Posters of the Zagreb Assembly

The holdings of the Department of Prints and Drawings of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts keep a small however very important collection of approximately twenty posters related to the Zagreb Assembly (Zagrebački zbor). Apart from an insight into the cultural and social history of Zagreb, they illustrate the evolution of visual culture and advertising graphic design achievements of this trade event in the period between the first Zagreb Assembly, held in 1910, and the Second World War. During the period of its activity, for the purposes of advertising around seventy events – annual exhibitions and trade fairs – the Assembly commissioned an entire series of visual artists. Ljubo Babić, Sergije Glumac, Atelier Three, Maksimilijan Vanka, Zdenka Sertić, Fortuna Atelier, Pavao Bolkovac, Kornel Becić, Edo Murtić, Emil Vičić and others, with their designs varying from the classic descriptive visual language and iconographic motifs to using more contemporary advertising premises of the time, contributed to the visual identity of the Zagreb Assembly. The exhibition focuses on the posters kept in the holdings of the Department of Prints and Drawings of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts and on the pioneers of graphic design from the early 20 ^th century in Croatia who combined aesthetic and commercial elements to design, develop and modify the visual rhetoric intended for a single event.