Nord Express

Why it works

No passengers, no scenery, no destination: Cassandre's poster for the Nord Express, the international express linking London and Paris with Brussels, Berlin, Warsaw and Riga, shows only the locomotive. The viewer is placed at track level, looking up at a towering engine built from clean geometric planes, while straight lines race toward a distant vanishing point to make speed itself visible. The names of the partner railways are pushed out to a band around the frame, so nothing competes with the machine. It is studied as a defining image of Art Deco travel advertising, Cubist in its visual language and modern in its subject, selling the glamour of the journey rather than its timetable. MoMA, which gave Cassandre a solo exhibition in 1936 and announced him as probably the world's foremost poster designer, holds a copy given by the French National Railroads; the V&A and the Minneapolis Institute of Art hold others.