Exhibition honors the product poster

A pair of shoes, a tube of toothpaste, a cleaning agent: even today, these are everyday objects that we take for granted. But never have they been so wonderfully staged and celebrated in posters as at the beginning of the 20th century. The German Lucian Bernhard recognized the advertising effectiveness of a compact fusion of product and brand name. In the early days of the brand article, the so-called product posters were intended to entice people to buy products that were only affordable for the upper classes in the interwar years. These product posters thus became the harbingers of our consumer society, without which branded articles and self-service stores would be inconceivable.

High point of the Sachplakats in the 1940s

The Sachplakat celebrated its real high point in Switzerland in the 1940s. This success was due both to the country's rapid economic upswing and to a particular affinity of Swiss design for this style of precise object fidelity. Bernhard's two-dimensional depiction, which presents objects without context, underwent a unique further development in the Swiss object poster. Important designers such as Niklaus Stoecklin, Peter Birkhäuser, Donald Brun and Otto Baumberger lent washing powder, a button or a spark plug a beguiling sensuality and a magical aura through the plastic, materially haptic close-up in the poster. The brand products also radiated emotional seductiveness through deliberately cast shadows and highlights as well as the effective interplay with other objects.

The end of the factual poster comes with the staging of the lifestyle

With the democratization of consumption at the beginning of the 1960s and the saturation of basic needs in Western society, advertising strategies changed again. The sole focus on the product and its brand name is no longer sufficient today. The lifeworlds associated with the product and the brand need to be staged in an increasingly elaborate way. The era of informative factual advertising has therefore become obsolete for the time being; consumers are being offered additional emotional values, "lifestyle". In cultural posters, however, the magical depiction of things is experiencing something of a renaissance with new means of design: removed from everyday life, their original aesthetics are revealed here and the familiar is seen in a new light.

Exhibition with classic posters, factual photographs and advertising films

The exhibition shows around 80 classics from the poster collection of the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich and juxtaposes them with factual photographs that illustrate similar tendencies in their focus on the essence of things. The advertising film, on the other hand, functions as a contrasting medium, usually focusing on the benefits of the products in a detailed narrative. The show thus takes a look at the development of product advertising in the course of social change.

Future of the Toni site

The poster collection will move to the collection center in the Toni-Areal at the end of 2013. Extensive preparations are already underway to make the approximately 350,000 posters ready for transportation to their future archive. The "Magic of Things" exhibition will therefore be another opportunity to show a selection of the classic posters held by the poster collection - one of the most extensive and important collections of its kind in the world.

Publication accompanying the exhibition

Magie der Dinge - The Magic of Things, "Poster Collection" 24
With texts by Gerda Breuer and Bettina Richter
Museum für Gestaltung Zürich (ed.), D/E, Lars Müller Publishers, 35 francs, 28 euros
Available for order as of August 29, 2012 at: www.museum-gestaltung.ch/e-shop

Opening hours

Tuesday - Sunday 10 a.m. - 5 p.m., Wednesday 10 a.m. - 8 p.m.
Long Night of the Museums: 1./2.9. 19-02 h
Holidays: 26.12.2012 and 2.1.2013 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Closed: Mondays and 24/25/31/12/2012 and 1/1/2013