02/23/2026
"If poster art is a mass medium, here is the punchy exception: images made by one person, for one movie, at one cinema."
The New Yorker highlights the work of Peter Strausfeld, on view at Poster House and in a book from RIT Press.
The artist Peter Strausfeld was born in Germany, in 1910. Nourished on a love of Expressionist art, and having designed work that was critical of Na**sm, he left his home country in 1938 for the safety of Britain.
In the 1940s, Strausfeld quickly found himself interned as an “enemy alien”—a term applied to almost anyone, including Jewish refugees, who had fled from countries with which Britain was then at war. Strausfeld was taken to the Isle of Man, where he met an Austrian film producer and director named George Hoellering.
Once released, the two men made animated films for the British war effort, and then, in 1944, Hoellering took charge of the Academy, a cinema on London’s Oxford Street. The storied reputation of the theatre was fortified during Hoellering’s reign, and crystallized by an unforgettable series of posters designed by Strausfeld. They were displayed not just outside the cinema but around London, and they confirmed the Academy’s status as a mecca for the adventurous moviegoer. Read more about the artist and his new exhibit in New York: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/P3b0RW
