Vintage Art Deco Posters | International Poster Gallery

Woman golfs in foreground, with river scene and country club behind; yellow, blue, green — Roger Broders, Vichy Ses Sources, 1928

Cubist still life of bottle, fruit and glass on table; red, green, yellow, black — Marcello Nizzoli, Cordial Campari, 1926

Train speeds past text at bottom; green, blue, black, orange, yellow, red — Sam Hyde Harris, Southern Pacific's New Daylight, 1937

Plumb line against brick wall; yellow, orange, blue, black, red — Jacques Nathan-Garamond, L'Habitation - Grand Palais Paris, 1936

Art Deco Posters

Explore our world-leading Art Deco collection.

Art Deco replaced Art Nouveau as the major international decorative style after World War I and continued until World War II. Art Deco represented a machine age aesthetic, replacing flowing, floral motifs with streamlined, geometric designs that expressed the speed, power and scale of modern technology.

Design influences were many, from the modern art movements of Cubism, Futurism and Constructivism to ancient geometric design elements from the exotic cultures of Egypt, Assyria and Persia. In poster art, precursors were the German Plakatstil, the Viennese Secession and the Parisian fashion design revolution that began in 1908.

The style received its name from the Decorative Arts Exposition of Paris in 1925, which marked the full flowering of Art Deco design. Simplification and abstraction were always its hallmarks, although the graceful elegance and exoticism of its early days yielded to a more muscular and forceful style in the late 1920s and 1930s.

That final phase is often called the "Cassandre Style" after its most famous artist, who enjoyed a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936. Cassandre's sleek designs of towering ships and speeding trains are still considered the style's quintessential images.

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