Glembinĭespite their enormous production quantity, posters were rarely seen for more than a week. The James and Susee Wiechmann Collection, M2021.63. Posters went mobile, carried by men on foot wearing placards–sandwich boards–and pulled on rickshaws. Posters began appearing not only on walls, but also in and on new structures dedicated to advertising such as frames, cylindrical Morris columns, news kiosks and even shelters surrounding public urinals. The law allowed posters to be affixed to any surface except those that bore language specifically prohibiting it. The merger fortuitously coincided with a new law granting greater freedom to display posters. Merging his business in 1881 with a printing company, acquiring a larger work force and atelier in the process, along with the steam-powered press he owned, allowed him to produce posters in huge volume. It is estimated Chéret’s workshop could produce 250,000 posters per year or 2,500 per day at peak capacity. The stately Parisian streets of today bear no resemblance to Chéret and Lautrec’s Paris where a raucous cacophony of advertising plastered nearly every façade.Ĭritic Raoul Sertat commented in 1896, “We cannot escape the advertisements… (advertising) is all around us, to the left, to the right, everywhere.” Think of today’s digital advertising landscape in Times Square.
“A lot of the poster artists working at the time (including Lautrec) would have cited Chéret as an influence since he was the first person to put these posters in the streets,” Otten said. Chéret, however, had direct influence on Lautrec who went through Chéret’s workshop, learning techniques from the master he would carry over to his posters which are now inseparable from the era. When most people imagine historic French posters–or La Belle Époque–what comes to mind comes directly from his hand. Any conversation of French poster art must include him. Because of the hierarchy of the arts, posters were not as much considered art so he got a little lost to history.” “If you think of (Henri) Toulouse-Lautrec, he was a painter, but also a poster maker. “He is less known today than some of the people that followed him because these other people also worked in different media,” Nikki Otten, Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Milwaukee Art Museum and the exhibition’s organizer, told. How then has one of the chief architects in its visual aesthetic been almost completely overlooked in the United States for the past 125 years?
That romance was created and sustained in no small measure due to these posters. This “golden age” or “beautiful era” in Paris which saw it transform from rubble after the Franco-Prussian War into the fantasy land it is cherished as today continues being widely romanticized. The James and Susee Wiechmann Collection, M2021.1 63.