Deco the Halls! 12th Annual Holiday Poster Show At International Poster Gallery BOSTON – International Poster Gallery located at 205 Newbury Street in Boston celebrates the holidays with a playful and elegant selection of more than thirty seasonal antique posters!
News-Antique.com - Nov 30,-0001 - BOSTON – International Poster Gallery celebrates the holidays with a playful and elegant selection of more than thirty seasonal antique posters: skiing, shopping, warm fur wraps, dancing, and champagne toasts are all to be found upon the gallery’s newly decked walls. The show opens December 1, 2005 and runs through January 15, 2006. Hours are Monday through Saturday 10am to 6pm and Sunday noon to 6pm. The Gallery is located at 205 Newbury Street in Boston. Call (617) 375-0076 or visit www.internationalposter.com for information.
Jean d’Ylen’s jubilant Cora Spumanti of 1925 sets the tone for Deco the Halls! with its red-headed coquette balancing herself, bottle of champagne in each outstretched arm, atop an origami horse. D’Ylen was the successor to no less than Cappiello at the leading Parisian printer Vercasson, and his inventive and unorthodox designs proved him immediately worthy. Two Bally posters in the show are among the finest of the two hundred designs made since 1910 for the leading Swiss fashion company, which were featured in a 1993 exhibit at the Basel Design Museum. These imposing designs include an elegant dancing couple in the sophisticated and very rare Bally Chaussures (1925) by Spanish artist A. Ribas, and Jacques Demachy’s late 1940s icon for Bally set on a dark black background. The dance theme continues with the stunning Bal de la Couture of 1922 by Jean-Gabriel Domergue, which portrays the belle of the ball preparing in her dressing room with her seamstress.
Another rarity is the seldom seen Art Deco fashion album Les Douze Mois de l'Annee (1919) by Martha Romme. The twelve hand stenciled plates are exquisite in their detail, with silver ink, fitting French verses and proverbs, and voluminous dresses swirling in snow
storms and billowing in spring winds. Romme’s scenes, so full of flights of fancy reflective of post-WWI French fashion, are accompanied by dozens of other first rank and affordable fashion illustrations from the 1910s and 1920s by Georges Barbier, Georges Lepape and Thayaht.
The shopping theme concludes with Donald Brun’s delightful Object Poster of a valet laden with precisely wrapped packages from the Rhine River Bridge Department Store. In the 1950s Brun and his fellow Basel artists turned this hyper-realistic style to a more whimsical vein and helped to spark a strong consumer recovery. Deco the Halls! will include other graphically mesmerizing Object Posters from the gallery’s collection.
Winter sport will also be highlighted in the holiday show, as International Poster continues to uncover many gems. There are several New England ski pieces, including Hechenberger’s pristine poster promoting New Hampshire just before Pearl Harbor in which an All-American gal is silhouetted against a bright blue sky, skis crossed and poised on her shoulder. Switzerland is well represented, with Paul LeComte’s dream-like Murren of 1930 showing a solitary ski racer kicking up powder at dusk. Walter Herdeg’s inaugural FIS Cup from St. Moritz of 1933 is another highly sought after racing masterpiece.
Among the rarest ski posters are those that were produced in Italy before
