LEXINGTON, KY.- The Kentucky University Museum of Art presents the exhibit Edward Penfield: Spring and Summer Posters for Harper’s Magazine. A collection of posters by Edward Penfield, considered to be the first and foremost American poster artist, is now on view at the Museum. Admission to the exhibition is free. Born in 1866, Penfield attended the Art Students League in New York where his work was seen and admired by an associate editor of Harper’s Magazine. He was hired in 1891 to work in the art department finishing other artists’ drawings, but he was soon commissioned to create original work, and, in 1893, he provided the inaugural poster for the publication. By the end of the year, many other publishers along with Harper’s were using the art poster for advertising. By 1895, the practice had become so popular that many companies were printing extra copies for a growing collector’s market.

Penfield was at the forefront of the poster art form. His particularly American approach to the Art Nouveau movement downplayed the dramatic curving lines of the European version and emphasized flat, simple areas of form and color as seen in Japanese prints and the work of the Post-Impressionists, especially Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Penfield’s posters became a means by which he could introduce avant-garde aesthetics to the American public. He is, in fact, credited with bringing abstraction to American commercial art. He had an art director’s understanding of what was required for a successful advertisement. As he noted, “It is more a question of what to leave out than what to put in.”

The subjects of Penfield’s posters were chosen to appeal to the particular readership of the magazine: stylish men and women of the upper classes. They were depicted engaged in leisure activities while wearing the latest fashions of the day, which, at times, the artist gently ridiculed when he included figures, especially women, bundled in layers of clothing at the height of summer.

After his successful career at Harper’s, Penfield sought new artistic experiences. He continued his commercial work for other publications including Collier’s, Life, Ladies’ Home Journal, The Saturday Evening Post, and Scribner’s. He also extensively traveled throughout Europe. In the early 1900s, he returned to the United States and continued to create artwork, including the murals for the breakfast room at Harvard University and work exhibited at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. In 1916, he began teaching at the Art Students League, and, by 1921, he was the most influential member of the Society of Illustrators in New York. Penfield died in 1925 of complications from a fall he had suffered the previous year.