Hello all.
I'm new to APF and this is my first post. Hope it gets you thinking.
Something that I have wondered about for some time is, "When is a Poster still considered a poster?".
Many times I have seen posters prior to being linen backed and there is maybe a little over (or under) 50% of the actual poster to work with. So, once it has been backed, it now is complete, with paper fills and in-painting and usually looks fantastic.
But surely if someone at some time were to have the poster removed from the backing, then they would still only have the half of the poster that was original and the rest would be floating around in the bath with the backing.
So, what I am wondering is this. If you start off with a few pieces of an incomplete poster then it is not going to be worth much at all, if anything, so how can the value suddenly sky rocket when in truth you still only have an incomplete poster but it has had paper added and been professionally painted, because no matter how good it looks, it's still not a complete, original poster, as the paper infills will be from a totally differant poster and the paint is not the same, nor done by the same artist.
I do believe that restoration can go to far. Sure the poster will look great but, it isn't an original poster. It didn't come originally from the printers (well, 50% of it didn't anyway). So how can it be valued in the same range as the same poster that is complete but not backed?.
Also the question is, when can you say that you have a genuine backed poster?. My thinking is that there has to be at least 80%. Maybe corners missing, paper lose to a small section and maybe paper lose around fold lines. But if a very large portion of the poster is missing then it cannot be claimed to be original once it's restored because most of it is, "fake".
When you buy a poster that has been linen backed from an on-line auction site they can never usually tell you who done the work and most can only guess at the amount of restoration that has been done, so you never really know how much of the original poster was there before work started. this is especially true with older rarer posters.
Anyway, something for you to think about.