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Our 22nd Annual Summer Show
July 4 through Labor Day, 2015
July is here and eternal summer is in the air!
We are celebrating the spirit of the season with our 22nd Annual Summer Poster Show. The joys of beach, travel, music, sport, fine food and spirits from the 1890s to the present are featured in more than 50 vintage posters on exhibit in our gallery. Some highlights:
Travel
This luminous view of Menton, a stunning resort town on the French Riviera near the Italian border, hails from the early years of the Golden Age of Travel. Menton became a popular destination in the 1890s for wealthy aristocrats from Britain and Russia, who enjoyed frequenting the Municipal Casino there. At that time, the temperate winter season made the idea of endless summer a reality - indeed, summer tourists did not arrive on the Cote d'Azur until after WWI.
In the early 30s, Edward Eggleston produced what is considered the best series of posters for the Pennsylvania Railroad, with the most spectacular ones featuring Atlantic City. Eggleston's striking beauties are highlighted by a rich color palette and fabulous architectural settings which create an idyllic world somewhat akin to a Hollywood stage set. Indeed, Atlantic City was in its heyday during the Depression, when a weary public needed an escape to a more perfect world - either of celluloid or sunshine.
Also included in the show is a remarkably rare airline poster for TEAL, or Tasman Empire Airways, the forerunner of Air New Zealand. Dating from 1940, the inaugural year for the airline, it shows a Short Empire Flying Boat above a map of the globe. The Tasman seaplane flew the 1200 miles from Auckland to Sydney in 9 hours, and through Qantas/BOAC provided the first direct connection from Britain's most distant colony to the motherland.
Spirits
A toast to the stars is the motif of this magical poster by J. Spring. A theatrical pierrot raises a glass to the heavens to express his joy of life and the wonders of Cognac Sorin. This poetic image would prove to be quite popular and we know it was used by the manufacturer several times during the period in a multi-media campaign including fans and small format materials.
Sports/Fashion
The headliner of the summer show is the Mid-Century Modernposter, Kajak, 1961. Leading Austrian designer Walter Hofmanncreated dozens of posters for several swimwear and sun tan producers during the Fifties and Sixties. Like David Klein in the US, Hofmann featured the early use of searing neon colors to amp up his designs and give them a fresh and youthful look. A sophisticated designer, Hofmann balances design elements like the color and shape of the headgear, the bathing suits, poses, hands and the footwear to create an irresistible 8 foot tall billboard.
Music
1967 marked the full flowering of the youth counter-culture of the Sixties. Not surprisingly, the psychedelic posters from the "Summer of Love" turned all the Modernist rules of "rational" Swiss design upside down. A new poster craze drew heavily on the floral excesses of Art Nouveau, the pulsating afterimages of Op-Art and the bizarre juxtapositions of Surrealism to create an intense, erotic and other-worldly visual experience.
A stunning poster for the Willisau Jazz Festival in Switzerland creates a remarkably fresh graphic expression for the act of playing jazz saxophone. It was created by Niklaus Troxler, a world famous Post-Modern graphic designer, whose hobby as an amateur musician led to his creation of a highly successful annual jazz festival in the mid-Seventies that continues today. Endlessly creative, Troxler has created more than 200 unique designs that blend word play, unique typography and diverse design traditions.
