Nicholas (Nicho) Lowry knows his stuff and has a lot of stuff to know … about posters. He is the president of New York’s famed Swann Auction Gallery, one of the major go-to venues for trading and selling posters, and one of the on-screen experts on the beloved PBS “Antiques Roadshow“—totally identifiable by his Simon Legree waxed mustache and an endless sartorial array of tartan plaid three-piece suits.
Lowry is a character, a poster child for the important value and revealing mysteries of how each poster represents the era in which it was first made. For Lowry, posters are not just printed pieces of paper, they are entry points into the worlds in which they were created.
As curator of the current Poster House exhibition on New York travel posters, on June 20 Lowry and fellow curator Angelina Lippert will discuss the book/catalog that bears his byline—and I think it is a propitious time for PRINT readers to learn more about this poster expert.
Nicho Lowry on set for Antiques Roadshow
At the recent event celebrating Poster House’s fifth anniversary, you casually mentioned you’re now 30 years into the poster business. The Swann Galleries have been in your family for a long time. How did you become interested in posters?
Swann Galleries was actually founded by my grandfather’s nephew, Benjamin Swann, back in 1940. My grandfather, Louis Cohen, founded New York’s Argosy Bookstore in 1925 and was avidly acquiring books. In the late 1930s he bought a library that was so big that he couldn’t absorb it into the store and so he put his nephew into business as a book auctioneer. For the first few years of Swann’s existence, all the house did was sell books from that original collection. In 1969 when Ben Swann was ready to retire, my father bought him out and ran the business until 2000, when I took over.
My interest in posters, however, predates my time at Swann, and actually began (officially) when I worked at the Argosy briefly in the mid 1990s. On one of the bookstore’s upper floors was a storeroom which my grandfather had filled with World War 1 propaganda posters he had purchased over the years. Hundreds and hundreds of them, each one with a cardboard backing and covered with stiff acetate that had been stapled all around the edges. At this incredibly early point in my “career,” I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. But I did know that every member of my extended antiquarian family had their own area of expertise. My mother was a specialist in modern first editions, my father was an autograph specialist, my grandmother was a map specialist, etc., etc., and I knew that if I ever did enter the family business that I wasn’t interested in following in any of their professional tracks, per se.
Preview exhibit, photos courtesy Swann Galleries
How did you study to be so keen in your expertise? You have a broad swath of knowledge, from Premodern to Modern to Postmodern to contemporary, and a range of themes and eccentricities …
I actually don’t remember what I thought when I was first confronted with this storeroom filled with dusty plastic and cardboard, but I do know that I emerged from that room about four months later with a sound knowledge of the values of American propaganda posters, and I had begun to oversee the restoration and selling of a number of the store’s better posters. And from there I was off and running. I have referred to the experience in the past as akin to falling in love.
To learn about the history and value of posters I initially turned to the printed catalogs put out by Meehan Military Posters. I used those as guides to understand more about the relative values, rarity and importance of different posters.
Did you teach yourself, or was there some cabal of passionate posterists you could tap into?
Ever since college I always felt that if I was interested in something then it wasn’t difficult to learn more about the subject. It never felt like learning if I was pursuing a passion. And so it was with posters. I came of age in the pre-internet years, so all I had were old catalogues and reference books to guide me. While I had a small library of my own (which has now grown to quite a large reference library), I was lucky that in New York City there was a great poster resource in the library of Poster Auctions International, where I would find myself several times a year pouring over books, finding references to and information about different posters that we had coming up for sale.
The vast majority of my learning was done through osmosis. People frequently ask me what is the best way to start collecting posters, and one of the things I say is that they should familiarize themselves as much as they can with the market. And that is what I would do. I went to auctions, read catalogues, visited dealers and poster shows (back in those days dealers had large ring binders filled with actual photographs of their inventory; I would ravenously flip through them, seeing new images and constantly checking prices, etc.).
I have continued through my career attending auctions, visiting exhibitions, meeting dealers and curators and collectors and always, always, filing away images in the back of my mind. It’s funny—while I often have trouble remembering my schedule, or what I did in the evening last Thursday, I seem to have a near-photographic memory when it comes to posters.
Would you concur that there is some quirky gene inside you that makes you a posterphile?
Oh, do I possess some quirky jeans. I am not entirely sure this is the business I have chosen; I am fairly certain it chose me. And I am a lucky man for it. Much like some people are hoarders and others are strict minimalists, I think that there are people who relate to material objects in different ways. I could not imagine a life without a lot of stuff. Maybe it is an extension of my ADHD, but I find it calming and enriching to be surrounded by items and posters. With their bold colors and captivating designs, they fit right into that mindset of mine.
The New York poster show sounds like a similar native obsession I’ve had for NYC (in art, design, cartoon, photography, souvenirs, etc.). What do the NYC posters say to you emotionally and intellectually?
New York posters to me pretty much sum up my life experience. They are a confluence of almost everything I hold dear. I was born and raised on the island of Manhattan. I studied history at Cornell University, and I now have worked with vintage posters and graphic design for almost 30 years. To be able to do a deep dive into the history of New York City travel and see how the city was advertised to tourists and emigres, etc., was a next-level experience for me. And one of the reasons it was next level was the unexpected rigors of academia. Having been writing poster catalogues for decades now, I foolishly assumed that writing wall notes for a museum exhibition would be a piece of cake. Little did I know about the research, and the editing and the proofreading and the rewriting, etc., that would have to be done before the project was polished enough to be presented to the public.
What factors determine the thematic range of your Swann auctions? And are there areas you are more interested in than others?
For a long time Swann conducted two general Vintage Poster auctions every year. These posters were organized alphabetically by artist and were a hodgepodge of topics and themes. Then, in 1998, I was called to Laurel, MS, where an art museum had discovered a cache of posters hidden under a rug that had been stashed there by a librarian who brought them back after visiting Europe in the 1930s. It was such a collection, largely of images I had never seen before, that I felt compelled to offer them for sale in a special auction, “100 Rare and Important Travel Posters.” It was the first time that I was aware of when travel posters were placed in as esteemed a position as their counterparts. Until that time travel posters were almost considered second-class collectibles within the poster market. The success of that auction (97 out of 100 sold, and the sale dollar total exceeded the pre-sale high estimate) led to the establishment of a yearly auction of “Rare and Important Travel Posters,” which now has been a signature auction in Swann’s yearly schedule for a quarter of a century.
You mentioned in your public conversation with Poster House chief curator Angelina Lippert (with whom you have a wonderful rapport, by the way), that value (i.e., rarity) is measured by how many times a poster is sold. What are other factors in determining why certain posters are collected?
With the success of the Travel Poster auctions we began to think of other areas of poster collecting which we could highlight by doing featured auctions, and the next area we came to was Art Nouveau posters, followed a few years later by Modernist Posters (the name of which became “Graphic Design” about five years ago).
You have the gallery but do you also have a personal collection? If so, what dominates your collecting passions?
Of all we handle I think that travel posters are my most favorite, but even as I write that I realize that many of the Modernist posters/graphic design images are fantastic as well.
My personal collection is of Czech posters. My father was born in Prague and I lived there for a number of years in the early 1990s. Together he and I began collecting and have amassed a collection which is larger than in the collections of most Czech museums (I love this “fact” because it is so difficult to prove!) We have hundreds of posters ranging from the years of the Austro-Hungarian Embassy, through the First World War, the First Republic and then on through the Second World War and the Communist Era.
We have mounted several exhibitions of our collection, including a 2013 Exhibition at the Dutch Poster Museum in Hoorn of Czech Modernist Posters (1898–1938) and a 2016 exhibition of Czech Travel Posters at the Czech and Slovak Museum & Library in Cedar Rapids, IA.
You clearly look into the distant past and propagate its meaning through posters. But have you looked into your crystal ball to see what the future will be like for posters as an artform? And for practical purposes, now that LED screens compete with printing on paper and vinyl?
People collect posters for any number of reasons. From the most mundane, “the colors match the couch and the shades,” to the esoteric, “this is the ship that my parents emigrated on to the United States.” People collect artists, they collect eras, they collect subjects and styles, they collect to decorate and enrich homes, restaurants and offices, they collect ski posters for their chalets, and tennis posters for their summer cottages. I once knew a woman who collected posters of women with ruddy cheeks!
By virtue of dealing with printed matter (including books, prints and more), are you intentionally preserving a legacy? Or do you foresee digital or optical technologies as becoming part of your wheelhouse?
As our society veers more and more into the digital world, with Kindles replacing books, NFTs attempting to replace art and social media now the hoardings that all turn to for amusement and enlightenment, it gives me just cause to worry about the future of printed advertising. But rather than think about it in a broad and anxiety-filled manner, I prefer to focus on the fact that as printed media becomes scarcer and scarcer, so too, as the thinking goes in my head, does interest in earlier forms of printing rise. I have faith that a future generation of collectors and enthusiasts like myself will eagerly seek out remnants of previous eras. Current-day collectors and institutions are working hard to preserve this legacy of the past, and as the years progress this material will be even more eagerly sought after by collectors, and even harder to find. (It’s a nice dream, isn’t it? Please don’t burst my bubble!)
Now that your dream of an NYC exhibit has been realized, what other dreams can come true?
With the New York Travel Poster exhibition behind me, there are several other projects for me to focus on. In the same vein, I am currently working on a book of Czech travel posters, which I hope to have finished in the next year or so, and for the past two years I have been working on a film project in Prague on the history of Czech graphic design. I also have begun thinking about doing another exhibition at Poster House (if they will allow me) in time for the institution’s 10th anniversary, which is five years from now.
(Note; Daily Heller @ Poster House, 2023.)