¡Hola! Poster House Exhibit Spotlights Puerto Rico’s Lorenzo Homar

By Phyllis Eckhaus

Posters are not unlike community newspapers—when they grab you and get their message across, they sometimes transcend their ephemeral moment and materials. And wow, the posters of Lorenzo Homar, on display at Poster House through Sept. 7, are timelessly transcendent. Homar’s spectacular work is attention-grabbing, gorgeous, and technically innovative.

His posters open a fascinating window into Puerto Rican culture and history from the 1950s through the 1990s. When Homar—who had trained at the Art Students League and Pratt, and apprenticed as a jewelry designer at Cartier—returned to Puerto Rico in 1950, the island had recently held its first democratic election for governor, won by liberal reformer Luis Muñoz Marin. Marín launched social programs reminiscent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, designed to improve the lives of Puerto Ricans, especially in the countryside.

Homar—a socialist supporter of Puerto Rican independence—headed two WPA-style government agencies for which he produced posters. His early poster audience was agricultural workers of limited literacy—and it’s a measure of Homar’s fervent humanism and rigorous aesthetics that what he produced for them was stunning.

The first poster in the exhibit, Los Peloteros (1951), advertises free screenings of a touring movie about underprivileged boys raising money for baseball team uniforms. It showcases Homar’s own “eye on the ball” as a brown boy with an intensely-focused upturned face reaches for the baseball above his head, his arm with catcher’s mitt extended. Everything in the poster, including the vermilion accents within an otherwise muted color palette, points to the film name, which is artfully suspended in the dramatic space between mitt and ball.

Modesta (1956) advertises free screenings of another touring film, the story—loosely based on Lysistrata—of a peasant woman who stands up to the machismo of her husband and organizes the women of her village to do likewise. Homar’s poster is remarkable for the dignity of Modesta, her pensive figure portrayed with simple eloquence in large linear profile. Equally remarkable is the poster’s technical wizardry—the small inset of Modesta’s peasant husband and the wood against which Modesta leans appear etched like a lithograph, an effect Homar meticulously achieved within his use of silk screening. I first attended the exhibit with an artist friend who’s a printmaker— “how’d he do that?!” she asked repeatedly, both flummoxed and marveling.

Curator Alejandro Anreus, emeritus professor of Art History and Latin American Studies at William Paterson University, told The Village View that Homar was, not for nothing, a lifelong gymnast; his exceptional discipline elevated both his work and his teaching. “He would do 60 to 100 prints before he was satisfied with the end product. So it’s about being very precise, but also incredibly focused and patient.”

Each poster was approached with intense commitment. Anreus said that Homar’s poster students all reported that he would give them a topic to research, then ask them to produce multiple proposals considering “whether you’re going to use typography or calligraphy” and what the color structure would be. “Then you would do studies of that— varying from doing colored pencil to watercolor to even wash or acrylic. And then, once you had done all that process of thinking through the image, then you would be taught how to cut the screens and create the actual full screen, but [Homar] was very, very conceptual in introducing the technical to his students.”

This account might suggest that Homar was fussy, yet there’s no fussiness to his work—just artistic intelligence in full passionate bloom. My favorites include two magnificent 1964 jazz posters—visceral joys to behold that also reward close consideration. Gran Baile Anual de la Federación de Músicos de Puerto Rico (Grand Annual Ball of the Federation of Musicians of Puerto Rico) features the boldly scripted name of the event erupting from the bell of a trumpet being played by an intensely-focused musician. He’s portrayed in black and gray yet the red, orange, gold, cream, olive and teal arising from his instrument surround him in a mid-century modern envelope of sound. In the San Juan Jazz Workshop, the word JAZZ explodes into a vermilion space, each letter radiating improvisationally from the center of a drum cymbal dividing the poster into sections. Again, the letters make music that atmospherically covers the confines of the poster.

The posters Homar produced advertising the work of his fellow artists provide additional insight into what I am tempted to call his aesthetic integrity. Homar often, with permission, integrated the artwork of the exhibited artist into the poster. Anreus shows us the original art—and I was struck by how Homar repeatedly helps us to appreciate the artist by focusing our eyes on what he would have us see. For example, his 1970 poster announcing an exhibit of the Mexican muralist and printer José Clemente Orozco reproduces, via silkscreen, Orozco’s lithograph of hands—drawing the viewer into Orozco’s work through Homar’s introduction of color and an angled background that serves as a frame.

Anreus characterized Homar as a radical autodidact, who never finished high school yet read voraciously in English and Spanish, treasuring especially the work of Bertrand Russell, the British logician and radical activist. Homar wanted to get to the root of things, rejecting the distinction between applied and fine art. Anreus agreed, declaring “a great poster is a work of art.”

Poster House, founded in 2015 and opened in 2019, is the first museum in the United States devoted to posters. Director and curator Angelina Lippert told The Village View that each exhibit is planned out five to seven years in advance, to allow for fact checking. She takes pride in presenting “levels of richness that all audiences can enjoy,” from first graders to scholars. Located at 119 West 23rd Street, west of Sixth Avenue, the museum is open to the public Thursday through Sunday and is free on Fridays and the third Sunday of the month.