In 1928 a transatlantic crossing took eleven days and cost a fortune, and the poster that sold it promised something better than the destination: a state of mind, in the sun, at a slight distance from everything.
A disc, a ray pattern and two colours. Deco posters did not paint light; they diagrammed it.
Always in profile, always small, always heading somewhere. The vessel is the reason, not the subject.
One gold line divides sea from sky and nothing crosses it. Deco believed in borders.
Wide capitals, tight leading, an enormous title and a great deal of air underneath it.
Before air travel, a crossing was an event, and the poster was the thing you looked at while you queued. Art deco was the first graphic language built for mass reproduction and for a public that had just learned to read quickly.
Its rules were strict enough to be taught and loose enough to allow a genius. Geometric, symmetrical, gold on a flat field — and yet every one of these posters was a painting of somewhere you had probably never been, made by an artist who mostly had not either.