Poster Post

July 29, 2017 6:18 PM

200+ Posters from the Golden Age of Graphic Design
posted by storybored (12 comments total)

Story time!

It's june. I'm gay. It's 2017, so I'm even More Gay than normal. My local museum is having a pride event, and the running joke of the night is that Everything Is Gay. Parking lot? Gay. Tasteful shrubbery? Gay. That enormous statue out front of the naked man on the horse with the giant balls? Extra Gay. It's june and we're queer in public and everything you love is gay.

So we're going around the museum, and the travelling exhibit is a companion of Japanese woodblock prints and impressionist works, many of them Toulouse-Lautrec. First comment of the exhibit: he's gay. And as we're going through, it just... gets a little but uncanny? The bio mentions that he never married, etc. Then we get to this work, and I just stop and say "I mean really, that's the most phallic thing I've ever seen." My group stops, ponders appropriately (if you don't stroke your face or tilt your head to the side, are you really even thinking about art?), and mutters things about "penises". A lovely museum attendant notices our interest and comes over to engage with us, asking what our perspective was on the poster. She thought our phallic discussion was rather warranted, and seemed pleased we were engaging.
posted by FirstMateKate at 6:45 PM on July 29, 2017 [20 favorites]

Yay for Minnesota's support of the arts! Thank you for posting this.
posted by yesster at 7:24 PM on July 29, 2017

Bières de la Muse, my all time favorite poster.
posted by Oyéah at 7:46 PM on July 29, 2017 [1 favorite]

In 1988 I was in Paris: a teen-ager with my best friend. He and I spent a day at a museum of advertising art, which was basically a dark space with these giant posters hanging up under bright lights. I hadn't seen most of them before, and certainly never presented as arrrrt, and I loved it. It really changed they way I thought of commercial art, and advertising, and a lot of other stuff.

I sure wish I could remember the name of that museum, so I could go see whether their collection is online now.
posted by wenestvedt at 8:16 PM on July 29, 2017

(Bummer, the Flickr pages have pretty small images for download -- and only one at a time. Or am I doing it wrong?)
posted by wenestvedt at 8:22 PM on July 29, 2017

@wenestvedt - There's a download link (downward pointing arrow) in the header to download the entire archive.
posted by rmmcclay at 9:47 PM on July 29, 2017 [1 favorite]

Pasta pomodoro, how I miss you.
posted by benzenedream at 9:48 PM on July 29, 2017

I got all excited thinking this was going to a trove of Swiss International style graphic design from the 50s to the 70s. Dammit.
posted by ereshkigal45 at 10:27 PM on July 29, 2017 [3 favorites]

I love, love, love the art of this era! Went to the Mucha museum in Prague recently and came out with a stained glass image of Repos de la Nuit.
posted by kyrademon at 5:22 AM on July 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

I thought it was going to be a Milton Glaser retrospective. These are great, too, though. ;)
posted by Thorzdad at 6:17 AM on July 30, 2017 [2 favorites]

Lovely stuff. I have some of the Mucha Sarah Bernhardt prints on my wall. Not enough Parrish in here, but perhaps not much of his stuff was made into posters?
posted by lhauser at 5:53 PM on July 30, 2017

I love, love, love the art of this era! Went to the Mucha museum in Prague recently and came out with a stained glass image of Repos de la Nuit.

I was in Prague a few months ago and sadly missed the Mucha Museum. But I did go to the National Gallery where they had all of the paintings from Mucha's Slav Epic on display in a massive gallery. It was stunning. There was no comparison between seeing pictures of the paintings and the actual paintings that went from the floor, twenty feet up to the ceiling.
posted by storybored at 9:43 PM on July 30, 2017