When the Julius Paul collection was restituted in 2008, the heirs decided on a
careful and strategic plan to disperse the posters. Rather than flood the market by
bringing the whole collection immediately to auction, they worked with New York’s
Reinhold Brown Gallery to slowly sell posters to prestigious institutions and private
collections, resulting in many being exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New
York, Neue Galerie, New York, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Madrid’s Juan March
Foundation and the Hungarian National Gallery.
They have now decided to give the poster-collecting world at large an opportunity
to acquire works at auction from the collection.
From a cultural, social, commercial, theatrical, art historical, political, literary and
cinematic point of view, this collection is a graphic time capsule, in which many
individual posters appear as fresh and bright as they did on the day the were printed.
One collector has even commented that “you can almost smell the fresh ink.”
The posters we have chosen for this auction make for a marvelous, often joyous
evocation of European life from the twilight of the Belle Epoque and the Austro-
Hungarian Empire (the source of the majority of the posters in Paul’s collection)
and the years before the Great War through the inter-war years, up until Paul’s
death in the late 1930s.
Hedonistic pursuits are represented in full force via posters promoting smoking,
drinking, eating, night clubs and performers. Fashion images make bold appearances
as do sports posters. Posters for movies and movie theatres, bars and restaurants,
masked balls and cabarets vividly depict the joys and decadence of Mitteleuropan
nightlife in the teens and twenties. Even the more sedate luxuries, such as tea,
coffee and chocolate make an indelible impression. There are posters for the
