Ah, that first apartment.
And with it, that first decorating decision: What shall I put on the walls? For most people, the choice was, and remains, simple: a poster, and mine was a colorful poster of Jim Morrison and the Doors.
In an informal survey taken in a South Loop saloon, the answers to the question, “What was the first thing you put on the walls of your first apartment?” yielded varied if fairly predictable answers.
“Marilyn Monroe.”
“A travel poster from Spain.”
“The Beatles.”
“Moody Blues.”
“Wrigley Field.”
“A Mapplethorpe.”
“The poster you pick generally reflects a combination of aesthetic sensibilities and financial resources,” said graphic artist Hank Sollenby, sitting on a stool at the bar and saying he selected an Erte print as his first apartment’s “first aesthetic element.”
Posters now fill the walls at the seventh annual Vintage Poster Fair, through Sunday in the Hillenbrand Auditorium of the American Dental Association Building, 211 E. Chicago Ave.
Many are eye-poppingly beautiful, others (such as the foreign movie posters pictured above) are playful and amusing. There are 10,000 in all, from the U.S., Europe and Asia, from the realms of sports, travel, entertainment and advertising.
To see them will cost you $10. Buying one? You might be able to pick up a bargain for, say, $50. But a few others run as high as $75,000. Those would be, I assume, for collectors. But most poster people are of less deep-pocketed means.
“I’d never spent more than $100 for a poster,” said a man named Jeff Wilson, sitting at a table in the saloon with friends. “I got my first apartment when I was a single 23-year-old. My posters were of James Dean and Farrah Fawcett. I think they cost me about $10 each and I still have them. They’re not hanging. My wife said, `No way.’ So they’re somewhere in the garage.”
