Records & Results: Vintage Posters
Poster Passion Leads to a Successful Auction
Our August 1 Vintage Poster sale set at least six auction records, including a new high price for Sutro Baths. The exhibition for the annual summer auction was overflowing.
Record Breaking Art Nouveau
Alphonse Mucha’s Times of the Day was the top lot of the auction, selling to an institution for $40,000. The sale set a record price for Peter Behren’s Der Kuss, selling at $5,000. Other Art Nouveau highlights included Marcello Dudovich’s 1908 design for the Italian department store Mele which sold at $6,500.
Lot 214: Alphonse Mucha, Times of the Day, 1899. Sold August 1, 2018 for $40,000.
Food and Drink
The auction offered an unusually broad selection of food and drink posters, with sections devoted to Leonetto Cappiello and Luciano Achille Mauzan. Cappiello’s Carnaval / Vinho do Porto, 1911, brought $18,750. Manuel Orazi’s Ligue Vinicole de France, 1901, an elegant image positioning wine as the wholesome answer to the modern world’s ills, brought a record $10,625.
Lot 365: Leonetto Cappiello, Carnaval / Vinho do Porto, 1911. Sold August 1, 2018 for $18,750.
Iconic Wartime Propaganda
Wartime propaganda, for which these sales are known, included both marketplace mainstays and surprises. Among top lots were perhaps the most iconic posters in the world: James Montgomery Flagg’s I Want You for the U.S. Army brought $10,000, the anonymously designed Keep Calm and Carry On, a 1939 image from Great Britain, sold for $12,500. Two posters designed by Arthur Szyk in the 1940s for the war effort, encouraging American soldiers to “Fool the Axis – Use Prophylaxis,” sold for $4,750 and $4,000, new auction records over estimates of just $800 to $1,200 apiece.
(Left) Lot 39: James Montgomery Flagg, I Want You for the U.S. Army, 1917. Sold August 1 for $10,000.
(Right) Lot 108: Keep Calm and Carry On, 1939. Sold August 1, 2018 for $12,500.