Awareness as we know it, emphasizes the eyes as critical navigators of the visual field, often claimed to be “windows of the soul.” In nearly all creatures, vision plays an extraordinary role in conditioning each individual’s perceptual cosmos and guiding life’s event patterns. In short, an assembly of meaning.

In the commercial art world, be it print media, television, or internet, these visual guides inform and educate consumers as purchasers of goods and services. Ever so persuasive is the artist that understands the desires of his or her audience, especially when “a picture is worth a thousand words.”

In the pre-television era, poster art served many cultural needs, shaping a full spectrum of ideological values from politics to plastics. Many of the finest talents on par with Picasso or DaVinci had lives in the advertising world, where their humor, wit, and consumer insights were brought to fruition.

Poster art began its slow but meteoric rise following Senefelder’s 1798 invention of lithography. Some decades later, Jules Cheret, father of the modern poster, revolutionized Europe and its street galleries as color lithography made rapid advances in the closing part of the 19th century. Cheret’s three-stone color process augmented and transformed the native architecture of many great cities, Paris, Milan, and Berlin in particular. Kiosk art as a media-scape had crossed over into the land of advertising and info-tainment.

As a natural bi-product of urbanization, theatres in London and Paris made early advertising clients. Single object focus as a dedicated product channel came later. When World Wars took center stage, political agendas forged unexpectedly new and different posters, acting as critical vectors into history, patriotism and economic morale.

Having remained politically neutral and not destroyed by war, Switzerland became a nexus of graphic design principles and typographical science. Walter Herdeg’s international design journal, Graphis, was born in 1944 and New Graphic Design came in 1958. The 50s were extraordinary years for the Swiss posterists and many legendary fonts such as Helvetica, were born of this era. Photographic technologies combined with mechanical breakthroughs in precision science led the Art Deco movement into a machine age of  iconic geometry.

A.M. Cassandre was one of the consummate geniuses of this period, blending sign and logo into the semiotic ideals of corporate identities and their product lines. Other giants  included Jean Carlu, Paul Colin, and Pierre Fix-Masseau in France, and Giuseppe Riccobaldi, Severo Pozatti, and Marcello Dudovich in Italy. Their equivalents in Switzerland were Herbert Leupin, Herbert Matter and Otto Baumberger.

Purveyors of vintage posters find the colorful sparks of conceptual brilliance distilled by commercial art, utterly irresistible. Retail motives combined with visual metaphors and abstract symbolism have generated galaxies of tantalizing works. This has led to authentic European posters becoming highly collectible items, often exhibited in museums, and fetching thousands of dollars at auction.

Aside from making good investments, vintage posters carry a distinct cachet similar to an antique, but one that has achieved a different path of distinction. As is often the case with cultural evolution and its artifacts, what was once a scientific apparatus becomes a museum sculpture fifty years later. Microscopes and cars are fine examples. All that has changed is the context of the object’s usability. Poster art, in principle relying only upon usable surfaces in space, shall forever endure in function, however much the mediums transition to electronic imagery prevails in the future.

This book represents a special selection of outstanding works orchestrated by these masters of commercial art. Though credit often remains anonymous for lack of historical record, many have well-documented biographies whose highlights are given in each sidebar. Each commentary as well, may identify the underlying spectral contrast of “complementary hues,” one of the most important choices an artist can make.

For many centuries, scholars and scientists such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, have considered color theory to be a philosophically rich and existential subject, through which many secrets of the cosmos have been probed. Many such masters attended art school and evolved their aesthetic powers through formal study of color theory. Among philosophers, it was Ludwig Wittgenstein who wrote about “impossible colors” in 180-degree spectral    opposition, where the pairings of red-green, orange-blue, and yellow-violet prohibit the perception of “reddish-green” or “orangish-blue.” Such laws pertain to the science of optics and the ordering rhythms or frequencies that regulate sight as well as defects such as color-blindness.

Throughout The Poster Book’s sidebar text, the identifying features of color theory are applied to each art selection. Extreme care has been given to each section’s image sequence and page layout to insure optimal visual stimulation. Not only is every page and its opposite companion image arranged with maximal complementarity, but if the viewer were to lay out all the images in each section as sub-fields of a larger hyper-portrait, they would discover even more about this book’s Grand Design. Over fifty images comprise each of the nine subject headings, which include: Transportation, Fashion, Products, Food & Drink, Travel, Politics & War, Arts & Education, and Scenic. May your journey through this collection bring countless hours of unique contemplation, amusement, and education.