Posters have been displayed in public places all over the world for over two hundred years. The history of the poster begins in the 1600s with black-and-white broadsides, which developed with the invention of the printing press. It was a quick means to mass-distribute information. The Declaration of Independence is a famous example of the broadside, spreading news of the victorious revolution rapidly throughout the American colonies. The broadside evolved as technology advanced; typefaces became more interesting and images were added. But the 19th century was a turning point in the development of the poster. The modern poster dates to the 1840s-1850s when the printing industry perfected color lithography and made mass production possible, government censorship of public places was lifted, and advertisers began to market mass-produced consumer goods in urban areas. This revolution was pronounced in France, particularly in Paris. Factors that influenced the rise of the art poster in Paris include: the burgeoning middle class which had more expendable income; advances in technology that allowed for larger and more complex poster designs; a multicultural milieu with diverse artists sharing ideas in Paris’ bohemian neighborhoods; and a city redesign that included street furniture intended specifically for posters (Driehaus Museum). More significant than any of these elements, however, was the “reinvention” of lithography, the printing medium employed to produce posters.
Lithography was invented in 1796 by the German Alois Senefelder. This development was soon followed by chromolithography which allowed for colored posters. But it was the Frenchman Jules Chéret (1836-1932) who revolutionized the poster, developing new lithographic techniques that better suited advertiser’s needs. Chéret was a painter and lithographer who became a master of the Belle Époque poster. He has been called the father of the modern poster. At age 13, Chéret began a three-year apprenticeship with a lithographer. He also took art courses at the École Nationale de Dessin. From 1859-1866, he trained in lithography in London. And he was also employed by the Rimmel perfume company as a designer. When he returned to Paris, Chéret founded a small lithography firm in 1866. Owning his own shop allowed him to maintain artistic control and to establish an innovative design approach.
It is important to know how lithographs are made to understand Chéret’s contributions to the medium and to the creation of the artistic poster. A greasy or waxy crayon is used to draw words and images onto a large, smooth limestone surface. Next, the surface of the stone is wet with water and rolled with ink. The greasy drawing repels the water and soaks up the ink, while wet areas without any drawing repel the ink. When a piece of paper is pressed onto the stone, it transfers the inky images and text onto the paper. For color lithographs, as many colors are desired, the same number of stones must be prepared. This was a difficult task; stones were heavy and the process was laborious. As a result, lithographs remained mostly monochromatic well into the 1860s. In addition, lithography suffered from its association with quick and commercial information (Driehaus Museum).
Lithography’s reputation would change with the interventions of Jules Chéret—innovations that would be imitated throughout the late nineteenth century. Owning his own firm allowed Chéret to maintain artistic control and to create inventive design approaches. Most lithographers commissioned an artist to create a poster design, which was copied onto a stone by a skilled craftsman. Chéret, however, worked directly on the stone. The artist designed his own lettering, taking advantage of the fact that the lithograph—as opposed to the printing press—allowed for the artist to draw freehand on the stone’s surface. He reduced the amount of text, leaning heavily on the image to communicate about the product or event. This can be seen in the David Barnett Gallery’s Viviane, a chromolithographic poster from 1886 advertising a ballet at the Eden-Théâtre in Paris. The characters, especially the dancer in yellow, are foregrounded, while the text frames the figures, becoming a part of the poster’s overall design. The artist simplified the chromolithographic process by using three primary colors; that is, three stones inked with red, yellow, and blue. Chéret made the colors semi-transparent so that he could layer them and make different shades. He also approached the limestone in a painterly way, using animated brush lines, crosshatching, stippling, soft watercolor-like washes, gestural textures, and areas of flat color (Driehaus Museum). Indeed, Chéret employs some of these techniques in Viviane, particularly in the figure of the dancer. He achieves the effect of movement not only with the woman’s pose—twisted at the waist, right arm outstretched, and feet off the ground--but also with his handling of color and his use of the crachis technique (splattered ink). He applies yellow and black on the dancer’s skirt in a painterly manner that indicates the dynamism of the dance. In addition, the artist’s technique indicates the texture of the tulle ballet tutu. He highlights the dancer by using yellow exclusively for her costume. A figure in a dark costume flanks her on the right, causing her to stand out. In addition, a diagonal block of flat color--blue and red—frames her from the left. And the text above and below serves to accentuate the image.
Chéret was in the vanguard of cutting-edge poster design in the late nineteenth century in Paris, influencing and educating such artists as Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Alphonse Mucha, and Pierre Bonnard. In the 1870s and 1880s, the artist’s style evolved from one typical of Victorian graphics—dominated by complex decoration—to a simpler, more dynamic approach (Britannica). According to Nikki Otten of the Milwaukee Art Museum: “As one of the first people to bring colorful large-scale posters to the streets of Paris, Chéret played a central role in transforming the medium into a form of ephemeral art that embraced public interest in novelty and rapid change” (Nikki Otten, “Lithographic Monuments: The Ephemeral as Modern in Chéret’s Posters,” in The Posters of Jules Chéret, MAM, p. 15). Chéret’s posters, particularly his representation of women, were influenced by the French Rococo painters Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Antoine Watteau, and the Venetian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Chéret’s women, beautiful, cheerful, lightly clad, and provocative, became a type, known as “chérettes,” after their creator.
Despite the fleeting nature of a single poster, there were always new ones to follow, along with another chérette advertising a new product or performance. Posters were often described as “always new,” “endlessly varied,” or “ephemeral.” Otten argues that ephemerality [was] “an important material property of the poster [;] it helped shape ideas about modernity and the experience of time in the last decades of the nineteenth century (Otten, p. 15). At the same time, there was an eternal quality to posters as well. In the 1890s, Paris was celebrated as a city of posters; it was called “an open-air exhibition” and “a museum for the masses.” Artistic posters were objects of intense fascination, even mania. A new term was coined: affichomanie (poster mania) to describe the phenomenon. Collectors stole them from billboards almost as soon as they were put up. People bought posters from print dealers and subscribed to portfolios. Collectors were saving posters, like those of Chéret and Toulouse-Lautrec, for posterity. In the 1880s, connoisseurs documented posters in catalogues raisonnés, rescuing prints from their own ephemerality. Charles Baudelaire, in The Painter of Modern Life, expressed the ephemeral and eternal quality of modern life: “By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable” (quoted in Otten, p.27) Otten elaborates: “Baudelaire specifically named lithography as the art form that could best capture the sort of rapidly changing images that would lead to greater knowledge. He even claimed that lithography had assumed the role of representing eternal concepts once held by architecture and sculpture”—“We have some veritable monuments in this medium” (Otten, p. 27). According to Otten, the relationship between the ephemeral and the eternal is inherent in the lithography process itself: it is paper on stone. And many Parisian monuments were made of limestone, including buildings by Haussmann in the rebuilding of Paris after the destruction of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune in 1870-71. “These events challenged the notion that architecture and monuments were immutable and created opportunities for new forms of visual expression” (Otten, p. 27). Chéret’s work was well suited for transcending time; critics recognized him as an artist who surpassed the contemporary moment (Otten, p.31). He was called the “Fragonard of the street,” “the Watteau of the intersection,” and the “Tiepolo of the public square.” In addition, critics saw the artist’s female figure as a classical type, a “Parisian Aphrodite.”
Trained by Chéret in lithography and also known as a fine artist, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) was a master of the modern poster as well. His enthusiasm for the medium was clear. He exclaimed “The poster, that’s all there is!” Lautrec’s career coincided with two major developments in the 19th century: the birth of modern printmaking and the explosion of nightlife culture. From 1891 until his death in 1901, he produced nearly 350 lithographic posters, editioned portfolios, and illustrations for journals and theatre programs recounting life in Belle Époque Paris. His first and perhaps most famous lithographic poster, Moulin Rouge: La Goulue, dates from 1891. When the dance hall and drinking establishment of the Moulin Rouge opened on the boulevard de Clichy in 1889, one of Lautrec’s paintings was displayed near the entrance. The artist himself was known to frequent the place and was commissioned to create the six-foot-tall advertisement that “launched his postermaking career and made him famous overnight” (The Metropolitan Museum of Art).
In Moulin Rouge, Lautrec highlighted the star performers of the nightclub: the acrobat, Valentin le Désossé (“the boneless”), and the chahut dancer, La Goulue (“the glutton”). Using only red, yellow, black, and white, and simple outlines, the artist exaggerated characteristic features of his subjects, making them instantly recognizable. Both characters are shown in profile—La Goulue’s yellow topknot is accentuated as it contrasts with the black silhouettes of the crowd watching the spectacle in the background. Her white cancan skirt, lifted at the finale of the dance, the only white in the poster, occupies the center of the composition. Valentin, depicted in grey, is outlined in black. His top hat and distinctive profile are foregrounded. The style and content of Lautrec’s posters is heavily influenced by Japanese ukiyo-e prints. As Cora Michael of the Metropolitan Museum of Art points out: “Areas of flat color bound by strong outlines, silhouettes, cropped compositions, and oblique angles are all typical of woodblock prints by artists like Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige. Likewise, Lautrec’s promotion of individual performers is very similar to the depictions of famous actors, actresses, and courtesans from the so-called floating world of Edo-period Japan.” Many of Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters were commissioned by his close network of performer friends. Part of the artist’s genius lay in his creation of an easily recognizable “brand” for the performers. “This was a new approach: prior poster artists like Jules Chéret had typically chosen to idealize their subjects, producing a selection of stereotyped figures, such as a generic dancer, singer, or acrobat, that they would then use for a variety of different commissions. Instead, Toulouse-Lautrec used his acute observational skills to highlight the aspects of each performer that distinguished them from their competitors. This individualism helped bolster the culture of celebrity that was growing in Montmartre—in Toulouse-Lautrec’s images, each client presented a distinct persona that could then attract a following” (Isabelle Sagraves, The Art Institute of Chicago). His representations of the denizens of Montmartre signaled the rising cult of celebrity, something, in part, that was of the artist’s own making. “It is fair to say that without Lautrec there would be no Andy Warhol” (Michael, Metropolitan Museum of Art). Lautrec and Warhol were part of the demi-monde, socializing and forming friendships with those in their milieu and both were celebrities in their own right. It is also fair to say that the artist made eternal the fleeting diversions of Parisians and Montmartre celebrities by elevating the ephemeral poster to art.
In 1894, Lautrec, already well known for his posters, was commissioned by Polish author Victor Joze to create an advertising poster for his novel, Babylone d’Allemagne (German Babylon). A pristine example of this poster is for sale at the David Barnett Gallery, and it can be viewed at the gallery’s Power of the Poster show beginning April 17. Joze, known for his potboilers, pandered to French distrust of Germans in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, in which the Germans blockaded and starved the French. The French surrendered in 1870, but the event was still fresh in the minds of the populace. Joze’s Babylone d’Allemagne satirically detailed the sexual depravity of the inhabitants of Berlin, describing Germany as a debauched and militaristic society. The implications of the book’s title as well as the poster caused the German ambassador to France protested its publication and it nearly caused an international incident (Julia Frey, Toulouse-Lautrec: A Life, p. 398). Toulouse-Lautrec’s poster is grand in scale and commanding of attention. The artist’s poster, in black, red, blue, yellow and green, highlights the emphasis the federal state placed on its military might during German Imperial rule (Victoria and Albert Museum). The diagonal orientation of Lautrec’s poster focuses the spectator’s attention on the hindquarters of four horses, the largest of which was also being closely observed by a caricature of the Kaiser standing in a guardbox. In addition, “Toulouse-Lautrec’s placement of the book title’s heavy black letters inescapably emphasizes the horse’s rear—a fairly provocative commentary on the erect, blond, Prussian officer. Only the exaggerated reactions of the two passersby offer a moment of relief in this otherwise mock-serious image” (Yale University Art Gallery). In keeping with the subject and tone of the novel, “the poster is marked with an uncurrent of disorder: the well-drawn, regal guard … crowds the mounted Prussian officer, who parades after his three companions down an awkwardly canted street” (Yale University Art Gallery). Lautrec, anticipating his poster to cause a scandal, paid to have it printed privately, so it could not be seized. “Over the ambassador’s objections, [Henri] refused to stop distribution of the poster, and as he had paid for it, the publisher was not able to stop distribution himself. After the Babylone d’Allemagne outcry, according to art dealer Edmond Sagot, the value of [Henri’s] work quadrupled” (Frey, p. 398).
Jules Chéret and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec made some of the greatest contributions to poster art in the 19th century. Both artists were able to capture the fleeting nature of modernity in their work. Chéret’s posters, achieved with novel lithographic techniques, captured the sense of incessant motion, a characteristic symbol of modern life. At the same time, the printing process that Chéret perfected reinforces the confluence of past and present. The artist saved some of his stones, making it possible to reprint some images later (Otten, p. 28). He was recognized by critics as an artist whose work surpassed the present moment; his posters were featured in a Paris exhibition in 1884. From 1895-1900, he created the Maîtres de l’Affiche (Masters of the Poster) series. And in 1890, Chéret was awarded the Légion d’Honneur by the French government. Similarly, Toulouse-Lautrec, who was educated in lithography by Chéret, was an expert in capturing the performers of the moment and immortalizing them, so they are known even today. Despite being an outcast in Parisian polite society, Lautrec met with wide acclaim and financial success through his posters. Both artists’ posters embodied Baudelaire’s concept of modernity—the ephemeral and the eternal. Their work is firmly of their time but their legacy lives on today.