A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE POSTER

 

Cheret and the Birth of the Poster

Although lithography was invented in 1798, it was at first too slow and expensive for poster production. Most posters were woodblocks or metal engravings with little color or design.

This all changed with Cheret’s "three stone lithographic process," a breakthrough which allowed artists to achieve every color in the rainbow with as little as three stones - usually red, yellow and blue - printed in careful registration.

Although the process was difficult, the result was a remarkable intensity of color and texture, with sublime transparencies and nuances impossible in other media (even to this day). This ability to combine word and image in such an attractive and economical format finally made the lithographic poster a powerful innovation. Starting in the 1870s in Paris, it became the dominant means of mass communication in the rapidly growing cities of Europe and America. The streets of Paris, Milan and Berlin were quickly transformed into the "art gallery of the street," and ushered in the modern age of advertising.

 

The Belle Epoque

In France during the 1890’s, the ‘Belle Epoque’ era was a poster craze which came into full bloom. In 1891, Toulouse-Lautrec’s first poster, Moulin Rouge, elevated the status of the poster to fine art. Poster exhibitions, magazines and dealers proliferated, satisfying the public’s love affair with the poster. Early in the decade, the pioneering Parisian dealer Sagot listed 2200 different posters in his sales catalogue.

In 1894, Alphonse Mucha, a Czech working in Paris, created the first masterpiece of Art Nouveau poster design. The flowery, ornate style was born practically overnight when Mucha was pressed to produce a poster for Sarah Bernhardt, the brilliant actress who had taken Paris by storm. Bearing multiple influences including 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 become the major international decorative art movement up until World War I.

 

The New Century

Art Nouveau continued after the turn of the century, although it lost much of its dynamism through sheer imitation and repetition. The death of Toulouse-Lautrec in 1901 and the abandonment of poster art by Mucha and Cheret (who both turned to painting) left a void in France in the new century.The void was filled by a young Italian caricaturist named Leonetto Cappiello, who arrived in Paris in 1898.

Strongly influenced by Cheret and Toulouse-Lautrec, Cappiello rejected the fussy detail of Art Nouveau. Instead he focused on creating one simple image, often humorous or bizarre, which would immediately capture the viewer’s attention and imagination on a busy boulevard. His 1906 Maurin Quina absinthe poster, a mischievous green devil on a black background with simple block lettering, marked the maturation of a style that would dominate Parisian poster art until Cassandre’s first Art Deco poster in 1923. This ability to create a brand identity established Cappiello as the father of modern advertising.

 

Collecting Vintage Posters

In 1963, during a renovation of the offices of a Parisian literary journal, workmen found hundreds of Toulouse-Lautrec posters rolled up under the floorboards. The ones in the best condition could be bought for a few hundred dollars. Even in the 1970’s, one dealer had 100 copies of Lautrec’s Divan Japonais, which he sold for $800 each.

When the market for vintage advertising posters emerged in the late 1970s, much of the attention focused on French artists like Lautrec, Alphonse Mucha, and Jules Cheret. Posters from these artists, as well as from those of the Art Deco period, notably Cassandre, Villemot and Fix-Masseau, brought the highest prices.

 

Antonio has been collecting posters for the last ten years. His public collection consists of posters by Leonetto Cappiello which he has a passion for.

 

Antonio's upstairs bar level at Verde Restaurant is dressed with Antonio's Private masterpieces from Cappiello.