Word and Image; posters from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, 1968

Catalog dust jacket for Word and Image/Posters from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art/Selected and edited by Mildred Constantine/Text by Alan M. Fern. Published in 1968 by MoMA and designed by Massimo Vignelli, Pieter van Delft/Unimark International, 160 pages. Cover: detail from a billboard for Kessler, courtesy of Four Roses Distillers Company, New York. Catalog shown is from the collection of David Versluis.



Page shown is page 100 with the work of Ben Shahn (American), Ballets U.S.A. 1959 and Giovanni Pintori (Italian), Olivetti Tetractys. 1957.

Inside the cover on the dust jacket the teaser copy states:

In the last 100 years the poster has been an enormously popular art with a growing audience not only among professional enthusiasts, but the public at large. This pictorial history considers the poster as an art form interacting with other visual arts of its times as well as a social document.

The illustrations in this book are drawn from The Museum of Modern Art’s collection of over 2,000 posters, by artists working in all styles and media, from the powerful lithographs of the turn of the century to the “psychedelic” brilliance and technical ingenuity of today’s experimenters: work by Cherét, Bonnard, Lautrec, Mucha, Hohlwein, Kokoschka, Tschichold, Bayer, Kauffer, Cassandre, Picasso, Moscoso, Max, Gee, Shahn, Lionni, and Stella.

Alan M. Fern is Assistant Chief of the Reference Department, Prints and Photographs Division, the Library of Congress, Mildred Constantine who helped assemble the collection documented here in her former position as Associate Curator of Graphic Design, is Consultant to the Department of Architecture and Design and Special Assistant to the Director of the Museum of Modern Art.