Passionate About Posters

Born into a Jewish family in Vienna in 1936, Jack Rennert spent the war years largely in hiding.

Rennert, his mother and older brother were lucky enough to make it to the United States at the war's end. His father wasn't so lucky. He died at Auschwitz.

From these unimaginable early years sprung a man who looks for beauty in the world.

Rennert has a passion for collecting art posters.

His exhibit of about 50 posters by Italian artist Leonetto Cappiello is on display at the Rahr-West Art Museum, 610 N. Eighth St., Manitowoc, through July 6. Rennert will speak at a reception at the museum from 1 to 4 p.m. next Sunday.

This is the first time that the advertising posters, created between 1900 to 1940 for display on the streets of Paris, have been shown outside of New York.

The Cappiello posters are as fragile and resilient as life itself.

"I think that when people look at old vintage posters they should realize they are witnessing a minor miracle," Rennert said during a phone interview from New York City. "Here is a poster printed on cheap paper. This was meant to last two to three weeks on the walls of a city in the rain and snow. They were not meant to be here 100 years later.

"The fact that they are here 100 years later is a testament to their power because someone thought well enough of them to keep them and save them."

The bold, colorful posters were created to sell such products as medicine, soap, chocolate and liqueurs.

"They charm, they grab your attention and you never forget the association with the product once you've seen it," Rennert said of Cappiello's posters. "He does this by the use of strong colors, usually placing his subject against a black background so they're sort of spotlighted."

Part of Cappiello's charm is the incongruity found in the images. A prime example is the 1903 poster the artist made for a company called Chocolate Klaus, which depicts a lady in a green dress sitting on a red horse.

"She is neither holding a bar of Klaus Chocolate nor is there any product there," Rennert said, "but the image and the product became so welded in everyone's imagination that until today, it remains the trademark of Chocolate Klaus."

Rennert is founder and president of Posters Please Inc. and Poster Auctions International, both located at the International Poster Center in New York City.

The prolific collector also has written and edited countless books about posters.

Rennert was fortunate to be able to turn his personal passion into a profession, said Tim Gadzinski of Manitowoc, who facilitated the Rahr-West exhibit.

"The poster is his true passion and he believes, quite literally, that they're the most democratic of all art forms, that they represent the galleries of the street and that they belong to everybody," said Gadzinski, a creative consultant who has worked for Rennert for the past 12 years. "Cappiello is far and away his favorite poster artist."

Rennert, 71, began collecting posters in the 1960s and acquired his first Cappiello in the 1970s.

His vast private collection of 40,000 posters from all over the world, spanning 150 years, is one of the largest � if not the largest � in the United States and possibly the world, he said.

The collection, which includes 200 Cappiellos, is kept in more than 600 tubes stored in two temperature-controlled warehouses. Part of the collection also covers "every square inch" of his home. He collects original posters, defined by the industry as the first printing of a poster.

"I also have in my collection important political and war-related posters," Rennert said. "I think it's important to keep those. Even anti-Semitic posters from Germany and other countries are important to keep as documents. They are history, after all."

He has purchased a number of these posters for Jewish museums in America and abroad.

"I've been collecting posters with an eye to starting an international poster museum here in New York City," Rennert said. "For the past 50 years, I've been putting together a collection which will be the foundation for this hoped-for museum."

Rennert said he was lucky to start collecting the Cappiellos when he did. The posters, which he once picked up for between $200 and $300 each, now sell for between $5,000 and $10,000.

June 21, 2008