Posters are a dying art form. In a world of Facebook invites, re-Tweets and Youtube uploads, sticking an A3 piece of paper on telegraph poles seems impossibly quaint. It’s a throwback to another era – one that Japan’s Kazumasa Nagai helped pioneer.
Born in 1929, Nagai helped shape both Japanese commercial art and the development of the promo poster. Starting out with entirely abstract patterns, he moved through three distinct phases in his career – each one pushing Japanese design in a new direction. The '60s were all about geometric shapes and patterns, the '70s focused on photography and the '80s saw him explore animal illustrations.
While the work was impressive, Nagai’s commercial savvy / stubbornness was just as intimidating. He refused to create illustrations specifically for ad campaigns so Japanese companies simply bought the rights to completed works and slapped their logos on them. The exposure cemented his name in design circles and made him ‘hella rich’.
50 years on, Nagai’s influence still looms over the design field. He may have started his career with street posters, but his original prints can now be found in the Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art, New York’s Museum of Modern Art and, ah, the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney.
Images sourced from
pinktentacle.com.