Many of the e-mail requests I receive contain the same questions over and over again. The most frequent ones are presented --and answered-- here. So, please take some time and have a look here first, before sending me any mail asking for the obvious!
Yes, but not from me! I'm always interested in exchanging duplicates, but I'm not a poster dealer
Although I'm not a poster dealer, we do have the
intention of selling off our duplicates later this year, or early next
year, at www.chineseposters.net. The site is operational, but the shopping options not yet.
In the meantime, have a look at Maopost.com,
The Ross Group, the Chisholm Larsson Gallery, Hinky Import and Victoria Edison's
Zitantique. All of them offer original posters, but Zitantique has Red Guard satchels and armbands, statues, booklets and other ephemera as well. Another excellent source for objects is The East is Red. Or try Chris To Kwok Ho's Culturegems.
Electronic versions of posters, suitable for print or web publishing, as well as high quality reprints, can be found at Chinaposters.com.
If you happen to be in China: there's still a lot of
materials available in the public domain. Try the various open antique
markets in urban areas. In Beijing, the Panjiayuan market on Saturdays and Sundays is a definite must.
Often, you don't. Most Chinese are rather puzzled by
our Westerners' interest in propaganda posters. They don't understand
why we can drool over a rare Mao poster, while they'd rather see we buy
one of those sickly sweet realistic paintings of kittens with blue
eyes. So let them. In the meantime, some try and make some money by
reproducing the CultRev memorabilia (posters, statues, alarm clocks,
etc.) that we are interested in. So let them.
Distinguishing fakes from real is an ability that
can only be trained through hard practice, through looking at and manipulating a lot of
posters, that's all I can say. And even then you can end
up with a fake.... Moreover, you have to know your revolutionary Chinese history!!
After all, if you don't know what's on a poster, what and who's
represented and how, it's hard to tell whether it's a copy or
not.
The quality of the paper can often tell whether a
poster is an original. Old posters generally are not printed on glossy,
or blindingly white paper. It's rather obvious, I think. An old
original CANNOT be crisp. Old paper has a tired feel to it. Of course,
new paper can be made to look old, and not all posters on old paper are
true originals. But take a close look at the printing of the colors of
the slogan on the poster. You'll see that often there's a yellowish halo around the
red characters. A dead give-away for a fake/reprint. Smell is another indicator. Old posters should
smell musty and rotting, with a tinge of camphor added. Again, these
things can be faked, so I'm back to my original point: training through endless
practice. Of course, in order to find out about these things, you
actually have to handle the poster(s) you want to buy, and that can be
pretty impossible when you buy from, say, the Internet.
Aside from these formal aspects, it pays to take a
close look at the image itself, too. Let me put it this way: There's a
poster being offered that, according to the information printed in the
lower right hand corner, with numerals that we Westerners can read, was
published in Peking in 1957. It shows soldiers in simple, unadorned
CulRev-style military uniforms waving Little Red Books. But knowing
your revolutionary history, you immediately identify this extremely
cool-looking poster as a sorry fake. First of all, Mao's quotes were
not compiled in 1957! Secondly, in 1957, soldiers did not wear simple
uniforms without insignia of rank. These were only introduced in the
mid-1960s.
In short, all I can say
is: caveat emptor, that is, buyer beware!
For some pointers on how to distinguish fakes from
real posters, including comparisons of real and fake posters that are
on offer these days, take a look at the excellent overview
by Chris To.
There's another on-line overview of fakes available at Maopost.com.
There's no general gudeline to that. The more you
buy from the same person, the cheaper they tend to get. As a repeat customer,
you become an old friend (lao pengyou 老朋友), often making for better prices. The
process of pricing is difficult to fathom, and largely has to do with
age and subject matter; Chris To provides an interesting method to assess the value of a poster. Condition of the material often is not a real
consideration. Expect to pay anywhere between 25-5,000 RMB. Real rare
ones (I’m thinking about stuff from the late 1940s, very early
1950s here, or even earlier) can do up to 10,000-35,000 RMB or even more. Haggling is not only allowed, but called
for.
Prices can get even higher. Some dealers ask for up
to US$ 5,000 for posters they have picked up in China for a mere 50
RMB. In the end, if you really want a poster, you pay the price...
In principle, I see no problem when you use images
from my Chinese Propaganda Posters site or from my collection. However, I always want to know
where my images end up in. So please send me an e-mail with your
request.
Moreover, when the materials are used for a publication (in whatever form,
and this not only includes articles, books or PowerPoint presentations,
but also documentaries, TV-commercials, MTV- or YouTube-/TuDou-clips,
coffee mugs, T-shirts, CD-booklets, bed covers, you name it), the
following conditions apply:
1. the image should be identified as being part of the IISH Stefan R. Landsberger Collection;
2. when and wherever possible, a link should be provided to the website; and
3. a copy of the publication should be forwarded to me at the address below:
Prof. S.R. Landsberger
Sinological Institute
Leiden University
P.O. Box 9515
NL-2300 RA Leiden
The Netherlands
To order hi-rez images, you have to turn to the
International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam, The
Netherlands, where my collection is located. Information is available at http://www.iisg.nl/service.php; enquiries can be sent to the IISH by .
Certain rates apply; check here for an overview.
I do not own the copyrights over the images, but they are all from my private collection.
The posters, as a form of political advertising,
were intended to reach a maximum adience. Although the designs some of
the posters are based on original art work (oil painting, watercolors,
woodcuts, etc.), the reproductions (i.e., the posters) can hardly be
called originals.
The designers/artists of the posters were employees
of the art academies, museums, or publishers. During the high tide of
socialism, it was seen as counterrevolutionary to exercise personal
claims to the copyrights over the works. It would be safe to consider
the academies, etc., as the copyright holders. Now, in my experience,
these institutions do not exercise their copyrights for materials
published in the period 1949-mid-1980s. With the Chinese adoption of
the ISBN-system, all this has changed, of course.
Up until the mid-1980s, China was no signatory of
any of the International Copyright Conventions. Quite some non-Chinese
books seem to have been pirated in Chinese editions in those years.
Seen from that perspective, I think China will find it hard to claim
copyrights retro-actively. However, I'm not an expert in this field,
and I'm open to all suggestions from people who know more about
(international) copyright law.
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Yes there are! First of all, the collection of the
International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, The Netherlands,
where my own collection is also located. The images shown in The Chairman Smiles are from the collection of the
Institute itself. Recently, an all-new site, ChinesePosters.net,
a joint-venture between the IISH and me, has come on-line. Here, we
plan to make both our collections available, completely searchable.
The collection of the University of Westminster, London, UK
The Jon Sigurdson Collection
The Oliver Laude Collection
Mao Badges, Posters and Ephemera by Kurt Groetsch
Street posters, a very nice site by Rice University
Picturing Power,
the exhibit that accompanied the publication of the book by Harriet Evans and Stephanie Hemelryk Donald
The Iris Wachs Woodblock exhibition
A.E. Maia do Amaral's Woodblocks Collection
Communism on stamps (check the CultRev and Mao's legacy sites)
The James Flath nianhua collection
Scrapbook of the Revolution, no posters, but very
interesting photographs and mementoes of the Cultural Revolution
Republican public health posters
Calendar posters (first decades of 20th century)
Zhang Hongtu's site (check the Mao's)
s.r.landsberger@let.leidenuniv.nl
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