Always New: The Posters of Jules Chéret

The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1850s-1900s, 2014

A landmark study of posters as art, design, advertising and an object of collecting in the nineteenth century. This is a cultural history that situates the poster at the crossroads of art, design, advertising, and collecting. Ruth E. Iskin argues that the avant-garde poster was instrumental in the development of a modern language of art in the 1890s, and in the adaptation of art to an era of mass media. She shows how posters played an important role in the emerging fields of advertising and design. She articulates the strategies that made posters function well in the hectic environment of the urban street and explains why they soon came to be coveted by collectors. This insightful study proposes that the poster played a constitutive role in the modern culture of spectacle.

Art in Print, 2017

Commercial posters designed by Jules Chéret, Théophile Steinlen, Alphonse Mucha, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others working in the Paris of the Belle Époque have long been synonymous with the city of light and continue to be immensely popular images associated with the elegance and gaiety of late-nineteenth-century Paris. At the time of their production, the brilliant colors and innovative designs of these posters led to a collecting frenzy known as affichomanie, or postermania, which saw commercial posters move from the streets into private homes and exhibition spaces as well as onto the pages of literary and artistic journals. This article examines how the postermania of the 1890s changed the way in which commercial color lithographic posters were designed, produced, and perceived. While many studies have been made of individual artists, posters, and the cultural climate of Paris during the Belle Époque, few have treated postermania as anything more than an anecdote illustrating the popularity of posters in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Rather than being a mere footnote in the history of the color lithographic poster, the collecting craze is essential to our understanding of the endurance and popularity of these images into the present day.

Paris, Fin-de-Siècle: Signac, Redon, Toulouse-Lautrec, and their Contemporaries, Vivien Green, ed. , 2017

the poster actually stimulated artists to invent a new and forceful visual language. Since potential viewers usually encountered posters on the streets rather than a dedicated art space, artists had to make formal innovations in design and color that would instantaneously attract the eyes of passersby. 4 All of these factors contributed to Lautrec's aesthetic innovations in postershis great simplification of form, emphasis on surface, flattened masses of color, elimination of shadows and modulation, use of brilliant colors, prominent outlines and lines, bold compositions, and striking points of view. Lautrec invented his modernist language as a hybrid of low culture and fine art: the poster had to be artistic, but also to respond to a new function (advertising), a new site of display (the street), and a new audience (a mobile general public).

Iskin, Collecting Prints, Posters and Ephemera: Perspectives in a Global World, edited by Ruth E. Iskin and Britany Salsbury, 2019

2007

Posters were developed as a medium for both art and advertising forming the foundation for much advertising today which continues to blend aesthetics of art with the practicality of commerce. Accordingly, the history of the development of outdoor and more specifically poster advertising is reviewed for an understanding of how these two domains were married into one. Through this, an understanding of how posters introduced art to advertising thereby representing an important leader to most other more modern forms of media and initiating the longstanding tension in advertising as creative art and commercial gain. The third section reviews the evidence for the significant and substantial effectiveness of outdoor posters.

Soon aft er Japan was opened to the West in the 1850s, large numbers of Japanese works of art were exported to Europe and America. Western artists, excited by the novelty of Japanese art, eagerly adopted and adapted Japanese aesthetics to their own creative eff orts. Th e fascination these artists held for Japan and its culture was but one small part of a much broader appreciation of Japan, a phenomenon dubbed Japonisme in 1872 by the art critic Philippe Burty. Japonisme reached the peak of its infl uence around 1890, the same time that Pierre Bonnard, a young French artist and member of the symbolist group, the Nabis, was formulating a new approach to poster design. A keen admirer and student of Japanese art, Bonnard applied what he learned of Japanese aesthetics to the style of his fi rst lithographed poster, France-Champagne. Innovative in its use of a fl at, reductive composition and synthesis between text and image-design elements borrowed fr om the Japanese-this work ushered in a new era of poster design.

Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, 2022

The awarding of a decorative commission to artist Jules Chéret in the venerable civic site of Paris’s Hôtel de Ville would appear to legitimize an aesthetic—that of the fin-de-siècle commercial poster—anathema to public decoration’s and the Third Republic’s goal of instilling civic values and fostering national unity. An examination of the commission’s reception alongside the discourses of affichomanie (poster mania) and solidarism reveals, however, an underlying logic. The artist’s synthesis of modern vitality with “decorative” harmony, considered vital to the democratization of beauty and the shared, solidarist feeling it inspired, was worthy of gracing the Hôtel de Ville.

e~SMOJ1SO elOJOO II JEM PIJOM JiljJE PUEI Od UI SWI1:l lI JUilJ::l PUE Ugl SilO J!lIdEJ9 JiljSOd P oster as a graphic form has a long and rich history bound up with the history of advertisement and reaching back to the nineteenth century and the work of French graphic artists, such as Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and jules Cheret in particular. The history of poster as an art form, on the other hand, is considerably shorter and associated with quite a different set of historical and economi c circumstances which emerged in the Soviet Russia after the Revolution and in other socialist countries throughout the period of the Cold War. In the place of a poster as a ve hicle for commercial advertisement, poster art developed a form closer to a public announcement and whose role 'was not primarily to sell but to interpret a complex artistic production; and interpretation was itself a specifIcally artistic and thus personal activity' (Rotzler 1961: 100). Unlike mass advertisement thus conceived poster was directed at 'a culturally wide-awake stratum of the society' who cou ld appreciate its innovative and original format (Rotzler 196 1: 103). Among the socialist countries Poland fou nd itself in a unique position in regard to the poster art. In 1948, young Polish artist Henryk Tomaszewski won five medals for his poster designs at the Vienna lnternational Poster Exhibition (Crowley 1993: 26). By 1956 two large exhibitions of Polish posters were organised in Paris, Brussels and other European cities where over two hundred posters designed by 25 different Polish graphiC designers were exhibited, including th ose by Tadeusz Trepkowski, Eryk Lipinski, Henryk Tomaszewski, Wojciech Zamecznik and j6zef Mroszczak (Rohonyi 1956: 68). This international success meant that in Poland poster designers were regarded as artists in their own right and shortly were to be given an opportunity to display their works in a purpose-built poster museum established in 1968. But it was th e close relationship of the Polish poster art with cinema which was most often commented on by the early critics of the poster art attending the international exhibition. ' They remarked on the posters 'standing in a direct relationship with the unique nature of the theatre or fUm production, which is itself something quite different from a commodity, a product among man)'

Alaa A. A. Eleyan, 2022

This study will detail the effects of computer-based graphic design on illustration in poster works. The understanding of art has evolved from ancient times to the present, giving rise to design works. With the development of the internet and computer technologies in the 20th century, the understanding of design has also changed. The impact of computer technology on the drawings in poster works will be highlighted in this study as how they began in the 1950s and 1960s and developed throughout the century. Especially in the 1990s, technological developments offered new technical possibilities to art and artists. The production of computeraided unique designs and illustrations began. The study's evaluation portion will cover the technical aspects of the illustrations seen in the posters created by well-known historical designers. The examples presented throughout the study cover the effects of computer-based graphic design in the 20th century on the illustration in poster works.