Vintage Poster Archives
Field Museum Chicago 1923 | Elevated Lines Exhibition Poster
Field Museum Chicago 1923 | Elevated Lines Exhibition Poster
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A winged flying fish in cadmium red-orange and golden yellow carries a red-haired child across a deep maroon sky. Below, a white silhouette of the Field Museum's neoclassical facade rests on a narrow cobalt-blue horizon strip. The composition reduces the journey from the elevated railway platform to the museum's door into a single soaring image: flat, spare, and resolved.
Designed around 1923 for the Chicago Rapid Transit Company's leisure travel campaign, which commissioned Chicago's commercial artists and design students to produce approximately 160 posters between 1921 and 1929. The oval cartouche at lower-right identifies the designer as John Schutab, working in the Research Class at the American Academy of Art, the Chicago commercial art school founded in 1923. The campaign aimed to persuade Chicagoans that the Elevated Lines were for more than the daily commute, and the Field Museum, which had opened its Grant Park building just two years earlier in 1921, was among its earliest and most vivid subjects.
The cut-out figure style and flat, unbroken ground show the influence of the graphic economy favoured by the best Chicago commercial artists of the period. The red-orange of the fish against the maroon ground creates contrast through hue shift rather than tonal contrast, a compositional decision that gives the poster its concentrated visual energy.
A considered choice for anyone with an interest in American graphic design of the 1920s, the history of Chicago's transit culture, or the period when museum institutions were still new enough to require advertising.
Reproduced as a fine art archival print on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper, using pigment-based inks that preserve the original poster's saturated flat colour palette.
