Vintage Posters

  • Original Art & Exhibition Posters

    Original Art & Exhibition Posters

    Art and exhibition posters by legendary artists such as David Hockney, Pablo Picasso, and Andy Warhol occupy a fascinating and highly coveted niche in the world of fine art collecting. Unlike original paintings or sculptures, these posters were typically produced in limited runs to promote specific gallery shows, museum retrospectives, or cultural events often printed in editions of just a few hundred copies.

    Additionally, the artists themselves were often directly involved in the design process — Picasso contributed original lithographic compositions, Warhol brought his signature screen-printing aesthetic, and Hockney lent his vivid, painterly sensibility — elevating these works far beyond ordinary advertising material and into the realm of original art.

    At the heart of this world was the legendary Mourlot Imprimerie, founded by Fernand Mourlot in 1852, which became the premier lithographic workshop in Europe and worked closely with virtually every major artist of the twentieth century — from Picasso and Matisse to Braque and Miró. Mourlot’s master craftsmen possessed an extraordinary ability to translate an artist’s vision directly onto stone, and the posters they produced for exhibitions at iconic Parisian venues such as the Galerie Maeght, the Galerie Louise Leiris, and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs were printed in strictly limited numbers, intended primarily for display in the streets and galleries of Paris rather than for posterity.

     As awareness of the artistic and historical significance of original art and exhibition posters has grown among collectors and institutions, demand has dramatically outpaced supply, cementing their status as rare and desirable objects that command serious attention at auction and in specialist galleries worldwide. View our enire range of orignal art posters here

     

  • Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup Cans

    Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup Cans

    “I used to have the same lunch every day, for 20 years, the same thing over and over again…”

    Andy Warhol’s earlier work in advertising inspired him, and the Campbell’s Soup Cans in particular, symbolised mass-produced, print advertising. Mimicking the repetition and uniformity of advertising by carefully reproducing the same image across each individual canvas, he varied only the label on the front of each can. In 1962, the year in which Pop Art was established as the latest major artistic movement, Andy Warhol began his transition from hand-painted to photo-transferred art with a groundbreaking series of works. While these pieces mimicked a mechanical method of production, they were in fact hand-painted. The set of works was called simply Campbell’s Soup Cans, and would become one of the most iconic, signature pieces of his career.

    Searching for subjects for painting, it was a friend’s suggestion that he paint something everybody recognised, “like Campbell’s Soup”, which gave Warhol his subject. Projections of the cans were traced onto canvas and hand-painted, making this first and original ‘batch’ of soup cans a work which appeared more uniform and mechanically produced than it really was.

    Letitia Morris Gallery is pleased to present a collection of original silkscreen Campbell’s Soup Can posters, printed by Sunday B. Morning. These original silkscreen posters one of Andy Warhol’s most iconic works and a true summation of consumerism and counterculture. It is a deeper message in these works that goes beyond the simple soup can. It taps into a world of overconsumption, production, consumerism, and greed. On the surface, they may seem superficial, but it’s as if Warhol put up a mirror to the world.

    View Here

    Campbells Soup Can Andy Warhol Original Vintage Poster

  • Original Qantas Travel Posters by Harry Rogers

    Australian Qantas Original Posters!

    Qantas Travel posters

    Harry Rogers was one of the most important Australian graphic designers of the twentieth century, and his long partnership with Qantas gave us some of the most recognisable vintage travel posters ever produced in this country. From the early 1950s through to the mid 1980s he helped shape the airline’s visual identity, borrowed the clean logic of Swiss design, and created a much loved series of screen printed posters celebrating Qantas’ first flights around the world. The originals are now sought after by collectors for their craft, their optimism, and their place in Australian design history.

    New Guinea Qantas

    Who Was Harry Rogers

    Harry Rogers was born in 1929 and trained at East Sydney Technical College, a school that turned out a whole generation of gifted Australian commercial artists. He arrived at design by way of animation, and that background never really left him. You can see it in the way his posters seem to move. Figures are pared back to their essentials, colour carries much of the story, and every shape looks placed on purpose. Rogers knew how to catch a viewer’s eye and then lead it exactly where he wanted, which is the quiet skill that separates a memorable poster from one you walk straight past.

    Across a career that ran for more than three decades, he became one of the most respected designers working in Australia. Qantas was the thread that held much of that career together. In the mid 1960s he designed the airline’s logo font, and he kept coming back to the brand year after year, producing poster series from the early 1950s right through to 1985. Very few designers get to shape a single client’s public image for that long, and fewer still manage it with such a steady hand.

    The Swiss Influence

    To understand why the posters look the way they do, it helps to know what was happening in graphic design at the time. After the Second World War, a group of Swiss and German designers developed what became known as the International Typographic Style, or simply Swiss design. The idea was to strip communication back to what was essential. Out went fussy decoration and ornament. In came modular grids, generous white space, asymmetrical layouts and clean sans serif type.

    Rogers absorbed those principles and made them feel warm rather than clinical. He used the grid to bring order, then broke the symmetry to create energy. He leaned on a limited palette so that a single strong colour could do the work of a dozen. The result is design that reads clearly from across a room, which is exactly what a travel poster in a shop window or a ticketing office needed to do. Clarity was not a stylistic choice for him so much as a practical one.

    The Round the World Posters

    In 1958 Qantas became one of the first airlines in the world to offer a service that circled the globe, a genuine milestone for a national carrier from the other side of the planet. Rogers marked the occasion with a series of animal themed travel posters that have become some of his best known work. Each one was screen printed, and each carried a small Constellation aircraft tucked into the upper right corner, a neat signature that tied the series together.

    The destinations read like a map of postwar wanderlust. New Guinea, Singapore, Australia and Hawaii all featured, each rendered through a bold central motif rather than a literal photograph of a landmark. This was clever thinking. A single strong image invites the imagination in a way that a crowded travel snapshot never quite manages. The posters sold a feeling of adventure and possibility, which is really what air travel represented in those years.

    Why the Originals Are Worth Having

    There is a real difference between an original screen printed poster and a later reproduction, and collectors can usually spot it. Screen printing lays down ink in thick, even layers, so the colours have a depth and a slight texture that flat modern printing cannot copy. Hold an original in good light and you can see the craft in it. That physical quality, combined with the age and relative scarcity of surviving examples, is a large part of why these posters hold their value. If you plan to hang one, it is worth talking to the gallery about framing, which protects the paper and shows the design at its best.

    They also capture a specific moment. This was the era when flying still felt glamorous, when a trip overseas was an event to be dreamed about for months. Rogers understood that mood and designed for it. Owning one of his Qantas posters is a way of holding on to that optimism, and of owning a small piece of Australian design history at the same time.

    Where to See Them

    Letitia Morris Gallery holds a selection of original Harry Rogers Qantas travel posters, available to view and to purchase. The gallery is based in Melbourne at 1158 High Street, Armadale. If you have any affection for mid century design, or simply for the golden age of travel, they are well worth seeing in person, where the colour and the print quality really come to life. To check current availability or arrange a viewing, get in touch with the gallery.

     

     

  • Celebrating Melbourne Design Week with Vintage Posters

    Celebrating Melbourne Design Week with Vintage Posters

    ‘Georges Pompidou’ Jean Widmer

    “Widmer claimed a practice of basic design, grounded in reduction, coherence, and legibility. Every form, every colour, every proportion carried meaning.”

    – Centre Pompidou

    To mark Melbourne Design Week, Letitia Morris Gallery pulled together a selection of graphic design posters that show off the minimalism, colour and typography of the 1960s and 1970s. The spotlight fell on two European designers, Jean Widmer and Friedemann Hauss, whose work grew out of the Swiss design tradition and its belief that good design should be clear, useful and quietly beautiful. Their posters are a reminder of how much power sits in a simple grid, a strong symbol and a well chosen colour.

    ‘Paris Construit’ – Jean Widmer

    What Is Melbourne Design Week

    Melbourne Design Week is one of the largest design events in the Asia Pacific region, a stretch of exhibitions, talks and installations that celebrate design in all its forms. It is the kind of occasion that invites you to look again at the objects and images we usually take for granted. For a gallery that deals in vintage posters, it was a natural moment to show how the design thinking of half a century ago still shapes the way we see things today.

    Rather than chase the newest work, the gallery looked back to the 1960s and 1970s, a period when a particular way of designing reached its peak. The posters chosen share a family resemblance. They are clean, confident and economical, and they prove that restraint can be every bit as striking as excess.

    Jean Widmer

    Jean Widmer and the Art of Reduction

    The gallery gave pride of place to Jean Widmer, a designer born in 1929 who built his career in Paris. His philosophy can be summed up in three words that guided almost everything he made: reduction, coherence and legibility. Every element in a Widmer design had to earn its place. Nothing was there for decoration alone.

    Widmer drew heavily on Swiss typography and minimalist principles, always putting function ahead of ornament. He favoured clean grids, bold symbols and strong, unified visual identities, and he became especially associated with cultural institutions and public projects. Two of his works featured in the gallery’s selection, “Georges Pompidou” and “Paris Construit,” both showing his gift for saying a great deal with very little.

    ‘PRISUNIC ETE 70’ by Friedemann Hauss 1970

    The International Typographic Style

    Widmer’s approach did not appear from nowhere. It grew out of a movement that took shape after the Second World War, when Swiss and German designers pioneered what became known as the International Typographic Style. Their aim was communication that felt neutral and objective, free of the persuasive flourishes that had come before. It is the same design language that shaped the mid century Qantas travel posters by Harry Rogers, which shows how far these ideas travelled.

    To get there, they relied on a handful of tools that still underpin graphic design today. Modular grids brought structure. Asymmetrical layouts brought movement and interest. Sans serif typefaces brought a plain, honest clarity. The combination produced work that was harmonious and easy to read, and it spread far beyond Switzerland to become a genuinely international language of design. When you look at a Widmer poster, you are looking at that language spoken fluently.

    Friedemann Hauss and Prisunic

    The second designer in the spotlight was Friedemann Hauss, a German who moved to Paris in 1967 after studying graphic art in Basel, one of the great centres of Swiss design education. His featured work was “PRISUNIC ETE 70,” created in 1970 for the French retailer Prisunic.

    This was a summer fashion advertisement, and it did its job out in the open. It appeared across Parisian streets and in the subway, where thousands of people would have passed it every day. The design was admired enough to win the prize for outstanding poster design in 1970, a fitting reward for work that had to be both commercially effective and genuinely good looking. It is a lovely example of how the discipline of Swiss design could be turned to something playful and popular.

    Why These Posters Still Speak

    What ties this selection together is a shared belief that good design does not need to shout. A clear grid, a single strong image and a considered use of colour can carry a message further than any amount of clutter. That lesson has not aged. If anything, it feels more relevant now, in a world crowded with visual noise, than it did when these posters were first pasted up.

    There is also something satisfying about seeing this work in its original printed form rather than as an image on a screen. These posters were made to be experienced at full size, with real ink on real paper, and a lot of their character lives in that physical presence. The scale, the crispness of the type and the flatness of the colour all read differently in person, and they carry a quiet authority that reproductions tend to flatten out.

    Celebrating them during Melbourne Design Week was a way of connecting the past and the present, and of reminding us that the best design tends to last. For anyone who loves this era, the pieces are available to view and to purchase through Letitia Morris Gallery.

     

  • Spotlight on Boris Bucan

    Boris Bucan

    Boris Bucan is one of Croatias most respected and highly regarded artists. His works offer the viewer an opportunity to experience a true master of poster art; often incorporating surrealist elements in his work, Bucan often uses colour and psychedelic patterning to attached the viewers attention.

    Boris Bucan is one of Croatia’s most respected and celebrated artists, known for posters that blend surrealist imagery with vivid colour and bold, almost psychedelic pattern. Born in Zagreb in 1947 and trained in the early 1970s, he built a career that moved fluidly between fine art and graphic design, creating striking work for theatres, galleries and national broadcasters. His large scale posters, often finished with metallic gold and lettering that runs along the edges, are highly collectable and instantly recognisable.

     

    Early Life and Training

    Boris Bucan was born in Zagreb, Croatia, in 1947, and the city stayed central to his story. He completed his formal artistic training in 1972 at the Academy of Fine Arts, where his studies stretched well beyond traditional painting. He worked with photography, film, video and graphic design, a broad grounding that shaped the way he thought about images for the rest of his career.

    That mix of disciplines mattered. It gave him a habit of moving between mediums without much fuss, and it pushed his work out of the quiet of the gallery and into the noise of everyday public life. For Bucan, an image was not something to be hung and admired in silence. It was something to be seen on a wall, in a street, in the middle of a city going about its business.

    From the Gallery to the Street

    Bucan first drew serious attention in the late 1960s with a series of public installations around Zagreb. At the time, taking art out of the gallery and placing it in shared public space was a pointed gesture. It questioned who art was for and where it belonged, and it fit neatly into a wider current of artists across Europe who were asking the same thing.

    This instinct for the public and the direct never really faded. It is one reason his posters feel so confident. He was comfortable with scale, comfortable competing with the visual clutter of a city, and comfortable making work that had to grab a passerby in a second or two. A poster, after all, does not get a second chance at a first impression.

    A Designer for the Stage

    Alongside his fine art practice, Bucan worked steadily and seriously as a graphic designer. He produced pieces for galleries, for theatrical productions, for Croatian Radio and Television, and for the National Theatre. Theatre in particular seemed to suit him. The drama of the stage gave him licence to be bold, strange and expressive in ways that a more conventional brief might not allow.

    His standing in this field was high enough that he represented Yugoslavia at the Venice Biennale with a group of theatre posters, one of the most prestigious platforms in the art world. To be chosen for that stage says a great deal about how his peers viewed him, and about how far a well made poster could carry an artist’s reputation.

    It is worth remembering the setting he worked in. The former Yugoslavia had a remarkably strong poster tradition, and its designers enjoyed a creative freedom that produced some of the most inventive graphic work in Europe during those decades. Bucan was a leading figure within that scene, not an outsider to it, and his posters carry the confidence of an artist who knew he was working at the front of his field.

    The Bucan Look

    What makes a Bucan poster a Bucan poster? Scale is the first thing. He thought big, and his compositions have a commanding physical presence. Then there is the surrealist streak, the sense that ordinary forms have been bent slightly out of shape into something dreamlike. His colour is rich and unafraid, often pushed into psychedelic territory that catches the eye from a distance.

    The finishing details are where his signature really shows. Metallic gold accents give his posters a glow that shifts as you move around them. Lettering frequently runs along the very edges of the sheet rather than sitting politely in the centre, framing the image and turning the type into part of the composition itself. Put those elements together and you get work that is unmistakable, and that holds its own against almost anything else on a wall. If you enjoy this kind of bold graphic design, it sits comfortably alongside the mid century work featured in our Melbourne Design Week selection.

    Collecting Bucan

    Letitia Morris Gallery holds several of Bucan’s recognised and sought after posters, available to view and to purchase. For collectors drawn to bold graphic art with a genuine sense of history, his work offers a rare combination. It is the product of a serious fine artist, it carries the energy of the theatre and the street, and it looks superb on a wall. These are posters that reward a long second look.

    They also happen to be forgiving pieces to live with. Bucan’s images are graphic enough to anchor a large room, yet their colour and pattern sit comfortably alongside both modern and more traditional interiors. Framed well and kept out of harsh direct sunlight, an original poster of this kind will hold its colour for many years, which is part of what makes it such a rewarding thing to own rather than simply to admire. To see what is currently in stock or to ask about a particular piece, contact the gallery.

    View our entire range here:  Boris Bucan 

     

  • Alan Fletcher & IBM

    Alan Fletcher

    Alan Fletcher was one of the most important and most influential graphic designers to come out of Britain in the early 1960’s. His famous design for Pirelli would go on to revolutionise the British graphic design industry.

    Fletcher was born in Kenya in 1931 to a British family but moved to London at an early age. His creative talents would soon earn him a scholarship to Yale in America, where he was heavily influenced by American art and culture. After returning to London in 1960, Fletcher began consulting for clients like Time, Life, and Pirelli. His unique designs stood out for being totally original and eye-catching.

    “I try to solve their problems, but in solving their problems take an opportunity to find that extra twist that adds the magic.” The art posters he did for IBM are a good example of this. IBM asked him to design a placard for their new Paris headquarters, which said a painting would shortly arrive for the space on the wall occupied by the placard. In response he produced a series of posters interpreting the word “art” as defined by an author or artist, and added the line, ‘Quest for Quality: an IBM exhibition’ along the bottom of each poster. The artwork image for each poster was thoughtfully interpreted by Fletcher and in turn reflected his keen eye and sense of humour. Keeping each poster in greyscale and black and white unified the series thematically, each poster telling a unique story. By incorporating quotes by well-known figures such as F Scott Fitzgerald and Confucius to J.F. Kennedy, the posters remain universal as well as personal.

    View and our collection of Alan Fletcher IBM posters here:

    Marshall McLuhan Quest for Quality: an IBM exhibition - Alan Fletcher

    Marshall McLuhan Quest for Quality: an IBM exhibition – Alan Fletcher

    Emanuel Swedenborg Quest for Quality: an IBM exhibition - Alan Fletcher

    Emanuel Swedenborg Quest for Quality: an IBM exhibition – Alan Fletcher

    Jonathan Swift Quest for Quality: an IBM exhibition

    Jonathan Swift Quest for Quality: an IBM exhibition

     

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