Vintage Czech travel posters explore different eras

Nicholas and George Lowry have around 250 vintage Czech travel posters in their collection. Narrowing them down to decide what to include in an upcoming exhibit at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library wasn't easy.

'They're all favorites. I had to do a lot of inner mental gymnastics to pick 43 that would be best for this exhibition,” Nicholas Lowry said.

He and his father, George, will attend the exhibit's opening reception Sunday, where Nicholas Lowry will talk about the collection and tell his family's story of life in Czechoslovakia and fleeing the country just before the Nazis stopped outgoing travel.

Lowry, who regularly appears on PBS's Antiques Roadshow as an expert, is the poster specialist for his family's company, Swann Auction Galleries, which specializes in historic and antiquarian paper products - books, maps, posters, autographs and more. He and his father have been collecting Czech posters for 25 years and own hundreds covering all topics and spanning time periods from the Habsburg Empire to post-Communism days. For this exhibit, they decided to focus in on the travel posters.

'The posters are a fabulous travelogue of wonders and beauty of the Czech country, but also an exploration of art history and art styles,” he said. 'They're very immediately accessible. Anyone who has been to Prague will recognize the posters from there.”

The posters were used to inspire travel and tourism; many were printed by rail companies and advertised destinations like spas and sea resorts. Some were printed in French, English and German and were sent to train stations and ticket offices abroad to encourage travel to Czechoslovakia.

They also illustrate different art periods, beginning with art nouveau from the 1890s through World War I, followed by Art Deco-style posters with more modern, streamlined designs and avant-garde posters in the 1930s.

'Posters in general, in any aspect, are great windows into their era,” Lowry said.

One 1930s poster, for example, shows a high-speed train that ran between Prague and Bratislava.

'It was the most magnificently designed, modernist-looking streamlined train. It was a source of incredible national pride. People could feel the country was at the cutting edge of everything modern,” Lowry said.

The collection also includes rail posters printed by the Nazis after they invaded.

'The history of travel posters really was a history of who ran the railroads and who was in charge of the country for a period of time,” he said.

That aspect of history is particularly poignant for his family. Jewish, they fled the country in 1938 after the German invasion, making it out just before the Nazis shut down the rail system. George Lowry was just 6 years old at the time, and his passport from that time bears the iron cross stamp of the Nazi government. The family moved to the United States in the early 1940s.

'The one piece of the story I don't fully understand is what prompted them to leave when so many others didn't make that decision,” Nicholas Lowry said.

'We were an industrial family, so money wasn't a problem; they could afford to get out. But what made that decision so obvious?”

After the fall of Communism, he went back to Prague and lived there for four years, getting closer to his family's heritage before returning to New York. He said he's looking forward to sharing some of that heritage with a wider audience, and for people to get a glimpse of the beauty he sees in the posters.

'Posters were meant to be there in your field of vision and catch your eye in the second it takes you to walk by and implant their message. Their primary function was to be as beautiful, as eye catching, as strong as they could be,” he said.

'I've been collecting these posters for so long, it's nice to make a contribution back.”

If you go

' What: Opening reception for Travel Posters from the Lowry Collection

' When: 1 p.m. Sunday (11/6)

' Lecutre free; gallery acess is regular admission price