You don’t have to be an incurable romantic to appreciate vintage posters, but it does tend to go with the territory. Just ask Mike or Nick Gotwalt, the father-and-son proprietors of Vero’s newest beachside art gallery, Indian River Poster Company. The gallery boasts original posters dating from the 1890s to the 1980s.
“Personally, I’m a romantic,” says Mike. “I think Nick is, too.”
Nick sighs in agreement.
“I have no problems with where I am today,” says Mike. “But if I had the opportunity, I would love to go see the 1939 World’s Fair in New York.”
Fortunately for Mike, he can time-travel anytime he likes by gazing at the 1939 New York World’s Fair poster that hangs in his personal collection at home.
The poster advertises “The World of Tomorrow” with a bold abstraction from a master of the medium, Joseph Binder. It is the first poster Mike collected that was not a movie poster, the genre in which he got his feet wet.
If anything, Nick Gotwalt’s case of romanticism is even more pronounced than his father’s.
Some of his favorite posters were published in the first half of the 20th century by U.S. railroads to extol the natural beauty of America. Their contemplation sends Nick into blissful reverie.
“It’s the idea of falling asleep on the Exposition Flyer (a passenger train that operated from 1939-1949) rolling out of Chicago, knowing that the next day you are going to be in the Rockies, and the next day after that you’re going to be in the Sierra Nevada, and then pulling into San Francisco.”
And it’s all going to be behind a steam engine, he marvels.
Travel posters from all countries are high on Nick’s list of collectibles. His personal collection contains a poster from an English railroad that hasn’t existed for 100 years, he says.
“It was called the South Eastern Chatham Railway. It’s the only railroad poster I’ve ever seen in which the primary image is an airplane – a pre-World War I airplane dropping out of the clouds. It says, ‘Royal Tunbridge Wells – Worth Coming Down For’ – because you would come down from London to get there, a little play on words.”
Travel posters are featured on the gallery walls right now. “GLASGOW” proclaims one. Its art features a comely lassie dancing a highland fling as a Pan Am jet streaks through the sky behind her.
“BULGARIE” announces another poster. It is a vision in purple, blue and orange of a train speeding into a tunnel on a mountain cliff, the top of which is corrugated by the rooftops of a mile-high village.
Another poster, touting Cuba’s sandy beaches and bikini-clad sunbathers, was printed in Havana, in 1950. Those were the days.
“We refer to poster artists a lot of the time as ‘dream makers,’” says Nick. “They were trying to make a dream that you didn’t know you had.”
In addition to travel posters, the gallery offers movie, art exhibition, military and sports posters, as well as advertising posters for everything from kerosene to cognac.
A salad oil poster is one of the most amusing prints in the shop. Created in the mid-1890s in high art nouveau style, the composition features a medieval damsel in distress: her bottle of Delftse Slaolie salad oil lays broken on the castle’s stone floor; meanwhile, her salad languishes undressed in its bowl. All is not lost, however. Outside the castle’s window two knights in shining armor can be seen riding to the rescue, each bearing aloft a bottle of the proprietary dressing.
“It’s a lot of fun,” says Mike, who explains that the Dutch salad oil manufacturer who published the poster was running what amounted to a pre-modern ad campaign.
“You can compare it to someone selling Hellman’s mayonnaise today. It’s the same deal,” he says.
Mike Gotwald bought his first posters in the late 1960s when he was a student at the Penn State, and had a job managing the local movie theater.
In those days posters for the theater were supplied for 50 cents each by National Screen Service, a company that distributed movies trailers, posters, and lobby cards for the major U.S. movie studios.
One of Gotwald’s roommates at Penn State (and fellow Harrisburg native), Steve Friedman, was a collector of movie memorabilia. Later known under the moniker of Mr. Movie, Friedman went on to host a late-night radio call-in show in Philadelphia that focused on film trivia. In their college days, Friedman liked to look over his friend’s shoulder when Gotwalt was ordering posters for the theater.
“He’d be running around saying, ‘Order this, order this, order this, order this!’,” Gotwalt recalls.
“So when he’d order one, I thought, ‘That’s sort of interesting, I think I’ll order one for me, too.’ So that’s how that started.”
The movie posters currently for sale at Indian River Poster Company were purchased by Gotwald back then, and include a poster for “Dr. No” with Sean Connery as Agent 007. It, as well as the other posters in the shop, have been mounted on linen to preserve them, as well as to make the large sheets easier to handle and display.
Gotwalt, who went on to have a 40-year career in management with the Department of the Navy, turned his collecting sights on auto racing posters in the 1970s, when he photographed racing events as a stringer for Associated Press. He got serious about collecting in the late 1980s, when he purchased a poster for Red Star Line, a steamship company that ran passenger ships between Antwerp and New York.
Not only does the poster bear “a great image of a ship,” it is also extremely hard to come by. Like countless other collectors before him, Gotwald enjoys owning rarity.
“It’s almost a one-of-a-kind poster. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s worth a whole lot, but I think it is,” he says.
Some may quibble that posters, because they are commonly made in open runs rather than limited editions, and signed in the plate by their artists, rather than individually hand-signed, are not worthy of serious collection. Not so fast. It is true, affirm the Gotwalts, that a poster’s lifespan was meant to be an ephemeral one. And while it was usually printed in quantity, a poster’s very expendability might help to ensure that few quality examples of the greatest ones would survive, making them rare and sought-after, indeed.
Nick Gotwald brings up the example of a poster by painter and graphic artist Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron, who was known under the pseudonym Cassandre.
A commission that Cassandre executed for the London, Midland and Scottish Railway in 1928 is a tour de force of Art Deco design. The poster depicts the wheels and piston rods of a steam locomotive in a striking, nearly abstract composition of red, white, black and gray shapes. According to Swann Auction Galleries, only 50 copies of the design were ever printed, and none of them were used commercially. In 2012, the hammer at Swann’s fell at a cool $130,000 for one of them.
Don’t expect to pay quite that much for art at Indian River Poster Company. Prices there range from $300 for a 1980s Disney poster of an A.A. Milne Winnie-the-Pooh illustration, to $5,000 for a poster from the 1924 Winter Olympics.
The most desirable poster in the shop’s inventory, says Mike, “depends upon who’s looking.”
Nick agrees. “There’s something in here that speaks to everyone,” he says.
Indian River Poster Company is open Wednesday through Sunday. Every month the gallery presents a new talk about the history of posters and poster collecting; on Tuesday, Jan. 27 the topic will be posters from World War I to 1939. The illustrated talk begins at 12:30 p.m. and is free to the public, but space is limited. Phone the gallery at 532-9586 to reserve your place. The talk will be repeated on Tuesday, Feb. 10.
