Art Deco was known as the Golden Age of Illustration. To celebrate its centenary, the Sarasota Art Museum opens an exhibition at the end of the month that features 100 rare fine art advertisement posters created during the 1920s and ‘30s by some of the world’s earliest master graphic designers. Executive Director Virginia Shearer explains why these posters are so rare.
“These Art Deco posters were not meant to last. They were meant to be broadsides, put up, taken down, selling the next thing. But Art Deco was really of an interesting time. We're talking about the roaring 20s. We're talking about the advent of luxury advertising. So these will be a great history lesson.”
“Art Deco posters are an art form that never should have survived,” Elaine Crouse told Lauren Antoine for a story that appears in Sarasota Scene. “It was done on very inexpensive paper. It was displayed on the side of a wall or a kiosk to be ripped down in a month or two.”
In addition to the posters, the exhibition highlights the era’s design aesthetic with selected sculptural works and cocktail shakers from the Crouse Collection. It also includes Art Deco furniture pieces on loan from the Wolfsonian Museum at Florida International University in Miami.
“Fonts that we use today, typefaces, architecture that we see today, furniture, jewelry, so many of those design elements were born at that time and have had lasting impact,” Shearer observed.
Spanning topics from automobiles, airlines and ocean liners to drinks and tobacco, the works represented in “Art Deco: The Golden Age of Illustration” celebrate modernity, dynamism, and luxury—the dreams and desires of the turbulent early 20th century.
“These early movements were making the way for modernism and paving the way for contemporary art today,” said Shearer. “So we're really excited about Art Deco.”
“Art Deco: The Golden Age of Modernism” opens on the second floor of the Sarasota Art Museum on Aug. 31.
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“Art Deco: The Golden Age of Illustration” shines a spotlight on Art Deco as the art form celebrates its centennial anniversary.
Art historians point to the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris in 1925 as the seminal moment of the Art Deco movement.
With geometric shapes and streamlines, it embraced modernity and the promise of the Industrial Revolution.
The posters included in the exhibition come from the Crouse Collection.
The Crouse Collection is considered to be the most significant private collection of its kind. Crouse’s posters were published in Vendome Press’ 2013 “The Art Deco Poster” and exhibited in “Art Deco: Commercializing the Avant-Garde” at Poster House in New York City from September 2023 through February 2024.
Bill Crouse has committed much of his knowledge about the creation and provenance of the posters to two books: “The Art Deco Posters” and “Grand Prix Automobile de Monaco Posters, The Complete Collection: The Art, The Artists and the Competition, 1929-2009.”
For more on Bill and Elaine Crouse, visit https://www.scenesarasota.com/magazine/the-crouse-collection/.
Featured in the Sarasota Art Museum exhibition are posters created by designers that include Lester Beall, Leonetto Cappiello, Jean Carlu, A. M. Cassandre, Paul Colin, Austin Cooper, Jules Courvoisier, Edward McKnight Kauffer, Charles Loupot, Leo Marfurt, Gert Sellheim, Federico Seneca, and Roger de Valerio.
Among Cappiello’s memorable lithographs were posters for “Folies Bergere, Tous les soire spectacle varie” and “Pilules Pink,” both of which are in the Musee des Arts decoratifs in Paris.
Adolphe Mouron Cassandre was one of the preeminent French Art Deco graphic designers. Among his commissions were posters for the French newspaper “Le Progres.”
The Art Deco posters followed on the heels of those created during the Art Nouveau movement earlier in the 20th century by such luminaries as Alfred Roller, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Dumont, Alphonse Mucha, Aubrey Beardsley and Jules Cheret.
“Art Deco posters of this quality are now extremely rare and are highly valued works of art that one would expect to see at major American and European museums,” states Shearer on the museum’s website. “As part of Ringling College of Art and Design, we especially appreciate these works for the artistic and historic significance they carry in terms of the evolution of graphic design, illustration, and typography. These works are stand-out examples of the essential role art played during the burgeoning age of advertising and continues to play today.”
The exhibition runs through March 29, 2026.
The Sarasota Art Museum opened in December of 2019. It spans two former Sarasota High School buildings: a Collegiate Gothic structure designed by M. Leo Elliott in 1926 and a Modernist 1959 addition by Paul Rudolph.
Lawson Group Architects led the $30 million adaptive reuse project, with Terence Riley of K/R (Keenen/Riley) as the design architect.
The team opened up much of the Elliott building’s interior, leaving behind concrete piers where walls once stood. They salvaged the building’s longleaf pine joists and turned them into flooring for the galleries, kept the exposed brick walls, and restored the lobby’s tile floor mosaic.
The central Gothic tower is now a soaring, 28-foot-high gallery space housing large-scale artwork.
The Rudolph building houses a bistro and additional gallery space.
Virginia Shearer serves as executive director of the Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design. She previously oversaw all areas of the High Museum’s department of education, where she was one of six members of an executive team that set strategic priorities for the museum. She holds a B.A. in humanities from Florida State University and a M.A. in museum education from George Washington University. She is also a past participant of the Getty Leadership Institute program and the Getty’s education program for museum leaders, and has also served as the southeast regional director for the museum education division of the National Arts Education Association.
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.