The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s–1900s

By Ruth E. Iskin

The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s–1900s is a cultural history that situates the poster at the crossroads of art, design, advertising, and collecting. Though international in scope, the book focuses especially on France and England. Ruth E. Iskin argues that the avant-garde poster and the original art print played an important role in the development of a modernist language of art in the 1890s, as well as in the adaptation of art to an era of mass media. She moreover contends that this new form of visual communication fundamentally redefined relations between word and image: poster designers embedded words within the graphic, rather than using images to illustrate a text. Posters had to function as effective advertising in the hectic environment of the urban street. Even though initially commissioned as advertisements, they were soon coveted by collectors. Iskin introduces readers to the late nineteenth-century “iconophile”—a new type of collector/curator/archivist who discovered in poster collecting an ephemeral archaeology of modernity. Bridging the separation between the fields of art, design, advertising, and collecting, Iskin’s insightful study proposes that the poster played a constitutive role in the modern culture of spectacle. This stunningly illustrated book will appeal to art historians and students of visual culture, as well as social and cultural history, media, design, and advertising.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dartmouth College Press
• Release date: Oct 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781611686173

Book preview

INTERFACES: STUDIES IN VISUAL CULTURE

Editors Mark J. Williams and Adrian W. B. Randolph, Dartmouth College

This series, sponsored by Dartmouth College Press, develops and promotes the study of visual culture from a variety of critical and methodological perspectives. Its impetus derives from the increasing importance of visual signs in everyday life, and from the rapid expansion of what are termed new media. The broad cultural and social dynamics attendant to these developments present new challenges and opportunities across and within the disciplines. These have resulted in a trans-disciplinary fascination with all things visual, from high to low, and from esoteric to popular. This series brings together approaches to visual culture—broadly conceived—that assess these dynamics critically and that break new ground in understanding their effects and implications.

For a complete list of books that are available in the series, visit www.upne.com.

Ruth E. Iskin, The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s–1900s

Heather Warren-Crow, Girlhood and the Plastic Image

Heidi Rae Cooley, Finding Augusta: Habits of Mobility and Governance in the Digital Era

renée c. hoogland, A Violent Embrace: Art and Aesthetics after Representation

Alessandra Raengo, On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value

Frazer Ward, No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience

Timothy Scott Barker, Time and the Digital: Connecting Technology, Aesthetics, and a Process Philosophy of Time

Bernd Herzogenrath, ed., Travels in Intermedia[lity]: ReBlurring the Boundaries

Monica E. McTighe, Framed Spaces: Photography and Memory in Contemporary Installation Art

Alison Trope, Stardust Monuments: The Saving and Selling of Hollywood

Nancy Anderson and Michael R. Dietrich, eds., The Educated Eye: Visual Culture and Pedagogy in the Life Sciences

Shannon Clute and Richard L. Edwards, The Maltese Touch of Evil: Film Noir and Potential Criticism

Steve F. Anderson, Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past

Dorothée Brill, Shock and the Senseless in Dada and Fluxus

Janine Mileaf, Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects after the Readymade

J. Hoberman, Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film between Two Worlds, updated and expanded edition

Erina Duganne, The Self in Black and White: Race and Subjectivity in Postwar American Photography

Eric Gordon, The Urban Spectator: American Concept-Cities from Kodak to Google

THE POSTER

ART, ADVERTISING, DESIGN, AND COLLECTING, 1860s–1900s

RUTH E. ISKIN

Dartmouth College Press | Hanover, New Hampshire

Dartmouth College Press

An imprint of University Press of New England

www.upne.com

© 2014 Ruth E. Iskin

All rights reserved

For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com

This book was published with the support of the Israel Science Foundation.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Iskin, Ruth.

The poster: art, advertising, design, and collecting, 1860s–1900s / Ruth E. Iskin.

pages cm.—(Interfaces: studies in visual culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61168-615-9 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-61168-616-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-61168-617-3 (ebook)

1. Posters—19th century. 2. Art and society—History—19th century. I. Title.

NC1806.7.185 2014

741.6'7409034—dc23        2014012006

In memory of my grandparents, Yehoshua and Frida Iskin,

and my parents, Charlotte and Aharon Ernst Iskin

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

List of Plates

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Poster at a Crossroads

PART I

THE POSTER AS ART

1 The Poster’s Place in Modernism: Art and Mass Media in the 1890s

2 Toulouse-Lautrec, Jane Avril, and the Iconography of the Female Print Connoisseur in Posters

PART II

THE POSTER AND PRINT: REPRODUCTION AND CONSECRATION

3 The Color Print: Art in the Age of Lithography

4Les Maîtres de l’Affiche: Aura and Reproduction

PART III

THE POSTER AS DESIGN AND ADVERTISING

5 Art and Advertising in the Street

6 Poster Design: The Dialogics of Image and Word

PART IV

COLLECTING AND ICONOPHILIA

7 The Poster at the Origins of the Age of Spectacle: The Rise of the Image and Modern Iconophobia

8 The Iconophile’s Collecting: Posters as an Ephemeral Archaeology of Modernity

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Color plates 1

Color plates 2

ILLUSTRATIONS

Unless otherwise noted in the captions appearing with the images, the illustrations are of posters and the image source is Posters Please Archive, New York.

I.1Jules Chéret, Bal du Moulin Rouge, 1889.

I.2Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec with Trémolada Standing next to Jules Chéret’s 1889 Poster Bal du Moulin Rouge.

I.3Armand Rassenfosse, book cover (front) for Les affiches étrangères illustrées, 1897.

I.4Advertisement of the Bonnard-Bidault bill-posting company, in Annuaire du commerce Didot-Bottin, 1890.

I.5Mystères de Paris, statuettes par Émile Thomas, 6 fr, 1844.

I.6Eugène Grasset, Librairie romantique, 1887.

I.7The Beggarstaffs, Girl Reading, 1895.

I.8Harry Furniss, How We Advertise Now, Punch, December 3, 1887.

I.9Jean-Alexis Rouchon, À l’oeil, 1864.

I.10Eugène Atget, Rue de l’Abbaye: Saint-Germain-des-Près, 1898.

I.11Alice Austen, Rag Pickers on 23rd Street at Third Avenue, New York, c. 1896.

I.12Alhambra Theatre, Leicester Square, London, 1899.

I.13Photographie vulgarisatrice, c. 1880–1900.

I.14Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, P. Sescau, Photographe, c. 1894–96.

I.15Poster Exhibition at the Main Building of the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, 1895.

I.16Sydney Higham, The 1894 Poster Exhibition at the Royal Aquarium.

I.17Premises of the Société belge des affichophiles in Antwerp, c. 1900.

1.1Pierre Bonnard, France-Champagne, 1891.

1.2Champagne Scohyers de Dorlodot Reims, 1890.

1.3Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, La Goulue, Moulin Rouge, 1891.

1.4Jules Chéret, Moulin Rouge, 1890.

1.5Alphonse Mucha, Gismonda, 1894.

1.6Aubrey Beardsley, Avenue Theatre, A Comedy of Sighs! 1894.

1.7Dudley Hardy, To-Day, c. 1895.

1.8Jules Chéret, Quinquina Mugnier, grand apéritif, 1897.

1.9Jules Chéret, Quinquina Dubonnet, 1896.

1.10Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Troupe de Mlle Églantine, 1896.

1.11Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Reine de joie, 1892.

1.12Jules Chéret, Théâtre national de l’opéra, Carnaval 1892.

1.13The Beggarstaffs, Kassama Corn Flour, 1894.

1.14The Beggarstaffs, Rowntree’s Elect Cocoa, 1896.

1.15Édouard Manet, Polichinelle, 1874.

1.16Jules Chéret, Valentino, samedi et Mardi Gras, grand bal de nuit, 1869.

1.17A Wall with Posters including Toulouse-Lautrec’s Aristide Bruant Poster, c. 1892.

2.1Louis Léopold Boilly, Les amateurs de tableaux (The Art Connoisseurs), 1823–28.

2.2Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, cover for the print portfolio L’Estampe Originale, 1893.

2.3Imprimerie Paul Dupont, Paris, c. 1893.

2.4Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Jane Avril, 1893.

2.5Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Divan japonais, 1893.

2.6Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Jane Avril, 1899.

2.7Honoré Daumier, The Print Collectors, 1860–63.

2.8Maurice Leloir, illustration for Henri Beraldi, Les graveurs du XIXe siècle: Guide de l’amateur d’estampes modernes, vol. 9, 1889.

2.9Alexandre Lunois, Ed. Sagot, Estampes modernes, 1894.

2.10Honoré Daumier, The Print Collectors, c. 1860–64.

2.11Théo van Rysselberghe, N. Lembrée, c. 1897.

2.12Georges de Feure, cover for the print portfolio Lithographies originales, album no. 1, 1896.

2.13Georges Alfred Bottini, Ed. Sagot, 1898.

2.14Alphonse Mucha, Salon des Cent, 1896.

2.15Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Centenaire de la lithographie, 1895.

2.16Hugo d’Alési, Exposition du centenaire de la lithographie, Galerie Rapp, 1895.

2.17Otto Fisher, Kunst-Anstalt für Moderne Plakate, 1896.

2.18Fernand Gottlob, 2e exposition des peintres lithographes, 1898.

2.19Edgar Degas, The Print Collector, 1866.

2.20Edgar Degas, The Amateurs, c. 1878–80.

2.21Edgar Degas, Miss Cassatt at the Louvre, c. 1879–80.

2.22Antoine Watteau, detail of L’enseigne de Gersaint, 1720–21.

2.23Armand Rassenfosse, Salon des Cent, nouvelle exposition d’ensemble, 1896.

2.24Fernand Fau, 14e exposition, 31 rue Bonaparte, Salon des 100, 1895.

2.25Frédéric-Auguste Cazals, 7me exposition du Salon des 100, 1894.

2.26Honoré Daumier, Le Salon de 1857, aspect du salon, le jour de l’ouverture, 1857.

3.1Pierre Bonnard, L’Estampe et l’Affiche, 1897.

3.2Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Bust of Mademoiselle Marcelle Lender, 1895.

3.3Pierre Bonnard, Les peintres-graveurs, 1896.

4.1Joseph Sattler, cover for the magazine Pan, 1895.

4.2Alexandre de Riquer, Ayuntamiento de Barcelona; Industria, Arte (Barcelona City Council, Industry, Art) 1896.

4.3Ethel Reed, Miss Träumerei, 1895.

4.4The Atelier of Jules Chéret in the Imprimerie Chaix, Paris, c. 1893.

4.5Jules Chéret, drawing for the title page of Les Maîtres de l’Affiche, 1896.

4.6Title page, Les Maîtres de l’Affiche, 1896.

4.7Jan Toorop, The Print Collector (Dr. Aegidius Timmerman), 1900.

5.1Mills, Posters on a hoarding by Daly’s Theatre, including Dudley Hardy’s poster for the revival of A Gaiety Girl, 1899.

5.2Dudley Hardy, A Gaiety Girl, Prince of Wales’ Theatre, 1893.

5.3Alphonse Mucha, La dame aux camélias, Sarah Bernhardt, Théâtre de la Renaissance, 1896.

5.4The Beggarstaffs, Hamlet, 1894.

5.5W. S. Rogers, Automobile Club Show, c. 1900.

5.6William George Joy, Bayswater Omnibus, 1895.

5.7Louis Robert Carrier-Belleuse, Mending the Pots, 1882.

5.8Édouard Manet, Au Café, 1878.

5.9Léon Louis Oury, Affiches Brondert, c. 1897.

5.10Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, cover of Le Mirliton, June 9, 1893.

5.11Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, La rue, 1896.

5.12Dudley Hardy, Liebig Company’s Extract, the Future Butcher Boy, 1900.

6.1Parapluyes et parasols à porter dans la poche, 1715. Published in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1884.

6.2John Orlando Parry, A London Street Scene, 1835.

6.3Émile Mermet, La publicité dans les rues de Paris en 1880.

6.4Alfred Concanen, Modern Advertising: A Railway Station in 1874.

6.5Tony Johannot, Don Quichotte illustré, 1844.

6.6Édouard Manet, cover for Champfleury, Les chats, second edition, 1868.

6.7Frederick Walker, Woman in White, 1871.

6.8John Everett Millais, Bubbles, Pears’ Soap, 1886.

6.9Jean-Alexis Rouchon, Absinthe-chinoise brevetée, 1862.

6.10Jules Chéret, Eau de Botot, 1896.

6.11Jean-Alexis Rouchon, Poudre de Duchesne dentiste, 1860.

6.12Jules Chéret, Vin Mariani, Popular French Tonic Wine, 1894.

6.13Jules Chéret, Exposition des Arts Incohérents, 1886.

6.14Jules Chéret, Folies-Bergère Les Girard, 1877.

6.15Will Bradley, Pegasus, The Chap Book, 1895.

6.16Francisco Tamagno, La Framboisette, c. 1905.

6.17Jules Chéret, Le Petit Moniteur, L’Ogresse, 1874.

6.18Aubrey Beardsley, Publisher. Children’s Books, 1894.

6.19Alfred Roller XIV. Ausstell[un]g der Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Österreichs Secession (14th Exhibition of the Secession), 1902.

6.20Koloman Moser XIII. Ausstellung d[er] Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Österreichs Secession (The 13th Vienna Secession Exhibition), 1902.

6.21Leonetto Cappiello, Chocolat Klaus, 1903.

6.22Lucian Bernhard, Manoli, 1910.

6.23Lucian Bernhard, Stiller, 1907–8.

6.24Chaussures modernes. Mon[sieur] Sutter, 1860.

7.1Café concert curtain at Les Ambassadeurs, Paris, decorated with posters by Jules Chéret, 1895.

7.2Horrible London; or, the Pandemonium Poster, Punch, October 13, 1888.

7.3Picturesque London; or, Sky Signs of the Times, Punch, September 6, 1890.

8.1Edward Penfield, Harper’s April ’98, 1898.

8.2Viktor Oliva, Zlatá Praha, 1900.

8.3Jules Chéret, La Diaphane, 1890.

8.4Francisco Tamagno, Aluminite, 1903.

8.5Ferdinand Lunel, Étretat, chemins de fer de l’ouest, 1896.

8.6Jules Chéret, Aux Buttes Chaumont, robes, manteaux, modes, 1882.

8.7Jules Chéret, Aux Buttes Chaumont, manufacture d’habillements pour hommes & enfants, 1880–81.

8.8Jules Chéret, Théâtrophone, 1890.

8.9Henri Thiriet, Machines à coudre françaises Peugeot, c. 1890.

8.10Écume de France, 1860.

8.11Jane Atché, Papier à cigarettes JOB, hors concours, Paris 1889, 1896.

8.12Alphonse Mucha, JOB, c. 1896.

8.13Fritz Rehm, Der Kenner, Cigaretten Laferme, Dresden, 1897.

8.14Jules Chéret, En versant 3 francs au G[ran]d Crédit parisien, 1877.

8.15Grands magasins du Bon Génie, saison d’été, vente à crédit, c. 1891.

8.16Ouverture à l’Harmonie, g[ran]de brasserie rhénane . . . 1872.

8.17Lucien Lefevre, Café Malt, le meilleur, 1892.

8.18Eugène Grasset, Masson, chocolat mexicain, 1897.

8.19Abel Faivre, Sports d’hiver, Chamonix, 1905.

8.20G. Moore, The James, 1890s.

8.21Edward Penfield, Ride a Stearns and Be Content, 1896.

8.22L. W., Cycles Gladiator, c. 1895.

8.23Charles Sénard, La Goutte d’or, 1895.

8.24Hulstkamp’s Old Schiedam, the Finest Gin Ever Imported, 1890.

8.25Adolphe Crespin, Paul Hankar architecte, 1894.

8.26La Négrita rhum, 1892.

8.27Eugène Vavasseur, "Hammond" Machine à écriture visible, 1904.

8.28Misti (Ferdinand Mifliez), Rouxel & Dubois, c. 1890–1900.

8.29Jules Chéret, Ernest Maindron, cover illustration, Les Hommes d’Aujourd’hui, 1887.

8.30Honoré Daumier, The Connoisseur, 1860–65.

8.31Pierre Vidal, M. Beraldi, père iconophile, in L’Art et l’Idée, March 1892.

PLATES

Color plates

Plate 1Jules Chéret, Bal du Moulin Rouge, 1889.

Plate 2Eugène Grasset, Librairie romantique, 1887.

Plate 3Photographie vulgarisatrice, c. 1880–1900.

Plate 4Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, P. Sescau, Photographe, c. 1894–96.

Plate 5Pierre Bonnard, France-Champagne, 1891.

Plate 6Champagne Scohyers de Dorlodot Reims, 1890.

Plate 7Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, La Goulue, Moulin Rouge, 1891.

Plate 8Jules Chéret, Moulin Rouge, 1890.

Plate 9Alphonse Mucha, Gismonda, 1894.

Plate 10Aubrey Beardsley, Avenue Theatre, A Comedy of Sighs! 1894.

Plate 11Jules Chéret, Quinquina Dubonnet, 1896.

Plate 12Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Troupe de Mlle Églantine, 1896.

Plate 13Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Reine de joie, 1892.

Plate 14The Beggarstaffs, Kassama Corn Flour, 1894.

Plate 15Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, cover for the print portfolio L’Estampe Originale, 1893.

Plate 16Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Jane Avril, 1893.

Plate 17Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Divan japonais, 1893.

Plate 18Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Jane Avril, 1899.

Plate 19Théo van Rysselberghe, N. Lembrée, c. 1897.

Plate 20Georges de Feure, cover for the print portfolio Lithographies originales, album no. 1, 1896.

Plate 21Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Centenaire de la lithographie, 1895.

Plate 22Otto Fisher, Kunst-Anstalt für Moderne Plakate, 1896.

Plate 23Edgar Degas, The Print Collector, 1866.

Plate 24Pierre Bonnard, L’Estampe et l’Affiche, 1897.

Plate 25Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Bust of Mademoiselle Marcelle Lender, 1895.

Plate 26Ethel Reed, Miss Träumerei, 1895.

Plate 27Jan Toorop, The Print Collector (Dr. Aegidius Timmerman), 1900.

Plate 28Dudley Hardy, A Gaiety Girl, Prince of Wales’ Theatre, 1893.

Plate 29Alphonse Mucha, La dame aux camélias, Sarah Bernhardt, Théâtre de la Renaissance, 1896.

Plate 30W. S. Rogers, Automobile Club Show, c. 1900.

Plate 31William George Joy, Bayswater Omnibus, 1895.

Plate 32Louis Robert Carrier-Belleuse, Mending the Pots, 1882.

Plate 33Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, La rue, 1896.

Plate 34Émile Mermet, La publicité dans les rues de Paris en 1880.

Plate 35Alfred Concanen, Modern Advertising: A Railway Station in 1874.

Plate 36John Everett Millais, Bubbles, Pears’ Soap, 1886.

Plate 37Jules Chéret, Eau de Botot, 1896.

Plate 38Jules Chéret, Vin Mariani, Popular French Tonic Wine, 1894.

Plate 39Francisco Tamagno, La Framboisette, c. 1905.

Plate 40Aubrey Beardsley, Publisher. Children’s Books, 1894.

Plate 41Leonetto Cappiello, Chocolat Klaus, 1903.

Plate 42Lucian Bernhard, Manoli, 1910.

Plate 43Jane Atché, Papier à cigarettes JOB, hors concours, Paris 1889, 1896.

Plate 44Alphonse Mucha, JOB, c. 1896.

Plate 45Fritz Rehm, Der Kenner, Cigaretten Laferme, Dresden, 1897.

Plate 46Adolphe Crespin, Paul Hankar architecte, 1894.

Plate 47Eugène Vavasseur, "Hammond" Machine à écriture visible, 1904.

Plate 48Jules Chéret, Ernest Maindron, cover illustration, Les Hommes d’Aujourd’hui, 1887.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book represents two decades of sustained interest in nineteenth-century posters, which began while I was conducting research in Paris in 1993 for what became the book Modern Women and Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting (Cambridge University Press, 2007). At the time, I was looking for a variety of primary sources on Parisian consumer culture as a means of providing a visual context for impressionist painting; but the posters captivated me, and I decided to focus on them in future work. As I pursued research, first in Paris and later in other cities, including Vienna, Berlin, Prague, London, and New York, it became clear that illustrated posters constituted a vast archive of images produced in the last decades of the nineteenth century, which was, with the exception of a small number of posters, little known to most scholars of the period, who tended to specialize in painting, photography, or sculpture. I soon discovered the more specialized literature on posters, much of it produced by print and poster curators on the occasion of museum exhibitions, and I greatly benefited from their scholarship, as well as from that of many colleagues, among them Réjane Bargiel, Phillip Dennis Cate, Mary Weaver Chapin, Karen Carter, H. Hazel Hahn, Ségolène Le Men, and Petr Stembera. During the 1990s and 2000s, I published articles on various topics related to nineteenth-century posters, several of them dealing with the representation of modern women in posters (and none of which are reproduced in the present book).

My research and writing on posters was undertaken while I was teaching at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, which provided me with the supportive context of a young and dynamic department. I am grateful to the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts (CASVA), in Washington, D.C., for affording me the perfect conditions in which to conduct intensive research for this book, and to the dean, Elizabeth Cropper, the associate deans Peter Lukehart and Therese O’Malley, and the librarians of the National Gallery of Art, all of whom, along with David Getsy and the other stimulating colleagues at CASVA, made my time there pivotal in the gestation of this book. My thanks also to the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA), which allowed me to further my research in Paris in the best possible circumstances.

Numerous curators and their staffs were helpful in showing me posters held in the storage of their collections, including Jan Grenci, the reference specialist for posters in the Prints and Photographs division of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; Réjane Bargiel, chief curator of the Musée de la publicité, and Anne-Marie Sauvage of the Cabinet des estampes et de la photographie in Paris; Dr. Barbara Dossi at the Albertina and Peter Klinger at the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna; curator Petr Štembera at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague; curator Andrea von Hegel and Manuela Ehses at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin, who enabled my viewing of many posters that had been in the extensive collection of the Jewish dentist Hans Sachs before being confiscated by the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and which have since been returned to the collector’s descendants. I am grateful to Thierry Devynck, curator at the Bibliothèque Forney, and to the staff of several libraries, including the Victoria and Albert Museum library in London, the INHA library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the département des estampes et de la photographie in Paris; the libraries of UCLA and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles; the New York Public Library and the Columbia University Library in New York; and the Herbert D. and Ruth Schimmel Rare Book Library at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University.

My thanks to the Israeli Science Foundation for its generous contribution to the publication of the book, and to the dean of the faculty of the humanities and social sciences at Ben-Gurion University, David Newman, for contributing to the purchase of reproductions. I am grateful to my colleagues in the department, Katrin Kogman-Appel, deputy dean of the faculty of humanities and social sciences, and Nirit Ben-Arieh Debby, for their helpful advice. I also owe an ongoing debt of gratitude to Haim Finkelstein, the founder of the department and its former chair of many years, and Danny Unger, the present chair, for providing a uniquely positive, vibrant, and congenial environment in which to work.

My thanks to colleagues and friends who offered their support and critical thinking and provided opportunities to present my work on posters in its early stages: art historians Serge Guilbaut, Maureen P. Ryan, Jill Carick, and Rebecca DeRoo, and the principal of Green College, the late Richard Ericson, during my Killam postdoctoral fellowship at the University of British Columbia; Susan Sidlauskas, Holly Pittman, and Christine Poggi during my year at the University of Pennsylvania as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the Penn Humanities Forum; and Joseph Bristow and Peter H. Reill during my Ahmanson-Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship at the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies.

I am extremely grateful for the insightful, generous, and constructive comments of colleagues and friends who read drafts of the manuscript: Paula Birnbaum and Norma Broude in the United States, and Dalia Manor, Merav Yerushalmy, and my doctoral student Ayelet Carmi in Israel. I am grateful to Natalie Melzer for her superb editing of the bulk of this book and to Liel Almog and Feliza Bascara-Zohar, who edited parts of it. My thanks also to Jack Rennert for providing reproductions of posters from his photo archive, Posters Please.

I thank my editor at Dartmouth College Press, Richard Pult, who selected this book for inclusion in the series Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture, published by the University Press of New England, and whose support, patience, and expertise during the process of preparing the book for publication were invaluable. I am most grateful to Susan A. Abel and Glenn E. Novak for their superb professional work on the editing and production. I wish to extend special thanks to Christine L. Sundt for sharing her expertise on reproductions and to my friend Jean Gremion for his gracious and welcoming company in Paris and for his indefatigable help in checking my French translations. And finally, a special acknowledgment to my mother, Charlotte Iskin, who was always an eager reader of my work and, in the final years of her life, of this book in particular. I thank her and my sister Michal Iskin for their enthusiastic and productively critical responses to this work.

INTRODUCTION

The Poster at a Crossroads

Everyone has been able to follow the metamorphosis. The poster of the old days, lacking seduction, with its ugly typography, slow to decipher, has become a veritable art print whose colorfulness delights the eye, whose symbolism is directly understood.—Roger Marx, 1896

All this art may be said to be, what the quite new art of the poster certainly is, art meant for the street, for people who are walking fast. It comes into competition with the newspapers, with the music halls; half contemptuously, it popularises itself. . . . Instead of seeking pure beauty, the seriousness and self-absorption of great art, it takes, willfully and for effect, that beauty which is least evident. . . . Art is not sought for its own sake.—Arthur Symons, 1898

AT THE CORE of this book is the conviction that the illustrated poster of the second half of the nineteenth century played a crucial role in visual culture, a role that cannot be understood in one single context, whether art history, the history of design, or the history of advertising. This book proposes that the illustrated poster, during its formative stage, occupied a unique position at the crossroads between fine art, reproduction, the emerging fields of graphic design and advertising, and popular culture. It aims to chart an integrated cultural history of the poster, one fully cognizant of the history of the poster within each of these fields while showing the interactions between them, aiming to expand our understanding of the visual culture of modernity. Although nineteenth-century visual culture was made possible by the wide use of new technologies of printing, among which lithography played a major role, the genealogy of the culture of spectacle has privileged photography and film and for the most part overlooked the poster. Rethinking this genealogy is important because, as this book proposes, the poster was at the center of several influential innovations: experimenting with a modernist art language; adapting art to the era of mass culture and reproductive media by establishing a new model for the artwork as a multiple original through the poster’s offspring, the original color print of the 1890s; and developing an image-centered design crucial to the emergence of the new fields of graphic design and advertising.

Paris was the capital of the poster. It was here that Jules Chéret developed the illustrated color lithographic poster as early as the second half of the 1860s and continued until the mid 1890s (Fig. I.1). By the mid 1880s Chéret garnered critics’ praise, and in 1890 he was awarded the Legion of Honor cross. Toulouse-Lautrec is seen paying homage to Chéret in a photograph that shows Lautrec taking off his hat in front of Chéret’s 1889 poster for the Moulin Rouge (Fig. I.2). Lautrec belonged to a new generation of young artists who began to design artistic posters in the early 1890s. The poster developed in Paris also thanks to artists from other nationalities who settled there—for a few years, as the Moravian-born Alphonse Mucha did, or permanently, like the two Swiss-born poster artists Alexandre Steinlen and Eugène Grasset (Fig. I.6). The French poster inspired artists in England, such as Aubrey Beardsley, Dudley Hardy, and the Beggarstaff Brothers, James Pryde and William Nicholson (Fig. I.7). Some of the British artists, for example Pryde and Nicholson, had spent several months in Paris studying art before they began to design posters in England.¹ Also inspired by the French poster, artists began to design illustrated posters in other industrialized nations, including Belgium, Austria, Germany, Holland, Italy, Spain, and the United States. The Belgian artist Armand Rassenfosse’s cover for the book Les affiches étrangères illustrées, published in Paris in 1897, demonstrates the idea of a variety of international posters included in the book by featuring on the front and back cover posters by British, American, and Belgian artists (Fig. I.3, which depicts an elegant woman looking through a portfolio, shows the front cover; the left side of the illustration, which was the back cover, is not represented in this figure).² German and Austrian posters were also discussed in the book but not featured on the cover.

Contributing to the international spread of the poster was not only the production of posters in numerous industrialized nations but also the fact that large bill-posting companies could mobilize an army of workers in France and overseas on very short notice.³ Ernest Maindron, the first historian of the poster, noted in 1896 that modern advertising turned bill-posting companies into real powers. Well organized, efficient, and prompt, they operated in thirty-six thousand towns in France and Algeria, pasting in public conveyances, buses, theaters, municipal buildings, and ferries.⁴ An 1890 advertisement for the Bonnard-Bidault posting and distribution company specified the firm’s impressive capabilities (Fig. I.4).⁵ It shows a single afficheur (bill sticker) pasting a poster on a designated company hoarding—a billboard or wall—while the text surrounding the image announces that Bonnard-Bideault posts all over France, Algeria, and in major cities abroad. Moreover, the company guarantees the conservation of the poster, having at its disposal five hundred framed spots as well as reserved posting areas on fences. It also announces that it paints poster advertisements for permanent outdoor locations on large canvases, walls, and fences.

I.1. Jules Chéret, Bal du Moulin Rouge, 1889. Chaix, Paris. 130 × 92 cm.

I.2. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec with Trémolada Standing next to Jules Chéret’s 1889 Poster Bal du Moulin Rouge. Photograph, c. 1890, in Gerstle Mack, Toulouse-Lautrec (Knopf, 1938), n.p.

I.3. Armand Rassenfosse, front cover for M. Bauwens, T. Hayashi, J. La Forgue, J. Meier-Graefe, and J. Pennell, Les affiches étrangères illustrées (Paris: G. Boudet, 1897).

Whereas the illustrated poster originally developed in France, and especially in Paris, it also became an international phenomenon, not only owing to the French influence but because it was a crucial new mode of advertising products, entertainments, and services in industrialized nations. Maurice Talmeyr, a conservative French journalist and a novelist who wrote an extensive and highly critical article on posters, L’âge de l’affiche, articulated this in 1896. He stated that the artistic poster (l’affiche d’art) was produced everywhere because it was the result of a direction in modern life and was the natural and logical art of an epoch of individualism and extreme egotism.⁶ He recognized that the poster’s ephemerality and its quick pace of production, distribution, and perception were part of the all-encompassing developments of industrialization, capitalism, and globalization: Today you go to sleep in a sleeping car in Paris and drink your hot chocolate the next morning in Marseilles. People lose millions overnight; large hotels are constructed in the matter of three months, you write telegrams and talk on the telephone. Like these modern developments, the poster is the epitome of instability: it breeds incessantly, keeps changing, and lacks substance.⁷

I.4. Advertisement of the Bonnard-Bidault bill-posting company, in Annuaire du commerce Didot-Bottin, 1890.

The Artistic versus the Commercial Poster

What exactly was the artistic poster? L’affiche d’art, to which Talmeyr refers, or l’affiche artistique, as most called it? A fundamental distinction between the commercial and artistic poster was the basis both for consecrating the poster as art and for establishing the poster’s importance for the emerging field of graphic design. This was the case even though the artistic poster too was actually commercial, because it was commissioned for the purpose of advertising.⁸ Jules Chéret was credited with the invention of the artistic poster. Critics recognized this time after time during the 1890s. Moreover, when the French state made him chevalier in the Legion of Honor in 1890, the citation was for creating a new industry by applying art to commercial and industrial printing.⁹ Edmond de Goncourt recognized Chéret in the same vein when he toasted the artist, at the banquet held in his honor, as the first painter of the Parisian wall, the inventor of art in the poster.¹⁰

The artistic poster initiated by Chéret aestheticized the crude commercial appeal of the earlier commercial poster through color, composition, and line and made sophisticated use of color lithography. It replaced coarse imagery with refined aesthetics, eliminating crude realism and melodrama in favor of a decorative sensibility. The artistic poster was also associated with developing a modernist style that stressed flatness, abolished shading, and often used brilliant colors and bold outlines, as in the posters of Pierre Bonnard and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (Figs. 1.1 and 1.3). The artistic poster incorporated a variety of artistic influences. For example, Jules Chéret was inspired by the eighteenth-century rococo style, whereas Toulouse-Lautrec and Bonnard were mostly inspired by Japanese prints. Grasset incorporated influences from medieval art, and Mucha, who was born in Moravia, drew on Slav folk traditions, Byzantine mosaics, and the Symbolism he encountered in Paris (Fig. 1.5).¹¹ The artistic poster also refined the imagery of commerce through iconography. It presented idealized and glorified consumers who were most often middle class, usually quite fashionable, and, when representing women, frequently seductive.¹² As contemporary critics noted, many artistic posters appealed to viewers by turning the poster into a visual seduction.

Most writings on the illustrated poster focus on the artistic poster while rarely examining the commercial anonymous poster. (Commercial posters are also underrepresented in the collections of art museums and only rarely exhibited there.¹³) Looking at some examples of commercial posters is necessary to set the artistic poster in its fuller cultural context and within its longer historical development. It also helps to better understand nineteenth-century critics’ comments on the innovations of the artistic poster and their objections to the commercial poster. For this reason, I include some earlier commercial posters alongside artistic posters. Compare, for example, a commercial poster with two later artistic posters, all of which promote books (Figs. I.5, I.6, I.7). The commercial poster, an anonymous 1844 black-and-white lithographic poster, Mystères de Paris, Statuettes par Émile Thomas 6 fr., figuratively shouts the title of the novel with an assaulting image (Fig. I.5). In contrast, Eugène Grasset’s 1887 lithographic color poster Librairie romantique promotes novels published by the Monnier firm in Paris, discreetly including the name of the publisher on a volume at the bottom and placing the emphasis on a dignified young woman dressed in velvet and lace who is reading the novel (Fig. I.6).

The Beggarstaffs’ 1894 poster Girl Reading is the epitome of the modernist poster, representing a fashionable woman with black gloves and hat reading while seated on a striped sofa (Fig. I.7). This proto-Matisse decorative design was created with an utterly flat silhouette, radical simplification of forms, and elimination of details. Macmillan Publishing rejected the design for this poster.¹⁴ Whereas many advertisers preferred realistic posters, artists and critics believed in the innovative aesthetics of the artistic poster and complained about advertisers’ conservative tastes.¹⁵ During the 1890s critics often contrasted the artistic poster to the crude commercial poster. For example, writing about the Beggarstaffs’ posters, a British critic voiced the hope that they would soon be seen on the London hoardings and serve as a contrast to the usually garish advertisements.¹⁶ Critics clearly distinguished between the crude commercial poster and the artistic poster. Charles Hiatt, the most prominent advocate of the artistic poster in England, wrote, What was one of the most hideous of human inventions is transformed into a delight to the eyes. Colour and interest are added to the street; the gay and joyous take the place of the dull and ugly.¹⁷ Another British critic succinctly defined the artistic poster in 1895 as using simple and decorative means for advertising, including large eloquent silhouettes . . . broad sweeps and patches of colour, and . . . expressive lines.¹⁸

The first international exhibition of artistic pictorial posters in England, which took place in 1894 at the Westminster Aquarium in London, generated quite a bit of discussion on the artistic poster. Charles Gleeson, the editor of the Studio, discussed it as a potential remedy for the desecration of our streets and noted English collectors’ interests in the artistic poster.¹⁹ Responding to this exhibition, another English commentator writing in 1894 in the journal Black and White acknowledged the fact that the English artistic poster lagged behind: It seems strange that London, the richest, and, in matters of commercial advertising, the most speculative city in Europe, should so lag behind Paris in this question of street bills, but he noted that the exhibition at the Aquarium shows that now and then an artist half seized the real idea. He also noted that while British poster artists were influenced by Chéret and Lautrec, they were nonetheless distinctly beginning to understand the new laws of the new art, and ultimately must develop a native school. They have no false pride: they work direct for the hoardings."²⁰

I.5. Mystères de Paris, statuettes par Émile Thomas, 6 fr, 1844. Aubert & Cie., Paris. 94 × 77 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

I.6. Eugène Grasset, Librairie romantique, 1887. J. Bognard, Paris. 85.7 × 127.3 cm.

I.7. The Beggarstaffs, Girl Reading, 1895. Rejected design for a poster for Macmillan Publishing. From a reproduction in The Studio, September 1895, n.p.

The lithographer and author Joseph Pennell, an American-born illustrator who lived and worked in London and wrote an extensive and perceptive essay in which he delineated the history of the nineteenth-century poster in England, discussed the gulf between the pre-artistic nineteenth-century poster and the artistic poster in England.²¹ The merchants of mustard, soap, laundry powder, and shoe polish promoted their merchandise with an iconography in which excess, even vulgarity, became a sure means for captivating the gaze.²² Pennell suggested that the vulgar traits of the English posters, which fit the uncultivated taste of the majority of people, also fit the viewing conditions of London mist, soot, and fog: In streets such as those of London, where the perspective most often recedes into misty somber garish tones . . . if an evident vulgarity was relished by the majority of the passers-by, it appears that only the painters were offended by the details. The rest, even the artist could not but be satisfied in noting how many posters, the most crude and gross in colors, were gradually, and agreeably blurred by the mist, rain, soot and fog.²³

Marion Harry Spielmann, considered one of the most powerful figures in the Victorian art world, an art critic and editor who wrote the first in-depth article on the development of the English poster (published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1895), articulated the diametric contrast between the horrors of the mid-century poster and the artistic poster of the 1890s.²⁴ The earlier English posters made the artistic angels weep.²⁵ English posters of the mid-century manifested ugliness, bad taste and barbaric coarseness.²⁶ Spielmann noted the transformation from the ugly to the beautiful poster: Art has gradually forced her way into her rightful place, and promises henceforth to attend as fairy-godmother at the birth of many a commercial enterprise.²⁷ He described the progress of the artistic poster of the early 1890s compared with the earlier vulgar poster: But, surely, the fact is at last becoming recognized that ‘shouting’ is no longer necessary . . . the artistic poster of real beauty proclaims itself gently but irresistibly, out of the mass of violent kaleidoscopic color and common design. Few colors in strong contrast skillfully arranged, the fewest lines and masses, simple chiaroscuro, added to charm, grace, dignity, or vigor of design—these are the elements and essentials.²⁸ Spielmann concludes, We in England, too long delayed, are at last advancing toward this point, explaining that poster artists are encouraged by some poster advertisers who are finding that they can attract more attention with novel and artistic posters than with shouting ugliness or rampant Philistinism.²⁹

The critics’ objections notwithstanding, the commercial poster was quite successful as advertising because it was attracting attention with bold images; but contemporaries considered it vulgar, assaultive, and offensive. Prior to the flowering of the artistic poster in the 1890s, French and British commentators vehemently objected to commercial posters, asserting that they desecrated city vistas, overshadowed architectural monuments, and commodified civic space. Punch published spirited attacks in caricatures and verses. In 1887, The Palace of (Advertising) Art referred to London hoardings as vast vistas of vulgarity and complained that posters depicted every horror imagined by the sensation-poisoned mind.³⁰ Harry Furniss’s satiric illustration titled How We Advertise Now appeared in Punch in 1887 (Fig. I.8). Depicting a hoarding full of crude commercial posters that overshadow the figures in the scene, it illustrates the assertions of the accompanying verses that the city is given over to dismalness and dread, Murder and misery. In every corner there are fiends and phantoms, brutal scenes of blood and horrible Nightmares. Scenes of grimness, gore, and shame, / Shock . . . from every wall.³¹ Verses titled Horrible London: Or, the Pandemonium of Posters, which appeared next to a caricature in 1888, warned that London and legions of dull-witted toilers were negatively affected by these mural monstrosities.³²

I.8. Harry Furniss, How We Advertise Now, Punch, December 3, 1887. E. H. Butler Library, Buffalo State (SUNY).

Although during the late nineteenth century numerous critics in Paris were full of praise for the artistic poster as beautifying the city, a few decades earlier, two noted architects strongly objected to the commercial poster. Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and Charles Garnier each published an article in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts voicing their extensive objections to commercial posters, essentially for defacing edifices, destroying city views, and offending the eye. They saw posters as an incursion into the territory of architecture, an affront to aesthetics, and a threat to high art. Their critiques made it clear that at stake was a battle over public space. Viollet-le-Duc’s 1859 article protested against gigantic commercial posters (many of them painted on the walls). He was dismayed that monstrous and barbarous posters were more visible than the monuments themselves.³³ Garnier (who was to become known primarily as the architect of the new Paris Opera House) titled his 1871 article Les affiches agaçantes (Annoying posters). He was very disturbed by the huge industrial posters imposing themselves on our gazes, spoiling many beautiful views of our city.³⁴ He protested that these posters assaulted artistic standards of beauty and contaminated pristine views of architecture. By attracting the eye with huge letters and barbaric images, they were literally injurious to one’s eyesight, he found. Moreover, they corrupted the taste of the public, causing it to abandon the museums.³⁵ Art cannot stand up to hideous posters seen in disturbing vicinity.³⁶

Voicing his complaints, Garnier must have recalled offensive posters he had seen over the years. Some of the colossal commercial color posters that disturbed him were most likely produced by the Parisian print establishments of Rouchon and Van Geleyn.³⁷ Certain posters by Rouchon were still displayed some years after they were made.³⁸ Although Garnier does not mention any specific names of poster printers or designers, we can identify specific posters as produced by the workshop of Jean-Alexis Rouchon, who printed gigantic posters by adapting a technique from the production of wallpaper before color lithography was used for large posters. Among these is À l’oeil, 1864, which advertised a proto-department-store (magasin de nouveautés), selling ready-to-wear clothing (de confection) (Fig. I.9). Garnier’s comment on À l’oeil fits the striking image of Rouchon’s 1864 poster: this dreadful big eye of a cyclops which looks shamelessly.³⁹ Several additional titles of posters mentioned by Garnier correspond to posters by Rouchon’s workshop.⁴⁰ For Garnier and his contemporaries, these crude, brutal posters whose display intruded upon the beautiful views of the city were nothing short of an act of vandalism.⁴¹ The disturbing impact of such commercial posters is highlighted by the fact that three decades later the colors of posters printed by Rouchon were still perceived as incendiary, brilliant, shouting.⁴²

Most of the writing about posters during the late nineteenth century was about the artistic poster; yet the commercial poster continued to be highly visible in public space after the birth of the artistic poster, as is visible in some photographs of street displays of posters during the height of the popularity of the artistic poster in the 1890s in France, the United States, and England. This can be seen, for example, in Eugène Atget’s 1898 photograph of a hoarding covered with posters in Rue de l’abbaye: Saint-Germain-des-Près, 1898, Paris (Fig. I.10) and in the American Alice Austen’s photograph of c. 1896, Rag Pickers on 23rd Street at Third Avenue (Fig. I.11). Most of the illustrated posters seen in Austen’s photograph feature realistic images rather than abstracted ones. Photographs from around the same time in England show the predominance of the commercial poster, for example in an 1899 photograph taken near the Alhambra Theatre, at Leicester Square in London. Here posters covering an entire wall as well as hoardings at street level include many commercial examples, such as the one depicting a man smoking a cigarette (at the top left) (Fig. I.12). The critics of the journal the Poster, who wrote a column titled The Hoardings, testified to the difficulty of finding artistic posters displayed in London.⁴³ Although Paris was the capital of the artistic poster, here too commercial posters did not disappear, as we can see, for example, in the poster advertising a camera described as l’incroyable appareil instanté (the incredible instantaneous camera) of c. 1900, which is untouched by avant-garde artistic posters such as Toulouse-Lautrec’s 1894 poster for his friend, the photographer Paul Sescau (Figs. I.13 and I.14).

I.9. Jean-Alexis Rouchon, À l’oeil, 1864. Rouchon, Paris. 125 × 98 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Today one might question the validity of a clear distinction between the artistic and commercial poster because of the fact that both served commercial purposes of advertising, and because of the critique of hierarchies. Nonetheless, the distinction has been central to the history of the poster from its inception. Furthermore, the hierarchical distinction between the commercial and artistic poster was decisive for poster collectors. Most nineteenth-century collectors focused primarily on the artistic poster, and the tradition was sustained by twentieth-century poster collectors.⁴⁴

I.10. Eugène Atget, Rue de l’Abbaye: Saint-Germain-des-Près, 1898. Photograph, 17.5 × 22.1 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

I.11. Alice Austen, Rag Pickers on 23rd Street at Third Avenue, New York, c. 1896. Originally glass negative, 10.6 × 12.7 cm. Alice Austen House, Staten Island, N.Y.

I.12. Alhambra Theatre, Leicester Square, London, 1899. Photograph. Aerofilms of Borehamwood.

The Illustrated Poster as a Cultural Phenomenon

The artistic poster in the form of the illustrated lithographic color poster was a phenomenon that attracted enormous interest among artists, commentators, critics, advertisers, and collectors during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Today, in most cases, we tend to encounter such posters in the form of illustrations in books or as freestanding reproductions, and these posters appear quite tame compared with the newer technological images, such as digital billboards, that now invade urban space. Yet at the time, the brilliantly colored posters were experienced as a new and unprecedented phenomenon. They were the most visible manifestations of a culture that became visual and commercial, and by the twentieth century became identified as the culture of spectacle. For the contemporaries for whom the illustrated poster was a new and negative phenomenon, the poster threatened the literate culture and its privileged male subjects (as discussed in chapter 7). For nineteenth-century commentators the poster was not merely an ephemeral image, although it obviously was that too, but also a cultural phenomenon of deep consequences that changed the look and function of urban space and the experience of urban dwellers. This was the case whether commentators approved, seeing in the poster a welcome colorful decoration of somber monochromatic modern streets and a charming seduction, or disapproved, experiencing the poster as a shameless solicitation, a disruption of the civic