1932 Sante Fe Railroad Olympics Poster
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GUEST:
I purchased this on January 1, New Year's Day, this year at a consignment auction. It's promoting the Olympic Games and had a Santa Fe logo down here, so I was just intrigued by the multifaceted nature of it and just the intricacies of the design and particularly the color. I just thought it was really great.
APPRAISER:
How much did you pay for it?
GUEST:
$250 at auction and I took it into a gallery and had it framed and we had it matted. It had a tear up here, about four- or five-inch tear, had some chipping on the edges, so we put a mat on it and framed it up nice, and it just... I wish I had a picture of it before because it looks just so much nicer now.
APPRAISER:
I don't know if you're aware of the fact that Olympic memorabilia is very highly collected and can be rather pricey. But I also don't know if you're aware that this is not an official Olympic poster.
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
Do you know what differentiates this from an official Olympic poster?
GUEST:
Well, I'm kind of assuming that maybe Santa Fe was a sponsor of the Olympic Games. I don't know for sure, but that's the only way, I think, how they tied together, is that they were some sort of sponsor or something for the games, but I don't know.
APPRAISER:
Well, you also brought along an official program of the 1932 Olympic games. The program itself isn't worth that much money, but I wanted to show it because what differentiates official Olympic memorabilia from unofficial Olympic memorabilia is really the existence of the five Olympic rings, which is the universal symbol of the Olympiad, which does not appear on the poster. So the poster isn't official Olympic memorabilia.
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
But here's what I can tell you about it. The artist is Hernando Villa, who's a very well regarded painter and graphic designer. And while he is famous for his paintings, he actually spent 40 years doing commercial graphic designs for the Santa Fe Railroad. Now, when you look at this poster, it doesn't really have a lot to do with the Olympics. Besides the absence of the Olympic rings, I'm not entirely sure archery was even an Olympic event back in 1932. When Villa designed it, he was designing a poster to advertise the Indian sights and sounds that a traveler would see traveling between Chicago and Los Angeles. It even says down here, "The Indian detours," which were a side route that the train would take through the Indian territories so train riders would be able to see some of the Native American culture.
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
So he designed this image for the train company. And then, when the Olympics came around, the train company had the idea to use the poster to advertise travel to Los Angeles for the games. So it's not that the Santa Fe railroad was a sponsor of the Olympics, they took it upon themselves to do cross-promotion. So they were basically saying, "Go to the Olympic Games via our trains." Down here it says where it was printed in Chicago, the Rand McNally Company, who a lot of people know through their work with maps. So we have this poster. You paid $250 for it and then you had it restored. How much did you pay for the restorations?
GUEST:
I paid about $150 to have it, some minor restoration and the framing, matting done to it.
APPRAISER:
Any idea what it's worth today?
GUEST:
Well, I'm hoping it's worth at least $400. Hopefully $500 to $800.
APPRAISER:
Villa is a very popular artist. His work is very scarce. In the research I did, I was only able to find one other example of this poster coming up for auction. It wasn't that long ago, it was in 2012. It came up for sale in Europe at an auction of Olympic memorabilia. And at that auction, it sold for $8,000.
GUEST:
Wow, no kidding.
APPRAISER:
Now, that poster was in more or less the same condition as this poster, but as you pointed out, there are some condition problems. I think to be safe, at auction, I would estimate this piece between $6,000 and $9,000.
GUEST:
Wow, cool, great. Well, I liked it before and now I love it, so that's great.
APPRAISER:
By the way, the official Olympic poster, the actual poster, not the brochure, is only worth about $4,000.
GUEST:
Oh, really?
APPRAISER:
The official poster is worth less than the unofficial poster.
GUEST:
Well, neat.
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