POSTERS: A Century of Summer Exhibitions

The Associate Royal Academician Frederick Walker is widely credited with having produced the first artist-designed advertisement in Britain, with his 1871 design for the Olympic Theatre's production of Wilkie Collins's 'The Woman in White', in which a ghostly shrouded female figure is seen from behind exiting the door. The impact of this poster was immense and it encouraged the belief that the medium could support real artistic expression. 19th century periodicals such as the Art Journal and the Magazine of Art printed essays that agonised over the extent to which posters could be regarded as fine art. Nothing characterised the commercial imperative of the poster more perfectly than the fate of Sir John Everett Millais's picture 'A Child's World', popularly known as 'Bubbles'. The painting and its copyright then found their way to the manufacturers of Pears Soap who used it as the basis of one of the 19th century's most successful advertising campaigns - Millais was initially furious but there was nothing he could do to prevent it. For many years The Royal Academy did not regard posters as a valid form of art until around 1910 when public attendance at the Summer Exhibition began to decline dramatically and again in WWI. Today The Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition is the largest event of its kind in the world and here for the first time archivist Mark Pomeroy brings together the wonderful collection of posters designed to publicise the exhibition in a unique record of a century of changing tastes in illustration, graphic design and typography. It features posters by Norman Adams, Edward Ardizzone, Edward Bawden, Elizabeth Blackadder, Peter Blake, Terry Frost, David Hockney, Allen Jones, Laura Knight, Eduardo Paolozzi, Carel Weight and many more, each given a full page in glorious colour to appreciate the detail of the artistry in this varied collection for all art lovers. 96pp.