#104: Posters as Persuasion with Angelina Lippert (ft. Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr.)

Angelina Lippert is the Executive Director and Curator at Poster House in New York City. She is an expert when it comes to the use of posters as a tool for mass communication and persuasion. We talk about what a poster is, the history of posters as a medium, the social effects they have, and why we should still care about posters in the digital age.

At the top of the show, we hear from Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. He's a letterpress printer who puts ink to paper to spread messages about social justice. His beautiful body of work was recently showcased in the book Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr.: Citizen Printer (Letterform Archive, 2024).

For a real crossover, you can check out Angelina's 2020-21 exhibition of Amos' work at Poster House: The Letterpress Posters of Amos Kennedy

For a transcript of this episode, visit this episode's page at: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episodes/

Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.

Transcript

Amos Paul Kennedy Jr: My goal is to infiltrate and infect.

I'm Amos Paul Kennedy Jr., and I am gainfully unemployable. People ask me what I do, and I just tell people I live. And that's basically all you're supposed to do is live, and then you do stuff while you're living. And I put ink on paper, and I've been doing that for the last 30 years. 

Andy Luttrell: Amos Kennedy is a printer. He uses old methods to get words into the world. These days you could pound out a message on a computer and shoot it out of an inkjet printer and Voila, you've got a sign to tell people where the bathroom is or what time you'll be back. But to make a sign like that used to take time, precision, and thought.

You'd have to pull out bits of wood or metal in the backward shapes of letters, arrange them like a puzzle, carefully fill in the spaces, and load it into a big printing press that would roll ink over those pieces and press it all like a big heavy stamp onto a clean sheet of paper, re-ink, and repeat.

That's how things were printed for centuries. And a motley crew of tinkerers and designers still do it today. Amos is one of them. 

Amos Paul Kennedy Jr: When I was in the Cub Scouts, my mother took the troop to the local newspaper, to visit the local newspaper, and you don't know what really affects things have upon you, but now looking back, I remember that, and so that probably planted a seed that lay dormant for a long time. There are some times when you do something and you know that, that is it. You don't know that, that is it, but it just feels so comfortable and it brings you such satisfaction in doing it. 

Andy Luttrell: As a young man, Amos got a math degree and started working as a computer programmer. But after a while, he found that world boring, preferring instead his new passion for calligraphy. Eventually, he rediscovered letterpress printing and took a course in the eighties at Artist Bookworks in Chicago. He remembers that many of the other people there had been English majors, and they would be having these conversations about poets.

Amos Paul Kennedy Jr: And I was like, ah, I don't know. I didn't know any of their names, but, on the way home one night, I said, yes. But the poets I know are Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sonia Sanchez, Don L. Lee. Those are the poets I know. And that piqued my curiosity and I found that those voices were missing from what they call fine print or artist books or whatever you want to call it, broadsides. A lot of those voices were missing. 

So I made it my mission at that point, which I continue to do to focus upon the Negro culture. But I've broadened it in the last 10 years to realize that it is the Negro culture, but the Negro culture is part of a larger forgotten voices, the voices of indigenous people, the voices of Latinos, of queer, trans, homosexual, all these voices that have been systematically excluded, need to be included.

I identify with those people who are oppressed. If you are oppressed today, I identify with you. If six months from now you start to oppress somebody, I identify with the people you're oppressing. 

Andy Luttrell: And that's the beauty of a printing press. It's a means of mass communication. It's a way for ideas to spread.

But there's a quote printers love by the journalist A. J. Liebling, who wrote, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” The printer holds the keys. But put them in the right hands, and the promise is powerful. 

Amos Paul Kennedy Jr: Suddenly, messages were able to get out there. I mean, it was the democratization that took place of the printing press that allowed the abolition movement to go forth so good, because, it was an expense, but someone could get a press and some type and start to print against the enslavement of my people. And you find that there were a lot of newspapers, a lot of small presses that did that. And that was part of the movement. 

Andy Luttrell: And yes, with these new possibilities comes opportunity for flourish and typography and design.

But what I love about Amos’ philosophy and aesthetic is that, it's all about not being too precious, and keeping your sights set on the point. Sending a message. 

Amos Paul Kennedy Jr: Put the message in the hands of the people and move on. The message is more important than how it looks. When I was young, I went to a talk by Dick Gregory and he talked about Black people, the way Black people speak, and this was back in the seventies, and the fact that it was looked down upon.

And he said, you have to remember that the reason you talk is to convey information. If you say, there come a truck. Nobody's going to look at you and say, Oh, yeah, he doesn't know what he's saying and get hit by the truck. They're going to say, Oh, let me get out of the way. So, the message was there and that's the important thing.

What is the message that you want to get to the people?

Andy Luttrell: You're listening to Opinion Science, the show about our opinions, where they come from, and how we talk about them. I'm Andy Luttrell, and I'm excited about this month's show. It's a little bit different from the typical social science interview, but I think you'll enjoy a tour through unique ways of conveying messages.

I've mentioned on this show that I've become obsessed with the world of letterpress printing over the last couple of years. I've got a few printing presses in my basement and all the quirky little bits of equipment that people had to use for centuries to mass produce printed text. I find this all very intriguing because it's opened me up to modern day creators who are taking this age-old practice and thrusting it into the present, using these methods in innovative ways to make message-oriented art.

Like Amos Kennedy, who, by the way, is the subject of a beautiful new book, Amos Paul Kennedy Jr.: Citizen Printer, published by Letterform Archive. It's an amazing testament to his work. But this interest has also thrown me into the depths of our history as human beings trying to share messages with each other. I've littered my bookshelves with books on the history of books and printing. And one of those curious histories is the subject of today's episode.

Angelina Lippert is the executive director and curator at Posterhouse in New York City. Straight from their website, here is Posterhouse's deal. Dedicated to presenting the impact, culture, and design of posters, both as historical documents and methods of contemporary visual communication. I had been wanting to do something on Opinion Science about history somehow, and last summer, I saw a brief clip of Angelina where she defined posters specifically as public facing notices meant to persuade that marries word and image.

And I was like, oh, that is exactly what I'm looking for. I was super excited to get the chance to meet Angelina and get the scoop on posters, their history and meaning for mass communication, and how she got caught up in this world in the first place. So, let's jump into my conversation with Angelina Lippert.

Andy Luttrell: Maybe if we're going to talk about posters, we should be clear about what a poster is? And I get the feeling that people can say poster and mean lots of things. But in your role, when you call something a poster, what are you talking about? 

Angelina Lippert: That's a great question and actually something that's a bit contested.

I love arguing about it, but I've definitely had arguments with a lot of other historians because it's kind of like a catch all word. It's sort of like how a square is a rectangle but a rectangle isn't a square. So how the museum and how I define a poster is a public facing notice meant to persuade that marries word and image. It also has to be a printed multiple. It's basically to distinguish itself from a bunch of subcategories. 

So, signage is, like, if I was at a protest and I drew a little poster that says vote for me, that is a sign. That is not a poster because it's not a printed multiple. Posters really, really took off in the 1870s, when Jules Cheret perfected color lithography so that posters could be produced cheaply and quickly or color advertising could be produced cheaply and quickly.

That doesn't mean that there wasn't advertising before that, or advertising on a large scale, just that those things are broadsides, which I don't touch. Broadsides are essentially, they're usually text based, they're usually a single color, so like black or brown, and if there is an image, it's usually as a tip on and a tip on is a separate piece of paper that's glued into an open space on the larger, what some people would call, poster. But, it's not the marriage of word and image.

My specialty takes over once the ability to combine text and image becomes a possibility on a large scale in color. It's also different from a hand bill, different from a flyer. Those things usually are not meant for public facing. Public facing in the sense that you hand them out in public, but there's a different relationship between the object and the viewer.

So, a poster because of its size and how it is displayed presumes that thousands, on average, of people are looking at that object and have to be able to understand the message instantly under a second. If a poster doesn't convey a message in under a second, it has failed. Whereas a handbill or a flyer, even a magazine ad, presumes a one-to-one relationship with the viewer, so you can have more information.

You can have, like, fine print. You aren't trying to catch everyone's attention, you're just trying to hold the attention of a single viewer who's already a captive audience because they are intentionally looking at that. A poster is something that catches your eye as you're walking by. So, the function is a little different too.

So, that's my general definition. 

Andy Luttrell: Yeah, that's great. I'm glad you mentioned the magazine. So, when I was looking at, examples of posters on the blog, on the museum blog, it did strike me that a lot of them felt like they could have appeared as a full-page ad in a magazine.

And so, it seems it's possible that the same design could be in both places, but it's not a poster unless it's publicly displayed without that one-to-one relationship. 

Angelina Lippert: Yes. Historically, if we go back to 1880s, a lot of the big, like, Cappiello posters also appeared as little tiny postage stamp size ads in newspapers.

So, they would use the same image, especially if it was a mascot in a variety of different advertising outlets, but how it functions is different. So, a giant eye catching poster that's seven feet tall, just functions differently than a black and white version of that same design printed in a publication.

But then there were things called poster stamps too, which I'm not an expert on, but, I'm learning from a wonderful, historian, Jane Plüer , who is an expert on these things. It was basically, if there was a popular image that was a poster, they would make a little collectible stamp of it that you could take home.

And the fact that they would make something that is an advertisement, but make it as a collectible instead, that is wild to me. Because, I don't think I would take home like an Oreo cookie ad and frame it at my house today. But apparently something like that was something people were interested in a hundred years ago.

Andy Luttrell: I mean, nowadays, like you can't like branded products and stuff. So, it's maybe not so, but it's an interesting precursor to that, that people would be like, I like just the vibe that I'm getting from this commercial entity. That's so much so that I want it for myself. So, is advertising, sort of, the origin story because I'm super interested in the earliest days of this, like once there was a method for being able to pull off what you're defining as a poster, what was it used for? So you said mid 1800s. Is that what I'm... 

Angelina Lippert: So, I mean, advertising dates back to, like, Pompeii, you can find advertisements all the way back then, as long as, like, any mural promoting a tavern is technically an advertisement. But with posters, it was the printed multiple, the idea that the same ad could be produced by the thousand and pasted up usually through wheat paste around a given area.

There are also other places that these posters appeared, but they're exceptions to the rule. It is generally a byproduct of commerce. It is a byproduct of the industrial revolution. You wouldn't have posters if you didn't have commerce. Obviously, there are posters that aren't commercial. So, anything that's asking you to vote, is not necessarily commercial, but generally, the purpose of a poster is to get the viewer to act. So vote for me, attend this event, buy this product, do this thing. 

If it's live, laugh, love, that's not a poster. That's another thing I should bring up the difference between a poster and a print. Because those two things function differently, but often people will use them interchangeably. A poster is a print, but a print is not a poster. A poster has to be asking you to do something. If it's live, laugh, love, or if it's decorative, if it was not made to be thrown out, it's not a poster, if it was made to be collected, if it's signed and numbered, if it's edition, that is a print and that's great.

I just don't touch prints. I only touch commercial advertising as well as political advertising, so it has to be… it is primarily a byproduct of commerce and it has to be instructing the viewer to do something. So, like, the thing behind you that I see, the make something great, that would be a print, not a poster.

Andy Luttrell: In that there's no imagery. I mean, what you're referring to is a print that I have behind me that says the words make something great. And that's a message calling for action.

Angelina Lippert: It is. Was it free face? Was it used? Was it printed as something that someone would hang in their office?

Andy Luttrell: Right, I don't know what the intention was probably something more like that. But it wasn't. I didn't take this down off of a City Hall or whatever. 

Angelina Lippert: Exactly. So the function is different. If it's meant to be decorative, if it's meant to be something people collect and keep at home. If that has the primary purpose, then it is a print and not a poster.

Andy Luttrell: So, it seems like, that the presence of a message is one of the key things that distinguishes it. I'm just curious. So, the emphasis that you're saying is on taking action. Like I'm trying to convince you to do something. From a persuasion perspective, I might say that sometimes persuasive messages are not deliberately about action, but are about thought, too.

And so, if this is, like, we want you just to support in principle this cause, and there's nothing really for you to do, but we want you to just to like it or to support it or to, like, step one is just to change minds. Does that live in the world of posters? If it's just, like, a persuasive message as opposed to no, this is deliberately about creating actions. 

Angelina Lippert: I think, it's one of those, like, I'll know it if I see it, if it fits all the other boxes, like, it's public facing, it's meant to be destroyed. Convincing you to think is a direction. I can't think of anything that does fit that description, but can you think of something that would have been street facing that fits within that. 

Andy Luttrell: Nothing is coming to mind at the moment. I mean, it's this constant debate about like, what are opinions for, but for action, right? Like when I tried to change your opinion, it's in order to inspire new action. And there are reasons why you are interested in just having people. Buy into an idea, even if they'll never have the opportunity. But, again, presumably that eventually is in the service of creating change through behavior. 

Angelina Lippert: I mean, the very famous Shepard Fairey Obama “Hope” poster is a poster. It's not actually asking you to do anything. It's presenting the concept or the allure of Obama. It is still a poster cause it was inspiring action. It’s just not explicitly. 

Andy Luttrell: That's a perfect example of what I was wondering. So like, that would be a poster. There's no call to action in the poster, but it serves a persuasive purpose, like, its intention is persuasive. 

Angelina Lippert: And it was circulated on the street. It wasn't just printed as a collectible, it functioned in the wild as it were. 

Andy Luttrell: So, in those early days, you mentioned that it's a lot of commercial interests that sort of gave way to posters. Can you try that evolution a little bit? So, roughly when are we talking about posters becoming a medium for mass communication?

Angelina Lippert: The switch from broadside to posters again, broadside, people are going to get all over me about this because that predates everything I know. And also broadsides tend to be letterpress or like wood type, metal type, whereas I focus on stone lithography is, kind of, the dawn for me of posters.  1870s Jules Cheret, you can see some of his early work then, it's more monochromatic, it's muted as opposed to what becomes like the really, really famous Cheret stuff in the 1880s and 1890s. A lot of artists, like, fine artists, use posters at that time. 

And I'm thinking like, Pierre Bernard, Toulouse Lautrec, they use posters as a place of experimentation because it's cheaper than doing a painting. It's also quicker. So, you don't have to wait for a patron to buy a painting off of you that takes a few months. You can do this in two days. And both of them have very, specifically Pierre Bernard and Toulouse Lautrec have different approaches to the poster. I think are really interesting.

So, Lautrec, his posters look like his prints look like his paintings. They are of a milieu and they're amazing. They are some of the most expensive commercial advertising you could purchase today as if you had an original three sheet Lautrec Moulin Rouge that's like a half a million dollars if you have it. He extends his fine art practice through commercial advertising for things that he already presents in his art.

Pierre Bernard, I mean, he's a post-impressionist. I don't particularly like him as a fine artist, but his posters are wild. Every single poster looks like it's done by a different person. He is clearly experimenting, like, figuring out his own visual language through lithography and just seeing what's, like, he's literally throwing like pasta on the wall and seeing what sticks like it is just really amazing what he does in posters and therefore everything from salons to periodicals and they all look totally different.

So, the fine artists get in on poster design when they see the flexibility of the medium and the breadth of the medium. And then commercial artists come in and succeed in making commercial design an actual profession by the turn of the century. 

Andy Luttrell: And what are the sorts of messages that are embedded in these early posters? Is it just a grab bag of all sorts of things, or…? 

Angelina Lippert: I mean, the majority of stuff from the 1880s, 1890s, it's cabarets, cafes, salons. You'll get some products, but it's very much entertainment focused at first. And then around the turn of the century, it gets much more product focused, where you get like anything that's shelf stable.

People are like, oh, you should do a food and wine show. And I'm like, Great, totally possible, except realistically, the only things advertised in posters in the food and wine category, in the early, 1890 to 1920, are stuff that's shelf stable.  Nobody needs their local, like, bakery to advertise because they sell out. They don't need our help. It's when you have products that are crossing borders or products that are on the shelf for a long time, that's when you need advertising. 

So, it's really a reflection of commercial paths rather than of like local businesses. When you look at posters in that time period, in that space, whereas, Cabarets and stuff are hyper local and for one night only, one week only. So, it's an interesting dichotomy between how those two different types of commerce function in advertising. 

Andy Luttrell: Yeah, that's interesting. And at what point do you eventually start to see these kind of more, like, social issue, public service announcement, kinds of, messages start to creep in to the fray?

Angelina Lippert: It's complicated because the thing that we have to remember is that the majority of posters that were made do not survive. And the majority of posters that do survive are anonymous, which is perfectly fine. They were never meant to survive. So, we only have, like, 5% of what was ever made. We don't know what else was made. 

But there are occasionally, I've found, like, right from the beginning, political posters from the 1880s, 1890s, using it to promote a candidate or an issue was something that they caught on very quickly. They just weren't as popular as collectibles.

So, how posters survive, is in the 1880s, I'm going to focus on one person in particular because he's kind of representative of the larger poster culture. The reason we have more French posters than anything else is because they had a collecting culture. It doesn't mean that they produced more posters than other countries. People just saved more of them.

There was a print dealer, named Edmond Sago, who worked in Paris. I think his granddaughter or great granddaughter still sells posters in Paris today. And Sago, like many print dealers, prints were incredibly popular. The print trade was growing throughout the 1800s, primarily to middle class people who couldn't afford a painting, but they could decorate their homes with prints, and the concept of being a print collector had a lot of social cachet to it.

It was a popular hobby. And print dealers, when they started seeing these big posters by Lautrec, by Cheret, by Alphonse Mucha, on the streets, they were like, huh, I can make a dollar off of this. Because what are posters, really, really big prints? And so, people like Edmond Sago, who became the leader in this field in France at the time, he went to the printers, not to the designers, that's very important, he went to the printers, and he was, like, okay, the next time Cheret, actually no, Cheret is a bad example because he owned the printing press. The next time Mucha makes a poster, I want 20 copies with the advertising text on it. I want 10 copies without the advertising text and just send them over to my shop. And so Sago would take those, the ones without the ad copy are known as the before letters version of a poster. And those would be sold to people who love the image, but don't want the commercial association.

And they would be sold for the equivalent of today's $5. These were incredibly accessible. And this is the time when poster collections of sizes that rank in the thousands and even tens of thousands are developed. Some of the most important poster collections ever made were amassed during this time.

And if you go into antique stores, you'll often see these big, like, chest of drawers, but the drawers are really thin and long. And those are for prints. They were for prints, posters, and maps. And furniture was specifically made for the passion around this hobby.

I mentioned Toulouse Lautrec's, Moulin Rouge, a few minutes ago, it's a three-sheet poster. So, it's two full size sheets of paper and then like a little seven-inch tall piece of paper to complete the full image and the top of the poster, which is where the seven-inch banner is that creates the complete design.

It just says Moulin Rouge three times. And the third Moulin Rouge is in the second larger sheet. And because it was too big to fit in the standard print drawer, people often threw out that top banner, so you only have the one Moulin Rouge, rather than the stack of three. And if you have the full third panel, that's the difference in the market between $250,000, and $500,000, that third sheet is super important to collectors, because it's so, so rare that someone was like, just keep the extra piece. That's a background on how they were, preserved and saved. 

Andy Luttrell: And so we have relatively little information about outside of the French system, it seems relatively little information about like what kinds of posters were out there in these earliest days. 

Angelina Lippert: I mean, there are great examples of styles that happened in various countries. It's just that we have the most information about French and Swiss posters as well, were saved extensively. Some of the best collections though were amassed by Germans. Hans Sachs developed one of the greatest collections of all time. It was taken by the Nazis during the war.

I worked on the auction around the restitution case about 15 years ago. But, there was collecting culture outside of France, just like the biggest collections, and the most posters survived from France, but Italian posters, incredibly rare because the climate and the collecting culture is just detrimental to paper.

But the posters they produced in Italy are some of my favorite. They’re rather huge first and foremost, they're like seven, eight feet tall and they are dynamic and beautiful. I mean, they are very Italian.  They have that whole like Caravaggio light and darkness thing going on.

They're very dramatic, very passionate and, so yeah, Italian posters are incredible. German posters, particularly from, like, that expressions period are like dark and creepy and I love them. English posters are a bit more reserved. They didn't do the theatrical posters to the extent that the rest of the continent did. But their transport posters, when we get into the twenties and thirties are the greatest thing they ever did. They’re fantastic.

But that took, a guy named Frank Pick, who was overseeing the London Transport. He actively encouraged hired designers, particularly female designers to create posters to promote the subway lines and he actually sent copies of all of the posters to the fine art museum in Chicago.

What's it called the Chicago… 

Andy Luttrell: Museum of Contemporary Art? 

Angelina Lippert: No, the fine art museum in Chicago. 

Andy Luttrell: Oh, fine art museum, I don't know. 

Angelina Lippert: Chicago Institute of Art. He sent copies of all the posters to the Chicago Institute of Art, or The Art Institute of Chicago. That's it. 

He sent them all to the Art Institute of Chicago and they have an incredible collection of London subway posters that came from the London subway as they were being printed. In almost all cases, it's the act of one person to think to preserve something that allows us to have access to these things today. It wasn't something that was just going to happen. 

Andy Luttrell: So in terms of the use of these posters for social issues and sort of not, I'm thinking about like who is supporting these? Like it makes so much sense that so much of it would be commercial because there's money involved in the process. What I also find really exciting are the use of posters for more public interest or social change missions. So, where do we start to see that like gaining more traction as a use for posters.

Angelina Lippert: So, you have political posters, like I said, as early as the 1880s, but they're usually done by a candidate or a party. So, most poster artists at that pivotal time, when posters are kind of being born, most of the artists come out of the caricature trade. So, they're caricature artists for political magazines, humor magazines. It's also why a lot of very early posters look like big caricatures.

So, that poking fun at the establishment, like, tearing down political figures, mocking your enemy, all of those is the language of the political cartoon, the humor magazine. Those things are enlarged in posters early on for various social issues. But again, it's usually sponsored by, let's say, the political magazine to promote themselves like Simplicissimus, is a political magazine. That's very anti-establishment. It's like a red Bulldog, that's kind of like breaking it's chain and I'm going to go up against the man. They did a ton of posters, that are incredibly rare and incredibly awesome. But the mascot comes out of the magazine.

So, it's a bigger version of the magazine image, simplified for poster purposes, because you usually have to simplify something when you enlarge it because you can't take in that much information that quickly. As you would if you were looking at a magazine, like I said at the beginning.

You'll see political stuff and social change stuff very early on. Although when you say social change, I'm assuming you mean something in the more contemporary context that you don't really see on mass until the 60s, which is obviously the dawn of social consciousness. And that's when you'll see things like, sit-ins, love-ins, save the trees, save the whales, all of those things happen in the long sixties, prior to that, it's more candidate and party focused.

Andy Luttrell: I was responding to, sort of, on the blog, there's a handful of articles on public service announcements, environmental campaigns, like, civil rights issues. And to me, those strike me as, like kind of, the most exciting use of posters because they seem to sort of be born out of this genuine, like, for the people interest.

And like how can we efficiently get a message out? And so, I don't know what all there is to say on it, other than I think just to showcase that like, it's so interesting to me that the same medium that commercial advertising responded so well to, can be so easily co-opted for sort of non-commercial interests.

Angelina Lippert: But I think that's what makes those things really exciting is they're using the language of commerce to present a message more globally. And with those things that we did a tremendous show curated by Es-pranza Humphrey on the Black Panther Party and the evolution of their  iconography.

The reason those posters were so successful, basically, they created branding. They're using the things that work for commerce, and turning them on their head and making them for a social change movement. Unlike the Black Panther Party posters are exceptional in that space. They really latched onto a universal image that was used around the world and was very recognizable for their cause to create like a visual touchpoint that anyone will associate with a movement is actually very important to that movement success. If you have disparate imagery that clashes or that just doesn't create a unified whole, it's actually much harder to get a message successfully across.

We also recently did a show curated by Tim Medland of the history of environmental activism posters. And while the visual language is incredibly different from each other, depending on where in the world it is, the messaging was very unified, which I thought was interesting.

Years ago, we did a show on the Women's March posters from the 2020 election, and they were carried by Melissa Walker and the focus was on how even though those posters, like, they all had different messages. They all had completely different points of view. They often contradicted one another, like, there wasn't actually a unified messaging within them.

So, what she focused on was the Trajectory of the iconography that they were drawing from and how it related to the history of political posters. So, like, the raised fist, like going back to the N.R.A., like, things that were used over time that were successful in other movements coming together for one single movement was, kind of, her curatorial thrust on that show, which again, really interesting.

If you have contradictory messaging, how do you create a unified look? And it's through the recycling of previous designs that people already recognize. I'm going off on a tangent here. But if you look at the psychedelic posters that came out of San Francisco in the late 60s, all of them are using imagery from 50 years prior.

Same as like there are posters by Alphonse Mucha that they've just like handed her a joint instead of a cigarette and turned her hair green. It's the exact same poster, but they're using the lineage of posters to communicate a new message and that ability for artists to call back and shift is just really interesting.

Andy Luttrell: It's a good transition to between what sort of the artistic merit of these posters are and also the tool, like, ultimately these are tools of communication. And you've spoken to it a little bit, but I'm curious to get your take on like, how effective are they as tools of communication?

You could say, they're trying to communicate a point, but what they're mostly succeeding at doing is like being incredible instances of art and design. But in terms of their like, actual, I don't know if we have any data on the measurable impact that these make, but is there reason to think that these posters have actually done the job that they were designed to do?

Angelina Lippert: Well, I think that if they weren't doing the job, people wouldn't have paid for them after 50 years. They would be like, it's not working.  So, while there is obviously no data from the 1890s about whether this increased ticket sales for a one night only concert in Mamout. I think that they must have been successful if people kept doing it.

But also even if they aren't necessarily successful in bringing bodies through the door necessarily, the one thing that they are successful in is, if they are strong enough, if they are good posters, they are excellent at embedding an image in the viewer's mind, a recognition.

I'm working on a show with Mike King. He was the most prolific gig poster artist of all time, coming next year. One thing he points out in his posters and again, concert posters, primarily Pacific Northwest. Like the psychedelic artists before him, he uses imagery that is from previous eras because those things have already done the work for you.

They're already in the popular consciousness. So, if you put a twist on them, like, if you use Fred Flintstone's head to advertise a concert for the Butthole Surfers, you're tapping into a collective memory already by using a recognizable image. And that ability to create an indelible image, but then also the riff on it, is something posters do very well. And you recognize Fred Flintstone in a second. Like, you know what it is. And then it's like, well, why is he advertising this concert? And the disconnect between those two things is quite interesting.

Andy Luttrell: It seems like there's no stopping posters, but I wonder a little bit about, like, what is the future of posters in a digital age, like, there was, it makes sense that this was an important tool of communication when it was a predominant way in which people could get that message. Is there a shift? Like, what is the role of posters in a contemporary context? 

Angelina Lippert: So, posters, whether I like it or not, are an endangered species. I think actually just data from when we advertise in New York, we've tried the digital screens in the subway platforms. We've tried the kiosks and we've tried the in car subway ads. The thing that I see people looking at and taking selfies with the most are our ads that are physical, the not screens, like, if we have an in car subway ad that's like we have one right now for the show I did on Dawn Bailey. It's riffing on the Nacho Libre poster that she designed for the movie. And I see people taking selfies with that weird image of Jack Black in a red cape.

And that's great because it's a physical object. It's static. The digital screens I think because so many of us grew up with the internet or remember when the internet happened, pop up ads and ads in between our news and stuff. We are so easily able to tune that out that, even though the movement is eye catching, we are self-programmed to ignore it.

So, a static image, I think actually has more power than a moving one, in advertising, in the poster space. So, I think that they are a more strategically powerful tool than digital advertising. I'm sure some digital advertisers out there are going to scare me for this. So sorry, not sorry.

But there are people that are doing exquisite posters now, they just aren't commercial anymore. They go back to the social consciousness, social justice, political posters that you were talking about. I think that's a great space for posters to really thrive in right now.

There's a designer, I'm particularly fond of, Winston Tseng, we collect him at the museum. He's in the current environmental show. He has two examples in that. If you Google him, he's had more cease and desists because everyone assumed, like, actual news outlets presume his posters are real or like legit.

They think that, oh, I don't know that Sesame Street is creating posters, advertising climate change, which no Sesame Street's, that's not their budget.  But people assume that what he does is real because they're so polished.

He is an incredibly witty and wry, and he currently is a contender for presidential nomination, advertising Ex-Lax in DC.  I think we can guess who he's referring to and the image is obvious, but he's done things talking about the banned books in Texas.

So, he's tapping into issues around the country and creating physical poster campaigns that can like cover a city in an evening. I find that really, really interesting.  Maia Lorian has an amazing series that she's been adding to every year in New York that you will see in kiosks. Again, securing a certain presidential candidate. I think that political poster artists know what they're doing and that is a really exciting space to watch for the current history of posters.

Andy Luttrell: One thing I wanted to do is Zoom all the way back, because you mentioned that, kind of, the advent of posters as a viable medium really corresponded with the invention of stone lithography. And if we can nerd out for a second, I don't know how interested the world is in this, but I find stone lithography such an incredible method, like I still can't quite wrap my head around how it actually produces these beautiful images that it produces.

So, chest is like a little peek behind the curtain. Could you give like a brief spiel on, I guess, what stone lithography is and why that would have catapulted posters as a viable communication tool? 

Angelina Lippert: So, stone litho is actually one of the most complicated things to try to describe. I don't think I've ever described it successfully because it is so baffling to the modern mind.

I know that MoMA actually has a Litho, like, step by step video demo on their website somewhere that is quite good. The thing is, it sounds like, very few people do it today because it is so impossibly time consuming and complicated, but in 1880, damn was this fast. We also just don't have the manpower and tools to do it anymore.

The setup is expensive and complicated and requires a lot of space for a stone lithographic press to produce a poster that's five feet tall.  So essentially, you take a limestone and you treat it. Most of the limestone came out of, like, Wolfsberg in Switzerland had some of the best limestone, you polish down that limestone, you make it as flat as flat can be.

And then you treat it chemically with a variety of solutions, which I'm not going to get in, but a variety of solutions that, prep it to absorb as well as repel ink.  Essentially it relies on the desire for oil and water not to mix because you draw on the stone and the areas that are repelling water and then you put ink over that, and every color has to be printed separately in this process. So, you do like, let's say the yellow first, you always end with black. Let's say you do the yellow first and you print the yellow, then you wipe down that stone. You take all of that off and you have to do it again, but for the red this time and overlapping red and yellow creates a third tone. So that's how you would get multiple colors.

Most posters were only three to four colors in the early days. They can be many, many more today. And also as time went on they got much more complicated.  And, to line up each pass through the press is quite complicated, the registration as we call it of the poster. Every time it goes through the press, it is just impossibly hard for us to imagine that if the design's a millimeter off, it looks pretty crap and that's also the difference between certain printers and certain designers Alphonse Mucha, Toulouse Lautrec, those were two designers that were on press and they were doing the registration for their own work. Somebody like Jules Cheret, he would not necessarily have been on press, but also, the nature of commercial design was that it was going to be thrown away. So, many of the posters I've seen, you'll see like the girl's yellow hair is two inches to the right of where it should be. And that was okay, because it wasn't meant to be saved. It didn't need to be perfect. So, a lot of Cheret's early work in particular, the registration's not perfect.

Someone like Alphonse Mouca, where the artist is on the press, that registration is unbelievably precise. And another thing that, with stone lithography to keep in mind is that, in many cases we do not know who actually did the poster, even like, let's say, Leonetto Cappiello, a very famous father of modern advertising.

He did tons of posters. Your audience will probably know him from, the big antique poster, black background, green devil, kind of, sneaking away. It's like very iconic. You'll see it, or like the clown jumping out of the orange peel and it's in every Italian restaurant. Those are both by Cappiello. 

He would produce a maquette. So, a preliminary drawing and just hand it to the printer. The maquettes look awful. Like, they're not great. So, my interpretation is that whoever that printer was, whoever the guy on press was, was actually the artist. He knew how to take some guy's good idea, mediocre execution, and turn it into a beautiful work of advertising art.

We have no way of knowing who that guy is or girl. Realistically, probably a guy, just because of the physical power needed to operate a press. And you need multiple men to like move it. It's at least a three-person job at many lithographic presses particularly in the United States, let's say, think of a Barnum and Bailey poster or a Buffalo Bill’s Wild West poster, those are printed by places like Morgan Litho or Strowbridge in the US and those aren't one designer.

That's like, there's a face guy, there's an elephant guy, there's a text guy. So it's many hands on one piece, all working on the same stone, separating out those colors to create a finished product. So it's very much a collective artistic expression in those cases. But I feel like I've totally gotten off track. 

But like to go back to stone lithography, every color is separate. Everything overlaps to create new colors. You end with black. It's not meant to be perfect. There's this big, big overarching issues to keep in mind.

Andy Luttrell: And the critical thing is, even though this is such a heavy lift, once it sets, you can run the same thing over and over again. So like that, that's also sort of the incredible thing is you can have this kind of beautiful artwork. But it's in a medium that you can run off as many copies of it as you want.

Angelina Lippert: Yeah. I mean, they definitely had shorter runs in the beginning because it would break down. I would say the average, and this is pure historic speculation. There is no documentation of this to prove it.

But at the turn of the century, the average poster run in a major city would be 5,000. You could probably have up to 10 to 30,000 by the 1920s. And that's because they switched to zinc lithography, which is a different thing. It just allows you to do it faster and it breaks down slower. But for posters where we only have one or two surviving copies in the whole world, that doesn't mean that they only made a few.

It just means that the other 5,000 don't survive. Nobody would go through the effort of making a lithographic poster and only make one. It's like, you would make a few, it takes days. You would make thousands. Nobody's making one or two or even a hundred of these. They are large runs by their nature. 

Andy Luttrell: Because it allows that message to be sort of carefully conveyed in the same way in all sorts of places whereas before if you wanted that level of artistry, you'd have to hand paint a mural or something and you can't pick that up and copy it over to the other side of town.

Angelina Lippert: No, exactly. It allows for this. It was the first time for the complete saturation of a message in an urban environment and they are an urban medium like you don't you rarely get these in like the countryside just because where would you put them who's seeing them? Obviously, with some like political posters from World War one, those did were in the countryside as well or along train lines.

Actually, I had this great image in the first show I did. It was a print from the 1890s, I think. Do you know Alphonso Mucha, for everyone listening, is, you'll recognize him. He did, like, all the girls with the macaroni hair and, like, sitting with the dragon in the throne, or, like, drinking the beer, and they're all, like, beautiful art nouveau maidens. Highly recognizable art.  

One thing I pointed out in tours of that show was prior to the dawn of color lithography used for advertising, the only time somebody of middle class and below would have seen color is in a church's stained glass, the newspapers weren't in color, magazines weren't in color. There was nothing that you would have seen that would have been color.

You wouldn't have gone to a fine art museum because that just wasn't something that those class of people did as a leisure activity. Like you would not have seen color until you saw a poster. And that is a massive moment for society where suddenly one day, you wake up and the streets are paved with red, green, and purple. 

Like how, you would never have seen pigment like that before outside of a church of stained glass. And there's this print in the show that I did, where you saw it's a rail line and there's, essentially like, a telephone pole. Not, it's obviously not a telephone pole, but it's the pole next to the side of the railway. And there's a little framed area that they put an advertisement in and it's one of Mucha’s women advertising Bières De La Meuse, which is a general beer. And there's a little girl, who is looking up at this and she's on her knees praying and the joke is that like realistically a woman with a flower crown and that kind of glory in color, the only association, a child would have had at that time in highly Catholic France is that she's the Virgin Mary. So, there's this, like, I keep trying to emphasize to people that how big a deal and big a consciousness shift it was when posters happened.

It’s like a lot of people call it the color explosion because you just didn't have color before that, you were in the first half of The Wizard of Oz until that moment.

Andy Luttrell:  I want to use this wrap up opportunity to talk about Poster House a little bit and it's poster house. I don't refer to it as The Poster House.

Angelina Lippert: Just Poster House like Madonna. Just Poster House.

Andy Luttrell: So, give the pitch. What is this place? What do they do? And, if people wanted to know more, what would they do?

Angelina Lippert: Okay, so Poster House is the first and only museum in the United States dedicated to the art and history of posters. We opened in 2019, although we were incorporated in 2017. We took over the TekServe building in New York on 23rd Street between 6th and 7th Avenue. So, if you're by the Flatiron building or by Eataly, we're right there. We have at any given time four shows up, ranging from a large show to a little bite sized show by the door that's more of a display.

We show everything from the 1890s to the present day and from all around the world, every country has posters, because every country has printing. And we try to balance every show cycle. So like, at the moment we have a show on the history of advertising in New York city and our main gallery downstairs, we have a show I curated on the art of Dawn Bailey.

You might not know that name, but you should cause she's created every movie poster you've ever seen like, The Sounds of the Lambs, Dirty Dancing, Nacho Libre, and that that show is really exciting to put together. We also have a show on environmental act, the history of environmental activism, and then a show on the Attica uprising and the visual repercussions and lineage through posters that through protest posters, mostly on college campuses, that those graphics inspired.

So, you see like, these are all incredibly different shows appealing to many different audiences. We're also open for free every Friday, open late every Friday till nine o'clock. Our programming is done by Salvador Munoz and he is a master of creating fantastic programming for all ages. And yeah, that's the general pitch of poster house.

Andy Luttrell: Yeah, that is great. I would love. Next time I'm in New York, I will definitely be popping by because it sounds very cool. And your role in it is what? Where do you fit in?

Angelina Lippert: So I have been up until, like, 30 days from now, I have been the chief curator and director of content and starting on October 1st, I become executive director and curator because our director is moving on to a different a different position. But I've also been a historian, a poster historian, specifically for about 20 years, so I am like the alpha and omega of posters, sometimes. So that's what I do.

Andy Luttrell: So, how does one become a poster historian? What is that leap that you made that got you here?

Angelina Lippert: Well, that was unintentional. It was an accident. I wanted to become the director of Sotheby's. Do we have time for the origin story? My origin story?

So, in between college and grad school, my background was in German art history. I was going to grad school in Europe for a master's in Russian art. And I wanted an internship in New York as everyone does. And I wanted that a commercial gallery. And at that time, this is 20 plus years ago. The only way to do that was nepotism. So you call your rich friends and you figure out whose dad can get you into a gallery, which is what I did. And my friend said, okay,  we got you an internship. You start Monday. I'm like, great.

Is it Gagosian? Absolutely not. Is it David's order? No chance.  He's like, we got it at a poster gallery. I'm like, what? Why? Because at that time, as so many people do, you assume posters are all reproductions. You assume they're the $10 things you buy at Walmart. I couldn't have been more wrong about what happened?

I was positioned with Jack Rennert, who is one of the leading poster historians of all time. He's written the majority of the books on poster history. I think, he's 88 years old right now. He just had his retirement party earlier this week.  He brought the poster trade as a collectible item to the United States in the late sixties, early seventies.

And I always tell people if you're going to get an internship or even a job, go with the smaller fish because like at Sotheby's I'd be caught fetching coffee for three years. With Jack I was allowed to, like, third day he's like, all right, we're going to teach you how to write a contract. Guess what? You're going to do a condition report. Let me show you how to test for restoration. And he did. 

I ended up looking at, let's see, it's 600 items per auction. So, 2,400 posters a year, we were looking at, at minimum. And, after a few years, I asked if I could be the one that wrote the auction catalogs, which meant that I had to research 600 items a quarter, give detailed reasons as to why this object is important and doing that for a decade will get you a deep understanding of the larger spectrum of poster history. So, that's kind of how I became an expert in the field. And then, my master's is in Russian posters. And I'm working on a PhD in posters.

So, that's how I fell into being a poster historian, but I think I'm the only, I mean, please email me if I'm wrong. I think I'm the only person in country that focuses on posters specifically. Plenty of people focus on the history of graphic design, but just as a poster nerd, I might be the only academic poster nerd, but I want to meet more of my kind. So please email me.

Andy Luttrell: Well, hopefully, hopefully this gets the word out. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk about all this stuff. I learned a whole bunch and this was super cool. And, yeah, thanks for being here.

Angelina Lippert: Thank you so much.

Andy Luttrell (Outro): Alrighty, that'll do it for another episode of Opinion Science. Thank you so much to Angelina Lippert for taking the time to talk Posters and Persuasion with me. Check out posterhouse.org for more on the museum and the exhibitions you can find there. Also, huge thank you to Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. for talking with me.

Not long after I got started printing, I saw Amos work and found it so striking, just, like, so many others have. So, to have the chance to meet him was really great. And you didn't hear this in the final piece, but I definitely used the opportunity to get some tricks for setting up the kinds of forms he's mastered on his presses.

The new book about his work again is called, Amos Paul Kennedy Jr.: Citizen Printer, published by Letterform Archive. Do the things you do. Follow the podcast so you don't miss new episodes. Rate and review the show on apps, like, Apple Podcasts. Go to opinionsciencepodcast.com to find past episodes and ways to support the show.

And, I don't know, can we all just look out for each other? The last month has been wild and concerning, at least in the US, and I want to think we'll be okay eventually. But for now, this is the part where I say, that's all from me, I'll see you in a month for more Opinion Science. Bye-bye.