---

Rene Wanner's Poster Blog

Zoe Whitley, the curator of the Schreyer Collection at the poster departement of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London recently wrote me about her collection: We are only slowly in the process of making the collection accessible online. Over the next year, I hope to research and catalogue a substantial segment of the Schreyer posters. Only a minimal portion of the Schreyer Collection has yet been photographed, but I will see whether or not any of those images can be uploaded for your site. For information about the collection in general, the best source of printed information is the book by Margaret Timmers, my senior curator, which you already have listed on your poster bibliography. (The Power of the Poster). Within our Department, posters were actively collected from the early 20th Century. The widow of pioneering poster collector Joseph Thacher Clark gave the V&A in 1921 all of the posters he had collected throughout his lifetime. This gift immediately made the V&A a poster collection of international standing, with work represented by all the major poster deigners up to that time. In 1931, the V&A hosted a display of more than 650 British and foreign posters in the Museum's North Court. This exhibition sparked further acquisitions, which continues up to the present day. Most of our posters come as gifts while others have been bought from individuals, institutions or at auction. Nearly half of the poster collection is British and the other half represents other nationalities. We collect the poster as an art form (with fine examples by Cappiello, Tolouse-Lautrec, Mucha, Cheret, etc.); the poster as a social document (how goods and services were advertised at particular times, e.g. Post Office or Shell Oil); and the poster as an instrument of propaganda (Mai 68 student posters, Black Panthers, Spanish Civil War, Feminist Movement). After the Victoria & Albert Museum mounted 'The Power of the Poster' exhibition in 1998, the British Museum offered to transfer its entire collection of posters to the V&A in order to rationalise the national collections. Secondly, we were offered an amazing collection of nearly 3, 000 posters from a private collection in New York in 1999 - the gift of Leslie, Judith and Gabri Schreyer and Alice Schreyer Batko. Because of this, what was initially a holding of approximately ten thousand posters in the Collection of Prints and Drawings has quickly risen to nearly sixteen thousand in our recently restructured Word & Image Department. The Schreyer collection in particular began during Leslie and Alice's student days in the 1960s. The collection they amassed is international in origin and interest and dates from the 1890s to the 1980s. Collecting posters became a catalyst for learning about design and about the history of the century. The holdings include now-rare posters from the Weimar Republic, the Russian Civil War and 1960s counter culture. Virtually every political event of the Twentieth Century is represented: The First and Second World Wars, Spanish Civil War, Mao's Cultural Revolution, anti-imperialist struggles of developing nations, the Vietnam War... For additional information see Schreyer Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum