Levi's Posters, ca. 1945
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GUEST:
They've been in our family business for as long as I can remember-- I think from the 1950s, when we first started carrying Levi's products.
APPRAISER:
And your family business is the clothing business?
GUEST:
Is a clothing business.
APPRAISER:
So they're hanging up in the family store?
GUEST:
They are now. They were upstairs in a store room. And one was curled up, rolled up, and kind of smashed.
APPRAISER:
And you actually, you had a specific question for me, didn't you?
GUEST:
I had a question about Jo Mora, and why he came to publish a poster like this for Levi's?
APPRAISER:
It's a great question, because Jo Mora, who, I don't know if you know, was born in Uruguay and moved to America, lived in California, and became a great artist of the cowboys and Indians. He illustrated several books. He was also a pictorialist map-maker-- you can see how this is filled with a lot of little different images, that's called the pictorialist style. And Jo Mora was most known for his pictorialist maps. When I saw this piece, I got very excited, because I didn't know that Jo Mora had ever done anything as commercial as a poster, and I thought, "What a great confluence. "Jo Mora, the great cowboy artist, is doing a poster for Levi's." And that was a really exciting thing. However, this is actually an image that Jo Mora published himself in 1933, and in 1933, the image was called "Sweetheart of the Rodeo."
GUEST:
Oh, really?
APPRAISER:
Which you can see, and that's the title of the print, and Levi's adopted the image for their own advertising. And it makes perfect sense, because the image is the history of cowboys, from the Spanish conquistadors through the modern-day, range-riding, smokin', rootin'-tootin' cowboy. Now, had this been the original Jo Mora "Sweetheart of the Rodeo" print, it would've been worth about $1,200. As the Levi's poster, several years after the print, it's actually worth about the same, because it's such a great confluence...
GUEST:
Wonderful...
APPRAISER:
...of art and industry and commerce. But you know, you also brought another poster, and I have to tell you, it's the first of its kind that I've ever seen.
GUEST:
Really?
APPRAISER:
And because it's a great picture of cowboys, because it's an American classic, like Levi's jeans, at auction, this piece, even in the bad condition that it's in, would be worth about $1,000 to $1,500.
GUEST:
Wow, that's wonderful. I like it because of what it says. We're in a dying small town.
APPRAISER:
Uh-huh.
GUEST:
And this is very pertinent to that.
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