Dress up your home (or garage) with these vintage Porsche posters
Vintage Porsche ads are famous for their creative and colorful graphics, iconic fonts, and motorsport-heavy themes that sold quite a few road cars by simply hanging on the right walls all around the globe. Part of that amazing work was done by legendary illustrator Erich Strenger, who photographed race cars by day only to dream up Porsche’s futuristic typography by night. Starting from 1951 until he passed the torch in 1988, the master of Porsche ads created a new poster for every Porsche victory—of which there were plenty, all around the globe.
Due to the global lockdown, auctioneers Mecum and RM Sotheby’s are both holding online-only events for Porsche’s best and rarest posters, with Mecum mostly focusing on the 1980s and motorsports with its 40 lots and RM Sotheby’s covering a wider range of large-format ads through 72 lots spanning from the ’50s through 2009.
Closing in six days, the RM Sotheby’s sale lets you snap up 356 memorabilia such as an original Columbia Records promotional poster featuring Janis Joplin atop her famous Porsche 356 C cabriolet, as well as decades’ worth of racing posters for events spanning from the Nürburgring through the Safari Rally to Sebring. There are also plenty of road car ads featuring all sorts of classic 911s and 356s; and for “the finest in the 1 ½ -liter class,” you should just ask U.S. distributor Hoffman of New York.
The Mecum auction ends in a little over a day, so you better hurry if your home badly needs some visual upgrades in the form of Porsche racing posters from the 1980s. With mostly American posters and a few European classics thrown in for good measure, Mecum’s most recent offers feature two Porsche 911 GT3 R victories from 2000—at Petit Le Mans and the Grand Prix of Charlotte. And just like those racing 911s, you should be quick to Mecum’s site to make the most of this sale before the (virtual) hammers drop.
