Art deco and the golden age of poster design

Georgia Morley is leading a curator's talk on Art deco and the golden age of poster design at the London Transport Museum on Saturday 14 November, part of a larger exhibition that's open daily in the Global Poster Gallery. Morley is the museum's Senior Curator for Collections Development, so she's one of the people who actually works with the stuff on the walls.

The talk itself runs for about 45 minutes, followed by a Q&A, and it's built around the exhibition's main focus: how art deco shaped the look of London transport. The show marks the centenary of the 1925 Paris Exhibition, which was a defining moment for the style, and it traces how those ideas of modernity, energy and sophistication made their way into the posters and architecture of the city's transport network. Frank Pick was the man behind it, and under his direction, the transport authorities used bold posters to promote travel while bringing art into everyday life.

There are more than 100 original posters on display, with work by Edward McKnight Kauffer, Dora Batty, Jean Dupas and Munetsugu Satomi, alongside the architecture of Charles Holden. It's a good cross-section of the period, and the museum holds one of the world's largest collections of 20th-century graphic art and design, with around 1,000 original poster artworks and over 30,000 posters in total, designated Outstanding by Arts Council England. The whole season is sponsored by Global, and there's an audio-described guide available.

The talk is on Saturday 14 November at 14:00, and it's free with museum admission. The exhibition itself is open daily from 10:00 to 18:00, with last entry at 17:00, and it runs through to May 2027, so if you can't make the talk, you've still got plenty of time to see the posters on your own. The museum is in Covent Garden Piazza, London WC2E 7BB.