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Vive l’Affiche!
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It
is hard to imagine the cities of the world without posters. Yet
it wasn’t until the mid-1860s that Jules Chéret developed the color
lithography technique which would transform Paris into the "picture
gallery of the street." As Charles Hiatt wrote in 1895:
Chéret’s theatrical and airy style recalled Tiepolo and Watteau, representing a late but highly visible example of the Rococo Revival in France. His charming ladies became so well-known that the Parisians gave them their own nickname: "Chérettes." With the passage of a law in 1881 that created official posting places, the poster industry was born. Every poster required a tax stamp to indicate that a fee had been paid for the right to post it. The tax, based on square footage, led to the adoption of standard poster sizes. Advertisers worked with artists, printers and posting companies to create, post and maintain posters on the street. In 1884, the first poster exhibition was held in
Paris; two years later the first book on posters was written; and in
1890 Chéret
was immortalized in the first one-man poster show. It celebrated the
man whose legacy included not only the innovation that made mass postering
possible, but also more than 1000 original designs. |
| The Poster Craze of the Belle Epoque [View Posters] | |
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The 1890s,
known as the Belle Epoque, were the golden age of the lithographic
poster. Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, and Toulouse-Lautrec all produced
highly original masterpieces which elevated the poster into an art form.
Toulouse Lautrec’s first poster, Moulin Rouge, which was inspired
in part by Japanese woodblock prints, created an instant sensation in
1891. The complete three-sheet version of this poster has sold for
$220,000, the highest price ever paid for a fine art poster at auction.
In 1894, Alphonse Mucha, a Czech working in Paris, created the first masterpiece of Art Nouveau design. The flowery, ornate style was born literally overnight when Mucha was pressed to produce a poster for Sarah Bernhardt, the American actress who had taken Paris by storm. Bearing the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites, the Arts and Crafts Movement, and Byzantine art, this style was to dominate the Parisian scene for the next ten years and to be the major international decorative art movement until World War I. By 1895, a poster craze was in full bloom. Great artists had transformed commercial art, small literary magazines were publishing images by poster artists and several dealers had arisen to sell extra copies of the best posters. (Early in the decade the pioneering dealer, Sagot, listed 2200 posters in his sales catalog.) In 1896 Chéret himself seized on this commercial opportunity by creating the Masters of the Poster series, miniature lithographs of the 240 best posters from around the world. Four were printed each month for five years and delivered to subscribers. [ top ] |
| 1900 to World War I [View Posters] | |
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Several
developments led to the decline of the Parisian poster craze early in
the new century. First came Chéret's
abandonment of poster art for painting after 1900. Toulouse Lautrec died
in 1901, having created barely more than 30 posters. Three years later,
Mucha left Paris for the United States and then Czechoslovakia. But
equally important was the decline of Art Nouveau. Although it would linger
on until World War I, much of its creative vitality was spent.
The French poster was revived by the arrival of a young Italian, Leonetto Cappiello. He began as a caricaturist of Parisian celebrities and by 1905 began to abandon Art Nouveau for a more simple and direct poster style. Cappiello understood that posters must make their point instantly on the busy boulevards, so he focused his message on a single, humorous metaphor to surprise and delight the viewer. This formula, so simple in concept but so difficult in practice, made Cappiello the undisputed master of poster artist for more than two decades. At the start of the new century there were other new design directions. The roots of a new international style, later dubbed Art Deco, were planted by French fashion illustrators. They were profoundly influenced by the arrival in Paris of Diaghilev and the Ballet Russe, whose performances of Cleopatra in 1909 and Scheherazade in 1910 opened a new world of Near Eastern exoticism. Their impact, along with the avant-garde art of Matisse and the Fauves, Picasso and the Cubists, and even the Italian Futurists working in Paris, would become more apparent after World War I. [ top ] |
| World War I [View Posters] | |
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The poster
played a key role in World War I, where it was the most important vehicle
for mass communication. The French, like all combatants, turned to the
poster to direct the national war effort, including recruiting, conservation,
security, production and finance. The brutality of the war rendered the
dreamy and soft Art Nouveau style irrelevant, and most posters were executed
in a direct and simple illustrative manner easily appreciated by the masses.
Some of the best posters were created by Sem and Steinlen.
[ top ] |
| Between the Wars [View Posters] | |
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World War I
destroyed the innocent optimism of the new century. Anxiety about the
destructive power of modern technology gave rise to the art movements
of Dada and Surrealism in the years following World War I. In the graphic
arts, Art Nouveau's organic inspiration was replaced by Art Deco's often
impersonal and sometimes menacing machine-age aesthetic. Power and speed
became primary themes. Shapes were simplified and streamlined, and curved
letter forms were replaced by sleek, angular ones. With the first posters
from A.M. Cassandre in 1923, the reign of Cappiello finally ended. Cassandre’s
posters for the Normandie, Étoile du Nord
and Nord Express, strongly influenced by the Cubists Leger
and Corbusier, delighted the public with their aggressive perspective
and bold geometry.
The Jazz Age saw an outpouring of innovation in French poster design. Cassandre collaborated with Charles Loupot at the Alliance Graphique, and Paul Colin opened a graphic design school after discovering Josephine Baker and producing the Bal Négre. Art Deco, like Art Nouveau before it, spread quickly to the rest of Europe and America. [ top ] |
| After World War II [View Posters] | |
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After World
War II, the French poster declined in importance as radio and other media
became dominant. The economics of labor-intensive lithography also became
prohibitive, and advertisers switched to offset printing and silkscreening,
techniques which could not produce the rich tones and textures of lithography.
The proliferation of photography also diminished the quality of most poster
designs. The Art Deco tradition was nevertheless carried on in France
into the 1980s by Bernard Villemot, who created wonderful campaigns for
Bally, Air France, Orangina and Perrier.
Villemot was rivaled by Raymond Savignac, a disciple of Cassandre at the Alliance Graphique. Savignac began in the ‘30s with a clean, intellectual Art Deco style that reflected his training. In the post-war years he began to use humor and whimsy to get his point across, much like the artist Herbert Leupin in Switzerland. The ‘60s featured many great protest posters from the Paris student uprisings; the ‘70s and ‘80s saw the rise of Postmodernism, the playful, somewhat chaotic style of contemporary graphic design. The collective known as Grapus created many fine works in this genre until their dissolution in 1991. [ top ] |
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french poster history 
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