culture of spectacle. This stunningly illustrated book will appeal to art historians and students of visual culture, as well as social and cultural history, media, design, and advertising.
As long as there have been movies, there have been posters selling films to audiences. Posters came into existence just decades before the inception of film, and as movies became a universal medium of entertainment, posters likewise became a ubiquitous form of advertising. At first, movie posters suggested a film's theme, from adventure and romance to thrills and spine-tingling horror. Then, with the ascendancy of the film star, posters began to sell icons and lifestyles, nowhere more so than in Hollywood. But every country producing films used posters to sell their product. Selling the Movie: The Art of the Film Poster charts the history of the movie poster from both a creative and a commercial perspective. It includes sections focusing on poster artists, the development of styles, the influence of politics and ideology, and how commerce played a role in the film poster's development. The book is richly illustrated with poster art from many countries and all eras of filmmaking. From creating the brand of Charlie Chaplin's tramp and marketing the elusive mystique of Greta Garbo, to the history of the blockbuster, the changing nature of graphic design by the decade, and the role of the poster in the digital age, Selling the Movie is an entertaining and enthralling journey through cinema, art, and the business of attracting audiences to the box office.