When Does a Poster Become Art? Exhibition, Film, Travel and Advertising Design
A poster can advertise a Picasso exhibition, a Disney film, a railway journey or a bottle of Campari. Put those objects in separate departments and the categories seem obvious: art, cinema, travel, advertising.
Look at the posters themselves and the boundary becomes much less tidy.
Exhibition posters have an obvious connection to art
A gallery poster may reproduce an artist's work, use an image created specifically for the exhibition or occasionally be designed directly by the artist. Either way, its original job was communication: announce the show, name the venue, give the public a reason to come.
That commercial purpose does not make the design less interesting. In fact, the tension between information and image is often what makes exhibition posters so good.
But an exhibition poster is not automatically an original artwork
Terminology matters. A poster bearing Picasso's name is not therefore an original Picasso drawing or signed lithograph. The artist may be the subject of the exhibition rather than the designer of the poster.
Our guide to identifying original exhibition posters explains those distinctions in detail.
Commercial artists were not second-rate artists
Movie studios, airlines, railways and brands commissioned exceptionally talented illustrators and designers because posters had to compete for attention in public. The work was commercial, but that describes its purpose rather than its quality.
Saul Bass could reduce a film to a few shapes. David Klein could make a destination feel electric. Bernard Villemot could turn a product into a handful of curves and colours. Their briefs were commercial; their visual solutions are studied as graphic design.
Film posters complicate the distinction further
A theatrical poster is fundamentally an advertisement. Yet the best examples have become some of the most recognisable images associated with twentieth-century cinema.
Disney is a particularly good example. Animation, illustration, typography and marketing all meet in the physical posters used to promote theatrical releases. That does not turn every Disney poster into fine art; it does make them significant pieces of visual culture.
Travel posters sold an imagined place
Railways and airlines rarely wanted a literal map. They wanted aspiration: sunshine, speed, glamour, architecture, snow, beaches and the promise of being somewhere else.
The resulting posters often tell us as much about the period's idea of travel as they do about the destination itself.
A gallery example
This 1979 Picasso Grand Palais exhibition poster is a useful object precisely because its identity is specific. It belongs to Picasso's exhibition history and to graphic design history, while remaining a poster rather than pretending to be a unique Picasso artwork.
So when does a poster become art?
There probably is not a useful single moment. Museums can collect commercial design; artists can make advertisements; a disposable cinema bill can become historically important; an exhibition poster can remain a mass-produced piece of communication.
We prefer not to force all of that into a hierarchy. A poster can be important because of its design, history, rarity, maker, subject or simply because it is an extraordinary image.
Collect what interests you
That freedom is one of the best things about poster collecting. You can hang a 1930s railway poster beside a 1970s exhibition poster and a 1990s film poster without needing them to belong to the same traditional art category.
What matters when buying is that the object is described accurately. Our authenticity guide explains how we establish what a poster actually is, while our collecting guide is a good place to start exploring the field.
Explore the posters featured above: Keith Haring · David Hockney · Henri Matisse. Continue with our collecting guide, authenticity guide and framing guide.