“Power to the Imagination”—with this call to action, artist Pierre Aléchinsky supported the Paris student uprising in May 1968. The spectrum between utopia and lived history gives the political posters of avant-garde artists their special appeal. The postwar era, during which Picasso used his doves of peace to emphasize the struggle for peace, was followed by the upheavals of the 1960s: In the protest-filled year of 1968, many artists supported the students’ demands with posters. The 1970s focused on the freedom of minorities; shortly thereafter, environmental pollution became a major concern for artists such as Joseph Beuys. In the mid-1980s, the immune deficiency disease AIDS drew attention to discrimination and exclusion, and the idea of equality found new expression, particularly among American artists such as Keith Haring and Jenny Holtzer. Globalization following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was also reflected in posters by Robert Rauschenberg and others.

This history of international protest movements, told through powerful works by the great artists of our time, is at the same time a history of the art of that era—viewed selectively, yet still an expression of remarkable continuity and authenticity.