Art for Art House: The Posters of Peter Strausfeld

Poster House, the first museum in the United States dedicated to the global history of posters, presents a new capsule exhibition for the fall 2025 season. Art for Art House: The Posters of Peter Strausfeld  will open on November 13, 2025 and close on April 12, 2026. The two main exhibitions, The Future Was Then: The Changing Face of Fascist Italy and Blazing A Trail: Dorothy Waugh’s National Parks Posters are on view at the museum now until February 22

Art for Art House features posters designed between 1947 and 1980 by German refugee, Peter Strausfeld, who created unique, compelling posters for London’s Academy Cinema—the city’s premiere art house movie theater.

Founded by Elsie Cohen in 1931, the Academy specialized in international films that eschewed classic Hollywood narratives, highlighting works by now-famous directors like Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, François Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman, Andrzej Wajda, and Satyajit Ray. While these films now hold cult status for cinema aficionados, in the early to mid-20th century, art house remained a novel and daring form of cinema that few theaters showcased.

In 1937, George Hoellering was hired by Elsie Cohen to be the Academy’s deputy general manager. During the height of World War II and Great Britain’s new involvement in the war, Hoellering was sent to an internment camp on the Isle of Man for being an Austrian-Jewish refugee. There, Hoellering met Strausfeld and formed a deep friendship, after which he hired Strausfeld to create the Academy’s unique advertising posters. Strausfeld would create these posters from 1945 – 1980.

First posted at bomb sites around the city and impacted by wartime paper shortages, Strausfeld created over 300 compositions that populated London’s subway system and represented not just the niche market for the cinema but also that which was occupied by the films themselves. They remain some of the most unique examples of localized cinema advertising in movie history.

The exhibition will be accompanied by the first English-language publication dedicated to Strausfeld.