Exposition posters: dreaming of the future

The Victoria & Albert Museum was born out of the success of the world’s first great international exhibition, held in London in 1851. The exhibitions, expositions and world’s fairs staged around the globe since then have been spectacular, popular and influential. Unsurpassed in their scale and confidence, the expositions encompassed the very latest developments in art, science and technology from all nations of the world, displayed in a fabulous array of buildings and parks.

The Museum has acquired a number of posters from 20th-century expositions. These striking images capture the excitement of these great events and illustrate the distinctive ways in which different countries promoted the exhibitions they hosted. The earliest in the collection is for the French Republic’s participation in the Exposition Universelle, staged in Liège in 1905. The designer, Henri Bellery-Desfontaines (1867–1909), was a multi-talented French artist who was variously a painter, lithographer, architect, decorator and designer.

The poster for the Paris International Exposition of 1937, by Leonetto Cappiello, portrays the allegorical figures of Art and Technology and expresses the idealism, optimism, modernity and innovation that the Exposition represented. In contrast to such symbolic imagery, the dynamic poster for the New York World Fair of 1939 personifies a sense of optimism and enjoyment with its depiction of a woman waving in front of the iconic structures of the fair, the Trylon and Perisphere. Although staged in troubled times, the New York fair aimed to convey a confident vision of the future, a recurrent theme of world expos. Shows of scientific progress were central to the first post-war exposition held in Brussels in 1958 and embodied in the simple but effective design of the poster, by noted poster designer Leo Marfurt (1894–1977).