News-Antique.com - May 24,2007 - BOSTON - Indulge in the spirit of wanderlust with the International Poster Gallery's 14th Annual Summer Poster Show, Summer Adventures! The show spotlights more than 50 original vintage travel, sport and entertainment posters from near and far, and runs from July 4 through Labor Day, September 3, 2007. The show is free and open to the public. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday 10 am to 6 pm and Sunday noon to 6 pm. The Gallery is located at 205 Newbury Street in Boston. Call (617) 375-0076 or visit www.internationalposter.com for more information.
The show is headlined by a classic American poster from the Roaring Twenties, Airplane Rides, where the highly popular Inman Flying Circus offers "special rides" for 50 cents and "long high rides" for $1. The air show also featured a 4,000 foot parachute jump from an "advanced" aircraft (the Boeing 80-A could carry 20 passengers). The Inman’s called it the Boeing Clipper, but they had to battle Pan Am in the 1930s to retain the name when the airline registered it for its seaplanes that were the first to fly regular schedules across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
Fittingly, the show also includes the most famous Pan Am Clipper poster, Paul Lawler’s Pan Am to South Sea Isles (here seen before text circa 1939), which brings to life the exotic adventure of luxury travel in the Thirties. A beautiful island native serenely watches a Boeing Super Clipper 314 land in the dramatic bay of Pago Pago, one of Pan Am's string of Pacific seaplane bases. The show features several other airline posters, including the hard to find Air France to West Africa of 1946. This poster had to be printed a second time, as the artist had pictured Asian elephants by mistake in this rare first version.
No summer is complete without blockbuster entertainment, which is represented in our show by one of the best King Kong film posters from 1949 by leading Italian film posterist, Giorgio Olivetti. The show concludes with several film festival posters from Switzerland and post-war jazz festival posters from Willisau and Montreux.
Since opening in 1994 on Newbury Street, International Poster Gallery has hosted more than 30 thematic exhibitions of original vintage posters. Many of these have been specialized, in-depth surveys, including exhibitions on posters of the Russian Revolution, Swiss Object Posters from 1919-1959, and the first exhibitions dedicated to Italian vintage posters in this country.
The gallery’s website, www.internationalposter.com, features more than 3,000 posters with thumbnails and offers helpful information about poster collecting. The PosterFinder search engine allows viewers to search the inventory thoroughly and easily by subject, country, style, poster artist, or special key word.
