Poster

About

Printed notices were posted in towns from the 15th century, but the pictorial poster was born with colour lithography. In Paris from the late 1860s Jules Chéret printed large, bright sheets for music halls and theatres, and by the 1890s Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Alphonse Mucha and Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen had turned the city's walls into a display of flat colour, bold outline and lettering. Collectors began to prize them almost at once.

Each era reinvented the form. The Beggarstaffs in Britain and Ludwig Hohlwein in Germany simplified shapes; governments in both world wars used posters to recruit and ration; A. M. Cassandre's designs for railways and ocean liners turned speed into geometry. In 1960s San Francisco, Victor Moscoso and Wes Wilson made concert posters with vibrating colour and melting type, while screenprinted protest posters spread from Paris in May 1968. A strong poster reads in seconds from across a street.