Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

More than 300 examples taken from the Museum of Modern Art's collectionand shown in a recent exhibitionclearly demonstrate the power of the modern poster to convey ideas quickly by combining fine and applied art for aesthetic, commercial, and political purposes. In the last century, what we call ``modern'' has converged with a maze of styles to produce recognizable genresincluding poster art. The posters, superbly reproduced here, run in a loose chronology from 1879 to 1986, with the most powerful images from the 1930s and World War II. Preceding the plates is an excellent text by Wrede, director of MOMA's Department of Architecture and Design. Highly recommended. David Bryant, Belleville P.L., N.J. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

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. (September) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

Published in connection with a 1988 exhibit of the same name, this book is similar in design and layout to American Art Posters of the 1890s in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. . .(1987). The volume is beautifully illustrated with 301 color plates and 37 black-and-white illustrations that accompany the 28-page text. Although the readable text is directed toward a nonspecialist audience, it is documented with endnotes and a good bibliography. Wrede treats primarily Western posters from the mid-19th century to the mid-1980s with limited reference to modern Japanese posters. This is an excellent introduction for the general reader, but it does not include enough text material for the serious researcher although the bibliography will be useful to this audience including, as it does, an international section of books by country as well as a list of individual designers. Alain Weill's The Poster: A Worldwide Survey and History (CH, Feb '86) remains a more thorough reference for the reader seeking more specialized material. For academic libraries as well as public libraries, this work will likely receive heavy use among undergraduate students interested in communications, design, advertising, graphic arts history, posters, and, perhaps, political science and sociology. C. Stroh Kansas State University

Booklist Review

This survey of modern poster art, covering a period from the late nineteenth century to the present, traces the process through which a number of artists and designers transformed overscale graphic advertisement into a legitimate form of aesthetic interest. Wrede, a staff member of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where an accompanying exhibition was held late in 1988, introduces the collection and comments on the evolution of the poster both as a cultural artifact and as a significant development in the history of modern art. The portfolio of colorplates presents a generous sampling of poster art in large and small reproductions with identifications. Among the artists represented are Herbert Bayer, Seymour Chwast, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and Henri de Toulouse- Lautrec. Bibliography, notes; index of illustrations. JB.