A house of Provenance
The Poster Atlas
Every nation argued in ink. These are the arguments that became art. The Poster Atlas is a curatorial reproduction house for the world’s great national poster schools — the WPA’s silkscreen, the French Belle Époque’s stone-drawn affiches, Japan’s travel and rail posters, Soviet constructivism, Young Poland, and the rest of the wings gathered here — organized wing by wing, school by school, each piece named to its school, its designer where known, its printer where known, and the street it was made for.
The Poster Atlas is a house of Provenance, sibling to Painted Myths and The Picture Palace. We don’t invent the schools; we curate and reproduce them, at museum grade, from sources anyone can check.
The sourcing promise
Every reproduction is traced to a named source and, where the holding institution assigns one, an accession number: the Library of Congress’s WPA and poster collections; open museum programs at the Met, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian, and the Rijksmuseum; Wikimedia Commons; and auction-house archival scans licensed under the family’s Bridgeman framework. House originals — pieces scanned in-house from our own holdings — sit at the top of that ladder as our apex trust line. Source and accession are recorded on every piece, plainly, as a commitment, not a footnote.
The registry promise
No piece publishes without a CLEAR verdict from the family’s rights registry, enforced in code at the route and at build. And the registry runs two lanes on purpose: some schools we reproduce outright, cleared and sold, piece by piece; others — a postwar school still deep in copyright, a mid-century style whose designers are still protected — we honor stylistically and never sell. That line is a value here, not a limitation: it is how you tell a school we stand behind from a school we merely admire. See the full registry →
The wings, so far
One house, organized by nation. Each wing is its own room, its own story, and its own reproducible school.
The Poster Atlas is a house of the Provenance family, sibling to Painted Myths and The Picture Palace. Read how the wings were printed →