![]() And the striking French poster for Maltese Falcon (1941) brings together the iconic faces of stars Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, and Peter Lorre across the back of the eponymous bird. ![]() Actor, singer, and activist Paul Robeson has five transformations in the poster for his most famous film, Emperor Jones (1933). Swedish designs, which in Kaplan’s words, “look as modern today as they did 90 years ago,” are represented by designer Moje Åslund’s streamlined, futuristic image for Things To Come (1936) and the vibrant poster for Harold Lloyd’s comedic Grandma’s Boy (1922). Robinson and Loretta Young in The Hatchet Man (1932) reveal how their celebrity transcended borders. Foreign depictions of Hollywood legends, such as the towering portrayals of Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, and Robert Montgomery in the Austrian posters for Forsaking All Others (1934) and of Edward G. The second grouping emphasizes the international scope of Kaplan’s collection, featuring rare works from Sweden, Austria, and France as well as the United States. Two stunning images are from America: an intense Bette Davis in Bordertown (1935) and movie queen Constance Bennett in What Price Hollywood (1932), where her private life is headlined across her face. The shadowy German design for director Josef Von Sternberg’s Underworld (1927, poster dated 1928) captures the dark mood of the pioneering gangster film. An elegant poster for the French release of Casablanca (1947), designed by leading artist Pierre Pigeot, demonstrates how the classic film was promoted abroad. The selections span film genres and artistic styles, from the great caricaturist Al Hirschfield’s playful rendering of The Three Stooges for The Big Idea (1934) and, in part two, of the Marx Brothers for A Night At The Opera (1935) to the dramatic realism of the three-sheet poster for the Errol Flynn World War I film The Dawn Patrol (1938). He is also a connoisseur of poster design history, gravitating toward exceptional illustrators, motifs, studio periods, national styles, stars, directors, and film genres. David Hockney, Don Bachardy, Allen Jones, John Van Hamersveld, Andre Carillho, and British airbrush maven Philip Castle are among the artists and illustrators with whom he has collaborated. A designer, art director, and producer ( The Whales of August, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead) Kaplan has first-hand experience in crafting campaigns and posters, the most famous among them A Clockwork Orange (1971) and "The Ultimate Trip/StarChild" campaign for the re-launch of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1970. Many people received an education in modern art and design history from movie posters, which are an essential link between fine-art practices and their distillation in everyday life.Īccording to Mike Kaplan, whose collection is founded on design, an ideal movie poster "captures graphically the creativity and emotion of the film-going experience" in a single image, while at the same time standing alone as a work of art and a souvenir of that experience. On the other, they were advertisements, intended to stand out in the visual cacophony of the modern city and to attract the broadest possible audiences. ![]() On the one hand, they often deployed the most avant-garde formal and typographic trends of a given period, demonstrating true compositional innovation. Poised at the frontier between high art and popular culture, movie posters are emblematic of modernity itself. In the words of Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan, great movie posters from the Golden Age are “snapshots of cinema, intense jolts of visual stimulation that convey the focused essence of a cinematic experience.” When adroitly executed and imbued with narrative flair, they carry a charge and fascination all their own. Amid this panoply of film-related material, posters have often achieved the status of art. In addition to producing theatrical features, the movie industry generated many types of objects to promote them: trailers, stills, lobby cards, and fan magazines. Highlights from the Mike Kaplan Collection
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