Book Review: The Art Deco Posters: Rare and Iconic

The big (and best) book of Deco posters

This surely has to be the definitive book on Art Deco posters. With 340 in color and large on the page I doubt if anyone will publish anything better, though as William Crouse says in a short essay about poster collecting it does not include movie, political and Russian ones.

The ten chapters in the book look at poster art around the world from 1919 to 1939. I think the best ones involve movement in some form: aviation; autos and racing; railways; liners. Speed seems the ideal subject to bring out the creative best using vibrant colors, strong graphic shapes and sans typography. It'll be no surprise that Cassandre has the most entries in the index -- thirty-one.

A thing that surprised me and it's really one of the strengths of the book, are very comprehensive captions. So, as well as large posters you can read a lot about the artist/designers and the companies that commissioned the work. The author really has done a huge amount of research to pull all this detail together and nicely, here and there, mono photos are included to tie in with what the text is saying.

The production is as impressive as the contents. A tip of the hat to book designer Russell Hassell who created a simple, elegant presentation that lets each poster work, clean typography too. The spread chapter openers are particularly attractive with each left-hand page using four upright strips, butted together, taken from posters in that chapter. A surprise was finding four fold-out pages, one of which has three beautiful Lester Beall posters created in 1936 for the Rural Electrification Administration.

As I've said already, I doubt there will be a better, more comprehensive book on Art Deco posters than this one.

The Art Deco Posters: Rare and Iconic is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

The Art Deco Posters: Rare and Iconic
Right: the other comprehensive book on Deco print. From 1986 by Patricia Frantz Kery.