American Poster Renaissance

Dutch translation The American Poster Renaissance By Victor Margolin The Golden Age of American poster design was short but brilliant, and summoned the best talent of the artists of that time. The heyday of the poster was in the last decade of the 19th century, when the poster developed into the perfect advertising medium, promoting plays, magazines, patent medicines, and a wide range of new factory-made goods, from bicycles to dynamite. Here, for the first time, American poster artists and their work are brought together in one richly illustrated volume. Some of the pioneers of American graphic design who contributed to the American poster renaissance include Bradley, Penfield, Parrish, Leyendecker, Gibson, Sloan, Bird, Bragdon, Carqueville, Gould, Hazenplug, Mayer, Nankivell, Reed, Rhead, and Woodbury, to name just a few. Their style paralleled the new directions in art that were already revolutionizing the European art world: sharp contrasts and flat patterns, large, bold color areas, strong, sinuous lines. For inspiration, they looked to their European counterparts Chéret, Mucha, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Beardsley, and to the aesthetic ideals set out by the English Arts and Crafts Movement, announced by William Morris and his Kelmscott Press. In the 1890s, posters spread in bookstores, theaters, and on billboards and walls from one end of the country to the other. The quality of poster design was at its peak, incorporating all the newest and most exciting new directions in art. Equally important was the public appreciation for poster art, which developed so rapidly in both Europe and America that it sparked a true poster collecting mania. Fortunately for today's art lovers and poster collectors, the poster has been rediscovered as an art form: the classics of poster design from the 1890s are now reprinted alongside modern posters. The American Poster Renaissance offers a vivid look at this short-lived but vital phenomenon, and at the changes in art ? and in lifestyle ? that it so perfectly reflected. 224 pages. 9 x 12. 175 black-and-white illustrations. 48 full-color plates.…