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<b>WHEN ADVERTISING WAS ART</b>
<p>Throughout history, all cultures have given form to their customs and ideas, personified in inexpensive objects of daily use, and today they are on view as works of art in museums. Some posters are a prime example of this, in that their original value was virtually nil, and indeed they were items intended for a passive form of consumption, namely, for posting in public places.
<p>More than any other art form, poster art, referred to as “cartelismo” in Spanish, embodies the twin features of exerting an influence on society while at the same time being a reflection of that society. In other words, it acted both as a social cathartic and, cocomitanly, as an aesthetic expression of society. For that reason, looking back over a century, the full expanse of poster art provides an original iconographic narrative of our culture. The influence of illustrations by Penagos in Madrid society from 1915 to 1935 is a clear instance of this interaction. In addition, posters were used to foment trade, promote competing businesses, and, in the beginning, announce leisure and entertainment activities.
<p>It is important to realize that posters had the advantage of being one of the first mass media and enjoyed their heyday in a society that was at a far remove from the saturation of adversiting messages and of myriad messages current in today’s society in general. Furthermore, given the high illiteracy rate in Spain (45% in 1936) posters exerted considerable sway over the people, as an object of curiosity, affording posters a further advantage over other media.
<p>Their influence grew stedilly until World War I, but in the 1920s and 1930s this medium first began to be complemented by, and in the 1940s even superseded by, the arrival of other, more direct media, such as radio, cinema, later television, and, in recent time, computing, digitization, and, toward the end of twentieth century, the Internet. Lithograph posters were an important link in the chain between the development of communications and the customs informing our civilization.
<p>The exponential growth in communications at the end of the twentieh century is the main factor accounting for the homogenization of the material culture surrounding the consumer society. The concentration of industry is another factor along those same lines, resulting in the worldwide unification of a growing number of commercial messages. The posters reproduced in these pages are representative of a time before those changes had begun, and the target of the messages was often limited and regional in scope.
<p>Commercial and political poster art in the nineteenth century had a well-defined theoretical basis for accomplishing its goals. Artist knew that the force and power of posters lay in their ability to get a message across instantaneously, and there was a clear and obvious intent to surprise and be remembered almost without being read. In short, the point was either to persuade the public and motivate in to buy a product or to guide people towards a political viewpoint.