New York City’s first museum, the New-York Historical Society (N-YHS), unveiled an exhibition that chronicles major breakthroughs in the advertising industry from 1895 through 1925. “Advertising in the Age of the Ashcan Artists” is a companion exhibition to “Life’s Pleasures: The Ashcan Artists’ Brush with Leisure,” and is on view through February 10 at the New-York Historical Society.
The collection of more than three dozen posters and prints taps the museum’s vast archives to trace the role artists played in reshaping the message industry was sending out at the dawn of a new century with the use of bright, stirring images and color. At the same time, the works on display reflect the inspiration American artists took from France’s poster craze of the late 1890s. In depicting the beauty, strength and activity of a new urban class, American advertising arts sought to marry the glory of image and design to a new message targeting the masses, much as the French had done a few years earlier.
The exhibit includes representations of the elegant and their pursuits during the leisure time they could now enjoy, thanks to the Industrial Revolution. There are scenes of both polo matches and indoor cafes, luxuries most of the nation’s citizenry could only dream of attaining. Lithographs and prints were catalysts in a movement to bring visual content to the fore in both print and outdoor advertising. They mark an important stride the industry made at a time when pictures began to overtake text as the primary medium that merchants, retailers and industrialists relied on to sway a growing consumer audience.
The exhibit accompanies the New-York Historical Society’s current display of works by the Ashcan School of painters and captures a number of uncanny parallels in the revolutionary changes both Ashcan artists and advertising artists brought to their respective spheres. At the time Ashcan notables such as George Bellows, William Glackens, George Luks and Everett Shinn gravitated to the city with an aim to portray the beauty of the gritty, urban landscape, advertisers, too, felt the pull of the nation’s cities and began to reach out to common folk with settings of urban comforts and pastimes. Advertising artists had a simple aim in mind: images of polo, picnics, tennis and the races were meant to link the buying public to the products and services their patrons had to sell.
The New-York Historical Society is at Central Park West and 77th Street. For information, www.nyhistory.org or 212-873-3400.
