Vintage Views

Jason Vass calls himself a “poster junkie,” and though his Santa Monica apartment was furnished on a shoestring, it is also a showplace for his overflowing collection of vintage posters. They’re everywhere--on the walls, lining baseboards and stacked in a spare room upstairs, depicting everything from the Spanish Civil War to Shakespearean plays.

Vass is as eager as a museum docent to show them off: A chilling propaganda poster from World War I is tucked in a corner, a 10-foot-tall poster for a production of Shakespeare’s “Winter’s Tale” looms at the top of the stairs. The living room is dominated by an elegant depiction of the Greek myth of Persephone and Hades from a series promoting the British Underground. “I got into posters because I couldn’t afford that Degas print, much less the Van Gogh,” explained the 45-year-old Vass, who turned his passion for posters into a gallery business eight years ago. “The poster prices have been driven up in recent years, but they are still a bargain.”

From dorms to screening rooms, posters are making big wall statements. They add instant panache and individuality to any room without the usual hand-wringing decisions about decorating. And, with careful selection, posters can become valuable--the beginning of a serious art collection.

Susan Carrandi,a Manhattan collector and dealer, says she has seen a notable increase in posters for home decorating. “People see them on the TV sitcoms, like ‘Friends,’ ” she said. “A client will start off with one, then they get hooked and come back for more and more.”

She thinks part of the appeal of many posters that promote products is sentimental--they evoke such childhood memories as cars, bikes, trains, food and drink. And the vibrant, life-size images are perfect for decorating a room, she said. “They come alive. A poster can pull together any room and also add depth.”

Chains such as Pottery Barn and Crate and Barrel are helping to popularize posters by featuring framed reproductions in their catalogs. “People start with those and then move to vintage posters,” according to Los Angeles interior designer Ron Gucciardo, who has long used vintage posters for decorating. “The whole image is right there in front of you, not too intricate or complex,” he said. “I like what they do to a room--I recently used vintage movie posters for the projection room of a Malibu home and it was just right.”

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Vintage posters, which are lithographs, offer a compromise between affordable and investment art. Typical customers are young couples starting a home. “We don’t like to talk about ‘art by the yard,’ but if you have a great big wall to fill, it’s going to take huge amounts of money to fill it with original art. And a reproduction is worthless after you buy it,” said Leonard Buschel, manager of the Jane Moufflet Gallery in Los Angeles.

“For $2,500 you can get something big and it will be a conversation piece. ‘Vintage’ means it is not a reproduction, that a limited number was printed so you won’t see it everywhere you look,” he said.

Movie director John Dahl, 43, and his wife, Beth, recently went poster shopping, hoping to fill “a big wall space” in their den. “I started out as a graphics artist and designed billboards, so I have loved posters for a long time,” said Dahl, whose movie “Squelch” is due out later this year. “And I love the French posters because they were made to be put up on those big kiosks and are huge.”

After looking at a big range, they bought an 8-by-12-foot French poster for the 1932 American movie “Lost Squadron” with Richard Dix and Erich von Stroheim.

“It wasn’t a great movie but the poster is so cool we had to have it,” said Dahl. “It’s partly black and white, a plane going down, and a ghostly image of a pilot.” They also bought an Italian poster for the 1963 Hitchcock movie “The Birds,” and Dahl says he can see himself getting addicted to posters. “We have a two-story contemporary house with big white walls, so we can stuff a lot of posters in there.”

He is not surprised at the growing interest in poster art. “It’s something people can have that feels like original art, and there was this great period from the 1930s to the ‘50s that was just classic.”

But shoppers can choose from more than a century of original advertising for everything from the Toulouse-Lautrec poster for Folies-Bergere to Andy Warhol’s pop art.

Posters as art originated in France in the 1870s, but they have since expanded over the years to every continent and style. Other major periods are Italian design from 1900 to 1930 and the Art Deco graphic design period from 1925 to 1940. For World Wars I and II, posters were used for drafting and recruitment, propaganda messages and food rationing. Posters from the 1960s reflect psychedelic art and political protests of the antiwar era. And movie posters have exploded in value in recent years--a poster for the 1932 Boris Karloff film “The Mummy” sold at a Sotheby’s auction for $453,000 several seasons ago.

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More than 10,000 vintage posters will be on exhibit this weekend at the International Vintage Poster Fair at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. The event will offer an overview that no amount of gallery-hopping can, said Buschel. “If you have any theme--if you were ever in a little town in France, if you are a designer looking for particular colors, if you love a certain kind of champagne--you will find a poster. They were all made to sell something.”

Most of the couples who shop for posters, he has learned, are not that specific about what they want. “They have a wall and a measurement, and they want to see something that strikes their fancy,” Buschel explained. He insists that they both like the image because it becomes part of the family.

“These are bold and strong images--they’re the original billboards and were meant to grab your attention from across the street on a very crowded Parisian boulevard. A billboard is like a couch--you don’t get tired of it.”

Like other collectors and dealers, Jason Vass haunts auctions, thrift stores, swap meets and antique shops for new acquisitions. “My prices start at $250, and these tend to be small pieces,” he said. “I think for $500 you can find a terrific piece over 75 years old.”

Value is determined by the number of lithographs in circulation, which may be as few as a dozen, the quality of the image and the appeal of the design itself, explained Buschel. “This one is so hip and contemporary--it could have been designed yesterday,” he said of a 1927 poster by a leading Parisian designer, Leonetto Cappiello, titled “Cognac Monnet.” It is a brilliant image of a woman in a red-fringed dress holding a glass of cognac. “This is $5,200--that’s the price another one recently sold for at Christie’s auction,” said Buschel.

A movie poster by the French writer Jean Cocteau, who also did set designs, is priced at $2,400. “It’s a line drawing--very Picasso-esque on a white background and looks like fine art,” said Buschel. “It’s fabulous and would be great in a modern house.”

A Toulouse-Lautrec poster can command as much as $200,000, while smaller posters, such as French opera scenes, might range from $600 to $800. “These are great for hallways,” said Buschel. “They can be lined up.”

Vass says that some posters he has bought and sold have gone up four times in value since he started collecting. And looking at a digital future and the development of the Internet, he predicts the value of original old paper to continue to rise.

“Bill Gates has been buying rights of art images. I think the future of art will be a mass quantity of digital images that you can punch up on a database,” he said.

Vass isn’t impressed by the prospect of those digital masterpieces.

“You want your house to be as nice as possible, and to me, that includes good art. It expands your ability to think and understand in an exponential way--it creates more thought and caring. I go to homes and there is not art on the walls, and I am astonished. And these posters have such character, you can’t believe they are merely printed paper.”

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International Vintage Poster Fair, Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Friday, 5-9 p.m. preview; Saturday, 10 a.m.-7 p.m.; Sunday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.. Admission: $20, Friday; $10, Saturday and Sunday; three-day pass, $20. The lecture “Introduction to Buying Posters” is Saturday and Sunday at noon; free. Information: (310) 395-2048; https://www.posterfair.com

Connie Koenenn can be reached by e-mail at connie.koenenn@latimes.com.