The Postcard Age
In the decades around 1900, a craze swept the world. This craze saw the humble postcard change the way of communication. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston celebrates the postcard.
Showcasing European and American postcards as both graphic art and as a historical phenomenon, The Postcard Age displays a wealth of beautiful and dramatic designs by well-known artists, along with those less renowned, and even yet, still unidentified. Artists who are barely known today created some of the most intricate and interesting cards in the collection.
Aside from the beauty of the designs, many printed on silk, leather or thin slices of wood, the postcards carry a stronger message than the words scrawled onto the rear of them. Propaganda imagery chronicled a period of industrialisation, women’s rights and social change.
Introduced in Hungary in 1869, the postcard was seen as a fast and inexpensive mode of communication. Postcards revolutionised the way people connected to one another. They were a truly democratic art form, accessible to a wide audience and provided a new arena for artistic experimentation. “They were the people’s art.”
The Postcard Age features more than 700 examples of work and is on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, until Sunday 14 April 2013.
