Travel was emerging as the possibility of leisure, object of desire, to break with the routine.
From 1920 to 1940 there was a significant development of railways in Europe and the United States, overseas travel was sold as the luxury item it was and the cars began to gain speed and design.
Drawings with destinations around the world presented today at the Obsessions section belong to the select collection of over 350 travel posters at the Boston Public Library (BPL) and is designed for tourism campaigns between 1920 and 1940, the so-called golden Age of travel in America.
In the twenties began commercial flights. The thirty were a decade of development, with well-insulated equipment, 14 passenger aircraft were comfortably seated in comfortable chairs. There were no borders, you could visit Europe, India, Japan, New Zealand …
‘Alaska via Canadian Pacific‘
The 351 posters are good size scanned and available for download from the Boston Public Library on Flickr.
There are landscapes, luxury scenes inside the French transatlantic route linking New York and Paris, exquisite alpine views, elegant expression of faces with fun illustrations of beautiful women dressed in exotic and local costumes…
Exclusive travel offices were adorned with these idyllic promises . Some artists even won their fame by designing the ideal visions of future trips.
Many of these posters are now being seen with an artistic perspective once stripped of their advertising purposes, now obsolete for today’s tourists.
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