Promoting the Good Life: Recent Acquisitions

With the advent of mass consumerism, modern advertising emerged to market not only goods, but the good life. As advanced printing processes made it easier and less expensive to reproduce images, street posters, catalog advertisements, and trade fairs turned bystanders into buyers. The promotional materials in this installation, generously donated by Jill and Avram Glazer, promised a leisure lifestyle  through a range of graphic strategies developed by the advertising industry in the beginning of the twentieth century. From direct representation to distinctive typography, the fundamentals of branding on view here—perhaps taken for granted now, though revolutionary at their time—shaped the rise of the mass consumer market as we recognize it today