Harking Back to a Simpler Time

Cigars are back and so are martinis. Women are wearing 1950s Chanel suits accessorized with ropes of pearls and young people are discovering the big-band sound of the ‘40s.

“I’ve noticed this whole nostalgia trend creeping up for the last few years,” said Elizabeth Lees. “Everyone is talking about the millennium and I think it’s a little bit terrifying. All the headlines about cloning sheep and genetic engineering--these can be frightening prospects and they make cigar smoking seem very peaceful. I think that’s why people are looking backward.”

Lees and her husband, Bill Caskey, are a Los Angeles-based producing team whose focus, as antique dealers, has always been in the past. Their 10th annual L.A. Modernism Show on Saturday and Sunday at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium looks back at the innovative styles and designs of the past century. It includes 80 international exhibitors selling furniture, clothing, pottery, rugs and textiles.

Nothing in the mix illustrates the current passion for retro designs any better than the growing interest in vintage posters, Lees said. “I’ve noticed such a resurgence just this year, and I really don’t know where these trends come from.”

Dealers and collectors agree that vintage posters--especially those from France--have taken on a new luster, which they attribute to both financial and aesthetic factors. Originated in France as an advertising medium in the 1870s, posters were slapped up on buildings to promote products and services before radio and television came along. Over the years in Europe, they were created by many top artists, including Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse and Picasso.

And although original Toulouse-Lautrec posters have skyrocketed to the $25,000 range, other works from his era are more accessible. And beautiful advertising posters have continued to be produced to this day as functional art.

“A lot of young people who can’t afford original art pieces are buying posters,” said Frances Larose of San Francisco, whose Larose Group has promoted the West Coast International Vintage Poster Fair for three years now. The show, once limited to dealers, increasingly attracts shoppers looking for original art to hang on the wall, she said.

“A major painting costs $5,000 to 10,0000 no matter what,” she said, “and for $1,000 to $1,500 you can buy a brilliant poster.”

Produced originally by a laborious stone lithography process that produced a limited run of prints, vintage posters are still admired for their clarity, exuberance and bold use of color.

“Posters were street art and their impact had to be immediate,” said Eric Leyton, owner of Artafax gallery in Scottsdale, Ariz. Not only has the strength of the dollar revived interest in European posters, he said (“Our dealers go to auctions where there used to be 20 people and now there are hundreds”), the nostalgia factor is growing as the century ends.

Current favorites, he said, are Swiss posters from the 1950s: “Artists like Herbert Leupin and Donald Brun did product posters for Coca-Cola which are fetching big prices now.” And American movie posters and rock concert posters from the 1960s are especially prized.

Manhattan gallery owner Louis Bixenman, who produces the International Vintage Poster Fair, credits Hollywood’s use of posters for movie and TV set designs for boosting their popularity. For instance, he said, NBC’s hit “Caroline in the City” once had a prominent “Lolita” poster on the set.

Bixenman advises beginning shoppers to do a little homework. An original poster, he said, is an image that does not exist in any other form, and the poster should be from the first printing, not a reproduction.

* Vintage posters are only part of the L.A. Modernism show at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, which runs from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $10, with children under 16 free when accompanied by an adult. Information: (310)-455-2886.