ARTICLE SUMMERY: Posters have been around long before the 19th century when artists and printmakers like Jules Chéret and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec raised the poster from cheap print status to high art. Like billboards, they are out in the open, you see them but don’t pay to much attention to them, but somehow you know their message and you may even see them as an art form. From movie posters to protest posters the history behind them is fascinating.
“INVENTING POSTERS” by John Boardley is a look back to the beginning of the poster to present day and how the innovations in technology and materials gave rise to the popularity of the poster. Some of the innovations include
- The ability to manufacture paper inexpensively
- Printing processes
- Engraving
- Drypoint
- Etching
- Lithography
- Chromolithography
To quote John Boardley “Just as the printing press brought knowledge and books to the entire world, so printmaking introduced the broader world to art. These days, when we’re permanently immersed in photos and videos, it’s hard to grasp just how important and revolutionary printing and printmaking were. Today, it’s as easy for me to look at a photo of bison painted on cave walls 40,000 years ago as it is to study the minutest details of a fifteenth-century Dürer woodcut, a sixteenth-century Bosch or Bruegel engraving, or a seventeenth-century Rembrandt etching. How lucky we are.”
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