On New Year’s Day 1895, the people of Paris were dazzled by the sudden appearance of a seven-foot-tall Sarah Bernhardt. The stage actor had been painted for a poster, in character, promoting her performance in the Greek drama Gismonda.
No one had seen anything like it before: Promotional material up to that point had usually been small hand bills with bold primary colors and lettering. But this, this was something new. It was muted in pastel colors but precise in detail—technical mastery at a scale never before seen. The poster was made by Czech artist Alphonse Mucha, thought of as one of the fathers of poster-making and the Art Nouveau movement. Some Parisians were so enthralled by this new style of street art that they cut down the posters with razors or bribed bill stickers to squirrel one away for them.
A prolific creator, Mucha went on to make a number of other posters for Bernhardt and her plays, and then for commercial products like cookies, Champagne, and cigarette papers—bringing Art Nouveau into the streets. His famed poster work is featured in the show Alphonse Mucha: Art Nouveau/Nouvelle Femme—one half of an opening set of exhibitions at Poster House, a new museum on West 23rd Street, in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, that opened June 20. The first museum in the United States solely dedicated to the global history and craftsmanship of posters, Poster House celebrates an often overlooked art form that, perhaps more than any other, has infiltrated just about every corner of everyday life, from dorm rooms to concert halls to picket lines. It’s a medium made for mass consumption, sitting at the crossroads of design, art, and advertising.
“Posters are always trying to persuade you, whether it’s to vote a certain way, or to buy a certain thing, or to think of a product or idea in a certain way,” said Julia Knight, Poster House’s director. “It’s fascinating to sort of traipse the history of tactics, of talking to the public and getting them to think a certain way.”
The museum is the brainchild of Val Crosswhite, a practicing artist and Poster House’s president. Crosswhite, Knight, and their partners have worked over the last several years to realize their dream of a living, breathing shrine to posters from the late 1800s to the present. They’ve amassed a permanent collection of some 7,000 historical items from around the world, plus a growing stockpile of contemporary posters that make up a living archive. The museum will pull from those collections for two thematic exhibitions that change every few months. Poster House curator Angelina Lippert defined a poster as “a public-facing notice meant to persuade,” and in that vein future Poster House exhibits will include hand-painted Ghanian movie posters, a history of posters in China, and posters of the 2017 Women’s March. Knight said Poster House has a mission to feature one non-Western and one women-focused exhibition each year.
The modern poster can trace its roots to the 19th century, when color lithography became accessible as a printmaking method. Artful posters, much like Mucha’s, promoted cabarets, operas, and fashion houses throughout Europe and then the United States. At the turn of the 20th century, the fussy elegance of Art Nouveau gave way to posters steeped in caricature and humor before turning a corner toward Art Deco. The onset of World War I and the Russian Revolution saw posters used as propaganda for the first time. As the 20th century hurtled ahead, art movements such as Cubism, Bauhaus, and Pop Art all lent their influence to poster design, informing how everything from soaps to nuclear energy to a Bob Dylan album were promoted to the public.
In the 1990s the personal computer changed things all over again, which brings us to Poster House’s second opening exhibition: Designing Through the Wall: Cyan in the 1990s, a showcase for the work of East Berlin graphic design collective Cyan. Working 100 years after Mucha, Cyan started designing posters in 1992 after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Its designers were some of the first to use digital tools like Adobe PageMaker and Photoshop, and their aesthetic flipped conventional poster design on its head. Instead of large lettering and clear imagery that conveyed a message quickly and from afar, Cyan posters contained layered images printed with small text, drawing the viewer in close. Having grown up in Communist East Berlin, the designers were opposed to shilling for commercial products, instead creating posters mainly for cultural institutions.
“Cyan posters are in tons and tons of design books, tons of poster books, but as we started talking to people, they were like, ‘Oh yeah, we know Cyan but we don’t really know anything about them,’” said Knight. Lippert conducted extensive original research and interviewed Cyan founders Detlef Fiedler and Daniela Haufe over the course of several months. The museum turned that research into a pamphlet that accompanies the exhibition, which is Cyan’s first-ever in the U.S.
On a visit to the museum the morning of its opening, I wondered how posters’ of-the-street ethos would feel once given the museum treatment of professional framing and track lighting. Would this feel like one giant, fancy dorm room or café vestibule? “Our curator really loves to say what’s important about showing posters in this context is that it’s a bottom-up look at culture and history and zeitgeist,” Knight told me. Showcasing posters in a museum setting gives reverence to the of-the-moment quality of the form. Their quotidian nature makes them more noteworthy.
I never would have thought of the posters I made for bands visiting my college campus as part of the zeitgeist, much less museum-worthy. But they did speak to a time and a place, and they conveyed a message—just, Knight said, as all posters intend to.
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