From the neon-lit streets of New York City to the tropical shores of Hawaii, the golden age of travel took flight Oct. 3 at Heritage Auctions, as its inaugural Wanderlust Travel Poster Auction realized $127,628. The event, Heritage’s first dedicated auction of travel posters, brought together striking examples of 20th-century advertising art celebrating destinations across the globe, with vintage airline posters, mid-century modern design and the enduring romance of travel taking center stage.
Leading the results were two distinctly different visions of American travel, each realizing $6,250: David Klein’s psychedelic “TWA: New York” poster from the late 1960s and John Atherton’s lush 1948 “Pan American: Hawaii by Clipper.” Together, the two works captured the remarkable evolution of commercial aviation advertising, from the elegance of postwar air travel to the electric optimism of the Jet Age.
Klein’s “TWA: New York,” a dazzling Day-Glo composition featuring a neon-hued Manhattan skyline beneath a sleek jet aircraft, exemplifies the artist's celebrated approach to airline advertising. Created during an era when TWA embraced bold colors, experimental graphics and psychedelic imagery, the poster transforms the city's nighttime energy into a vibrant celebration of modern travel. Its geometric forms and saturated palette reflect the visual experimentation that made Klein’s work a defining feature of mid-century American graphic design.
The $6,250 result was particularly notable for the poster’s later and scarcer variation, which depicts a stylized jet rather than the Lockheed Super Constellation featured in Klein’s earlier design. That distinction marks a pivotal transition in commercial aviation, when the arrival of jet aircraft transformed both the experience and imagery of international travel.
Matching that result was Atherton’s “Pan American: Hawaii by Clipper,” a 1948 advertisement that offered travelers an irresistible vision of paradise. A graceful hula dancer welcomes visitors against a backdrop of tropical flowers, pineapples, sugar cane and Diamond Head, while a Pan Am Flying Clipper crosses the distant horizon. The composition reflects the optimism of the postwar years, when expanding passenger air service opened new possibilities for long-distance journeys and destinations once considered remote became the subjects of aspirational advertising campaigns.
While Klein’s New York poster celebrates the speed and spectacle of the Jet Age, Atherton’s Hawaii illustration offers a more leisurely invitation to escape. Both demonstrate the power of travel posters to sell more than a destination: They offered a vision of the world and the promise of experiencing it firsthand.
The auction’s next-highest result belonged to another beloved destination, one where fantasy and travel have long gone hand in hand. A ca. 1955 “United Air Lines: Disneyland” poster featuring artwork by Stanley Walter Galli sold for $4,750. Created during Disneyland’s earliest years, the poster captures the enchantment of Walt Disney’s newly opened theme park through a lush, storybook illustration of the Jungle Cruise, with Sleeping Beauty Castle rising in the distance. The artwork’s distinctive mid-century aesthetic also connects two collecting interests: vintage airline advertising and early Disneyland memorabilia.
Disneyland appeared again among the auction's leading lots with another work by Klein. His ca. 1955 “TWA: Disneyland - Los Angeles” poster realized $3,750, offering a strikingly different interpretation of the park during its inaugural year. Klein’s modernist design brings together Sleeping Beauty Castle, the Main Street Railway Station, the Jungle Cruise and the futuristic TWA Moonliner soaring above Tomorrowland. The Moonliner, in particular, serves as a reminder of the moment when air travel, science fiction and America’s technological ambitions converged in popular culture.
Klein’s influence extended well beyond New York and Disneyland. His 1960 “TWA: Africa” poster brought $3,250, adding another bold example of the illustrator's unmistakable style to the auction’s top results. Rather than relying on a conventional landscape, Klein transforms a procession of zebras into a dynamic graphic composition, their black-and-white stripes set against vertical bands of brilliant red and orange. His approach helped establish TWA’s travel advertisements as works of modern graphic design in their own right, with visual appeal extending beyond their original commercial purpose.
Hawaii made another appearance among the leading sellers with a ca. 1960s “Delta Air Lines: Hawaii” silkscreen poster by John Hardy, which also realized $3,250. The cheerful composition features a smiling woman wearing a bright yellow flower lei and hibiscus in her hair, while a surfer rides a wave in the background. The image distills the tropical destination into a vision of sunshine, recreation and relaxation. Like Atherton’s earlier Pan Am design, Hardy’s poster demonstrates the enduring appeal of Hawaii in American travel advertising, even as the visual language shifted from postwar illustration to the brighter, more streamlined aesthetics of the 1960s.
The auction also traveled beyond the world of commercial aviation. A 1938 titled “Côte d’Azur” poster created by Roland Hugon for French National Railways sold for $3,000, offering a glimpse into an earlier chapter of European tourism. Promoting overnight train service to the French Riviera, the poster frames a Mediterranean harbor scene through a railway carriage window, inviting travelers to imagine boarding a train in the evening and awakening to the sunlit beauty of the Côte d’Azur the following morning. Like airlines, railways also relied on evocative imagery to transform transportation into an experience, and Hugon’s poster captures that promise with an elegant visual narrative.
Rounding out the featured results was Klein’s ca. 1960s “TWA: Miami,” which realized $3,000. The poster takes a playful approach to the Florida destination, using an oversized pair of retro cat-eye sunglasses to frame a blazing sun and a stylized waterfront skyline filled with resorts. Its sunny palette and inventive composition perfectly capture the glamour and leisure associated with Miami during the mid-century travel boom.
More than advertisements for places to visit, these posters are enduring records of how the world once imagined travel, and how artists helped make those journeys irresistible.
Complete results can be found at www.HA.com/42199.