The Modern Poster

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The history of modern posters is one of adaptation and cross-fertilization, as this catalogue of an exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art reveals. Toulouse-Lautrec borrowed the flat color surfaces and flowing outlines of Japanese prints to produce an almost photojournalistic view of the urban scene. In A. M. Cassandre's posters of ocean liners and trains, the mechanistic tangle of Fernand Leger's oils has been transformed into pure icons. In the contemporary commercial posterwhether Japanese, Polish, Dutch, Venezuelan or Americaninnovations in graphic design, abstraction, typography and advertising art are endlessly recombined in pictures mingling wit, inventive imagery and bold color. Works by Klimt, Schiele, Ben Shahn, Man Ray, Warhol, Richard Avedon and scores of less famous artists complement an informative text by Wrede, director of the museum's department of architecture and design.