France in the ‘Belle Epoque’—roughly the last quarter of the 19th century—produced an amazing variety of innovations in many fields, from the Eiffel Tower to Impressionism to Art Nouveau, but it has taken more than a century for a major museum to highlight the significance of one that is both less visible and glaringly visible: the modern advertising poster.
That’s the subject of the exhibit titled Art is in the Street, at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris until July 6th. It’s a big exhibition—over 230 pieces and many narrative labels—and has pushed aside some of the usual galleries for space.
Some of the posters are already familiar to many of us because they’ve become familiar bits of our culture, or because in some cases they embody products and trademarks that are still on sale. Two examples: Toulouse-Lautrec’s poster for Aristide Bruant and his cabaret, and the Petite Escolier of LU biscuits.
And that makes a point that is clear throughout the exhibition—there was much less separation between “fine art” and “commercial art” than we are accustomed to today.
Part of the reason why posters suddenly were everywhere in new ways is the development of efficient four-color lithography, which helped turn advertising and notices from acres of text to arresting images with minimal wording. Among the first to take advantage was Jules Cheret, himself a printer as well as a painter.
Many artists of the time were interested in experimenting with new media of all sorts along with their experimentation with styles. Cheret’s posters helped draw some of the biggest names in to posters and magazine illustrations, a crew as varied as Manet, Mucha, Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat, Steinlen, Bonnard, Vuillard and more.
While the earliest posters tended to be for local shops and events, over time they came to encompass several different categories. Roughly speaking, I’d call them commercial, advertising products; entertainment, advertising events, venues and entertainers and a category it’s tempting to call political, but will have to settle for ‘social,’ since political, at least for us, has come to represent ‘party politics,’ rather than movements or a call to arms of some sort.
With such a wide variety in the exhibition, I’m forced to limit myself; I wish it were possible to see it all again—and it is, through the exhibit catalog, which has all the art and a series of fascinating (I assume) essays which are not in translation, so my progress with them is very slow.
Posters for entertainers and venues were and are among the most widely-known, for a number of reasons, including frequently-changing shows and performances, but also because many of the artists were friends of the performers and frequent visitors to the clubs and theaters. In some cases, the posters amount to a collaboration between performer and artist—the clearest example being Mucha’s posters for Sarah Bernhardt, who supervised and almost tyrannized every step of the process.
Below, a wall of mostly familiar posters in a familiar style; below a quartet of quite different styles. The Folies Bergere is by Jules Cheret, the Bal Tabarin by Jules Grun, La Scala by Albert Guillaume and the circus poster is, of course, by Georges Seurat.
If some of the posters appear a bit risqué, it’s worth noting that censorship was not unknown, and not only for political reasons. These two versions of a poster by Cheret are an example; the one at left was banned and replaced with the other. Occasionally an artist and his client took a different tack with censors, as seen in a satirical magazine cover by Alfred Choubrac, bearing the legend “This part of the illustration is banned.”
The status of posters as an art form is clear from the annual series of International Exhibitions of Posters that ran for over 20 years; each had posters of its own advertising the show, such as this one.
And now we come to the more political/social aspect of the world of Belle Epoque posters. We are talking about a relatively delicate era in French life here—on the one hand the success in arts and engineering; on the other the memory of the lost war of 1870, of the Paris Commune and of Alsace and Lorraine under German rule. And, it was the era of the Dreyfus case, and a wide movement against the influence of the church.
Beneath that lay the whole panoply of monarchist, Bonapartist, republican and other politics of the entire century. Freedom of the press, established by an 1881 law, didn’t mean a complete absence of censorship, whose severity fluctuated from year to year. Posters with broad social content, such as Fernand Pelez’s ‘Without Asylum’ and the anti-Absinthe poster above were more common than actually political ones until later on. The anti-Absinthe poster almost prefigures the scary art on cigarette packages today.
But time both blurred and sharpened lines; by 1883, it was possible to put on a “Grand Panorama” of the Commune from a sympathetic point of view, even though thousands who had taken part were in exile, in prison or silent.
Posters were a frequent choice for advertising new political magazines of varying views.
Two anti-clerical posters and one naming Freemasonry as the enemy; they date to the period 1902-1905, the year France ultimately separated church and state. A bas les calottes’ or ‘Down with the Clergy, is by Henri Gustave Jossot, who wrote that posters were a key weapon in the anti-clerical cause and that “The poster, on the wall, must scream! It must assault the gaze of passers-by.” In the election poster below, Jews are the enemy.
When the Belle Epoque ended with the outbreak of the First World War, the use of posters did not; on all sides posters became rallying cries and calls for patriotism, enlistment, and more. These two are by Abel Faivre. The first calls out “We’ll get them!” and calls for contributions to the National Defense loan fund; the other, showing a German soldier crushed by a French coin, bears the message, “For Freance, melt your gold! The gold fights for Victory”
And, just for a personal moment: I took this photo at the exhibit, taking advantage of a mirror facing a wall-sized engraving. I seldom appear in my blogs, but here I am…
Very interesting. The art is so beautiful!