Welcome to Montana WPA Poster (Rothstein), 1936

The story of this poster

Jerome Rothstein’s Montana sheet is the warmer of the two the Federal Art Project made for the state in 1936: the same elements as Richard Halls’s — mountain, pines, tipis, water — but printed in terracotta and cream with a dark green for the trees, so the whole poster reads like late afternoon.

It was silkscreened on board in the project’s New York poster division for the United States Travel Bureau’s “See America” campaign. The Library of Congress copy has its mount and colour bar, trimmed here, and shows the slight registration slips of hand screening, kept.

The scan is smaller than the park series, so the print is offered at 12×16, where it carries 246 dots per inch; nothing is upscaled. Hang it with the Halls sheet for the pair, or with the Yellowstone survey map.

Printed to order on archival matte paper, framed in the country of delivery.

Before and after

Left: the archive scan exactly as published. Right: the file that goes to the printer.

Archive scanRestored

Restoration notes

Restoration: trimmed the mount board and scanner margins, balanced levels while keeping the silkscreen's flat inks and paper tone (90% of the original colour retained), removed dust and specks, and applied gentle sharpening. Creases, edge wear and registration slips of the original screen printing are kept where they belong to the object; nothing is redrawn.

Every print carries its archive credit on the packing slip. Paper tone and small imperfections of the original are kept on purpose; nothing is redrawn.