Step back in time with old travel postcards depicting cities brimming with historical charm and cultural vitality, inspiring wanderlust in you as you discover their architectural marvels and colorful histories. This collection will transport you back in time.

Postcards represent an incredible social archive, acting as field notes in reflexive ethnography. Their images have changed our view of reality and how it’s represented.

The Art of Postcards

Postcards are an intimate form of cultural communication, inspiring their recipients while also serving to convey important social, economic, political and historical topics. Utilizing Lauder Archive material from around the globe this exhibition showcases postcards dating back a century of global exploration to illuminate ideas, images and emotions projected by people producing, using and receiving them.

At their height in 1900, postcards served as an expressive vehicle for many of the major historical and cultural themes of their era, from depicting New York skylines evoking ambition and excitement to photomontage cards depicting shifting gender roles. This exhibition also includes postcards that illustrate natural disasters as well as those caused by humans.

The exhibition not only highlights postcards’ rich visual history, but also shows how contemporary artists continue to use this medium creatively to express their artistic vision. One example featured by Ellsworth Kelly uses both formal constraints and playful elements to produce an image which challenges traditional ideas about what constitutes postcard subject matter.

Curt Teich Company also maintains postcard production archives which demonstrate how postcard designs transform from photographs into printed cards. Postcards serve as an effective medium to facilitate intercultural dialogue by prompting students to consider values, assumptions, and beliefs often depicted on postcard images.

The History of Postcards

With digital communications becoming more prevalent, postcards have lost some of their relevance as an effective medium for communication and souvenirs of travel. Yet as postcard collectors can attest, postcards have an incredible history dating back to late 19th and early 20th century postcard collections such as Lauder Archive material that documents social and cultural themes ranging from urbanization, changing views on women’s roles in society, technological innovation, fashion trends and more that were documented and celebrated through billions of cards produced, sent out and collected during this time. This exhibition draws heavily upon Lauder Archive materials in order to illustrate this rich and varied history through billions produced, sent out and collected during this period of time.

Postcards were first introduced by Austria-Hungary in 1869 following a proposal by economist Dr Emanuel Herrmann, and two years later in Britain they saw official postcards with two-sided printing that also featured an official stamp costing halfpenny to cover postal service costs. Privately printed cards could still be bought; however they would incur full letter rates of two cents while government-issued ones cost just one penny each.

By the turn of the century, companies like ETW Dennis and Sons in Scarborough, England; Curt Teich and Company in Chicago; among others had adopted chromolithography to produce postcards depicting cities, historic landmarks and popular vacation spots for consumers to buy or send as mementoes of their holidays or send as greetings from. Each card featured illustrated views on one side while featuring Gruss Aus (or, “Greetings From”) with space reserved for an address label on its backside – providing ample opportunities to purchase or send.

The Social Impact of Postcards

Postcards are an integral component of history, technology, culture and art. Their global reach connects people across continents and oceans while serving to document disasters as well as celebrate world-renowned architecture, natural wonders and cultural heritage. Postcards were also one of the earliest global social networks with parallels to popular digital picture networks like Instagram, Snapchat Twitter TikTok.

At their height of popularity, postcards were an integral part of everyday life for millions of Americans and Europeans. At the turn of the 20th century, postcard images explored major historical and cultural themes such as urbanization; changing roles for women; celebrity culture; new technologies; World War I as part of daily life for many millions around the globe.

During this era, postcards became an important medium of artistic expression for numerous artists. Their small format allowed them to experiment with sketch and message, semi-intimacy and public audience all in one image – as Ellsworth Kelly discovered. They offered distinct formal restrictions as well as visual ambiguities.

Postcards have the ability to change lives by recording experiences, sentiments and memories in written form. Receivers of postcards often express joy, nostalgia and gratitude when reading them; postcards also offer political activists an avenue for engaging new members and connecting them with their cause.

The Postcard Age

Postcards were an instantaneous means to communicate, build relationships with strangers, immortalize moments and places and preserve them forever in albums – as seen during a global postcard craze around 1900 that saw millions produced, sent out, collected in albums, then recycled again as new cards!

Early in the 1860s, postcards began featuring images on both sides. Thanks to chromolithography – an advanced printing process capable of simultaneously printing multiple colors – their popularity skyrocketed; during this era there was a dramatic surge in production of photographs and graphic imagery for postcards, particularly in Germany where photomechanical processes had emerged earlier than elsewhere.

Detroit Publishing Company became one of the best known publishers, producing millions of postcards that showcased color, composition, and meticulous detail.

These postcards provide an interesting insight into life at the turn of the 20th century, when industrialization, urbanization, shifting cultural perceptions and changing gender roles began reshaping societies around the globe. Drawing from MFA’s Leonard A. Lauder Archive – gifted to us in 2010 – this exhibition provides a rich glimpse of life at this pivotal time period.