I’ve added some new additions to the galleries which can be viewed in the ‘RECENTLY ADDED’ section of the home page or by going to this link. Some of the images come from a very exciting upcoming poster auction at Swann Galleries in New York. Included in the sale is a very rare Wiener Werkstätte stencil poster by Josef Hoffmann with an estimate of $250,000-$350,000. In 1905, the Wiener Werkstatte artists designed approximately 40 hand-stenciled posters for showrooms, each with the same block of text in the centre. The rest of the paper was to be filled by the artist chosen to execute the design. Of these 40 posters, only 3 are known to have survived. Two are by Josef Hoffmann (this one and another with a repeating beehive motif in blue and black) and one by Koloman Moser currently on display in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. I highly recommend you visit the Swann galleries website and have a look at this remarkable collection.

Here is a description of the collection from the Swann Galleries website:

“The collection was formed between 1900 and 1935 by Julius Paul, a Hungarian-born Viennese distributor of cigarette papers, who died two months before the takeover of Austria by the Nazis in March of 1938. The posters were housed for nearly 70 years in the renowned Albertina Museum in Vienna, before being restituted to Paul’s heirs five years ago.

Paul’s heirs have now decided to give the poster-collecting world at large an opportunity to acquire works from the collection at auction. The posters selected for Swann’s December 18 auction are exceedingly scarce, and most are in–or close to–new condition, owing to the Albertina’s utmost standards of museum conservation. Further offerings from the Julius Paul Collection will be offered in Swann’s 2014 Rare & Important Travel Posters auction.

Paul’s collection is like a time capsule of European life in the 15 years before World War I through the 15 years following it, and provides a dazzling look into the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire”