Poster Girls

STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE
Sunday, December 1, 2002

A new exhibit at CSI considers women in poster art from a century ago

But telling differences surface quickly. Even though these 110-year-old ladies from the golden age of poster culture are prim by contemporary standards, they are behaving shockingly, up and down the walls of the College of Staten Island Gallery. They’re reading. Try to find that in ads today.

“Designing Women: American Femininity and the Poster Arts of the 1890s” should satisfy multiple audiences – the pretty-picture crew, students, feminists, academics, print collectors, Americana buffs and the hordes who are besotted with the Impressionists, etc.

It’s hardly surprising that these commercial lithographs actually were collected and preserved. They’re ravishingly flat and unmodelled like the Japanese prints that Impressionists painters (Toulouse Lautrec was the master) collected and imitated in Paris 20 years earlier.

Legible and modern with large planes of color, it was the perfect style for advertising. Different aesthetics intervene periodically, in the form of romance, women wearing elaborate gowns, inhabiting nearby castles and keeping affectionate peacocks. The drawing is often sinuous, long-lined and languid.

These would be Pre-Raphelite (think Medieval/ Round Table) and Art Nouveau (Art Deco precursor) influences, If you mash these two together and administer hallucinogenic drugs, you have psychedelia, the graphic style that flowed out of California in the late 1960s.

The object lesson for this connection is illustratior Louis Rhead’s wild “If You See It In the Sun, It’s So!” made in 1895 and featuring a female figure sailing against – what else – a giant yellow sun. Like, we’re at Fillmore looking at the sun, man!

Curator and CSI Art History Professor Nanette Salomon did some detective work for this show, which was inspired by the arrival on campus of the poster-like 1900 study “Angel of the Sun” by John Le Farge. It’s in the library, newly restored and on longtime loan from the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences.

The show’s only woodcut (for a magazine called “The Echo”) is an understated work the Ashcan-school artist John Sloan. While borrowing posters from collectors, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Hirsh and Adler Gallery, Ms. Salomon kept an eye out for the under-known women in the poster – illustrating business. Several turned up.

The most gifted may well have been Ethel Reed, a trained artist born and raised in Boston and sought after in the late 1890s. Her poster for “The House of Trees and Other Poems” by someone with the unbelievable moniker, Ethelwyn Wetherald, may be the single best piece in the show. Even though it’s small and has a palette restricted to green and white, its complicated organization of saplings, foliage, hillside and lady-with-book, is like a waterfall.

Almost none of the women in the images look directly at the viewer. They’re a demure group. The single most intelligent face in the show It’s in a Reed poster, promoting the Women’s Edition, Buffalo Courier.

In this array, newspapers and magazines commissioned posters eagerly, followed by book publishers. A fragrance house called Lundberg’s is the only product-driven image.

Foliage, flowers, fruits are ubiquitous elements. Ladies apparently could barely be depicted without such garnishes.

The one that has not a hint of a petal or a leaf (although it is printed in shimmery lilac-and-gold) is the latest item in the show, Robert Wildhack’s large poster bearing the logo “CENTURY” (a magazine).

Printed in 1908, it imagines a female – she’s no Earhart hangliding. She looks giddy, admittedly but at least she’s flying, not messing around with peacocks.

Designing Women: American Femininity and the poster Arts of the 1890s
An exhibit of newspaper and magazine commissioned posters.

Where:
College of Staten Island Gallery
2800 Victory Blvd., Willowbrook

When:
Monday through Thursday, from noon to 4p.m., through Dec.18.

Admission:
Free