Advertising Posters
Sheets made on the assumption of a few seconds of street attention, compressing a product or a destination into one image, all of it enabled by cheap color lithography.
Dictionary entry
- Plakatstil / Sachplakat 1900s–1910s / Style
Cuts advertising down to the product and its name, delivering meaning at a glance from across the street.
- Circus Poster 1870s–1930s / Style
Show bills that mustered chromolithography and wood type to announce the spectacle in overloaded scenes and the largest words available. Pasted up until they occupied whole walls, they were advertising that turned the city into a theater.
- Beggarstaff Style 1894–1899 / Style
Nicholson and Pryde's cut-paper poster style: contours dropped, subjects summarized in flat shapes of few colors. Commercially unsuccessful in its day, its radical economy anticipated the 20th-century poster.
- Golden Age Travel Poster 1890s–1930s / Style
The lithographed tourism posters railways and shipping lines competed with: idealized destination landscapes, ornamental lettering and proud route names inventing travel itself as an image of desire.
- Shōwa Modern 1920s–1930s / Style
Prewar Japan's commercial modernism, typified by Sugiura Hisui's Mitsukoshi and subway posters: Deco crossed with nihonga, the modern girl's city and refined lettering drawing the dawn of consumer culture.
- Yuefenpai 1910s–1940s / Style
Advertising pictures with a calendar attached, which flowered in Shanghai. Women in qipao rendered in rubbed charcoal and watercolor sold cigarettes and cosmetics while keeping the date, and this East-West hybrid of commercial beauty painting repainted the visual culture of East Asia.