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Gallery · Room 11 · France and beyond, 1920s–1930s

Art Deco posters

Travel posters of the machine age: liners, mountains and bold lettering.

A towering red-and-black ship's funnel in the foreground, with liners and the hilltop basilica of Marseille behind, above the word MARSEILLE.

Roger Broders

Marseille, Porte de l'Afrique du Nord, c. 1929

Color lithograph

Victoria and Albert Museum, London · View record ↗

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Wall text

Art Deco first appeared in Paris in the 1910s. It takes its name from the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes, held in Paris from April to October 1925. Antoine Bourdelle designed one of the four posters made for it. The label itself came much later: it first appeared in print in 1966 and caught on as a style name in 1968.

The style stood for luxury, glamour and faith in technical progress, and drew on the design of modern ships, trains and cars. In the 1920s travel posters became hugely popular. Railways and shipping lines hired artists to sell travel, and the images grew simpler, more linear and more dynamic, often set against a single color.

Roger Broders made posters for the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée railway, from the mountains around Chamonix to the Mediterranean coast. His Marseille poster sets a liner's funnel in the foreground and the harbor behind, in bold, flat color. One of the best-known Deco poster artists, A. M. Cassandre, is still in copyright, so his Étoile du Nord and Normandie are not shown here.

Palette · Sampled from the works shown

  • Funnel red

    #E34125

  • Deep navy

    #3C4461

  • Dusk violet

    #76718F

  • Bronze brown

    #5D311D

  • Poster cream

    #E4DDCA

How to recognize it

  • Bold, simplified shapes with crisp edges and flat color

  • Ships, trains and cars shown as glamorous modern machines

  • Simple, bold lettering that names the place or event

  • A single subject, often against a plain one-color background

More works

What to borrow

  1. 01

    Let one subject dominate. A single funnel in the foreground, as in Broders's Marseille, says more than a crowded scene.

  2. 02

    Build the headline into the picture. Lettering that shares the image's geometry looks designed, not added.

  3. 03

    Simplify to flat shapes and a few colors so the message reads from across the street, or across a small screen.

Sources