Paris streets once served as the poor man's picture gallery
In the 1890s the walls of Paris became an open-air exhibition. Colour lithography let printers turn out huge, cheap, vivid sheets, censorship of public space had eased, and advertisers had crowds to reach. Painters from Toulouse-Lautrec to Mucha took up the work, and theatre stars even chose which artist would design their bills.
Printed notices are ancient; plain text bills once announced Shakespeare's plays and royal proclamations. What made the modern poster was technology. Alois Senefelder invented lithography in Germany in 1796, and chromolithography soon allowed vibrant colour runs. By the 1840s and 1850s the process had been perfected for mass production, and three shifts came together: cheap large images, the lifting of French restrictions on public display, and urban shoppers ready for mass-produced goods.
Jules Chéret is often called the father of the advertising placard. A pencil artist and scene painter, he opened a small lithography workshop in Paris in 1866 and went on to make more than 1,000 advertisements for theatres, shows and products. He poured on colour, paired it with inventive lettering and filled his sheets with laughing, flirtatious women nicknamed chérettes, openly using feminine allure to sell. Paris held a major poster exhibition in 1884, and between 1895 and 1900 Chéret's Masters of the Poster series became both a commercial hit and a lasting reference.
America followed a different route. Travelling circuses of the 1850s plastered towns with crowded, brightly coloured woodcuts that critics sneered at, until designers such as Edward Penfield and Will Bradley won admirers on both sides of the Atlantic. After the First World War the poster lost ground to magazines, radio, television and billboards, and civic groups had long complained that it made streets ugly.
War gave it a new job. The First World War brought the first large-scale political use of illustrated posters, with recruitment and bond appeals displacing commercial ones; images like Lord Kitchener pointing at the viewer entered popular memory. In the mid-1960s posters came back as counter-cultural decoration, a revival one observer in 1968 placed halfway between fashion and mass hysteria, with Jim Fitzpatrick's stylised Che Guevara on countless walls. Collectors now seek out Belle Époque, film and travel posters, and forgeries are relatively rare because the originals were cheap.
Source: Poster
