A poster made for an exhibition that was a landmark in design and art history, and which a collector spent a quarter of a century trying to track down, is coming up for auction with a top sale estimate of £200,000.
The poster was designed by the typographer and graphic designer Joost Schmidt for the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar, which publicised Walter Gropius' Bauhaus movement, whose influence survives today in minimalism.
The house specially built for the exhibition is now a World Heritage Site but almost all the posters for the show disintegrated, printed on atrocious quality paper at the height of German inflation.
The Bauhaus poster, which bears the words Staatliches Bauhaus, is the rarest in a collection of more than 100 to be auctioned in London by Christie's this October.
The posters in the auction date from 1894 to 1988 and represent a fraction of the collection of Martijn le Coultre, a Dutch enthusiast and author specialising in poster design history, whose collection began with a poster on his bedroom wall given by his aunt when he was helping clear out some junk, and which now includes more than 5,000 examples.
Of the Bauhaus poster he said: "It took me 25 years to find this work, now it's my turn to offer it to another collector."
Another rarity in the sale is an Art Deco gem of a poster by Jean Carlu, estimated to be worth £40,000, which was created for the opening night of the Theatre Pigalle, in 1929. Instead of glamorous actors it shows the lighting rig and back-stage machinery.
Another poster – by the Moscow avant-garde Stenberg brothers, made for the Russian release of the film The General, directed by Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman – is estimated at up to £50,000.
One of the earliest posters in the sale, designed by Jan Toorop in the 1890s, shows two glamorous sinuous women against a richly patterned background – the bottle poured by one gives the game away: salad oil. The poster was such a hit that Art Nouveau came to be known as "salad oil style" in the Netherlands.
Sophie Churcher, a specialist in vintage posters, said the artwork was so striking because the posters, designed to last only a few weeks before being torn down, had to grab the attention of passersby in seconds. "Today these posters connect with people in a very direct and immediate manner, and are just as powerful as when they were first presented to the public."