Book Description

This is neither a manual claiming to be a popular summary nor a systematic treatment of the art of the wall poster. It is an original work, of vast scope, structured into independent essays organised along a cohesive timeline, from 1880 to the second half of the twentieth century, reflecting on various aspects of artistic advertising graphics in an interdisciplinary dimension and with an international perspective. From the establishment of the poster as an innovative form of large-circulation visual communication and from its emancipation from the painting aesthetics of the nineteenth century to the understanding of the influences of advertising on the Pop Art experiences of the 1960s, according to a logic of inverted relations. The constant points of reference show the relations not only with painting but also with graphic processing and design, publishing graphics, original prints and photography; in the background, there also is cinema, decorative arts and urban furnishing. Artists, schools, movements, trade magazines, the book industry, exhibitions and performances, business advertising, political and war propaganda, social topics: these are some of the subjects and phenomena that interact in the history of advertising languages, which have been framed here by the specialist expertise of six authors. There is also the recurrent emergence of the dialects around the instruments and purposes of advertising communication, between practice and experimentation, commercial requirements, professional training and creative demands.