Grèce: the golden age of the Greek travel poster

For half a century the Greek National Tourism Organisation did something most states only talk about: it handed the poster to the best painters and photographers in the country. Between Nelly's lens on the Parthenon in 1929 and the flat red geometry of the 1960s and 70s, the EOT poster became a small national art form, printed in Athens, pasted up in Paris, London and Zurich, and quietly responsible for how much of the world still pictures Greece.

The names in the credits are the canon of twentieth-century Greek art. Yannis Moralis drew Hydra in 1948; Panagiotis Tetsis and Spyros Vassiliou painted the Aegean and its figureheads; Perikles Vyzantios lined a mole with caiques. A generation later the graphic designers Freddie Carabott and Michalis Katzourakis stripped the same country down to flat colour and a single lower-case word, greece, and made it look entirely modern.

They were commercial objects with a job to do, and they did it with more restraint than the holiday they were selling. We have gathered ten of them here, from the collection of the National Historical Museum in Athens, in the order the years fall. Read them as design, as soft propaganda, and as a portrait of a country deciding how it wanted to be seen.