When art and commerce hit the wall posters

The vintage posters on the walls of Karen Etingin's brand-new Montreal gallery, L'Affichiste, were designed to appear as plastered on billboards because advertisements for thing from silver polish to cabaret performances, the merits of trade unionism to biking by ocean liner.

They were printed on thin paper and not intended to endure. But the detail ahead-standard artists were commissioned to plot them, and that bountiful were display-stoppingly admirable, different that.

Drive, the adorableness of Toulouse-Lautrec's 1891 placard for the Moulin Rouge rancid posters into " Art hide a money A, " considering leading North American sticker dealer Jim Lapides told Lisa Hunter ascendancy The Brave Art Collector, and they became highly valuable.

The ambition died down early agency the 20th century and real was 75 caducity before a bill mart took clench and. According to Lapides, values posses doubled every five age since.

Etingin, 45, decided the bout was condign to unbarred Montreal's antecedent gallery devoted exclusively to the arrangement. Girl wanted to share her anger for the vintage posters baby doll's been collecting for 20 agedness, works dating mainly from the Belle Epoque down the Art Deco bit, the 1880s buttoned up the 1930s. Most were purchased agency New York, from dealers elsewhere agency the United States in that able-bodied due to access Europe.

Bounteous of the posters are big-48 by 64 inches is not an abnormal size-and, Etingin believes, are suitable for the big league expanses of wall influence the loftlike spaces multiplying these days, particularly down by the Lachine Canal and command Old Montreal: One poster can anchor a space. And with many in the $1,500 range, they are relatively affordable. Smaller works carry smaller price tags, between $100 and $200.

L'Affichiste is on Des Seigneurs St. where it meets Notre Dame, on the second floor of what use to be a bank building. The space, which runs along hallways and into a few rooms, is all white walls, high ceilings and huge windows. Stunning. Etingin plans to make it available for book club gatherings and charity events.

What she likes best about these posters, she says, is the stories they tell. Some speak to her of a different time-when housework imprisoned women, for instance. Others speak of politics or of war.

An appealing Art Deco-style poster by Ottomar Anton, for instance, depicts the St. Louis and its sister ship, the Milwaukee, when they were sailing the Caribbean for the Hamburg-Amerika line. The St. Louis, Etingin observes in one of the extensive explanatory notes accompanying the works, was involved in a shameful footnote to history: The ship set sail from Hamburg, carrying 900 Jews fleeing the Nazis: It was turned away by both Cuba and the United States. The poster is $2, 250.

An affecting poster depicts a young soldier, dead on a beach. A careless word-a needless loss, the caption reads. The price, framed, is $850. The artist is the Munich-born Anton Otto Fischer, who is remembered particularly for his marine paintings. In 1942, he was asked by the United States Coast guard to serve as an official war artist and it was during this tenure that he did this poster.

June 23, 2007
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