Ooh, la, la! Every preconceived notion we Americans have about France – specifically, Gay Paree and environs – as the home of romance, perfume and the can-can, is now on display in the Holmes Gallery at the Vero Beach Museum of Art through Jan. 12, 2020. “L’Affichomania: The Passion for French Prints” is an exhibition of more than 60 posters (including a handful of watercolor sketches for posters) dating from 1875 to 1910, Paris’s Belle Epoch.
The artworks on display are from the collection of the Richard H. Driehaus Museum. Installed in a restored mansion a couple blocks west of Chicago’s Miracle Mile, the museum was originally a splendid home built by banker Samuel Nickerson in 1883, and its works focus on the art and architecture of the White City’s Gilded Age. Philanthropist Richard H. Driehaus is the founder of not only the museum and art collection that bear his name, but also of Chicago-based Driehaus Capital Management.
“L’Affichomania” came to the VBMA via International Arts & Artists, a nonprofit business that handles the details of traveling exhibitions for museum and private entities in the U.S. and internationally.
Jeannine Falino, guest curator for the Richard H. Driehaus poster collection when it debuted in 2017 at the Driehaus Museum, recently visited the exhibition in Vero Beach.
Falino complimented VBMA staff on installing an intriguing photo mural at the exhibition’s entrance, a detail unique to the current showing. The c. 1900 black and white image shows the side of a French shop that is plastered with boldface advertisements of every size and type. Against that graphic explosion, a prim bonne dame hurries on her way.
The image shows that “spam” predates email by at least seven decades. According to Falino, such a display had its origins in the heralds of medieval times, who sang the news in the village square, and street vendors, who bawled out their inventory from house to house.
She notes that with the advent of the printing press, “news items were posted on hoardings (billboards) where people would go to read the news or have the news read to them. Early posters were just text, in black and white.”
Enter the technology of color lithography in the mid-19th century, and printers soon began recreating famous paintings as color prints for art lovers on a budget. In the Holmes Gallery, ultramarine blue accent walls are a dramatic backdrop for the posters, which hold their own handily.
The largest are two-sheet vertical compositions measuring just shy of 7 feet tall; the smallest are special editions sized to fit an amateur collector’s print cabinet. The posters advertise everything from cabarets to concert halls, cigarette rolling papers to confetti. Printed in eye-popping primary colors, they employ every trick in the advertising book, flaunting winsome mam’selles with artless smiles and low-cut bodices, well-groomed children, celebrities and even defiant alley cats.
“The father of the French poster, as we know it, was Jules Chéret,” says Falino.
Born into a poor family in 1836, Chéret’s art education was mostly catch as catch can. At age 13 he was apprenticed to a lithographer; 10 years later he traveled to London, where he worked for seven years as a journeyman lithographer. Schooled in British graphic design as well as printmaking techniques, Chéret returned to Paris where he realized the potential of color lithography not as a copyist’s tool, but as a medium for original expression on a wholesale scale.
Gazing at the exhibition’s selection of posters by Chéret, Falino remarks on the secrets of his commercial success. Instead of including wordy descriptions of the product he was selling, Chéret filled his compositions with colorful imagery. The text he included was bold but brief; busy passersby could get the gist of what was being sold by the poster without breaking their pace.
Chéret’s posters were printed in bright red, yellow and blue ink with very little overprinting. The bright, clear colors could be read from a distance, as could his eye-catching imagery.
“The pretty women he featured in his posters tend to be very light on their feet; they seem to float in their environments,” Falino says.
Chéret’s public dubbed the girls Chérettes, a word, says Falino, which conflates the artist’s name with Chérie (sweetheart).
Like every respected huckster before him, Chéret knew that sex sells. Falino describes the Chérettes as “gorgeous women with a lot of décolletage, tiny waists, flounces everywhere, and of course a big smile. These are the ‘It’ girls of the 1890s.”
She explains that Chéret’s women (and their auxiliary male companions) were drawn from the 17th century’s Fête galante paintings, featuring elegant couples partying en plein air, of Watteau and Fragonard.
“The Chérettes thereby held a certain nostalgia for an earlier age. The girls are comely, but they are not coarse. These are ladies,” Falino emphasizes.
Chéret was so famous in his time that up-and-coming poster artists wanted their work to be seen by him. One of those artists was Henri de Toulouse Lautrec who, says Falino, inscribed a copy of each of his own early poster editions to Chéret, and had it delivered in tribute to le maître.
Instead of the coyly sexy girl-next-door Chéret was known for, Lautrec portrayed the louche performers who sang and danced for the demimonde that congregated in the clubs and bars of Montmartre, along with foreign visitors (invariably male) who wanted a taste of spicy Parisian nightlife.
On display in L’Affichomania is Lautrec’s famous 1891 poster “Moulin Rouge: La Goulue,” which depicts one of the recently opened dance hall’s habitués, a young woman nicknamed “The Glutton.” Hemmed in by onlookers, she dances a frenzied chahut (can-can) that sends her skirt flying. In the immediate foreground, a fellow performer, Valentin le Désossé (“the Boneless”), gestures in mock horror at the expanse of ruffled bloomers thus revealed to him and, incidentally, to us.
Another Lautrec poster, commissioned by the dancer Jane Avril in 1893 to advertise her cabaret show at another nightspot, shows her performing the can-can in an orange skirt accessorized with long black gloves, black stockings and a frilly, plumed hat. She is framed by a sinuous line that begins and ends at the neck of a double base in the foreground; the giant hairy hand that plays it belongs to a bespectacled wild man, who, had Lautrec not invented him, would surely have later come from Robert Crumb’s pen. The daringly foreshortened boards of the stage and the glimpse of the flats stage left, however, are pure Lautrec.
The other artists whose posters are featured in the exhibition are Eugène Grasset, Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen and Alphonse Mucha. One of the few watercolors in the exhibition is Grasset’s fully realized study of a flame-haired beauty caught in the act of sticking a long-stemmed chrysanthemum behind her ear. The 1897 painting is titled “Coquetterie.”
Steinlen standouts in the show are his iconic poster for nightclub owner Rodolphe Salis’ Chat Noir, with its imagery of an imperious black cat, and a racy poster advertising a novel titled La Traite des Blanches (White Slavery). That one features the images of a well-heeled pimp, two despairing young women and a madam, who Steinlen originally depicted bare-breasted.
Alphonse Mucha is represented in the show by two two-sheet posters for Sarah Bernhardt, including one published in 1896 for the play “La Dame aux Camélias.” It depicts the then 52-year-old tragedienne as the consumptive young courtesan Marguerite, profiled against a starry lavender sky.
