Poster Art

Poster art is much more than duplications of fine art on lightweight glossy paper stock. The styles of graphic design dedicated specifically to creating posters have gone through nearly as many artistic movements as painting styles have. Lithography prints first appeared in the late 1700s, but it was in Paris in the 1870s where artistically designed posters began appearing in the streets as a way to communicate on a vast scale.

Poster art is credited as having spawned the modern age of advertising. The Belle Epoque period that began in France in the 1890s is considered by some to be the true beginning of the poster's metamorphosis into fine art. One of the most famous posters to date was created in 1891 by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and is called Moulin Rouge. Across the world, poster art reflected each society's cultural lifestyle. Posters in Germany depicted trade fairs. In Holland, posters demonstrated the importance of literature and products for the home. French posters often depicted cafés, bohemian dancers and bottles of absinthe. American and English posters during the late 1800s were often representations of the circus and popular literary works.

In the early 1900s, German poster artist Lucien Bernhard began a new movement called Plakatstil, which contrasted with the ornamental and flowery styles of the Belle Epoque movement. His designs emphasized flat colors and shapes accompanied by bold and clean lettering. During World War I, posters were designed to depict colorful and vivid propaganda images as an advertising campaign in hopes of encouraging military recruits, volunteers for the cause, and donations towards military aid. After the war, the movement of Art Nouveau dissipated, and Art Deco replaced it, in response to the needs of the industrial age. Many posters during this time depicted colorful images of large ships and machinery.

New Generations of Poster Art

The Object Poster Style movement began to develop during WWII and through the early 1950s. Poster artists from this period made posters depicting average everyday objects, but they were drawn on a giant scale. Other important movements of graphic poster art during the 1900s include the International Typographic Style, Conceptual Image, Postmodern, Memphis and Retro. All of the aforementioned styles borrowed freely from other artistic painting movements, such as Dadaism, Cubism, Surrealism, Pop Art, Expressionism and so on. Today, poster art is still constantly evolving. Many of the vintage posters offered by Cover Your Walls depict some of these early movements that paved the road for graphic artists to come.