5 Vintage Cycling Arrivals to celebrate Tour de France!
Tour de France enters stage 19, with just two days to go. The gallery has acquired five vintage cycling posters from the 1950s and 1960s that catch the energy and power of the sport.
Posts Tagged ‘bicycles’
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Posters as Gifts- Check our Under $1000 Category!
What to give the person who has everything? A Vintage Poster is always a great idea. Our selection of ‘Under $1000’ has just expanded, as well.
http://www.juliasantengallery.com/posters/category/1000_and_Under.html
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Peace Race Cycling 1960, 1961 and 1962
The Peace Race was an annual multiple stage bicycle race held in the Eastern Bloc states of Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Poland. First organized in 1948, it was originally created with the intent of relieving tensions existing between Central European countries following the interwar period and World War II. Maintained by the three states ruling Communist parties’ newspapers (Rudé právo, Neues Deutschland and Trybuna Ludu), it was dubbed to be the “world’s biggest amateur cycling race” and “Tour de France of the East”.
Below are the event’s original posters from 1960, 1961 and 1962.
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Early Bicycles
Walter Thor was one of the turn-of-the-century artists designing posters for car and bicycle companies. Born in Munich, he studied in Paris for a few years and then returned to Germany. Peugeot, like many early car companies, had its origins in the bicycle manufacturing business. Here, in rich colors and with sharp outlining, Thor depicts an aristocratic lady surrounded by her dogs as she cycles toward a music pavilion. Although virtually devoid of Art Nouveau ornamentation, the graceful, winding bicycle path in the background serves to adorn the images much as a plume of smoke might in an image by the Father of Art Nouveau, Alphonse Mucha.
By allowing women the feeling of freedom, mobility, and independence, the bicycle helped to fundamentally transform social relations between the sexes. Not only did the bicycle play a large role in freeing women from the restraints of constricting fashions, it changed the idea of female beauty by dispelling the myths of women’s fragility and helplessness. The early women’s liberation movement found in the bicycle a vehicle for change; as the famous women’s emancipationist Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton proclaimed: “Woman is riding to suffrage on a bicycle.”
