The Golden Age: 90 Years of International Film Posters

09-06-2016 - 02-07-2016

Why is Compass Gallery exhibiting a poster show? Because all good design and all fine art shows a basic knowledge and understanding of the visual language. Collectors of fine paintings and prints respond to visual images in the same way as collectors of rare, well designed posters, plus you get the film too!

We have carefully selected over two hundred original film posters. Many of these were designed by well known artists of the genre and are highly collectable. We hope that you will queue up and buy a ticket and ice cream, come and see the will be a visual treat!

"Film posters were born in an era rich in poster tradition throughout the western world. An era generally considered to be the golden age of the poster. The public were used to seeing Toulouse Lautrec posters for the Moulin Rouge, Alphonse Mucha and Pierre Bonnard posters with their brilliant colours and few words, pasted on advertising boards. The early film posters, with their beautiful full colour art, were in complete contrast to the black and white films which they represented. In the early days of cinema the main source of advertising was through poster art. This was the public's first exposure to what they could see at the cinema, and the posters therefore had to entice the viewer.

When the films had finished their run in the cinema, the poster for the following feature would be pasted over the previous one. The posters and lobby cards loaned to the cinemas were meant to be returned to the poster exchanges. In many cases they were returned and kept stored in the warehouses until the Second World War, when owing to paper shortages many of the posters were recycled. The advertising material that remained was rented out to cinemas if the films were re-released. In the late 1960s and early 1970s there were a handful of people dealing in cinema memorabilia. It was more profitable for the owners of the poster exchanges to sell the items to these people than to wait for a small rental fee. A number of cinemas did not return their posters or lobby cards, and these were stored on their premises and then discovered many years later.

Owing to the fact that film posters and lobby cards were not really accessible until the 1960s, they are a relatively new area of collecting. Like many great novels and works of music that are now cherished, their commercial origins kept them from being taken seriously when they were first produced. In contrast, comics and baseball cards were collected in the 1930s and 1940s and are now an extremely established market. In the 1990s a Boris Karloff poster for The Mummy 1932, sold for $452,000 in New York. This sale really was instrumental in not only bringing film poster art to a wider audience, but also elevating it to a serious art form. Many major institutions, including MOMA, The Library of Congress and the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, have all formed their own collections of film posters.

Film historians and other academics have documented the importance of the role of films in the twentieth century. Films are a cultural artefact, created by people from different backgrounds, and reflecting a diverse array of cultures. Bringing images to the big screen has influenced changes in fashion, beauty and design. This collection represents nine decades of our ever changing society" B Marchant. 2016