February 14, 2014 would have been my husband Georg Rauch’s 90th birthday. In celebration of his life, I am preparing a birthday show at Quattro Gallery, Colon 9 Ajijic, beginning at 3 p.m. The exhibit will include a selection of posters from our large collection.
I find the history of the poster fascinating. Purely textual flyers and handbills have been with us almost as long we have been able to read and write. It wasn’t until about 150 years ago, when the full color poster, combining graphics and text, came into its own.
The modern poster as we know it was made possible by the perfection of the lithography printing process. What a blessing that was, since only six years previously, Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec was born. In spite of the childhood disease which broke his bones and left him a midget, Lautrec became a painter and very familiar in the cafes and dance halls of Montmartre where he spent most of his time. In contrast to his misunderstood friend, Van Gogh, Lautrec sold his art and became famous, even though that fame was based on his gorgeous posters of prostitutes and dance hall girls rather than his oil paintings.
Take a minute to think about the posters in your own life, depending on your age of course. In the 1940s Rosie the Riveter was encouraging women to take up men’s jobs in the factories. My own mother was one who did just that, thereby supporting me as a toddler. Perhaps posters of a favorite sports team, or of Elvis decorated your bedroom as a teen-ager or at college? And if you were a rock music fan, you may have collected posters of your favorite bands.
Choosing the posters for the upcoming show has provided me with some special memories and a wonderful stroll back in time, especially the 60’s and 70’s. When we arrived in Guadalajara in 1968, many of our friends were collectors of Georg’s art. Thanks to one of these, I became an “edecan” or aide de camp for the cultural events of the 1968 Olympic Games held in Mexico City.At a time when the city’s population was just 1.5 million, when Guadalajara was filled with birds and flowers, lacking pollution, I found myself squiring around the Berlin Opera, the African Ballet and Duke Ellington’s band. At the end of the Duke’s concert, he kissed me on the cheek backstage and said,”Shuuuugar!” I wore my Austrian dirndl dresses on the opera tour bus, and, speaking German with an Austrian accent, I fooled the director into believing I was an authentic Austrian “maedchen.”
At the Ajijic show on February 14 there will be some wonderful posters produced in Mexico City for the Olympics, as well as a few that the cultural events committee commissioned Georg to design for concerts and plays in Guadalajara. At that time there were no official poster designers in Mexico’s second largest city, and Georg was glad to take on the challenge. I love the posters he did for the Berlin Opera and the Greek Theater.
In 1970 many were celebrating Beethoven’s 200th birthday. Georg’s family has owned a few unique items from one of Beethoven’s homes for many generations. The composer was fond of one particular likeness, a steel engraving made when he was young – so fond that he liked to give copies to friends. Georg enlarged by six times our antique print, and silk-screened some dramatic Beethoven posters for the bicentennial birthday celebration.
Later that year, our lives changed dramatically when we found ourselves living in southern California at the height of the hippie period. Though we didn’t attend rock concerts, we did acquire two special, psychedelic posters from concerts by the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane.
At that time oral contraception was given the go-ahead and also given credit for perhaps more than was actually true. It definitely had an effect on the feminist movement and the sexual revolution, whereas the hopes that it would end world hunger and drastically reduce populations were a little too optimistic. A couple of small posters reflect humorous takes on the pill, featuring Uncle Sam and Pope Paul VI.
After seven years in California, Georg found our property in Jocotepec, and, while still living and working in California, we began building our dream home on the hill overlooking Lake Chapala. Georg was still one of the featured artists in Laguna Beach’s Pageant of the Masters, an artistic and theatrical event that draws people from across the country and even from abroad. Ira Roberts, a company specializing in commercial lithographs, approached my husband at the Festival.
Georg is better known for his nudes and harlequins, but reproductions of the flower paintings he created for Ira Roberts would go on to sell by the thousands, and I still receive emails, from as far away Australia, from people who have discovered or inherited one of these prints.
Of course the exhibit also includes hand made, silkscreened posters for some of Georg’s own Mexican art shows. Most of the galleries no longer exist, but his posters live on.
I took the title for this exhibit from a poster for a Saul Steinberg exhibition in Guadalajara in 1980. Visitors to Georg’s studio have often compared his humorous take on life and some of his work to Steinberg’s. You might know this artist from his many cartoon covers for the New Yorker, but his art covered a much broader spectrum that just cartoons. I highly recommend the Steinberg Foundation website to learn more about this contemporary of Georg’s. www.saulsteinbergfoundation.org I wish we could have met.
I hope I have whetted your curiosity. There are other wonderful pieces among the 30-40 posters in the exhibition, and I’d love for you to see them at Georg’s celebration, The Art of the Poster.