Louis Harnett O’Meara

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Literary Posters: The Birth of an American Visual Culture

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The Art of the Literary Poster: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 7 March–11 June 2024

The Art of the Literary Poster, Allison Rudnick, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2024, 248pp
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What is now America’s longest-standing society for bibliophiles was only six years old when it put on a show to surprise the Belle Époque crowds of New York. ‘The Grolier Club finished its former season in the gravity of an exhibition of prints by Durer, Burgmair, Schauffelein, Holbein – old masters in the antique art of wood engraving,’ reads a review in The New York Times from November 1890. ‘It began the new season last evening in the gayety of an exhibition of prints by Chéret, Willette, Choubrac, Grasset, masters in the newest art – that of bill posting.’

Though posters were familiar to American audiences, their status as works for exhibition was hardly secure. The form was largely reserved for text-heavy notices, considered at the time as ephemera – and even then, ephemera for circuses, melodramas and burlesques, all genres that buttoned-up notions of Waspish propriety were quick to dismiss. A transgressive frisson would have followed the thought of posters hung in an enclave of New York’s elite; that these new print-makers came from France, home of aesthetic innovation and moral decadence, was perhaps unsurprising. The Times article elaborates that this ‘new art’ was an ‘art for the vagabond, the tramp, the gamin, the forgotten and disdained… and it must be as Shakespeare’s art to please the elect, to touch at once the men of genius and those who are to them as hyssop to an oak.’

Years passed before Americans launched their own art poster movement, recently memorialised in its own exhibition, The Art of the Literary Poster, at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. A book, complete with four essays and a catalogue of key works, complements the show, along with an online archive of more than four hundred works, updating one of the definitive books on the subject, also previously published by the Met, American Art Posters of the 1890s. The American movement contrasted with France’s louche posters in its appeal to a respectable middle class, and in its preoccupations with mass psychology, consumer culture and the possibilities of the dawning mechanical age. Lasting for less than a decade, it heralded the birth of visual advertising culture in the US. And it was tied to literary publishing from the first.

It began with Harper’s monthly magazine in New York, the spring of 1893. Encouraged by the success of a Paris-based illustrator’s Christmas cover, the publisher’s management commissioned their newly appointed artistic director, Edward Penfield, to create a placard promoting the latest issue. Penfield worked through the night, composing a design that recalled the simplicity and sophistication of those first French posters. He reduced the number of figures and the copy to the bare minimum: one or two well-dressed folks, beside the magazine’s title and the month of the advertised issue. He also became known for arranging the words in a way that interacted with the time of year. In one, ‘April’ runs vertically, in line with a scattering of spring showers, through which an overcoated, Harper’s-reading man strolls. In another, ‘July’ is written with firecrackers, a woman about to light them for Independence Day.

Allison Rudnick, the Met exhibition’s curator and editor of the accompanying book, notes in her essay ‘The Literary Poster: A Beacon of Modernity’ that Penfield denied ever attending that Grolier show. Regardless, the influence is there. However, he’s right to emphasise that he had produced something entirely his own – and, in doing so, birthed an aesthetic that was soon seen as characteristically American. His style distinguished itself with its straight lines and blocky colours, favouring immediacy of impression over busy spectacle or the relay of information. Penfield created more than seventy such advertisements for Harper’s in the succeeding years, laying a solid basis for a US graphic identity. But these were only the first ripples in what was to become a tidal wave.

Imitators of Penfield cropped up in droves, with figures such as Joseph J. Gould Junior and William Carqueville – both of whom designed scores of posters for Harper’s competitor Lippincott’s – reproducing almost every aspect of his style. Others tacked the other way: F. Gilbert Edge’s adverts for The New York Sunday Journal drew more clearly from the bombast of those original French posters, using advanced printing techniques to create watercolour effects and curved lines as opposed to Penfield’s straight edges against flat planes of colour. Books were also common subjects for promotion: Blanche McManus Mansfield’s 1897 poster for Rudyard Kipling’s ‘American novel’, Captains Courageous, is among the most striking of The Met’s archive. It depicts a drowning boy in primary colours, offset by the vast black hull of a ship looming in the background.

This barrage of periodicals, formats and artists reflected the broader economic and social changes underway. Rachel Mustalish, head of the Met’s paper conservation department, emphasises in her essay for The Art of the Literary Poster that more affordable, increasingly complex methods for lithography were revolutionising the print industry, permitting an extensive range of tones with just three or four base colours. This, even as bicycles, telephones, cameras, zippers and typewriters were entering the market, all in need of advertisement. Money flowed into publishing, overall circulations quadrupled nationwide, and the number of titles increased threefold, with some three thousand ‘little magazines’ appearing between 1888 and 1894. Production processes became more efficient, pricing more competitive, and jobs abundant. Almost two hundred US poster artists were working on the back of this boom.

‘Artists’ is perhaps the key word here. When Penfield designed that first placard for Harper’s, he knew he had made a trade-off: reducing the information about the advertised product allowed for a more impactful design. This minimalism became a staple of the movement, and was, for many, what secured its credentials. These posters spoke directly to individuals who were well-enough informed to already know what was being advertised, and who would appreciate the artistry behind each work. Cultured circles at home and abroad became increasingly covetous, with reviews and round-ups of posters becoming commonplace in publications such as The Poster. According to one British critic of the period, more than eight thousand collections of literary posters were active in the US around this time, the collectors often purchasing them from bookshop windows before they had even been up a day. In a final nod to their value as art objects, a new trend established itself: each poster would be printed with a credit to the artist.

For all its high-brow appeal, the American poster sustained some of the old French poster’s countercultural tone. Ernest Haskell produced a raft of posters for comic paper The New York World, and A. K. Moe a number for student humour magazine The Harvard Lampoon, marking the start of a long love affair between satirical publications and punchy graphic styles. Youths threw ‘poster and hashish’ parties, and some even hosted gatherings in which guests were asked to ‘dress up’ as people from posters, as you might dress up as a character from your favourite film at a fancy-dress party today. Many posters also kept up the Art Nouveau tradition of tasteful ribaldry: the archive showcases a number of scantily clad women, and even nudes at times, though never without a conveniently placed bush. If Penfield was the father of the American art poster movement, Will H. Bradley was its alternative uncle. Bradley was even more productive than Penfield, though he was, at least in aesthetic terms, less typically American. Working along an avant garde bent, he used fantastical imagery, and more consciously recalled the sensuous, Oriental forms of the Art Nouveau and the English Arts and Crafts movements – especially the style of London-based illustrator Aubrey Beardley. Think naked fauns, wood nymphs and masked white figures frolicking across the covers of literary quarterlies. But, distinct from his European counterparts, Bradley was also a consummate print-maker, and a true American entrepreneur.

Using his technical expertise to create cost-effective methods and more eye-catching visuals, Bradley’s compositions often feature patterning and repetition, enlargement and reduction, the overlap of text and image, presaging key elements of the later Modernist aesthetic. Under Bradley’s guidance in 1894, The Inland Printer, a Chicago-based print industry trade publication, became the first magazine to feature a new illustrated cover for every issue. He also used little magazines, such as the influential Chap-Book, as a platform for his work, going on to create his own such periodical in 1896, cheekily titled His Book. Though it was short-lived, it left a valuable legacy as both a literary compendium and as a serviceable brochure for business executives in search of branding, fonts and affordable, arresting imagery. In a rare moment of confluence between the artistic vanguard and new channels of wealth, Bradley became, around the turn of the century, America’s richest working artist.

These new channels were also pushing a new consumer class to the fore: women. These were women who were yet to have children, were yet to join the labour market, and had plenty of time for reading. Marketing teams and publishers were keen to capitalise on this fact, and at least half of Penfield’s designs foreground women readers of Harper’s, a tendency replicated by promotional imagery across the spectrum: women reading Sunset magazine, women reading The Penny Magazine, women reading Century Magazine, The Sun, The Weekly Dispatch, Scribner’s, The Boston Sunday Herald, and The Echo. Women also regularly featured on posters for bicycles, a fact that carried its own intimations of impropriety. (How would they modestly mount the saddle?)

Shannon Vittoria, an assistant curator for the Met’s America Wing, writes in her essay ‘By Women, For Women’ that ‘within just two years of Penfield’s first advertisement, women – who had not only been a primary subject of the poster but also its target audience – emerged as accomplished producers of this new medium.’ Some 11,000 women artists and art teachers were working around this time, up from less than 500 just two decades prior. The literary poster, by helping to wear away the line between the fine and decorative (read: masculine and feminine) arts, offered some of them a chance to participate in an elevated, legitimated artistic sphere. Ethel Reed led this crowd, reaching national fame while still in her twenties and was known – patronisingly – for her beauty as much as the quality of her work. Regardless, her designs speak for themselves; many have been placed prominently in the Met’s collection, including that unforgettable poster for a long, forgotten novel, Miss Traumerei.

Florence Lundborg was perhaps alone in working with the traditional Japanese woodblock printing for San Francisco-based magazine The Lark. This method, known as Ukiyo-e, had served as the progenitor of much of the period’s graphic style, brought into France during the country’s Nipophile era in the mid-nineteenth century, Japonisme, which had helped spawn Art Nouveau and the styles of Chéret and Beardsley. Though Lundborg’s prints were limited to the hundreds – instead of thousands, as lithography allowed – her work was respected by peers such as Bradley. The likes of Reed and Mansfield (the woman behind the poster for Kipling’s Captains Courageous) were also deviant practitioners and chose to design books, which was rare for poster-makers then. Reed became famous for integrating her advertisements with the books themselves; her twins motif is noteworthy for this, running across the poster, cover and illustrated interior of Gertrude Smith’s 1895 collection, Arabella and Araminta Stories.

It seems strange to us now that book and magazine covers sustained a church-and-state separation with their promotional material for so long. They were, after all, engaged in the same activity: selling the publication. This realisation ultimately spelled the literary poster’s demise. Executives acknowledged that paying for a promotional poster was hard to justify if it was going to be taken by collectors within an hour or two of going up. While American softcovers had remained bland objects in the decades prior, designs began to find their way onto them as the twentieth century rolled around. Dust jackets, previously blankly utilitarian, became sites for colourful visuals. Other magazines followed the way of The Inland Printer, and new covers for every issue became standard. Commissions for literary posters dwindled, while illustrators received more requests to work on other advertisements, or the publications themselves.

This was the fate of the literary poster; brief but seminal, its visual motifs, techniques and advertising innovations were quickly absorbed into new mediums. And where are they now? You’re unlikely to see books advertised on billboards, and certainly not magazines. But as Vittoria notes in her essay, women designers for these literary posters went on to prove a key influence in propaganda for the women’s suffrage movement in the US. It’s hard not to detect the influence of Penfield, Carqueville or Moe in the gentlemanly logo of The New Yorker – an image that comes from the first cover for the magazine in 1925, when it launched as a high-brow humour weekly. For Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? in 2021, in what was probably the biggest literary campaign of recent decades, flat, figurative illustrations recalled those Ukiyo-e woodblock prints. These were repeated endlessly online and across posters, dust jackets, bookmarks, badges, pencils, postcards, tote bags and even bucket hats, as if influencer buy-in were more important than the novel itself.

A contrast to when it rode on book and magazine sales, visual culture now dominates across all spheres. As for the American literary posters themselves, they hang where they always did: in galleries and on collectors’ walls, though without the faint air of moral panic they once carried. In an age of publishing decline, when literary periodicals and little magazines such as the one you’re reading are seen as increasingly niche affairs, the Met’s work provides a reminder of a moment when, however brief, good writing set the tempo of the times.
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Cover image: Edward Penfield, Harper’s, July 1894. © Leonard A. Lauder Collection of American Posters, Gift of Leonard A. Lauder, 1984.
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Louis Harnett O’Meara is a British writer living in Brooklyn. His short fiction and criticism has appeared in Peripheries journal and Essays in Criticism, and his journalism has aired on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service. He was previously Saul Bellow Fellow for the graduate writing programme at Boston University; he is currently an Editorial Fellow for A Public Space. A collection of his short fiction is forthcoming with Staircase Books, a small press based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.