Could 1968 posters spark a sale revolution?
Acollection of agitprop posters are to go on sale at this week’s London Original Print Fair at The Royal Academy, a major moment for what is currently a fledgling market. The sale is timed to coincide with a wider celebration of the 50th anniversary of the student and workers protests that spread throughout the Western world in 1968, during which a distinctive artwork flourished – hurriedly produced graphic posters and broadsheets designed to catch the public’s eye and spur the protesters on to greater efforts.
In London, The Poster Workshop, set up in a basement in Camden during the summer of 1968, is holding until today a pop-up exhibition commemorating posters produced by the collective between 1968 and 1971. Among those who came to their dingy premises requiring posters were the striking workers at the Dagenham Ford plant, anti-apartheid groups, anti-vietnam War groups, Black Power movements, London Fire Brigade and CND. The workshop productions will also be remembered at Tate Modern, where a special display of photobooks and facsimile posters relating to the global protests of 1968 is currently on show. Meanwhile, later this week, Lazinc’s Mayfair gallery will be showing more than 50 original screen-printed posters, films, archival imagery and memorabilia from the “Mai 68” riots, a collection last exhibited at the Hayward Gallery in 2008.
Perhaps the most stormy protests of the time were in France, where student occupations of the universities of Nanterre and the Sorbonne escalated into violent confrontations throughout the country. The posters made during these events were created by the Atelier Populaire, a studio set up in various locations specifically to create agitprop street art. Printed on old newspaper stock provided by striking printers, the imagery was powerful enough to influence not only the Camden Workshop collective, but later, punk art of the Seventies and even Banksy today.
The London Original Print Fair will provide a rare opportunity to buy some of these landmark posters. Gerrish Fine Art is presenting a selection of 18 original screen-prints from the approximately 500 or so images that were created during the Paris riots denouncing President de Gaulle, police power and capitalism, and calling for unity between students and workers.
At the time, the posters were put to immediate use, without a thought for their commercial potential or artistic credentials. An Atelier statement made in 1969 reads: “To use them for decorative purposes… is to impair both their function and their effect. That is why the Atelier Populaire has always refused to put them on sale.”
Georgie Gerrish has managed to buy 170 original Atelier Populaire posters over the last 12 years. Her starting point was a supplier to the Archive of Modern Conflict, the stunning but little-known collection of vernacular photography, objects, artefacts and ephemera owned by Thomson Reuters’ chairman, David Thomson. At the fair Gerrish will be selling her posters priced at between £350 and £2,250 each.
Works such as these are not yet part of the modern print market mainstream, in which prices are determined by authorship, rarity and condition. The artists of the Atelier are anonymous, each work signed instead with one of five or six Atelier stamps that relate to the date and location of printing. It is not known how many prints were made of each image – but on average, about 1,000, says Gerrish. She also thinks, contrary to normal evaluation processes for prints, that the best are those which are frazzled from use.
Given the top end of the original market (Warhol et al) remains very strong, would-be collectors looking for a cheap entry point would do well to follow Gerrish’s lead and hunt in out-of-the way sales, private collections and on the internet. For similar counter-culture material, a good starting point would be Carl Williams, formerly of Maggs Brothers in Berkeley Square, who is now a private dealer based in East London.
The most adventurous auction in this particular market was conducted by Christie’s online last year.
Uprising! covered numerous political flashpoints, from the Bolshevik Revolution to the miners’ strikes, in photographs, memorabilia and posters, though it had nothing by Atelier Populaire. Estimates ranged around the £1,000 mark, but results were not disclosed. Perhaps it didn’t go too well. In an undeveloped market like this, beginnings can sometimes be challenging.