Poster art gets a bad rap. No matter the loftiness of its subject, the cachet of its artist or the sophistication of its graphic gesture, a poster will rarely elicit the same response as an original artwork. Produced en masse and procured online or from museum gift shops, they are often relegated to the status of disposable decor, destined to be tacked up with tape in dorm rooms or plastered on street corners next to portraits of lost dogs. 

Indeed, when compared to paintings or expensive art prints, posters lack a certain dimensionality—quite literally, given they are usually printed on glossy paper without pores or fibers, smooth rather than tactile. There is no textured, breathing canvas; no dappled surface; no shadows to shift around a chunk of pigment as light moves across the room. 

Yet the limits of medium belies the rich history of poster art, a genre that has for centuries been developing a distinct artistic legacy of its own. Since the advent of lithographic printing, which enabled their mass production in the late 1800s, posters have been used for purposes at turns mercenary, expressive and political, from Toulouse-Lautrec’s vibrant vignettes of Parisian nightlife and Rodchenko’s Constructivist Soviet designs to the more recent work of graphic designers like Paul Rand and Shepard Fairey, who was behind the iconic HOPE poster for Obama’s first presidential campaign.

The accessibility of the poster, as well as its use in advertising, manipulative messaging and propaganda, has led some to view it as a lesser art form. But that is precisely what makes posters so essential: In their populist glory, they speak directly to us. They catch our eye on city streets, in bustling cafés or on subway walls; posters are defined by their ability to provoke double takes rather than more rarified pursuits. Their form—marked by iconic colors, graphics and typography that demands attention in a fleeting glance—is their function.