Poster, The - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2011

Throughout the twentieth century, tourist posters have played a key role in the transmission of the image of Spain abroad. This article focuses on two periods in which they had a greater role: the end of the reign of Alfonso XIII with the founding of the National Tourist Board and the Franco dictatorship. These two periods are two different ways to show the country’s image. The first was an attempt to spread the wealth and diversity of Spain, in an effort to break stereotypes that travellers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had created. The second used many of these clichés in order to gain acceptance of the regime at a time of international isolation.

The Polish posters in The Osborne Robinson Collection form a very distinct group in the archive at The University of Northampton, United Kingdom. They were all created at a particular historic moment between 1945 and 1975. They were collected by the British theatrical set designer, Thomas Osborne Robinson and then given to his local Art School to inspire and influence students. The Polish artists created thought provoking posters to be pasted on the streets of their home cities. Their work continues to be admired and considered internationally significant. They are key to any study of art and design in Poland in the post-war decades, as they worked together in new ways. They were able to create an outlet for individual artistic expression in a period of state control of production. These poster artists belonged to an artistic community working with film-makers, theatre producers and architects. They provided a visual commentary to the physical and social rebuilding of the cultural capital of the Polish nation after World War II. Their work and methods were exported and have relevance and appeal beyond the hoardings of Warsaw. The posters continue to influence on graphic design as they are admired, collected and exhibited internationally.

The political in representation, as active dissent, has no meaning if it is denied that the visual can mean – propose, argue, reason, contend – in ways comparable to that achieved in language. In the first part of this article, working through the analysis of a number of political posters (above all the Obama Hope poster from 2008) the case was made for seeing the visual configuration of the work (its design or disegno) as structuring the work in potentially the same way as arguments and propositions are structured in language. Working from the comparison between a moment from Hamlet and Margaret Bourke-White’s famous photograph from Louisville 1937 (which shows a line of people standing queuing for flood relief below a poster boosting the American Way) part two takes much further the analysis of the Bourke-White photograph opened in part one but it balances this with an exploration of a remarkable, but little known, 1993 Holocaust memorial in Berlin by the artist and art historian couple Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock. As the only Holocaust memorial centred on a distributed series of printed, poster-like images, the memorial is analysed both in its economy and in the force of its political gestures. Taken together the two analyses offer the embryo of a theory of the politics of visual dissent.

In the Year 1789 is a poster series that addresses the uniquely American challenge of gun control, as notions of gun ownership are tied to history, patriotism and national mythologies concerning freedom and morality. The posters, cut by computer-guided laser, leverage two qualities to convince viewers to consider the issue. The use of Baskerville typeface, with its tested perceptions of credibility, and images embodying rhetoric’s tenets of ethos, logos and pathos combine to make a rational and emotional appeal.

Exhibition: ‘Typographie Des Terrors – Plakate in München 1933 Bis 1945’/‘Typography of Terror – Posters in Munich 1933–1945’, Munich Stadtmuseum, 11 May–11 November 2012

Exhibition: ‘Posters of Discontent II’, University Gallery, Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, Michigan, 3 October–7 November 2012