RELATED SEARCHES
Sponsored Poster Periods Results:
Different Periods In Poster Art
By:
Published: October 20, 2006
Art through the ages, from the earliest wall drawings and etchings to twenty-first century digital imaging, continues to change, influence, remain the same, and bring something new, all at the same time. Like any other form, poster art has seen its share of eras, ushering in and out old and new aesthetics, purposes, and means.
Of the twentieth century alone, the poster has been the penultimate evolutionary revolution of ideas and appearances in visual art.
Beginning with the Belle Epoque, "the beautiful era," of 1890's Paris, posters were decoratively used to enhance and adorn Parisian streets. The images were lively, colorful, and eerily detailed. Organically, true to form-and-function fashion, they matched much of what was happening in Parisian urban life - debauched, decadent, almost indulgently primal. Belle Epoque saw the outgrowth of posters from Paris to the rest of Europe and abroad, but the outgrowth yielded a much different product than Paris city posters. Today, they are an artifact of celebration and good times had by the French urban underclass and other indicative Western life.
Just after the century's turn, before World War I, poster art adopted a more simplistic, focused style. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec died in 1901, and fellow artists had gone back to other more conventional mediums. Toulouse-Lautrec's famously wild, raucous, busy style was rejected for more subdued lettering and sober, unencumbered images. Yet, at the same time, modernist modes were slowly creeping into the poster scene.
With the advent of the First World War, Art Nouveau had made its impression on posters. Shapes and colors became less curvilinear and more geometrically rigid. The color lines both blended and opposed each other; figures communicated erectness, jauntiness, power, and authority in presence. The ideas culminated reflect the propagandistic plight of war and war-torn places. And though not all of the posters directly related to tumultuous strife, many of the same works carried the resonance of these ideas and feelings in their renderings and
representations.
But even this style would change, as posters move into the contemporary World War II, post-World War II phases. Images became more brightly colored and, sometimes, so nuanced and textured as to look like photography. More was done with deceiving the onlooker's eyes and appealing to mainstream, popular, everyday sensibilities. There became less politically propagandisitic images and more capitalistic images. The focus of the West (especially America) became economic gain intertwined with domesticity. Contemporary art movements enabled poster artists to reach wider, more common audiences with depictions of household items and consumer products for advertisers. As opposed to the street life of fin de sciele Paris as the purveying common-based ideal, home and daily life of suburban citizens became the new common art object.
Now, in a post-modern era where advertisement is so prolifically abound, there are many directions poster art has taken. "Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue" has been used to describe Post-modern posters. Because Post-modernism is such a potpourri of styles, themes, images, aesthetics, and means, the jury may still be out on Post-modern poster art. Only time will tell what it in fact is.
Related Articles
Beginning with the Belle Epoque, "the beautiful era," of 1890's Paris, posters were decoratively used to enhance and adorn Parisian streets. The images were lively, colorful, and eerily detailed. Organically, true to form-and-function fashion, they matched much of what was happening in Parisian urban life - debauched, decadent, almost indulgently primal. Belle Epoque saw the outgrowth of posters from Paris to the rest of Europe and abroad, but the outgrowth yielded a much different product than Paris city posters. Today, they are an artifact of celebration and good times had by the French urban underclass and other indicative Western life.
Just after the century's turn, before World War I, poster art adopted a more simplistic, focused style. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec died in 1901, and fellow artists had gone back to other more conventional mediums. Toulouse-Lautrec's famously wild, raucous, busy style was rejected for more subdued lettering and sober, unencumbered images. Yet, at the same time, modernist modes were slowly creeping into the poster scene.
With the advent of the First World War, Art Nouveau had made its impression on posters. Shapes and colors became less curvilinear and more geometrically rigid. The color lines both blended and opposed each other; figures communicated erectness, jauntiness, power, and authority in presence. The ideas culminated reflect the propagandistic plight of war and war-torn places. And though not all of the posters directly related to tumultuous strife, many of the same works carried the resonance of these ideas and feelings in their renderings and
representations.
But even this style would change, as posters move into the contemporary World War II, post-World War II phases. Images became more brightly colored and, sometimes, so nuanced and textured as to look like photography. More was done with deceiving the onlooker's eyes and appealing to mainstream, popular, everyday sensibilities. There became less politically propagandisitic images and more capitalistic images. The focus of the West (especially America) became economic gain intertwined with domesticity. Contemporary art movements enabled poster artists to reach wider, more common audiences with depictions of household items and consumer products for advertisers. As opposed to the street life of fin de sciele Paris as the purveying common-based ideal, home and daily life of suburban citizens became the new common art object.
Now, in a post-modern era where advertisement is so prolifically abound, there are many directions poster art has taken. "Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue" has been used to describe Post-modern posters. Because Post-modernism is such a potpourri of styles, themes, images, aesthetics, and means, the jury may still be out on Post-modern poster art. Only time will tell what it in fact is.
Featured Poster Periods Products:
