Poster Artists & Designers

Before posters became collectibles, they were commercial work. Somebody still had to make them unforgettable.

Across more than a century, illustrators, lithographers, photographers and graphic designers turned advertisements into images that outlived the products, films, journeys and events they were created to sell. In many cases the artist is now as collectible as the subject.

This part of the Learning Resource is our growing guide to those people.

The Birth of the Modern Poster

Late nineteenth-century Paris transformed the poster into mass visual culture. Improvements in colour lithography allowed artists to work at scale and in vivid colour, while streets, theatres and entertainment venues created enormous demand for printed advertising.

Jules Chéret is central to that story. His energetic colour lithographs helped establish a visual language for the modern advertising poster and influenced generations of artists who followed. For us, these early French releases are some of the most exciting objects in the entire field: commercial ephemera that also happens to sit at the beginning of modern graphic design.

The generation that followed Chéret pushed the single striking image even further. Leonetto Cappiello built entire campaigns around one memorable character rather than a crowded scene, and his influence runs through advertising design for decades afterwards.

Art Deco and the Machine Age

By the 1920s and 1930s, poster design could be radically simplified. A.M. Cassandre used geometry, perspective and bold typography to make ships, trains and products feel monumental. The best Art Deco posters are still startlingly modern because they reduce an idea to exactly what it needs and almost nothing else.

Travel and transport companies became major patrons of graphic design during this period, commissioning artists to sell speed, glamour and escape.

Mid-Century Modern Poster Design

Mid-Century design is one of our particular passions. Post-war posters often combine strong typography, simplified illustration, photography and blocks of colour in ways that still feel contemporary.

Artists and designers such as Bernard Villemot, Raymond Savignac, David Klein, Herbert Leupin and many others brought wit and clarity to advertising and travel. Britain developed its own extraordinary tradition through railway and tourism commissions, with artists such as Tom Purvis and Edward McKnight Kauffer translating landscapes, architecture and destinations into graphic shorthand. Milton Glaser brought a similar warmth and wit to American graphic design a little later, from the Bob Dylan poster to I ♥ NY.

Razzia shows that this hand-painted advertising tradition did not end with the twentieth century — his Louis Vuitton, motoring and travel imagery keeps the same illustrated style alive today.

The Movie-Poster Illustrator

Cinema created another kind of poster artist: the illustrator who had to sell an entire film in one image.

Saul Bass approached film advertising through graphic reduction and symbolism. Bob Peak brought painterly scale and drama. Tom Jung and Roger Kastel produced some of the defining imagery associated with Star Wars and Jaws. Drew Struzan’s, John Alvin’s and Richard Amsel’s illustrated One-Sheets became inseparable from the blockbuster era for many collectors.

The 1970s and 1980s US One-Sheets are a particular weakness of ours. At their best, they sit somewhere between commercial illustration, portraiture and pure nostalgia — but the reason they endure is that the artwork is genuinely excellent.

Modern Art on the Wall

A separate collecting area brings together some of the biggest names in twentieth-century art — not as paintings, but as the original posters printed to advertise their exhibitions. Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Haring and David Hockney all have rich exhibition-poster histories worth exploring in their own right, distinct from signed prints or fine-art editions.

Artists Are Not Always Credited

One complication for collectors is that poster authorship is not always obvious. Some commercial artists signed their work; others were credited in archives or later scholarship; many posters were produced within studios where attribution can be uncertain.

We should not force an artist attribution where the evidence is weak. Where an artist is known, we will say so. Where an attribution is probable or disputed, that nuance should be preserved.

Collecting by Artist

Following an artist is one of the most rewarding ways to collect. It lets you see how a visual language develops across completely different commissions, and it can lead you toward subjects you would never have searched for otherwise.

A collector who starts with a famous film poster might end up discovering advertising work by the same illustrator. Someone drawn to a railway poster might follow the designer into books, exhibitions or commercial campaigns.