Modern posters: abstraction as a wall language

Modern art stopped describing the world and started arranging it. The posters that carried that change out of the studio were made for galleries, museums and printers' catalogues, and they were built to be read in one look: a few shapes, a few flat colours, a grid. That economy is exactly why they work as decoration — nothing in them competes with a sofa or a window.

What is in this collection

• Le Corbusier — Modulor, Totem, Main et silex and Petite Confidences: an architect's drawing hand, hard black outlines, pure colour fills.
• Paris and the gallery print — Léger at the Galerie, Braque's Estampes, Soulages, Tàpies and Jean Arp in Paris.
• Hard-edge, geometry and American painting — Noland's Turnsole, Gottlieb, Stuart Davis, Mondrian and Demuth's Lancaster buildings.
• Colour fields and quieter work — Yves Klein's Princess Helena, Matsutani, Onchi Koshiro and Hartley.

Two kinds of modern: the announcement and the picture

Part of this category is a document: a gallery poster for a show, the artist's name set in type, the graphic idea doing the work. It reads as typography and is happiest in a hallway, where you pass it rather than stare at it. The other part is the picture itself — a screenprint, a study, a composition — and those want a wall of their own.

Knowing which of the two you are buying explains the framing budget. An announcement tolerates a thin black moulding; a flat, saturated print needs a white mount wide enough to keep it from touching the frame.

How to choose one, and how to hang it

Choose by temperature of colour before you choose by artist. The warm group — ochre, red, Klein blue against cream — goes into rooms with wood and lamplight. The grey-green group, where Matsutani and Onchi sit, belongs where the daylight is already cool.

One large modern print above a low piece of furniture is the safest arrangement. Two smaller ones work as a pair only if they share a grid. Hung next to a photograph, a modern print usually loses, because the eye reads the photograph as a window and the print as a wall.

For the argument behind the style rather than the style itself, start at Bauhaus; for the quieter end of the same century, look at minimal. Artists with their own pages are collected under artists.

Two sheets come at that argument from outside the studio. The torn Union Jack pinned back together with safety pins, a ragged banner across it, was made with scissors and a photocopier, and it treats flat colour as something to break rather than to balance. The Killer Shrews sheet, a long tail crossing green water beside an overturned shoe, uses the same flat printing to sell a cinema seat, and the green is the whole weather of the picture. Neither is abstraction, and both belong to the same argument about what a printed sheet can afford to do.

Sizes, paper and delivery

Pigment print on 210 gsm Hahnemühle paper, sizes from 30×40 to 70×100 cm plus A3 and A2. Frame not included. Orders leave within 24 hours and arrive in 3–5 working days inside the EU, tracked.