Further Research

Useful Links

http://wellmedicated.com/50-amazing-gig-posters-sure-to-inspire/

http://99designs.com/designer-blog/2013/07/23/historys-most-famous-posters/

http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/poster-art-history.htm

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/sign-of-the-times-bob-dylan-95420/?no-ist


5 Quotes:

POSTERS

1. "Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language." (Walt Disney)

2. "A room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts." (Joshua Reynolds)

3.  "Sometimes I have chosen to see films just by their posters." (Jean Paul Gaultier)

4. "When I think of sex symbols, I think of posters my two sisters had on their bedroom 
walls." (Jamie Dornan)

5. "There was a fascinating handmade poster scene in Chicago in the '90s, and I became friends with many of the artists; the posters were often more impressive than the bands."

(Andrew Bird)

INTERNET & DIGITAL AGE

1. "The more social media we have, the more we think we're connecting, yet we are really disconnecting from each other." (JR)

2. "I paint digitally now. A pity, in some ways, as the biggest price one pays is that you no longer have a finished piece of physical art to hang on a wall. I miss that terribly." (Berkeley Breathed)

3. "We haven't lost romance in the digital age, but we may be neglecting it. In doing so, antiquated art forms are taking on new importance. The power of a handwritten letter is greater than ever. It's personal and deliberate and means more than an e-mail or text ever will." (Ashton Kutcher?!)

4. "The poster scene has been a way of bringing back something beautiful into a digital world". (Hasted, N)

5. "Today, our lives are so taken up with tweeting, blogging, browsing and networking that the time it takes to master a trade or a musical instrument, is time many of us think we can no longer afford." (O'Hagen, S)

5 Stats/Facts

1. Decline in Poster Advertising

After World War II, advertising-posters everywhere declined in importance as the market was effectively taken over by photography, radio and later television. In addition, labour-intensive lithography was also becoming prohibitively expensive, causing advertisers to switch to cheaper but less colourful methods like offset printing and screenprinting. As a result, by the 1960s - despite exceptional campaigns by post artists Bernard Villemot and Raymond Savignac - the poster was no more than a minor genre. Designers who might previously have been attracted to posters were now moving into illustration and other graphic design work.

2. Poster Art in the 1960s and 1970s

In Italy, a series of spectacular images were produced for the national film industry, by Alfredo Capitani, Luigi Martinati, Anselmo Ballester and Ercole Brini. Another great Italian poster designer of the 1950s/1960s was Armando Testa. In addition, there was a sudden surge in Psychedelic rock posters, originated by Wes Wilson. They appeared in the late 1960s, together with other popular music graphics like Milton Glaser's poster for Bob Dylan's 1967 'Greatest Hits' album. Widespread in San Francisco and New York, the music poster movement expanded into marketing and point-of-sale with free album-posters, as well as promotional concert posters. The craze for this sort of graphic art mirrored the demand for vintage posters in Paris during the late 19th century.

Note: an iconic poster dating from the 1968 student riots in Europe, and still popular today, was the silhouette style image of the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara by the American artist Jim Fitzpatrick.

3. Early Digital Artists:

• In 1968, Vera Molnar, from Budapest, Hungary, invented "Machine Imaginaire." She transformed different geometric shapes, such as a triangle, by rotating and deforming, erasing parts or merging them with other geometric shapes (similar to some screen saver images today).
• Larry Cuba was a pioneer in animation art and produced his first computer animation in 1974. One of Cuba's most famous works was for the animated sequences used in the movie "Star Wars."
• Lillian Schwartz is a digital artist best known for computer art and analysis in graphics, film, video, animation, special effects, virtual reality and multimedia. Her artwork was the first computer-generated art to be acquired by the Museum of Modern Art.

4.  British Poster Artists:
During the mid 1890s most British designers, including Aubrey Beardsley, Will Owne, Dudley Hardy, and Walter Crane, tended to be heavily influenced by French Art Nouveau. Two of the first to free themselves were the "Beggarstaff Brothers" James Pryde and William Nicholson, who focused on far more simple types of design. Other UK post artists, some of whom specialized in producing works for the London Underground rail system, included Austin Cooper, Fred Taylor, Tom Purvis, and Pat Keely. 

5. There has been an enormous resurgence of interest in posters used for interior decoration in the United States. Among the most popular are reprints of World War I posters; movie advertisements; works by Toulouse-Lautrec, Mucha, and Picasso; and photographs of celebrities and animals.


5 People of Note 

1. Drew Millward
2. Beggarstaff Brothers
3. Aubrey Beardsley
4. John and Thomas Knoll
5. Alois Senefelder

5 Images