The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s–1900s 1611686164, 9781611686159, 9781611686166, 9781611686173

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t

THE POSTER

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

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

Heather Warren-Crow, Girlhood and the Plastic Image

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

T POSTER t the

art, advertising, design, and collec ting, 186 0s –19 0 0s

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 Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by April Leidig Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro by Copperline Book Services, Inc. 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.i85 2014 2014012006 741.6'7409034— dc23 5 4 3 2 1

In memory of my grandparents, Yehoshua and Frida Iskin, and my parents, Charlotte and Aharon Ernst Iskin

CONTENTS List of  Illustrations  xi List of  Plates  xvii Acknowledgments xix Introduction: The Poster at a Crossroads  1 part i the poster as art 1 The Poster’s Place in Modernism: Art and Mass Media in the 1890s  39 2 Toulouse-Lautrec, Jane Avril, and the Iconography of the Female Print Connoisseur in Posters  79 part ii

the poster and print: reproduction and consecration 3 The Color Print: Art in the Age of  Lithography  127 4 Les Maîtres de l’Affiche: Aura and Reproduction  145 part iii

the poster as design and advertising 5 Art and Advertising in the Street  173 6 Poster Design: The Dialogics of  Image and Word  209

part iv

collecting and iconophilia 7 The Poster at the Origins of the Age of  Spectacle: The Rise of the Image and Modern Iconophobia  247 8 The Iconophile’s Collecting: Posters as an Ephemeral Archaeology of  Modernity  263 Notes 303 Bibliography 371 Index 397 Color plates follow pages 136 and 232.

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.1 Jules Chéret, Bal du Moulin Rouge, 1889.  3 I.2 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec with Trémolada Standing next to Jules Chéret’s 1889 Poster Bal du Moulin Rouge. 3 I.3 Armand Rassenfosse, book cover (front) for Les affiches étrangères illustrées, 1897. 4 I.4 Advertisement of the Bonnard-Bidault bill-posting company, in Annuaire du commerce Didot-Bottin, 1890.  5 I.5  Mystères de Paris, statuettes par Émile Thomas, 6 fr, 1844.  8 I.6 Eugène Grasset, Librairie romantique, 1887.  8 I.7 The Beggarstaffs, Girl Reading, 1895.  9 I.8 Harry Furniss, “How We Advertise Now,” Punch, December 3, 1887.  11 I.9 Jean-Alexis Rouchon, À l’oeil, 1864.  13 I.10 Eugène Atget, Rue de l’Abbaye: Saint-Germain-des-Près, 1898.  14 I.11 Alice Austen, Rag Pickers on 23rd Street at Third Avenue, New York, c. 1896.  14 I.12 Alhambra Theatre, Leicester Square, London, 1899.  15 I.13 Photographie vulgarisatrice, c. 1880–1900.  16 I.14 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, P. Sescau, Photographe, c. 1894–96.  16 I.15 Poster Exhibition at the Main Building of the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, 1895. 19 I.16 Sydney Higham, The 1894 Poster Exhibition at the Royal Aquarium. 20 I.17 Premises of the Société belge des affichophiles in Antwerp, c. 1900.  21 1.1 Pierre Bonnard, France-Champagne, 1891.  44 1.2 Champagne Scohyers de Dorlodot Reims, 1890.  44 1.3 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, La Goulue, Moulin Rouge, 1891.  45 1.4 Jules Chéret, Moulin Rouge, 1890.  46

1.5 Alphonse Mucha, Gismonda, 1894.  47 1.6 Aubrey Beardsley, Avenue Theatre, A Comedy of Sighs! 1894.  48 1.7 Dudley Hardy, To-Day, c. 1895.  55 1.8 Jules Chéret, Quinquina Mugnier, grand apéritif, 1897.  57 1.9 Jules Chéret, Quinquina Dubonnet, 1896.  58 1.10 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Troupe de Mlle Églantine, 1896.  59 1.11 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Reine de joie, 1892.  61 1.12 Jules Chéret, Théâtre national de l’opéra, Carnaval 1892. 61 1.13 The Beggarstaffs, “Kassama” Corn Flour, 1894.  64 1.14 The Beggarstaffs, Rowntree’s Elect Cocoa, 1896.  64 1.15 Édouard Manet, Polichinelle, 1874.  67 1.16 Jules Chéret, Valentino, samedi et Mardi Gras, grand bal de nuit, 1869. 67 1.17 A Wall with Posters including Toulouse-Lautrec’s Aristide Bruant Poster, c. 1892. 69 2.1 Louis Léopold Boilly, Les amateurs de tableaux (The Art Connoisseurs), 1823–28. 80 2.2 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, cover for the print portfolio L’Estampe Originale, 1893. 81 2.3 Imprimerie Paul Dupont, Paris, c. 1893.  85 2.4 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Jane Avril, 1893.  87 2.5 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Divan japonais, 1893.  88 2.6 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Jane Avril, 1899.  89 2.7 Honoré Daumier, The Print Collectors, 1860–63.  91 2.8 Maurice Leloir, illustration for Henri Beraldi, Les graveurs du XIXe siècle: Guide de l’amateur d’estampes modernes, vol. 9, 1889.  92 2.9 Alexandre Lunois, Ed. Sagot, Estampes modernes, 1894.  96 2.10 Honoré Daumier, The Print Collectors, c. 1860–64.  98 2.11 Théo van Rysselberghe, N. Lembrée, c. 1897.  99 2.12 Georges de Feure, cover for the print portfolio Lithographies originales, album no. 1, 1896.  100 2.13 Georges Alfred Bottini, Ed. Sagot, 1898.  101 2.14 Alphonse Mucha, Salon des Cent, 1896.  103 2.15 Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Centenaire de la lithographie, 1895.  104 2.16 Hugo d’Alési, Exposition du centenaire de la lithographie, Galerie Rapp, 1895.  104 2.17 Otto Fisher, Kunst-Anstalt für Moderne Plakate, 1896.  106 2.18 Fernand Gottlob, 2e exposition des peintres lithographes, 1898.  107 2.19 Edgar Degas, The Print Collector, 1866.  108 2.20 Edgar Degas, The Amateurs, c. 1878–80.  109 xii  · Illustrations

2.21 Edgar Degas, Miss Cassatt at the Louvre, c. 1879–80.  110 2.22 Antoine Watteau, detail of L’enseigne de Gersaint, 1720–21.  111 2.23 Armand Rassenfosse, Salon des Cent, nouvelle exposition d’ensemble, 1896. 113 2.24 Fernand Fau, 14e exposition, 31 rue Bonaparte, Salon des 100, 1895.  115 2.25 Frédéric-Auguste Cazals, 7me exposition du Salon des 100, 1894. 116 2.26 Honoré Daumier, Le Salon de 1857, aspect du salon, le jour de l’ouverture, 1857.  118 3.1 Pierre Bonnard, L’Estampe et l’Affiche, 1897.  129 3.2 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Bust of Mademoiselle Marcelle Lender, 1895.  132 3.3 Pierre Bonnard, Les peintres-graveurs, 1896.  133 4.1 Joseph Sattler, cover for the magazine Pan, 1895.  146 4.2 Alexandre de Riquer, Ayuntamiento de Barcelona; Industria, Arte (Barcelona City Council, Industry, Art) 1896.  146 4.3 Ethel Reed, Miss Träumerei, 1895.  147 4.4 The Atelier of Jules Chéret in the Imprimerie Chaix, Paris, c. 1893.  150 4.5 Jules Chéret, drawing for the title page of Les Maîtres de l’Affiche, 1896.  153 4.6 Title page, Les Maîtres de l’Affiche, 1896.  154 4.7 Jan Toorop, The Print Collector (Dr. Aegidius Timmerman), 1900.  164 5.1 Mills, Posters on a hoarding by Daly’s Theatre, including Dudley Hardy’s poster for the revival of A Gaiety Girl, 1899.  180 5.2 Dudley Hardy, “A Gaiety Girl,” Prince of Wales’ Theatre, 1893.  180 5.3 Alphonse Mucha, “La dame aux camélias,” Sarah Bernhardt, Théâtre de la Renaissance, 1896.  184 5.4 The Beggarstaffs, Hamlet, 1894.  184 5.5 W. S. Rogers, Automobile Club Show, c. 1900.  186 5.6 William George Joy, Bayswater Omnibus, 1895.  193 5.7 Louis Robert Carrier-Belleuse, Mending the Pots, 1882.  195 5.8 Édouard Manet, Au Café, 1878.  196 5.9 Léon Louis Oury, Affiches Brondert, c. 1897.  198 5.10 Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, cover of Le Mirliton, June 9, 1893.  199 5.11 Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, La rue, 1896.  200 5.12 Dudley Hardy, Liebig Company’s Extract, the Future Butcher Boy, 1900.  207 6.1 Parapluyes et parasols à porter dans la poche, 1715. Published in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1884.  217 6.2 John Orlando Parry, A London Street Scene, 1835.  217 6.3 Émile Mermet, La publicité dans les rues de Paris en 1880. 218 6.4 Alfred Concanen, Modern Advertising: A Railway Station in 1874. 219 6.5 Tony Johannot, Don Quichotte illustré, 1844.  221 6.6 Édouard Manet, cover for Champfleury, Les chats, second edition, 1868.  222 Illustrations  ‡ xiii

6.7 Frederick Walker, Woman in White, 1871.  223 6.8 John Everett Millais, Bubbles, Pears’ Soap, 1886.  225 6.9 Jean-Alexis Rouchon, Absinthe-chinoise brevetée, 1862.  227 6.10 Jules Chéret, Eau de Botot, 1896.  228 6.11 Jean-Alexis Rouchon, Poudre de Duchesne dentiste, 1860.  228 6.12 Jules Chéret, Vin Mariani, Popular French Tonic Wine, 1894.  229 6.13 Jules Chéret, Exposition des Arts Incohérents, 1886.  231 6.14 Jules Chéret, Folies-Bergère Les Girard, 1877.  232 6.15 Will Bradley, Pegasus, The Chap Book, 1895.  233 6.16 Francisco Tamagno, La Framboisette, c. 1905.  234 6.17 Jules Chéret, Le Petit Moniteur, L’Ogresse, 1874.  235 6.18 Aubrey Beardsley, Publisher. Children’s Books, 1894.  236 6.19 Alfred Roller XIV. Ausstell[un]g der Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Österreichs Secession (14th Exhibition of the Secession), 1902.  237 6.20 Koloman Moser XIII. Ausstellung d[er] Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Österreichs Secession (The 13th Vienna Secession Exhibition), 1902.  237 6.21 Leonetto Cappiello, Chocolat Klaus, 1903.  238 6.22 Lucian Bernhard, Manoli, 1910.  240 6.23 Lucian Bernhard, Stiller, 1907–8.  241 6.24 Chaussures modernes. Mon[sieur] Sutter, 1860.  241 7.1 Café concert curtain at Les Ambassadeurs, Paris, decorated with posters by Jules Chéret, 1895.  251 7.2 “Horrible London; or, the Pandemonium Poster,” Punch, October 13, 1888.  254 7.3 “Picturesque London; or, Sky Signs of the Times,” Punch, September 6, 1890.  255 8.1 Edward Penfield, Harper’s April ’98, 1898.  272 8.2 Viktor Oliva, Zlatá Praha, 1900.  273 8.3 Jules Chéret, La Diaphane, 1890.  273 8.4 Francisco Tamagno, Aluminite, 1903.  274 8.5 Ferdinand Lunel, Étretat, chemins de fer de l’ouest, 1896. 274 8.6 Jules Chéret, Aux Buttes Chaumont, robes, manteaux, modes, 1882.  275 8.7 Jules Chéret, Aux Buttes Chaumont, manufacture d’ habillements pour hommes & enfants, 1880–81.  275 8.8 Jules Chéret, Théâtrophone, 1890.  276 8.9 Henri Thiriet, Machines à coudre françaises Peugeot, c. 1890.  276 8.10 Écume de France, 1860.  277 8.11 Jane Atché, Papier à cigarettes JOB, hors concours, Paris 1889, 1896.  278 xiv  · Illustrations

8.12 Alphonse Mucha, JOB, c. 1896.  278 8.13 Fritz Rehm, Der Kenner, Cigaretten Laferme, Dresden, 1897.  278 8.14 Jules Chéret, En versant 3 francs au G[ran]d Crédit parisien, 1877.  279 8.15 Grands magasins du Bon Génie, saison d’ été, vente à crédit, c. 1891.  280 8.16 Ouverture à l’Harmonie, g[ran]de brasserie rhénane . . . 1872.  281 8.17 Lucien Lefevre, Café Malt, le meilleur, 1892.  281 8.18 Eugène Grasset, Masson, chocolat mexicain, 1897.  283 8.19 Abel Faivre, Sports d’ hiver, Chamonix, 1905.  283 8.20 G. Moore, The James, 1890s. 283 8.21 Edward Penfield, Ride a Stearns and Be Content, 1896.  283 8.22 L. W., Cycles Gladiator, c. 1895.  284 8.23 Charles Sénard, La Goutte d’or, 1895.  284 8.24 Hulstkamp’s Old Schiedam, the Finest Gin Ever Imported, 1890.  284 8.25 Adolphe Crespin, Paul Hankar architecte, 1894.  285 8.26 La Négrita rhum, 1892.  286 8.27 Eugène Vavasseur, “Hammond” Machine à écriture visible, 1904.  286 8.28 Misti (Ferdinand Mifliez), Rouxel & Dubois, c. 1890–1900.  287 8.29 Jules Chéret, Ernest Maindron, cover illustration, Les Hommes d’Aujourd’ hui, 1887. 289 8.30 Honoré Daumier, The Connoisseur, 1860–65.  290 8.31 Pierre Vidal, M. Beraldi, père iconophile, in L’Art et l’Idée, March 1892.  297

Illustrations  ‡ xv

PLATES Color plates follow pages 136 and 232. Plate 1 Jules Chéret, Bal du Moulin Rouge, 1889. Plate 2 Eugène Grasset, Librairie romantique, 1887. Plate 3 Photographie vulgarisatrice, c. 1880–1900. Plate 4 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, P. Sescau, Photographe, c. 1894–96. Plate 5 Pierre Bonnard, France-Champagne, 1891. Plate 6 Champagne Scohyers de Dorlodot Reims, 1890. Plate 7 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, La Goulue, Moulin Rouge, 1891. Plate 8 Jules Chéret, Moulin Rouge, 1890. Plate 9 Alphonse Mucha, Gismonda, 1894. Plate 10 Aubrey Beardsley, Avenue Theatre, A Comedy of Sighs! 1894. Plate 11 Jules Chéret, Quinquina Dubonnet, 1896. Plate 12 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Troupe de Mlle Églantine, 1896. Plate 13 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Reine de joie, 1892. Plate 14 The Beggarstaffs, “Kassama” Corn Flour, 1894. Plate 15 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, cover for the print portfolio L’Estampe Originale, 1893. Plate 16 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Jane Avril, 1893. Plate 17 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Divan japonais, 1893. Plate 18 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Jane Avril, 1899. Plate 19 Théo van Rysselberghe, N. Lembrée, c. 1897. Plate 20 Georges de Feure, cover for the print portfolio Lithographies originales, album no. 1, 1896. Plate 21 Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Centenaire de la lithographie, 1895. Plate 22 Otto Fisher, Kunst-Anstalt für Moderne Plakate, 1896. Plate 23 Edgar Degas, The Print Collector, 1866. Plate 24 Pierre Bonnard, L’Estampe et l’Affiche, 1897.

Plate 25 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Bust of Mademoiselle Marcelle Lender, 1895. Plate 26 Ethel Reed, Miss Träumerei, 1895. Plate 27 Jan Toorop, The Print Collector (Dr. Aegidius Timmerman), 1900. Plate 28 Dudley Hardy, “A Gaiety Girl,” Prince of Wales’ Theatre, 1893. Plate 29 Alphonse Mucha, “La dame aux camélias,” Sarah Bernhardt, Théâtre de la Renaissance, 1896. Plate 30 W. S. Rogers, Automobile Club Show, c. 1900. Plate 31 William George Joy, Bayswater Omnibus, 1895. Plate 32 Louis Robert Carrier-Belleuse, Mending the Pots, 1882. Plate 33 Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, La rue, 1896. Plate 34 Émile Mermet, La publicité dans les rues de Paris en 1880. Plate 35 Alfred Concanen, Modern Advertising: A Railway Station in 1874. Plate 36 John Everett Millais, Bubbles, Pears’ Soap, 1886. Plate 37 Jules Chéret, Eau de Botot, 1896. Plate 38 Jules Chéret, Vin Mariani, Popular French Tonic Wine, 1894. Plate 39 Francisco Tamagno, La Framboisette, c. 1905. Plate 40 Aubrey Beardsley, Publisher. Children’s Books, 1894. Plate 41 Leonetto Cappiello, Chocolat Klaus, 1903. Plate 42 Lucian Bernhard, Manoli, 1910. Plate 43 Jane Atché, Papier à cigarettes JOB, hors concours, Paris 1889, 1896. Plate 44 Alphonse Mucha, JOB, c. 1896. Plate 45 Fritz Rehm, Der Kenner, Cigaretten Laferme, Dresden, 1897. Plate 46 Adolphe Crespin, Paul Hankar architecte, 1894. Plate 47 Eugène Vavasseur, “Hammond” Machine à écriture visible, 1904. Plate 48 Jules Chéret, Ernest Maindron, cover illustration, Les Hommes d’Aujourd’ hui, 1887.

xviii 

· Plates

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 Sid­ lauskas, Holly Pittman, and Christine Poggi during my year at the University of xx  · Acknowledgments

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.

Acknowledgments  ‡ xxi

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THE POSTER

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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 over2  · Introduction

I.1. (left) Jules Chéret, Bal du Moulin Rouge, 1889. Chaix, Paris. 130 × 92 cm. I.2. (below) 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.

seas 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-­ Introduction  ‡ 3

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

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. 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 4  · Introduction

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

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 Introduction  ‡ 5

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 6  · Introduction

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, Statu­ ettes 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 adver­ Introduction  ‡ 7

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.

tising, 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 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 Introduction  ‡ 9

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 10  · Introduction

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

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 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 Introduction  ‡ 11

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-­A lexis 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 12  · Introduction

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

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). 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. Introduction  ‡ 13

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.

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

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 Introduction  ‡ 15

I.13. Photographie vulgarisatrice, c. 1880–1900. S. Glaise, Paris. 57.5 × 80 cm. Graphic Arts Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

I.14. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, P. Sescau, Photographe, c. 1894–96 (printer not listed). 61 × 79.5 cm. Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. Gift of the Estate of William S. Kinkead 1984–44–57.

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 nature of urban space that overshadowed architectural monuments. The extensive development of the poster in France was greatly facilitated by the 1881 law of the freedom of the press, which enabled bill stickers (afficheurs) to post without submitting posters for advance approval to the prefect of police or obtaining prior authorization for working as afficheurs.45 From that point on, posters could be displayed on most walls, with the exception of churches and specific buildings designated by the mayor of each community for posters announcing laws and other official proclamations.46 In the case of “fly posting,” posters were posted everywhere rather than being limited to paid spaces rented by bill-­posting companies. This method was widely used during elections, but such posters were usually pasted over within hours. In order for posters to have a more durable presence, advertisers paid bill-­posting companies for regularly posting fresh copies on hoardings rented by the bill-­posting companies. This resulted in the commodification of public space. Walls and hoardings were turned into revenue producers for building owners, companies, and municipalities. The convergence of the 1881 law with the development of mass consumption, for which advertising was essential, greatly increased the law’s impact. The new availability of improved inks and powerful presses that printed huge quantities of posters in decreasing time spans had great impact on the burgeoning poster industry. Chéret, who in 1881 merged his independent print shop (which he had founded in Paris in 1866) with the large Parisian print establishment Chaix, had designed some one thousand posters by 1884. In addition he was overseeing other in-­house designers and the annual printing of some two hundred thousand Introduction  ‡ 17

posters.47 Georges D’Avenel, the author of an extensive article on advertising, estimated in 1901 that 25 million francs were being spent annually on posters in France, counting all posters in public spaces including streets, train stations, omni­buses, boats, theaters, kiosks, and many other sites.48 Nonetheless, the history of advertising has allotted the nineteenth-­century illustrated poster a marginal role. This was the case because illustrated posters came to be so closely related to art rather than advertising and because during the twentieth century the poster’s role diminished as it became just one of many means for advertising.49 During the 1890s the poster became widely known, not only through its display on the streets but also through large exhibitions, most of which included posters produced in many countries. Exhibitions organized by collectors were held in numerous European cities, including Paris, Reims, Nantes, London, Leeds, Hamburg, Dresden, Vienna, Strasbourg, Brussels, and Milan.50 Poster exhibitions were also held in American cities, including Boston, New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Richmond. Several poster exhibits in the United States took place at art and design schools, including the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. These exhibitions were usually based on the collections of poster collectors. For example, the exhibition at Pratt, which was the most popular of the school’s early shows and included posters by French, British, and American poster artists, was based on thirteen private collections and drew a large attendance of over twelve hundred, and extensive press coverage (Fig. I.15).51 In France, Alexandre Henriot, president of the Society of Friends of the Arts in Reims, organized a large international exhibition based primarily on his own poster collection, for which he obtained the patronage of the esteemed mural artist and president of the Société nationale des amis des beaux arts, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. The exhibition included posters from France, Germany, the United States, England, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, Holland, Italy, Sweden, Annam (Vietnam), and Japan.52 These exhibitions were often held in spaces that were identified with mass culture rather than high art. For example, Henriot secured a huge space at the Cirque de Reims, and the two large international poster exhibitions in London were held in the Westminster Aquarium, known for its variety shows. Edward Bella, a poster collector, dealer, and entrepreneur in the paper and print business, organized the London exhibits in 1894 and 1896, relying on his own collection and on other collectors and dealers.53 In 1896 a librarian named William T. Peoples organized an exhibition based on his own collection of French, English, and American posters, and displayed it in the Mercantile Library in New York City.54 Such exhibitions attracted audiences beyond 18  · Introduction

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

those who usually attended the museum, including “many who knew nothing about art in general, and still less about the poster-­painting art in particular.”55 As the New York Times reported, some seventeen hundred to two thousand visitors attended the exhibit on a single day. Its reporter characterized the diverse audience as those who came out of curiosity or for business purposes, “lithographers, poster artists and pretty girls by the score.”56 These exhibitions usually displayed the posters in a casual mode. At the New York library, for example, the over one thousand posters were hung from slender wires, hiding the books, and the longer posters trailed the floor.57 Although the Salon displayed framed artworks that filled the walls from floor to ceiling with limited space between the paintings, poster exhibits displayed the poster unframed, usually with no space separating them, and arranged in what appeared to be a haphazard order. This invoked the flavor of street hoardings rather than the decorum of art exhibitions. This can be seen in a rare photograph showing the installation of the 1895 poster exhibition at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn (Fig. I.15). Although the mode of display was quite a bit more casual than that of framed artworks in museums and plush galleries, the illustration of the poster exhibition at the Royal Aquarium in Westminster, London, represented it as a Introduction  ‡ 19

I.16. Sydney Higham, The 1894 Poster Exhibition at the Royal Aquarium. In the Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times, November 10, 1894. British Library, London.

fashionable gathering of middle-­class men and women (Fig. I.16). The illustration, which appeared in the Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times on November 10, 1894, promoted the exhibition alongside a brief text titled “Chic Show of Artistic Paris and London Posters at the Westminster Aquarium.” A similar mode of edge-­to-­edge display of posters directly on the wall is seen in a photograph showing the premises of the Société belge des affichophiles in An­twerp, an association of Belgian poster collectors, whose secretary, Henri Grell, was a major poster collector (Fig. I.17). Here posters were displayed on the walls and, to provide more space, also on two sides of large panels that one could leaf through. (Two posters by Toulouse-­Lautrec are visible on one panel, and Chéret’s 1891 poster for the Japanese print exhibition at the École des beaux arts is on the wall at the top on the right corner.) This method of storing and displaying posters was used by Paris dealers as well as some collectors during the 1890s.58 In addition to their visibility in exhibitions, posters were brought to the attention of the public through copious writings, ranging from long essays in journals and illustrated books to shorter articles in journals, the daily press, and exhibition catalogs. During the late nineteenth century one could read about 20  · Introduction

I.17. Premises of the Société belge des affichophiles in Antwerp, c. 1900. Photograph by Arthur Verbeeck DeSwerdt. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

the artistic poster in specialized journals and in books in France, England, Germany, and the United States. Journals published articles, reviews, and news items about posters. Among the prominent publications were L’Estampe et l’Affiche in France; the Poster in England; the Poster and Poster Lore in the United States. Das Plakat, founded by Hans Sachs, the leading poster collector in Germany, was published in Berlin.59 In addition, numerous literary journals in Europe and the United States published articles about the poster, including La Plume, Art et Décoration, Gazette des Beaux-­Arts, Le Livre Moderne, Revue des Revues, Revue du Monde Littéraire, and La Critique in France, the Studio and the Art Journal in England, Scribner’s Magazine and the Century in the United States, and Pan in Germany. Talmeyr, who wrote a sharp critique of the poster, noted ironically that the poster was a “true art” in the sense that it had its own aesthetic, critics, collectors, historians, special issues of journals dedicated to posters, a book about the history of the poster, and galleries.60 The first galleries specializing in the artistic poster opened in the 1880s, and by the 1890s they proliferated. Poster and print dealers, including the preeminent Ed. Sagot, also became publishers of reissued posters. Art dealers, for example Ambroise Vollard and Gustave Pellet, published portfolios of original color prints by contemporary artists.61 Introduction  ‡ 21

A new type of ephemeral image-­centered color advertisement, posters were posted outdoors in urban spaces and in some interior spaces. They were commissioned by advertisers and printers as well as directly by clients. Among the latter were performers including Sarah Bernhardt, Aristide Bruant, and Jane Avril in France, author and playwright Wilkie Collins in England, and publishers of illustrated journals in the United States. Quickly appropriated by collectors, the illustrated lithographic color poster became a hybrid print. Although initially it functioned as ephemeral advertising on the streets, collectors assembled, preserved, cataloged, exhibited, and stored the poster in their portfolios for posterity. They thus played a crucial role in transforming the poster into an artwork in an expanding field of graphic arts. Collecting is central to the cultural history of the nineteenth-­century poster explored in this book. Collecting is discussed in two chapters: chapter 2 analyzes the representation of the print collector in posters, identifying a new iconography of the print collector as female; chapter 8 identifies and examines the iconophile, a new kind of collector (usually male) who was dedicated to collecting the poster and other everyday prints, in order to create a visual archive for the future. Without collectors, the consecration of the poster as art could not have been accomplished. Yet affichomanie (the poster craze) can only be understood in a wider cultural context rather than in a separate history of the poster. As argued in this book, collecting posters was a creative response to the radical change in public space, in which everyday life became saturated with functional illustrated prints of all kinds, from posters to product labels, ex libris, menus, and theatrical and musical performance programs. This caused iconophobia in some, while stimulating iconophilia (the love and collecting of print images) in others. During the 1890s, for members of the middle classes, who could not afford to buy the more expensive painting or sculpture, collecting artistic posters was a mark of class distinction. As articulated by a reporter who wrote about the London Westminster Aquarium Poster Exhibition of 1894, “People now not merely observe posters, but collect them . . . and a collection of posters [is] a distinguished proof of being a connoisseur of art.”62 In turn, the practice of collecting enhanced the status of the artistic poster, and contributed to the rise of its market value as well as its entrance into museum collections.

A Short History of Poster History The history of the poster was begun by late nineteenth-­century poster collectors and subsequently has been written primarily by museum curators. Collectors and curators tended to write a separate history of the poster rather than integrating 22  · Introduction

it with a broader history of art and design.63 Collectors were among the first to write studies on the illustrated poster during the nineteenth century because at the time museums were not yet collecting posters. In addition to discussing particular artists and their work, some collectors also included information on the cultural history of the poster. Their participatory witness accounts were based on knowing the artists, printers, and dealers, with all of whom they were in close contact. They commented on such topics as collectors, dealers, bill stickers, and posting practices. For example, Ernest Maindron, himself a leading collector of posters, wrote the first history of the poster in an 1886 volume, Les affiches illustrées, during the early stages of the interest in the illustrated poster.64 Maindron published a second volume in 1896 — when posters and poster collecting reached their height — in which he focused on the phenomenal growth of the poster in the decade since his first volume.65 Among the topics he discussed were collectors and their practices. He also described all the stages leading to a poster being displayed on the wall: from selecting the artist, printer, format, and print run of the poster, to considering costs and time of production, choosing the posting company, buying maintenance and conservation services, and understanding what type of neighborhoods were best suited for specific posters, based on what the posters promoted and which classes they targeted.66 Maindron’s 1896 volume also included a catalog of Jules Chéret’s posters, based on the author’s own extensive collection. Henri Beraldi, the foremost authority on the nineteenth-­century print, known for his monumental twelve-­volume study on it, Les graveurs du XIX siècle: Guide de l’amateur d’estampes modernes, had first cataloged Chéret’s work in 1886 and continued in 1890 (also based on Maindron’s collection).67 By cataloging Chéret’s posters and writing a preface to them, Beraldi offered an innovative approach for his time. He established Chéret’s print production as the oeuvre of an artist, even though most of it consisted of advertisements. He thus provided collectors with an important tool enabling the growth of the market for Chéret’s posters. Most important, Beraldi pioneered the integration of the poster into the history of the nineteenth-­century fine-­art print, despite the fact that the poster was an industrial art that was doubly suspect, because it was both mercantile and popular.68 Although Beraldi’s volumes focused primarily on the print, they are an important source for a cultural history of the poster because they are not limited to dictionary entries on nineteenth-­century artists and their prints, but also include essays and extensive commentaries with his own up-­to-­date insights on contemporary developments of the print and poster between 1885 and 1892 (the first and last dates of the publication of Beraldi’s volumes). His accounts are Introduction  ‡ 23

based on his own intense involvement as a collector, connoisseur, and scholar. He was enthusiastic about new developments in prints, at a time when most print collectors accepted only the black-­and-­white lithograph made by skilled printmakers, while shunning the more experimental black-­and-­white print and color lithograph made by avant-­garde artists. Whereas Maindron’s books focused on the French poster, and A. Demeure de Beaumont’s 1897 book focused on Belgian posters, most late nineteenth-­century publications presented the poster’s international scope.69 A Scribner’s volume, The Modern Poster, published (in English) in 1895, was the first to do so, including essays about posters in several countries, written by authors of different nationalities.70 In the same year, the British critic Charles Hiatt published a history of the poster in English, Picture Posters, which focused primarily on France, England, and the United States but also included a chapter on Spain, Germany, Italy, Holland, and Belgium.71 Likewise, W. S. Rogers, the British author and poster designer, wrote about the poster in Europe and in the United States in his Book of the Poster, published in 1901.72 Two books published in 1897 included a chapter on Japan in addition to chapters on the United States and European nations: a history of the poster written in German by Jean Louis Sponsel, the art historian who later became a curator and museum director in Germany, and Les affiches étrangères illustrées, written by experts of different nationalities and published in Paris.73 All these books charted a separate history of the poster intended primarily for collectors. Thus, most of them were printed in limited editions with individual volumes numbered, and a smaller number of volumes in each edition were printed on high-­quality paper.74 In contrast to the central role of the poster and the extensive critical attention it received in the late nineteenth century, twentieth-­century art history has tended to marginalize it. All but excluded from the modernist narrative, the poster has not had a significant place in the canonical history of modern art. Twentieth-­century American modernism led by Clement Greenberg relegated posters to kitsch, within a general category of mass culture. This dichotomy between high art and mass culture limited the possibility of discussing posters within art history. Yet, while posters were marginalized in the history of modern art, they could be given a prominent place within a separate history of posters and of graphic design. Design history initially included posters primarily within art movements and styles such as Art Nouveau, local developments such as the Vienna Secession, and by highlighting particular artists, such as Toulouse-­Lautrec, Eugène Grasset, or Jules Chéret. The pioneers of graphic design history have given most of their attention to formal innovations, style, and biography.75 More 24  · Introduction

recently, graphic design history surveys and specialized studies have incorporated issues of industrialization, new technologies, ideologies, and social contexts.76 Museum print curators, and art historians who have also been curators, have contributed most to the scholarship on posters, which has been published in catalogs for exhibitions.77 The museum object-­classification system has placed prints (including posters) in separate departments that are distinct from paintings and other media. This has contributed to print curators’ devotion to scholarship and exhibitions on prints, including posters. However, it has also tended to perpetuate a separate history of posters and graphic arts as adjacent to the main history of painting, sculpture, and architecture and reinforced the twentieth-­century modernist dichotomy between high art and mass culture. The work of curators has for the most part treated posters in a separate history, and more rarely, within a broader category of graphic arts. Phillip Dennis Cate’s pioneering essays in The Color Revolution are a notable example of the latter.78 Important examples of the former include Alain Weill’s L’affichomanie, David W. Kiehl’s American Posters of the 1890s, Margaret Timmers’s The Power of the Poster, and Réjane Bargiel’s and Ségolène Le Men’s La Belle Époque de Jules Chéret: De l’affiche au décor.79 Such exhibition catalogs tend to focus on individual artists, groups, themes, or nations, at times grounding posters in the art and social history of the time, while others include informative but brief introductory essays followed by an abundance of illustrations accompanied by catalog entries.80 Print curators and art historians have also analyzed posters as part of the graphic oeuvres of particular artists such as Bonnard and Toulouse-­Lautrec.81 Only rarely has the poster had a significant role in an exhibition not specifically dedicated to posters, thus placing the poster in a broader context of the art of its time. A notable example is the National Gallery of Art exhibition catalog Toulouse-­Lautrec and Montmartre by Richard Thomson, Phillip Dennis Cate, and Mary Weaver Chapin.82 It has been relatively rare that art historians have written about the poster outside of museum exhibition catalogs, and for most of those who did, it was not the primary focus of their work. Important contributions have been made, nonetheless, beginning with Robert Goldwater’s and Robert Herbert’s articles in the 1940s and 1950s respectively, which discussed the poster in relation to the avant-­garde art of the time;83 and continuing with Bradford R. Collins’s article on Chéret, Marcus Verhagen’s on the chérette and the poster as carnavalesque,84 and Katherine M. Kuenzli, whose study on the Nabis dedicates a chapter to these artists’ use of the poster in developing their modernism.85 Among the art historians who have written on posters more extensively are Ségolène Le Men (who has also curated exhibitions) and Karen L. Carter, whose dissertation examines Introduction  ‡ 25

the reception of the French poster during the last two decades of the nineteenth century and whose articles analyze censorship, and spectatorship of posters.86 Mary Weaver Chapin’s dissertation is also notable for focusing on the convergence of publicity, printmaking, and celebrity in Toulouse-­Lautrec’s posters and prints, paying attention to the issue of promotion, which is often overlooked in art historical studies.87 Finally, historians such as Max Gallo and Miriam R. Levin have contributed to the study of the nineteenth-­century poster by making it central to the discussion of historical events and ideologies, and Aaron J. Segal and H. Hazel Hahn have studied the poster as part of consumerism, advertising, or national identity.88 The scholarship on posters in all these contexts has greatly contributed to the work undertaken here. Differences notwithstanding, most of the art historical and curatorial studies on posters tend to focus primarily on the artifact, attending to formal developments, iconographical themes, posters of a specific nation, or the oeuvres of individual poster artists, and most leave outside of their parameters the cultural history of the poster itself.

The Poster at a Crossroads in View of Twentieth-­Century Theories This book presents the cultural history of the poster as a dynamic dialogical encounter between art, design, reproduction, and advertising. It is based on an extensive study of late nineteenth-­century sources and aims to understand them within their own historical context. Yet it also addresses twentieth-­century and contemporary theory in two ways: to interpret primary sources, paying attention to issues that originated in the formative years of the poster and are still central today; and to reconsider some theories in light of historical evidence and case studies. Most important to this study are Walter Benjamin’s essay on artwork in the age of reproduction; Pierre Bourdieu’s theories on the aesthetic disposition, aesthetic gaze, and the field of cultural production; Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas on the dialogic interaction of diverse languages; and Jacques Rancière’s revisionist views on modernism.89 Inspired by Bakhtin’s ideas on dialogic interactions, the discussion about the poster as design contends that the poster was central to the development of a new type of design during the late nineteenth century. I will argue that the poster’s design innovation occurred through its dialogic interaction between art, advertising, the street, public, and client (chapter 5). Bakhtin’s ideas on dialogic interaction, double-­voiced discourse, and hybridization are also the basis for my analysis of poster designers’ new mode of integrating word and image by insert26  · Introduction

ing sparsely chosen words into images rather than illustrating words with images (chapter 6). Drawing on Rancière’s ideas, this study reconsiders the poster’s place in modernism during the 1890s. Rancière called attention to the fact that twentieth-­ century modernism reversed much of what was central to modernism of the 1890s, reasserting the separation between the arts, and reinforcing a dichotomy between art and life.90 Following Rancière’s ideas, this study proposes two distinct modernist narratives: that of historical modernism, developed in late nineteenth-­century France, in which the poster played a central role, and the twentieth-­century modernist narrative that originated with Clement Greenberg in New York, which dismissed the poster as kitsch. The book reconsiders the 1890s poster within the context of historical modernism of the 1890s, when critics who championed the poster campaigned to eliminate the hierarchy between the major arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture and the minor arts, which included prints, posters, and a wide range of decorative arts; and when artists like Toulouse-­Lautrec and Bonnard made their artistic breakthroughs in posters and devoted a large part of their oeuvres to both functional and fine-­arts prints (chapter 1). Benjamin’s theories have a significant place in this book. They were vital to shaping central issues explored here, namely the encounters between art and the developments of reproductive media and mass culture. This study revisits Benjamin’s ideas about the diminishing aura of artwork, through the case of the late nineteenth-­century lithographic poster and art print (chapters 3 and 4). Benjamin’s essay has been the subject of an immense amount of discussion, and as Stephen Bann has pointed out, it has “acquired the fixity of a cliché,” to the point where its interpreters almost never question its blanket applicability and most often tend to consider it prophetic.91 Only rarely do scholars reexamine Benjamin’s theory in light of a historical case study, as Bann did in Parallel Lines, where he demonstrated that an unreserved acceptance of Benjamin’s argument comes at the expense of understanding “the complexities of the historical situation.”92 Bann’s study shows that nineteenth-­century artistic practice in France was not regulated by a dichotomy between “original” and “copy,” but by “the ‘fecundity’ of the processes of reproduction.”93 Focusing primarily on the first half of the nineteenth century (discussing burin engraving, photography, black-­ and-­white lithographic prints, and replication in the medium of painting), it does not address the late nineteenth-­century lithographic poster or the color print. Studies on nineteenth-­century copies, repetitions, and reproductions by Bann, Patricia Mainardi, Robert Verhoogt, and others who have examined specific Introduction  ‡ 27

historical cases of prints and reproductions, have cumulatively contributed to a more complex history than that charted by the modernist dichotomy of original and copy.94 Nonetheless, Benjamin’s ideas on the original versus copy have continued to be very influential. By treating the poster and print of the late nineteenth century as a case study, this book proposes a rethinking of Benjamin’s theory on the diminishing aura. I will analyze how both the poster and lithographic color art print came to be regarded as graphic art through social processes of auratization. As will be shown, collectors played a crucial role by appropriating the ephemeral advertising poster, turning it into an art print for an aesthetic gaze, and by writing and publishing about the poster. The numerous international exhibitions of posters, which they organized, were usually accompanied by catalogs, which promoted posters both locally and internationally.95 Critics made an important contribution by developing theories that legitimized the poster and its descendant, the fine-­art color print. Finally, galleries and publishers played a crucial role in the auratization of the poster/print, by using a range of strategies to transform the large advertising poster designed for a brief street encounter into a small-­scale print intended for the collector’s sustained gaze in a private interior. This book will argue that Benjamin’s theory on the diminishing aura is only part of a more complex process. Through the case study of the poster and print it proposes that the diminishing aura was complemented by another process, that of auratization. It revisits Benjamin’s ideas with Bourdieu’s theory on “consecration.” According to Bourdieu, social agents contribute to the distinction of art.96 The consecration of art involves not only the producers of artworks “but rather the entire set of agents engaged in the field. Among these are producers of works classified as artistic, . . . critics, of all persuasions . . . collectors, middlemen, curators, etc., in short, all who have ties with art, who live for art and, to varying degrees from it.”97 Bourdieu points out that consecration consists “on the one hand, of institutions which conserve the capital of symbolic goods, such as museums; and, on the other hand, of institutions (such as the educational system) which ensure the reproduction of agents imbued with the categories of action, expression, conception, imagination, and perception, specific to the ‘cultivated disposition.’ ”98 I draw on Bourdieu to revise the Benjaminian understanding of aura from something that existed before the era of reproduction in the cult object itself or in experiencing the cult object in its unique site, to a consecration process that is continuously established within a social field. Bourdieu’s ideas appear to contradict Benjamin’s, yet in some ways they are complementary. Benjamin’s seminal essay posited a new paradigm of exploring 28  · Introduction

the interrelations of art with new reproductive media and with a changing social and institutional context. It focused on the ways in which the aura was diminished not only by new reproductive technologies but also by the age of the masses. Benjamin argued that in the age of the masses it was no longer possible to contemplate paintings in museums or in their original ritual sites. Instead one viewed reproductions/copies of original paintings in numerous locations, and experienced works in a state of distraction.99 Thus Bourdieu elaborates on something that was already recognized by Benjamin, namely that the aesthetic gaze and the auratic artwork are not autonomous, but rather are dependent on historical developments that include site, class, and mode of looking. Whereas Benjamin focuses on the process of the diminishing aura, Bourdieu discusses its opposite, “consecration.” According to Bourdieu the artwork is consecrated even in the age of the masses through the social field. He clarifies, however, that aesthetic contemplation of artworks is not available to a mass public. The aesthetic disposition demands an education and is restricted to privileged classes, for whom it is a mark of distinction.100 The simultaneous processes of diminishing aura and auratization through consecration practices occurred in the course of the nineteenth century, when engraving techniques flourished, color lithography came into wide use, and photography emerged. Benjamin, who focuses primarily on photography and film, refers to lithography only in passing.101 He places lithography in the history of nineteenth-­century media as merely leading to photography: “only a few decades after its invention, lithography was surpassed by photography.”102 His brief comment, “Lithography enabled graphic art to illustrate everyday life, and it began to keep pace with printing,”103 applies to press illustration but overlooks the originally designed poster and the color art print. Thus these important components are missing in Benjamin’s outline of the relationship between the artwork and reproductive media during the nineteenth century. This oversight is significant because, as will be argued, the predominant model for the consecration of art in reproductive media during the late nineteenth century was not in photography (or film). Rather this model was first developed in the field of the lithographic poster and original print. Lithography allows producing an original artwork not as a singular unique object, but in multiples, while retaining an auratic status (discussed in chapter 3). It also includes the possibility of appropriating and repurposing works initially produced in mass media as artworks (discussed in chapter 4). Remarkably, the system of consecration still prevalent today is based on the development of the nineteenth-­century poster and modern art print. The art field, which includes international and local Introduction  ‡ 29

exhibitions, galleries, dealers, printers, publishers, collectors, specialized journals and books, and various forms of new media, still relies on the late nineteenth-­ century model of multiples in a limited edition in contemporary art. This has been the case in sculpture and art photography, and has also been extended to art video and DVD. Whereas collectors today participate in curators’ circles and acquisition committees at museums, following developments in contemporary art, in the late nineteenth century individual collectors and the associations they founded preceded museums in collecting, exhibiting, studying, and publishing about contemporary posters.104 As the field of the poster and print expanded, the next logical step in the consecration of the poster and print was to conceive of, and campaign for, the opening of museums devoted to the poster and art print. Roger Marx did just that in 1899. One of the most important art critics championing the poster, print, and decorative arts, Marx, who was a French state museum official as well as a critic and collector, called for founding a museum of the modern poster in Paris.105 Félix Buhot, an acclaimed French printmaker, had initiated a “vigorous campaign” for the creation of museums of prints in Paris and the provinces a few years earlier.106 Not surprisingly, in the days before posters and prints by living artists were collected by museums, the plans advanced by Buhot called for choosing curators from among knowledgeable collectors. Discussing the poster museum, Marx mentioned a “volunteer curator” (conservateur bénévole), suggesting he too was thinking of a collector.107 This book has an international scope, but to enable an in-­depth study, it focuses more on posters and critical writings about them in France and in England. This choice was made because the artistic poster originated and was developed most intensively in France, yet posters produced in England since the early 1890s constituted an important part of the development of the modern poster. Furthermore, the most extensive critical discussion of posters up to 1900 developed in France and England. To give a sense of the international scope of the poster, the book discusses posters made in several European countries, including Germany, Austria (which at the time also included what became the Czech Republic), Holland, Spain, Belgium, and Italy, and in the United States. Certain chapters focus primarily on developments in France and England (chapters 1 and 5); others focus more on France, while analyzing examples of related developments in other nations (chapters 2, 7, and 8). Chapter 4, which analyzes the case study of the Maîtres de l’Affiche, a publication produced in Paris, of 240 reissued posters, includes examples of posters from diverse nations, as the publication itself did. Chapter 6, which analyzes the development from the typographic to the illus30  · Introduction

trated poster, begins with a focus on France where this development originated, and continues with an analysis of the important contributions made by poster artists in England, Germany, Austria, and the United States. This book explores the complex status of posters and prints, analyzing the multiple ways in which the poster was a hybridized object that was simultaneously art, reproduction, design, advertising, and a collector’s object. This is reflected in the division of the book into four parts: “The Poster as Art”; “The Poster and Print: Reproduction and Consecration”; “The Poster as Design and Advertising”; and “Collecting and Iconophilia.”

3 Part I, “The Poster as Art,” begins with the chapter “The Poster’s Place in Modernism: Art and Mass Media in the 1890s,” which argues for the position of the poster in the 1890s as a unique site for experimentation with modernist aesthetics. It focuses primarily on the French and British poster artists, Bonnard, Toulouse-­Lautrec, Chéret, Beardsley, and the Beggarstaffs, and on the critical writings about them in Paris and London. It explores the relationship between art and mass media and the consequences of repositioning the poster as integral to avant-­garde practices of the 1890s. With the help of Rancière’s ideas it distinguishes between two modernisms — the historical modernism that originated in 1890s Paris, in which the poster featured prominently, and twentieth-­century modernism, originating in New York, whose reinforced dichotomy between fine art and mass media relegated the poster to the margins. Chapter 2, “Toulouse-­Lautrec, Jane Avril, and the Iconography of the Female Print Connoisseur in Posters,” identifies a new iconography in posters of the 1890s. It proposes that this iconography depicted a new type of middle-­class collector, which represented the democratization of collecting associated with the affordable poster and color print and did not appeal to the taste of traditional print collectors. The chapter opens with an analysis of Toulouse-­Lautrec’s 1893 lithograph of the café concert performer Jane Avril as a print connoisseur, examining the meaning of this image and of the choice of Avril for this role. It then examines a selection from the numerous 1890s posters that feature a female print connoisseur to promote print/poster dealers, exhibitions, galleries, and portfolios of original art prints. Interpreting the iconography of the female print connoisseur in the context of the cultural developments of the late nineteenth century, particularly the still-­contested but shifting status of both the original color print and the modern woman, the chapter draws on writings by late nineteenth-­ Introduction  ‡ 31

century critics on collectors and examines the difference between the written and visual discourses of the time. Finally, it draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas about the aesthetic gaze and its power of consecration with respect to both art and its collectors to argue that the iconography of the female print connoisseur participated in such a double act of consecration. Part II, “The Poster and Print: Reproduction and Consecration,” focuses on issues of art and reproduction. It begins with the chapter “The Color Print: Art in the Age of Lithography.” An offspring of the advertising poster, the originally designed color print became an important new art form in the 1890s. This chapter examines the theories of Roger Marx and André Mellerio, focusing on how they legitimized the originally designed lithographic color art print at the time when color lithography was still banned from the Salon. It argues that in their efforts to adapt the notion of the work of art to the era of reproduction, they legitimized the notion of a multiple original. Furthermore, Mellerio developed a pre-­Greenbergian notion of medium specificity. While these progressive late nineteenth-­century critics championed the elimination of the hierarchy between “major” and “minor” arts, they sought to preserve the auratic status of art, contending that the modern color art print retained its status as original art even though it was printed in multiples and made in the medium of lithography, which at the time was widely used to produce copies of paintings. Thus they produced a model that was significantly different from the one that Walter Benjamin would develop several decades later, about the diminishing aura of the artwork in the era of reproduction. As the chapter proposes, in spite of Benjamin’s enormous influence, the notions that Marx and Mellerio advanced in the late nineteenth century are, perhaps surprisingly, relevant to contemporary practices and aesthetic debates. The next chapter in this section, “Les Maîtres de l’Affiche: Aura and Reproduction,” performs a detailed analysis of the Maîtres de l’Affiche (Masters of the poster), a publication that reissued some 240 selected advertising posters from Europe and the United States, turning them into small-­scale prints for collectors and using a variety of strategies to consecrate them as fine art. Through this case study the chapter reexamines Benjamin’s theory on the diminishing aura in the era of reproduction. Using Bourdieu’s theories on the consecration of art objects, I argue that the late nineteenth-­century poster and fine-­art color print established a model, still influential today, for artwork that is experienced as auratic despite being made in reproductive media and existing in multiples. Part III, “The Poster as Design and Advertising,” begins with the chapter “Art and Advertising in the Street.” Focusing primarily on England and France, the 32  · Introduction

chapter explores the crucial role of the poster in the development of both graphic design and design discourse during the last decade of the nineteenth century. It makes two main arguments: first, that the street was crucial to the poster — not, as so many French critics repeatedly claimed, because posters turned the streets into “museums of the people,” but because it was the dialogical encounter between art, advertising, and the street (the poster’s main site of display) that stimulated poster designers to develop a new design, a street “speech type” that aimed to reach passersby. Second, it proposes that whereas the major French critics paved the way for the acceptance of the poster as a color print — that is, as original art — Charles Hiatt and his British colleagues treated poster design as a relational practice rather than an autonomous artistic activity. The British critics viewed the poster as a design that must successfully integrate aesthetics with advertising functionality, prefiguring twentieth-­century developments in design discourse. Chapter 6, “Poster Design: The Dialogics of Image and Word,” argues that poster designers developed a new mode of image-­centered design that modernized visual communication. Drawing on Bakhtin’s ideas about the dialogic interactions between languages, I probe the changing relationship between word and image in poster design, examining posters in France, England, Austria, Germany, and the United States. To situate the visual practices within the concerns and discourses of the time, the chapter analyzes statements by late nineteenth-­century poster designers and critics regarding the use of words and images in poster design. It traces the evolution from the verbal orientation of the typographic poster to the illustrated poster’s hybrid visual language, which embedded a sparse selection of words within an overall image, thereby offering a novel design model that privileged the image. Part IV, “Collecting and Iconophilia,” begins with a chapter titled “The Poster at the Origins of the Age of Spectacle: The Rise of the Image and Modern Iconophobia.” It analyzes the poster’s prominent, if overlooked, role in the genealogy of modernity’s culture of spectacle. It demonstrates that late nineteenth-­century commentators viewed the poster as a central player in a broader cultural transformation that replaced the priority of the word with that of the image in a wide array of print media (illustrated books and the press, trade cards, sheet music, and the covers of books and journals). Exploring the responses of  late nineteenth-­ century critics to posters and other mass-­media images, the chapter analyzes the response of iconophobic critics, who typically highlighted the supposed vulnerability of women and children to images, yet ultimately judged the poster as a threat to masculine subjectivity, claiming that the predominance of posters and mass-­media images eroded the distinctions between educated men and the Introduction  ‡ 33

class-­and gender-­mixed masses. At the other end of the spectrum, politically progressive critics viewed mass-­media images as agents of democracy. Thus, the state of being “under the influence of spectacle” (a phrase originally used in the mid-­nineteenth century to describe the effect of posters) stimulated criticism prone to iconophobia and moralization, but also gave rise to an appreciation of the wide accessibility of images in the mass media. The last chapter, “The Iconophile’s Collecting: Posters as an Ephemeral Archaeology of Modernity,” uncovers the late nineteenth-­century “iconophile,” a new type of collector/curator/archivist of posters and other prints who valued printed images that circulated in everyday life. The chapter charts his characteristics as described in writings and sketches of the time, and analyzes the figure of the arch-­iconophile Ernest Maindron, whose collection included some fifteen thousand posters. I argue that the iconophile was responding to the emergence of a visual culture in the late nineteenth century by collecting, cataloging, and preserving posters and other ephemeral functional prints. He viewed his poster collecting as assembling an archive of historical significance. Analyzing his belief that the poster would be crucial to writing the history of modernity, the chapter explores the kind of history the iconophilic collector wished to preserve, by probing issues in the posters’ iconography of modern life. The chapter draws on postrevolutionary collecting practices and ideas about writing a history of the everyday, and concludes with an evaluation of the iconophile’s conviction about the importance of the poster and everyday prints for future historians.

3 This book aims to make an original contribution to the history of visual culture. As will be shown throughout this study, the poster’s place at the crossroads of art, design, advertising, and reproduction was established through its multiple functions and fields. By rethinking the history of the poster and its place in avant-­garde art, the book aims to contribute to a new understanding of historical modernism and its relation to mass media. Revisiting Benjamin’s ideas on the diminishing aura through the case study of the poster and print, and with the help of Bourdieu’s ideas on consecration, it reexamines widely accepted notions about art in the age of reproduction. The book further argues that the poster had a leading role in the development of graphic design and visual communication, placing the poster at the heart of nineteenth-­century visual culture. It proposes a revised genealogy of the culture of spectacle that does not privilege photography and film to the point of overlooking print media. It is hoped that the cultural 34  · Introduction

history of the poster offered here will become integrated with a cultural history of modernity as it developed at the dynamic crossroads of art, design, advertising, and reproduction. It was at this crossroads that artists invented a modernist art language and designers created a hybrid visual communication composed of dominant images that incorporated words. It was here that the field of the poster and originally designed art print pioneered an adaptation of art and design to an era of reproductive media; led the way in the consecration of art created in what at the time were the new print media; and stimulated the democratization of collecting. At this crossroads, passionate collectors embraced posters and other everyday printed images, recognizing them as constituting a new visual culture of their time, and envisioned their own role as custodians of an ephemeral archaeology of modernity.

Introduction  ‡ 35

u

PART I

The Poster as Art

1 t The Poster’s Place in Modernism A rt a n d M a s s M e di a i n t h e

1890 s

[Toulouse-­Lautrec’s Moulin Rouge poster] is no longer just a poster, it is not yet quite a print; a work of hybrid flavor partaking of both, or rather, this is the modern color print.— André Mellerio, 1898 The poster movement in this country amounts to a positive revolution. No young artist is satisfied unless he has a hand in the decoration of the hoardings; the gold frame is for the time forgotten, and all have their eyes on the lithographer’s stone.— Charles Hiatt, 1895 Certainly at the rate we are going on, if Alfred de Musset and Eugène Delacroix were still alive, they would be working for the café-­concert in a few years.— Arsène Alexandre, 1895

With rare exceptions, art historical studies on the major artistic developments of the 1890s have tended to overlook the poster as a site for the invention of a modernist aesthetic and practice.1 This is not surprising, given that, as Nancy Troy has argued, historians of modern art have generally “failed to acknowledge the significance of the decorative arts in their own right and have discounted their relevance for investigation of the media of painting, sculpture, and architecture.”2 The status of posters as art has been further complicated by their commercial function as advertising. The leading British poster critic Charles Hiatt addressed this condition right at the opening of his 1895 book, noting that, in the poster, the “aesthetic qualities have of necessity to be subordinated to its com-

mercial qualities,” since the artist must first of all “call the attention of the man on the street to the merits of an article.”3 For this reason, one is “amazed that the artist of talent is willing to work within the strict limitations imposed on him in the production of a pictorial poster.”4 Yet these limitations, he notes, are precisely what encourages experimentation: “There is a certain fascination in the very strictures of these elements: the complexity of the problem allures him, and gives him the appetite for experiment.”5 Indeed, the commercial function of posters did not necessarily pose a problem for the young progressive artists of the 1890s, who were, as Pierre Bonnard testified, always looking for “connections between art and life” and seeking to make “a popular production with everyday applications” such as “prints, furniture, fans, screens.”6 This chapter examines why and how the poster was a unique site for experimentation for modernist art in the 1890s. This contradicts Susan Sontag’s position (in her extensive essay on posters) that posters are always applied art “because, typically, they apply what has already been done in the other arts. Aesthetically the poster has always been parasitic on the respectable arts of painting, sculpture, even architecture. . . . As an art form, posters are rarely in the lead. Rather, they serve to disseminate already mature elitist art conventions.”7 Certainly some posters, especially in the twentieth century, fit Sontag’s definition. As will be argued here, however, this is not necessarily the case, and definitely was not the case in the 1890s, when quite a few poster artists used the poster to experiment and innovate. While largely relegated to the margins of the canonical history of artistic developments of the 1890s, posters have been addressed in various more specialized studies on the graphic arts.8 So, for example, studies on the graphic work of such artists as Bonnard and Toulouse-­Lautrec have included their posters.9 During the 1940s an article by Robert J. Goldwater, and during the 1950s one by Robert L. Herbert recognized the importance of the poster to the 1890s, although that became an exception in the direction that came to predominate later on in art historical studies of the 1890s.10 Phillip Dennis Cate has included posters in his influential study of late nineteenth-­century color lithographic prints;11 and most recently Katherine M. Kuenzli’s study of the Nabis includes a substantial discussion of the poster within the context of an art movement and acknowledges that Bonnard and some of his colleagues used the formal vocabulary of the poster to further their painting practices.12 Nonetheless, several central questions relating to the emergence of the poster have rarely been examined, including: Why were innovative artists attracted to the poster? How and in what ways did the poster come to function as a prime site for experimentation with modernist aesthetics 40  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

in the 1890s? And what are the consequences for the modernist narrative of repositioning the poster as integral, rather than marginal, to the avant-­garde practices of the 1890s? This chapter focuses on these questions. Modernism in the twentieth century affirmed a great divide between autonomous art and mass culture.13 While scholars in diverse disciplines have increasingly shown that a modernist aesthetic developed through a productive inter­ action with mass culture rather than simply in opposition to it, none have focused specifically on posters.14 This chapter argues that artists used the poster as an important site for the invention of a modernist language and an iconographic representation of modernity. It proposes that the poster served this function precisely because it was a place where art and mass culture had to coexist: posters were displayed in the low-­culture environment of the street, and in order to function effectively as advertisements they had to attract attention in a split second. In the early 1890s, Toulouse-­Lautrec and Bonnard in Paris, and Beardsley and the Beggarstaff Brothers in London, were drawn to making posters. They designed their posters to function as advertisements while at the same time treating them as platforms for a new mode of visual expression. In what follows I focus primarily on the posters of these four artists and the discourses about them in 1890s Paris and London.

The Poster as an Attractive Medium for Artists in the 1890s During the early 1890s, more than twenty years after Jules Chéret began producing color lithographic posters and when the poster was increasingly coveted by collectors, a younger generation of artists in their twenties was drawn to designing posters, not least because it was a casual medium. Printed on cheap paper with a short life expectancy and destined for display on the streets, the poster freed its creators from both the ambitions and constraints involved in making high art. Pasted on fences, walls, hoardings, or Morris columns, the poster mixed with everyday life rather than being sequestered in exhibitions in the dedicated art spaces of the Salons and galleries. Félix Fénéon, writing in the anarchist journal Le Père Peinard, enthusiastically noted that even when posters are designed by a well-­known artist, “they don’t pretend to be precious stuff; they’ll be torn down in a little while and others will be put up, and so on: they don’t give a damn! That’s great! And that’s art, by God, and the best kind, mixed in with life, art without any bluffing or boasting and within easy reach of ordinary guys.”15 Gustave Geffroy, in his 1888 article on Chéret in the Republican La Justice, praised everything that differentiated the experience of seeing posters on the Art and Mass Media in the 1890s  ‡ 41

street from that of museum and gallery exhibitions. He valued primarily the informality and accessibility of posters, which anyone can observe without requiring a printed invitation to a closed-­off exhibition or attending private viewings, convocations, and luncheons.16 Posters can be seen and seen again, directly — without shiny gold frames — and don’t require catalogs to be understood.17 He contrasts the simple pleasure of seeing these works on the street with the highbrow celebration of the style of grand art.18 Critics of the poster frequently noted the absence of the gold frame. They saw this as representing a welcome freedom from the symbolic power of the “framing” of precious artwork. In Fénéon’s words, instead of “dirty linen in gold frames,” colored posters were a real-­life art, “an outdoor exhibition, all year long and wherever you go.”19 In a witty article published in 1894, Aubrey Beardsley distinguished between framed painting and the advertising poster on the street: “The popular idea of a picture is something told in oil or writ in water to be hung on a room’s wall or in a picture gallery to perplex an artless public. No one expects it to serve a useful purpose or take a part in everyday existence.”20 Noting the “light character” of the poster, Beardsley stressed the lack of both frame and three-­dimensional modeling as distinguishing the poster from academic painting. He also likened the poster to the Italian fresco for its vulnerability to weather and other environmental conditions: “Still, there is a general feeling that the artist who puts his art into the poster is déclassé — on the streets — and consequently of light character. The critics can discover no brush work to prate of, the painter looks askance upon a thing that achieves publicity without a frame, and beauty without modeling, and the public find it hard to take seriously a poor printed thing left to the mercy of sunshine, soot, and shower, like any old fresco over an Italian church door.”21 The street provided the greatest visibility and accessibility, and least intervention by authorities. Although avant-­garde artists from Courbet in the mid 1850s to Manet and the Impressionists in the following decades broke free of the authority of the jury by organizing their own exhibitions, 1890s artists displaying their posters in outdoor urban spaces experienced a different level of liberty, the street being furthest from the sanctioning implicit in dedicated art spaces, whether official or independent. There was a sense of greater freedom to display one’s posters on the street also because, unlike the Salons’ juries, poster commissioners did not care to safeguard the standards of academic painting.22 Beardsley humorously counted the advantages of displaying posters on the street, saving the artist the trouble of organizing 42  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

his own exhibition and allowing him to avoid the art world’s intermediaries of juries, dealers, official art exhibitions, and hanging committees: What view the billsticker and sandwich man may take of the subject I have yet to learn. The first is, at least, no bad substitute for a hanging committee, and the clothes of the second are better company than somebody else’s picture, and less obtrusive than a background of stamped magenta paper. Happy, then, those artists who thus escape the injustice of juries and the shuffling of dealers, and choose to keep that distance that lends enchantment to the private view, and avoid the world of worries that attends on those who elect to make an exhibition of themselves.23 Poster artists valued the opportunity to communicate with the broad public directly. The preface to the catalog of the first large poster exhibition, held in 1894–95 at the Royal Aquarium in London, asked rhetorically: “What painter of genius has not been, and will not ever be, glad to thus openly display his work to the passer-­by. . . . Thus does modern art address itself like the epic of old, to the crowded market-­place.”24 The British poster artist Dudley Hardy valued posters for enabling him to make art that was not confined to the frame or to the museum. Moreover, he welcomed the judgment of people on the street: “Why he [the artist] should confine his attention to painting pictures for a frame I cannot imagine; he can have no finer canvas than that of the walls of London, and I am quite sure he cannot have a more critical audience than that of the London streets.”25 Toulouse-­Lautrec cherished the freedom to exhibit with no interference from a jury, and categorically refused to participate in juried exhibitions.26 Yet, unlike Hardy, who welcomed street viewers’ comments, Lautrec humorously proclaimed that street display freed him of any obligation to consider the opinions of the viewers, since they paid no entry fee: “As for the public, it would be entitled to criticize (even though I may pay no attention) if it were paying. However, since it is not paying. . . .”27 Designing a poster was an attractive prospect for young artists also because the poster promoted not only the advertised product but also the artist.28 Printed in varying print runs, often of several thousand, posters gave the artist high visibility. The appearance of a shockingly revolutionary poster on the streets brought Bonnard, Lautrec, Mucha, and Beardsley overnight fame. Just a month after Bonnard’s March 1891 France-­Champagne poster was displayed on Paris streets, Fénéon referred to it as “this celebrated poster” (Fig. 1.1).29 The twenty-­four-­year-­ old Bonnard reported enthusiastically to his mother that everyone was asking Art and Mass Media in the 1890s  ‡ 43

1.1 (left) Pierre Bonnard, France-Champagne, 1891. Edw. Ancourt, Paris. 79 × 59.4 cm. 1.2 (right) Champagne Scohyers de Dorlodot, Reims, 1890. J. Haly, Brussels. 122 × 81 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

him for his poster.30 Critics immediately recognized Bonnard’s striking innovation. Francis Jourdain reported his “astonishment” at “the novelty and the force” of this poster by an unknown artist. He did not succeed in finding out any information about the artist but was able to buy a copy of the poster for fifty centimes from a dealer on the bank of the Seine.31 Octave Mirbeau recognized the singularity of Bonnard’s bold poster as compared with Chéret’s “charming mural decorations.”32 Bonnard’s innovations become very clear when we compare his poster to other posters advertising champagne, such as the 1890 poster by an anonymous artist, Champagne Scohyers de Dorlodot Reims (Fig. 1.2). Instead of the realistically rendered figures of man and woman seated in the three-­ dimensional space of a restaurant, Bonnard’s poster features a radically flattened figure and space, brilliant yellow color, and bold decorative black line, all of which reflect an influence of Japanese prints. Finally, the Symbolist decadence of the woman in Bonnard’s poster, whose weightlessness and instability due to drinking champagne are enhanced by the overflowing foam contrasts with the sturdy woman seated on the table, triumphantly raising the filled champagne glass as if it were a victory trophy. 44  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

1.3 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, La Goulue, Moulin Rouge, 1891. Ch. Levy, Paris. 193.6 × 119.38. cm. Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Gift of William S. Kinkead 1975–11–5.

Toulouse-­Lautrec himself was reportedly “overwhelmed” by Bonnard’s poster, and did not relent until he was able to track down the artist.33 Lautrec’s 1891 poster La Goulue, Moulin Rouge (Fig. 1.3) is a well-­documented case of a poster that brought its artist almost instant renown. According to Ernest Maindron, the poster “was so new and so completely unexpected that it was immediately noticed.”34 Francis Jourdain, who would become Lautrec’s friend, described his first encounter with the poster: “I still remember the shock I had when I first saw the Moulin Rouge poster. . . . This remarkable and highly original poster was, I remember, carried along the Avenue de l’Opéra on a kind of small cart, and I was so enchanted that I walked alongside it on the pavement.”35 Lautrec’s signature style was already evident in this first poster.36 Unlike Chéret’s 1889 and 1890 posters for Moulin Rouge, which featured the typical anonymous chérette (Figs. 1.4 and I.1), Lautrec’s poster depicted the star as a recognizable celebrity.37 The poster was also shocking and memorable for its massive size, measuring almost six and a half feet in height and three feet, three inches in width (achieved with three sheets of paper); its flat areas of color and elimination of all modeling; a dynamic composition that incorporated multiple points of Art and Mass Media in the 1890s  ‡ 45

1.4 Jules Chéret, Moulin Rouge, 1890. Chaix, Paris. 84 × 60 cm.

view; and the reductive abstraction of form achieved by a simplified color scheme of bright yellow, red, and black. Finally, the poster caught the attention of passersby because of its emphasis on the sex appeal of La Goulue performing her provocative high kick, depicted in a way that allowed the spectators to look up her skirt.38 The striking image of  La Goulue performing the cancan dance, which originated on the streets of working-­class neighborhoods, was accentuated by the frieze of black-­silhouetted figures of men and women forming the predominantly bourgeois audience for the café concert star.39 Lautrec wrote to his mother in December 1891, soon after the poster first appeared on the streets: “The news­ papers have been very kind to your offspring. I’m sending you a clipping written in honey ground in incense. My poster has been a success on the walls.”40 Mucha’s first poster, Gismonda, made for the actress Sarah Bernhardt in 1894, had a similar immediate effect on the artist’s reputation (Fig. 1.5). Jerôme Doucet wrote in La Revue Illustrée, “This poster made all Paris familiar with Mucha’s name from one day to the next.”41 He described the intricately decorative poster as a “mosaic on the wall . . . a creation of the first order. . . . It is the triumph of 46  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

1.5 Alphonse Mucha, Gismonda, 1894. Lemercier, Paris. 74 × 216 cm.

silk, gold and precious stones, it is wealth thrown open-­handed on the dubious whiteness of our city’s walls.”42 Aubrey Beardsley’s first poster, Avenue Theatre, A Comedy of Sighs!, 1894, was said to have “dropped a bombshell”43 and “changed the whole idea of the poster in England”44 (Fig. 1.6). A year after the controversial poster appeared on the walls, Hiatt described its initial reception: “Nothing so compelling, so irresistible, had ever been posted on the hoardings of the metropolis [of London] before. Some gazed at it with awe, as if it were the final achievement of modern art; others jeered at it as a palpable piece of buffoonery; everybody, however . . . was forced to stop and look at it.”45 Like other avant-­garde art of the late nineteenth century, Beardsley’s posters, because of their innovative artistic language, were highly controversial from the first time they were seen. In Avenue Theatre, A Art and Mass Media in the 1890s  ‡ 47

1.6 Aubrey Beardsley, Avenue Theatre, A Comedy of Sighs! 1894. Stafford & Co., Nottingham, Eng. 76.1 × 50.8 cm.

Comedy of Sighs! the utterly flat female figure is partially covered by the dotted pattern of a transparent curtain. Hiatt reported on the reactions to the poster: It “has been so enthusiastically received, on the one hand, as a new revelation, and so passionately condemned on the other.”46 A year after the first poster appeared, Hiatt noted that Beardsley “has already become an established favorite with French connoisseurs.”47 “On both sides of the Channel” collectors “eagerly sought out” Beardsley’s posters, which were “steadily increasing in value.”48 In addition to artists’ enthusiasm for making posters because of the freedom from constraints of juries and from conventions related to the tradition of high art, as well as the wide diffusion of their work, young artists were also attracted to making posters because the commissioners paid for their designs. The British artists William Nicholson and James Pryde, who collaborated on posters in the 1890s under the name Beggarstaff Brothers, told an interviewer in 1896 that despite being “intensely fond of painting,” they were drawn to posters “because one cannot always sell one’s pictures; consequently, finding poster work remunerative, and seeing very great chances in it in England, we decided to adopt that.”49 When the twenty-­year-­old Bonnard received one hundred francs for his 48  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

first poster design, France-­Champagne, he was encouraged to believe for the first time that he might be able to make a living from his art and free himself of the civil-­service career that his father had intended him to pursue.50 Yet Bonnard’s sheer enthusiasm for graphic work — he undertook hundreds of graphic projects (including music covers, theater programs, menus, and posters) without commission in the period between 1889 (the year he first designed the France-­Champagne poster) and 1891 (the year the poster was published) — suggests that his interest in such work went beyond the prospect of mere financial remuneration. One of his early biographers, Gustave Coquiot, who saw hundreds of Bonnard’s projects from this period, described them as having “an inventive” and “enchanting style” carried out “with charming negligence . . . decorative silhouettes and unforeseen arabesques.”51 Some scholars explained Bonnard’s interest in color graphic projects during this time as reflecting the fact that they lent themselves to his painting aesthetic.52 Though this may hold some truth, this explanation fails to recognize the opportunities Bonnard (and others of his generation) found in graphic projects as a field in which they could actually develop their modernist aesthetic. Artists were also attracted to the poster because it had another life beyond advertisement — collectors acquired, preserved, exhibited, and wrote about posters. Arsène Alexandre testified that the great admiration of Chéret’s posters and their popularity with collectors resulted in “everybody” beginning “not only to collect posters, but to make them; every painter was ambitious to be a Chéret.”53 Collectors who could not afford to buy paintings or sculpture could collect posters and prints, with lithography rendering the work of artists like Lautrec and Bonnard accessible.54 For example, Toulouse-­Lautrec’s first art print, At the Moulin Rouge: La Goulue and Her Sister, printed in 1892 in an edition of one hundred signed and numbered prints, was priced at twenty francs, only a little more expensive than a Lautrec poster.55 His paintings and studies, by contrast, sold for several hundred francs (600 francs were paid, for example, in 1893 for his painting La Goulue Entering the Moulin Rouge).56 Beyond all these advantages, artists of the 1890s found in color lithography a new and stimulating medium for original art making. Artists appropriated and transformed the medium that had been associated with chromolithographs —  reproductions of paintings — into a medium for originally designed posters and fine art. As a new medium for the art print, which, unlike painting, was not shaped by the tradition of high art, color lithography naturally attracted the younger generation of artists. In his volume La lithographie originale en couleurs, published in 1898, André Mellerio wrote extensively about the growing importance of color lithography in the 1890s.57 Art and Mass Media in the 1890s  ‡ 49

The medium held particular appeal for artists because, while printed in multiples, it allowed them to draw directly on the stone, thus producing a print that incorporated traces of the artist’s hand. This clearly distinguished the original art lithograph from the reproductive lithograph, in which the printer copied an existing painting. It also distinguished the original art lithograph from the emerging photographic reproductive technique, the photogravure.58 Henri Beraldi noted in 1891, “All the painters were seduced by the ease of the process.”59 Using the oil crayon on the lithographic stone allowed the artist’s hand to move with far greater ease than in engraving.60 Outside of France it was rare for artists to draw directly on the lithographic stone. Critics in England and in Germany lamented that artists in these countries had to give their design to the print shops to carry out, with lithographers bound by their own traditions.61 Lithography made possible a productivity much greater than that of earlier printing techniques. As Beraldi noted, it allowed Daumier and Gavarni, who had worked in black-­and-­white lithography earlier in the nineteenth century, each to produce thousands of original lithographs.62 The artistic novelty of the use of color lithography and the ease of execution made the color print an exciting new medium for artists during the 1890s. In 1897 Pissarro wrote to his son, Lucien, from Paris: “Nobody does anything but printmaking here, it’s the rage, the young don’t make anything else.”63 And Mellerio wrote: “There is no one who has not made them, is not making them, or will not make them in the future.”64 For some artists, printmaking became “their principal if not their only mode of expression.”65 Émile Zola, in his 1886 novel L’oeuvre (The Masterpiece), described a group of irreverent artists encountering a large circus poster on the street: “With the calm certainty of conquerors . . . jeering at the Institute as they passed and reached the Luxembourg by the rue de Seine, where a poster in three glaring colours advertising a fairground circus, made them shout with admiration.”66 Zola chose to represent these young artists as identifying with the crude aesthetics and brilliant colors of the poster because they saw it as a denunciation of the beaux arts tradition and an alternative to the aesthetic hegemony of a stagnant academic painting. He shows that rebellious artists found their inspiration in the low culture of a poster on the street rather than in the temple of art. Several conditions coalesced to make illustrated color posters attractive to artists during the 1890s: the casualness, informality, and ephemerality of the poster medium; the freedom and accessibility associated with the street as a site of display; the ability to communicate directly with a broad public; the production of new art forms that were affordable to many potential collectors; the visibility of 50  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

posters and of the artists who made them; the financial rewards of poster design, including the boost to young artists’ ability to sell their work; the ease of working in the medium compared with other forms of printmaking; and finally, the novelty of the poster and color lithography as a medium for original artwork.

The Poster and the Development of Modernist Aesthetics For both Toulouse-­Lautrec and Bonnard, designing posters played an important role in the process of freeing their work from naturalism and inventing their modernist language.67 Bonnard and Lautrec both made their first poster in 1891. For both, the poster was their first print, became their first memorable work, and led them to develop an important body of work in lithography. Lautrec made some 370 prints between 1891 and 1901, of which 30 were posters. Bonnard made some 250 lithographs between 1889 and 1902, including posters, piano music and playbill designs, illustrations for magazines and books, and color fine-­arts prints published by Vollard.68 Colta Ives points out that Bonnard’s prints were crucial to his artistic evolution in the 1890s and placed his work during that period at “the absolute center of the Parisian avant-­garde.”69 His prints “were so central to his artistic existence” that when he later summarized his career from his student days until 1900, he did not cite a single painting, referring only to his published works, including his poster France-­Champagne.70 Thadée Natanson, the publisher of La Revue Blanche who knew both Bonnard and Lautrec well (and himself commissioned posters from them), recounts in some detail Lautrec’s enthusiastic response to Bonnard’s France-­Champagne when he saw it on the streets.71 Bonnard introduced Lautrec to his printer, Cotelle, working in Ancourt’s print establishment, were Lautrec subsequently printed some of his posters. Several months after seeing Bonnard’s poster, Lautrec undertook his own first poster, Moulin Rouge, La Goulue, which was printed and displayed in December 1891 (Fig. 1.3). These two posters heralded a new phase in the development of the French poster, and were the first to make of it a medium for avant-­garde art. Bonnard and Lautrec were in their twenties, at the start of their careers, when they made their first posters, and they approached the poster as an integral part of their artistic work. In this they differed radically from Chéret, who had initially gained his knowledge of lithography as an apprentice in a lithographic print shop from age thirteen to sixteen. He later educated himself about art by going to museums, and was known to have had a special admiration for Watteau, Turner, and Tiepolo, whose influences were visible in his posters.72 Bonnard, by contrast, studied at the Académie Julian and the École des beaux arts, and Toulouse-­ Art and Mass Media in the 1890s  ‡ 51

Lautrec at the studios of Léon Bonnat and Fernand Cormon. Unlike Chéret, both learned about lithography only later on, through their work with printers. Chéret opened his own print shop in 1866 after “long years of patient and tedious work as an ordinary lithographer.”73 From 1881 he was the artistic director of lithographic poster production at the large imprimerie Chaix. Chéret’s primary context of the making of posters was the print shop and the printing industry. His daily work was filled with interactions with clients (namely, the commissioners of posters) and overseeing printers and in-­house designers who worked in his style. Bonnard and Lautrec, on the other hand, were grounded in the world of art and the cutting-­edge artistic developments of the 1890s. Bonnard, along with his young Nabis colleagues, learned from the work of Gauguin, and Toulouse-­Lautrec was especially interested in Degas. Bonnard and Lautrec approached each of their lithographic color posters as they did their other artworks. Lautrec made numerous studies for each of his posters, as he did for his paintings. For example, for his poster Moulin Rouge he made studies of La Goulue and her dancing partner Valentin le Désossé, and for his poster La Chaîne Simpson he visited the racing track, making numerous sketches of bicycle riders and onlookers, and met the well-­known racers and their coaches.74 Chéret made studies of live models in his own studio to keep his drawing skills fresh, but unlike Lautrec, he did not venture out to café concerts or other places to produce on-­site sketches. Chéret designed about 1,430 posters, compared with Toulouse-­Lautrec’s 30 poster designs and Bonnard’s 15 (of which only 10 were actually published).75 Chéret’s innovation was to introduce artistic qualities into commercial posters. His lithographic work replaced the hard quality of the “mechanic production” that was common in posters before his with an airy “vaporous impression.”76 Chéret gradually improved the use of color in his posters to the point where his technique transformed “the heavy, hard, cold, and somber lithography” into a fluid, graceful, delicate, and powdery quality of pastels.77 Critics also praised Chéret for his modern iconography, his light Parisian production, expressing gaiety and highlighting sensual women, as seen in his poster Moulin Rouge, 1890 (Fig. 1.4).78 Chéret’s inspiration from rococo art led numerous critics to regard the women in his posters as tasteful, charming, and delicate, even though they were highly sexualized. Gustave Geffroy noted that Chéret “played the role of  Tiepolo of the crossroads, of Watteau of the department stores.”79 Maurice Guillemot dubbed him “Fragonard of the rue de la Paix and of the elite fashion designers [les grands couturiers].” Chéret’s drawings, he wrote, were akin to a Correggio dressed in the latest fashion.80 Geffroy noted approvingly that Chéret turned contempo52  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

rary life into an apotheosis.81 The most celebrated poster designer of his time, Chéret was credited by his contemporaries with launching an industry and turning the commercial poster into the artistic poster. After about three decades of poster design and printing, Chéret succeeded in shifting his industry-­oriented career into the art field, with commissions for mural decorations.82 Whereas for Bonnard and Lautrec the poster was always an integral part of their broader artistic careers, for Chéret, becoming an artist meant leaving behind poster design and production. Bonnard and Lautrec applied the lessons learned from their work on posters to their art prints. They also applied lessons learned in their work in lithography to their paintings. As Bonnard testified, “I’ve learned a lot that applies to painting by doing color lithography. When one has to study relations between tones by playing only with four or five colors that one superimposes or juxtaposes, one discovers a great many things.”83 Ives notes that, for Bonnard, “assignments for the printing press . . . brought out the best in him: a keen and playful wit, the power to concentrate narrative and emotion in compact imagery, and an affecting, lyri­ cal spontaneity.”84 Gale B. Murray recognizes that Lautrec’s “thematic maturity coincided for the first time with a radically more innovative and less realistic style in late 1891 with the poster for the Moulin Rouge, and its appearance foretold the next state of his artistic production.”85 Despite such recognition in specialized studies of Lautrec and Bonnard that the poster was the site for the development of these artists’ modernist language, the prevailing art-­historical narrative on the 1890s has tended to obscure this fact by emphasizing Japanese prints as the most significant factor in stimulating the replacement of naturalism with a modernist aesthetic. Among the sources typically mentioned as influencing Lautrec’s bold abstraction and the unprecedented simplification found in his posters are Bonnard’s 1891 poster, and the work of Degas, Gauguin, Émile Bernard, and, most importantly, the Japanese woodcut.86 Lautrec scholars tend to attribute the modernist language of flat and bright colors, negation of depth, elimination of modeling, and emphasis on outlines in his posters primarily to the influence of Japanese prints.87 It is notable, however, that although Lautrec had begun collecting Japanese prints as early as 1883, the earliest clear evidence for the Japanese influence on his work appeared only seven years later, in his first poster, the Moulin Rouge.88 Recognizing the influence of Japanese prints on the development of the poster and on modernist aesthetics more generally fits into the well-­established art historical paradigm of aesthetic influence and suits the notion of the autonomy of the aesthetic realm. Although Japanese prints were indeed a source of inspiration Art and Mass Media in the 1890s  ‡ 53

for Lautrec, Bonnard, and other poster designers, a fuller understanding of the innovation of posters requires us to consider also extra-­artistic factors, which do not fit the paradigm of aesthetic influence and aesthetic autonomy. These factors, which are generally overlooked in charting the development of modernist aesthetics, include the poster’s advertising function and its site of display on the street, both of which stimulated artists to create a poster for a new mode of looking. The radically flat and simplified style of Japanese prints dovetailed with effective advertising communication on walls in urban spaces. This was clearly understood at the time, as stated in a 1901 article titled “The Influence of Japanese Art on Poster Design,” published in the London-­based journal the Poster and Art Collector: Take any representative Japanese print — a book-­illustration, a broad sheet, or a theatre bill — and it will be found to embody all that a good poster should. One dominant idea is presented graphically, beautifully. The detail does not weaken, but actually enforces the motif. There is not a superfluous line. The colour scheme of flat tints is fresh and striking, but always harmonious. The composition gives an idea of balance and breadth, but affords no hint as to how these qualities have been obtained. . . . The general effect is decorative in the highest degree, may be humorous, and is certainly pervaded by the “hidden soul of harmony.”89 The article asserted that the Japanese aesthetic was important not only in Lautrec’s posters but also to the graphic work of several British artists. It mentioned Dudley Hardy’s 1893 poster The Yellow Girl, made for the weekly magazine To-­ Day, as “the first English poster to be executed after the Japanese style” (Fig. 1.7), and Aubrey Beardsley’s posters, which “almost outdid in points of grotesque fancy, the Japanese examples that inspired them” (Fig. 1.6).90 Far less widely recognized than the influence of Japanese prints on poster artists, however, is the contribution of the poster’s advertising function to the artists’ invention of a modernist language. Indeed, it is this function, more than anything, that explains why Lautrec and Bonnard made their first primary innovations in the medium of the poster rather than in painting. As Mellerio, the most astute critic of the art lithography movement of the 1890s, recognized, the poster assumed an ambiguous status very early on, becoming more than just a poster, but not yet quite a print; this ambiguity made the poster “a work of hybrid flavor participating in both.”91 What exactly was this “hybrid flavor”? It was the poster’s dialogic identity as belonging to the realm of art but also to the extra-­artistic 54  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

1.7 Dudley Hardy, To-Day, c. 1895. David Allen, London. 295 × 195 cm.

world, by virtue of its advertising function and display on the street. How could the poster stimulate immediate interest and communicate its message effectively to passersby in busy everyday urban spaces? This called for experimentation. In the hands of young artists like Lautrec and Bonnard, the challenge became integral to their formalist solutions — a simplification of formal means, brilliant colors, flat two-­dimensional space, flat color areas devoid of shadows, and an overall emphasis on the surface. Poster artists could not have invented the modernist language without this hybridity of low culture and fine art: the poster had to be artistic, but also to respond to a new function (advertising), a new site of display (the street), and a new audience (the general public). There were fundamental differences between Chéret and the younger generation of avant-­garde artists who turned to poster making. For example, the modernism of Bonnard’s 1891 poster France-­Champagne stands out in comparison to Chéret’s posters made up to that time. Bonnard’s poster was simultaneously Art and Mass Media in the 1890s  ‡ 55

a breakthrough in developing his modernist art language and in formulating modern advertising. He used a new visual language of flat surfaces, decorative outlines, and brilliant color. In this poster Bonnard eliminated all modulation, atmospheric background, and realistically rendered figures, all of which had appeared in Chéret’s posters. He purged any semblance of anecdote and focused on the power of the poster as a graphically simplified advertisement. His depiction of the female figure in France-­Champagne has often been thought of as influenced by Chéret, but as we shall see, Bonnard’s poster in turn also influenced Chéret’s subsequent posters promoting alcoholic drinks. Initially, Bonnard was inspired by Chéret’s first poster for the Moulin Rouge, made in 1889 (Fig. I.1). This was the year in which he first designed the France-­ Champagne poster (printed and displayed only two years later).92 Chéret’s 1889 Moulin Rouge poster was one of the earliest appearances of the chérette, the seductive Parisian woman in revealing costume, which became a trademark of his 1890s posters.93 Bonnard extracted the yellow-­attired chérette who appeared in Chéret’s 1889 poster from a busy scene with numerous figures — donkeys, a procession, and the Moulin Rouge with its red windmill in the background — transforming her into a simplified, powerful icon by eliminating the anecdotal context and positioning her as the only figure and seen from close up. Bonnard also eliminated all modeling and placed the figure under the large undulating letters that spell out “France-­Champagne” in a way that made them appear as unstable as the intoxicated woman and the frothy foam spilling over from her overflowing glass. The rosy, alluringly choreographed performer seated seductively but in full control on a donkey in Chéret’s poster became, in Bonnard’s work, a decadent woman who had too much to drink. Bonnard’s champagne drinker and the froth are “loose” compared with the well-­ordered gaiety of Chéret’s Moulin Rouge. Signs of abandon predominate in Bonnard’s depiction, from her pose to the squinting eyes and parted lips. Seductively leaning forward toward the potential spectator of the poster, the woman in Bonnard’s poster is clearly under the influence of the champagne, projecting an ambiguous availability. Yet Bonnard’s use of a modernist visual language distances her from being a realistically depicted drinking companion. Bonnard’s female figure is flat. Bold, decorative black outlines delineate her figure against the fully flat yellow background, creating an illusion of volume only by varying the thickness of the lines, as in Japanese brush paintings.94 In contrast, Chéret’s waitress in his 1890 poster Quinquina Mugnier, grand apéritif, is represented as a fully rendered three-­dimensional figure (Fig. 1.8). Bonnard turned the bubbly froth into a flat decorative pattern reminiscent of the wave in prints by the Japanese artist Hokusai,95 replacing Chéret’s eighteenth-­ 56  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

1.8 Jules Chéret, Quinquina Mugnier, grand apéritif, 1897. Chaix, Paris. 245 × 88 cm.

century rococo influences with Japanese formal simplification.96 Purging any illusion of natural exuberance, Bonnard presented instead decadent excess. Bonnard’s striking 1891 poster influenced Chéret’s 1896 poster Quinquina Dubonnet (Fig. 1.9). The chérette made her debut around 1889 and 1890 in Chéret’s entertainment posters, but she did not enter his posters for alcoholic drinks till a few years after Bonnard’s poster made a splash. Chéret’s Quinquina Dubonnet of 1896 echoes the depiction of the female figure in Bonnard’s France-­Champagne. The similarities are visible in the yellow dress, hairdo, decorative ribbons, facial features, and in the choice to posit the woman as the sole figure in the poster. Also following Bonnard, Chéret represents the woman as intoxicated, although Art and Mass Media in the 1890s  ‡ 57

1.9 Jules Chéret, Quinquina Dubonnet, 1896. Chaix, Paris. 122 × 82.5 cm.

he suggested this through iconography more than style by showing her with a half empty bottle in hand, whereas Bonnard’s overflowing froth, taking over much of the poster, expressed this idea predominantly in formal means. Chéret’s poster, like Bonnard’s, showed the woman holding up a glass of the promoted drink, representing her as the consumer as well as the spectator’s bait. Chéret only began to use this iconography in 1893 and 1894, a few years after Bonnard’s poster. Earlier, in his 1890 poster Apéritif Mugnier, Chéret had featured an attractive but sober waitress marching in an impeccable professional costume that reveals her curves but keeps her fully clothed and aproned (Fig. 1.8). Purposefully carrying a tray with the bottle and a glass full of the drink, she is kept at a distance from the spectator, and her seductive appeal is far less aggressive than that of the drinking woman in Bonnard’s 1891 and Chéret’s 1896 posters. For Lautrec, too, the poster was a primary site for audacious innovation. It was in the poster that he simplified form, flattened color masses, avoided any modulation, used brilliant colorations and prominent outlines, emphasized the surface, and used bold compositions and striking points of view. In some of his later post58  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

1.10 Henri de ToulouseLautrec, Troupe de Mlle Églantine, 1896 (printer not listed). 58.4 × 78.2 cm.

ers, as in Troupe de Mlle Églantine, 1896, he used a decorative free-­flowing arabesque of black outlines simultaneously constituting form, surface, and figures (Fig. 1.10). Through all these means, Lautrec freed his posters and prints from all vestiges of naturalism, which persisted in his paintings to a greater degree. Some scholars, for example Richard Thomson, have acknowledged that “the simplified schema of color areas was carried to its furthest degree” in the posters.97 Laurence des Cars attributed Lautrec’s liberating himself of naturalism to “the practice of lithography, and more so of the poster.”98 This led Lautrec to invent “a system of signs” that, as Fénéon observed, immobilizes “life in new iconic forms.”99 Likewise, Anne-­Marie Sauvage identifies Lautrec’s strength as a modern artist, in his best posters, as the ability to venture “into the universe of the sign.”100 As early as the 1890s, Mellerio recognized the importance of the lithographic print work in Lautrec’s oeuvre: “The artist conceives simply and distinctly —  purely in terms of the print. He uses the contrast of flat tones, vigorously composed and colored.”101 Asserting that Lautrec is especially “gifted for the print,” Mellerio prefers Lautrec’s prints to his painting, noting that, in painting, Lautrec “does not seem as much at ease,” working in “a more elaborate, less direct medium.”102 He singles out Toulouse-­Lautrec as the artist who has “powerfully contributed to create original color lithography, from the point of view both of conception and of craftsmanship.”103 Whereas Chéret’s posters evoked enthusiastic responses from numerous critics and spawned a wealth of articles and reviews, Lautrec’s work, during the 1890s, divided the critics and generally received less critical attention. Some critics, among them Maindron, Fénéon, Natanson, and Hiatt, did recognize the greater Art and Mass Media in the 1890s  ‡ 59

importance of Toulouse-­Lautrec’s posters. They wrote about the innovation of Lautrec’s posters precisely by contrasting them with Chéret’s.104 Maindron, who had a great appreciation for Chéret, nonetheless recognized Lautrec’s greater importance as early as 1893: “It is undoubtedly a new language that he [Lautrec] speaks, but it is a strong, clear language that does not lack harmony and it will certainly be understood. All his works have a genuine importance.”105 Lautrec’s modernism was apparent not only in his use of a new language but also in his expression of a critical perspective on modern life. Writing in the slang style of Le Père Peinard, Fénéon praised Lautrec’s posters for both accomplishments: That Lautrec’s got a hell of a nerve, and no mistake. No half measures, the way he draws, or the way he colours either. Great flat dollops of white, black and red — forms all simplified — that’s all there is to it. He’s got them off to a tee, those gaga old capitalists, completely past it, sitting at tables with clever little tarts who lick their snouts to get cash out of them. . . . What’s so fantastic is the single-­minded way he does it, the bare-­faced cheek of it, the humour. It’s one in the eye for all those halfwits who can never bear to taste anything stronger than marshmallow.106 “Marshmallow” was probably a veiled allusion to Chéret’s saccharine visions; “gaga capitalists” and “tarts” referred to the characters depicted in Lautrec’s 1892 poster Reine de joie (Fig. 1.11). Toulouse-­Lautrec’s new visual language, expressing a biting critical view of modernity’s Parisian pleasures, was at the core of his modernism, and represented a negation of Chéret’s seductive idealizations.107 Compare, for example, Lautrec’s Reine de joie with Chéret’s poster of the same year, Théâtre de l’opéra, Carnaval 1892, 1er bal masqué (Fig. 1.12). Chéret’s poster promoted a masked ball by showing a coyly posed, elegantly clad chérette. Wearing a yellow evening gown with a plunging back and matching yellow gloves, the red-­haired, slim-­waisted chérette is accompanied by a happy male admirer who is shadowed by an ethereal child-­faced figure radiating joy. That the chérette’s sexual favors are for sale is only hinted at without tarnishing the joyful evocation of the pleasures of the masked ball. Lautrec’s Reine de joie, by contrast, promoting a novel by that name, depicts vice stripped of gaiety. The occasion is a dinner celebrating the contract between a leading Parisian courtesan and the Baron de Rozenfeld, a thin disguise of the Baron Alphonse de Rothschild.108 Unlike the atmosphere of pleasure in Chéret’s poster, with its exuberant, laughing male figure, Lautrec’s striking scene lays bare a joyless reality of sexual commerce between the bald, coarse-­featured, pot-­bellied 60  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

1.11 (left) Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Reine de joie, 1892. Edw. Ancourt, Paris. 137.2 × 91.7 cm. 1.12 (right) Jules Chéret, Théâtre national de l’opéra, Carnaval 1892, 1er bal masqué, 1892. Chaix, Paris. 124.5 × 87.5 cm.

Jewish banker, portrayed as lascivious and undignified, and the red-­lipped pale courtesan, who is planting a kiss on his nose. As Hiatt noted, Chéret’s “charming” posters attract “by joyousness of colour or grace of pattern,” whereas Lautrec’s posters “compel your attention by the force of his realism or the curiosity of his grotesqueness.”109 Hiatt points out that Chéret’s posters infuse fin-­de-­siècle decadence with extra doses of gaiety: “Of the sick disease itself Chéret gives no hint. He is unflagging in his vivacity, unswerving in his insistence on the joie de vivre.”110 By contrast, he observes, Lautrec applies an incisive gaze that is “at once realistic and grotesque”; his posters depict life “as seen by a man who, possessing the most acute powers of observation, is poignantly impressed by the incongruities of modern life.”111 Natanson, the publisher of the avant-­garde journal La Revue Blanche, contrasted Lautrec’s stirring up of anxieties with the “thoughtless joyous colors” of Chéret’s posters.112 He praised Lautrec’s posters, as early as 1893, for articulating a modern language and evoking troubling emotions.113 The critic Gustave Coquiot also noted the disquieting effect of Toulouse-­ Lautrec’s modernist poster. He described the strong impression made by Lautrec’s first poster in 1891 when it first appeared on the streets before a public that Art and Mass Media in the 1890s  ‡ 61

was accustomed to Chéret’s posters: “All of Paris was enthusiastic about Chéret. Then all of a sudden an unknown appeared who astounded us and who disturbed us with his strange determined drawings in flat, acidic tones! And they were signed Lautrec and strangely enough, the name quickly became popular, but as a name which implied anxiety and anguish. He made people uncomfortable but they also shivered with pleasure.”114 The impact of Lautrec’s posters contrasted, then, with that of Chéret’s. Numerous French critics enthusiastically reported on Chéret’s evocation of pleasurable sensations, usually when writing about the chérette. Nor were British critics and collectors immune to the chérette’s charms. Joseph Thacher Clarke, the British poster collector who wrote the preface to the 1894 catalog of the Royal Aquarium Exhibition, praised Chéret for “the tantalizingly fascinating types of female beauty, chic to the tips of their finger-­nails,” their faces “wreathed” with smiles, “an elusive and evanescent vision.”115 He astutely singled out Lautrec as representing a younger generation of artists, “pre-­eminent for tremendous force and one might almost say ruthlessness of his characteristics.”116 Hiatt articulated a judgment that subsequently became widely held: “The posters of Lautrec are . . . human documents strangely eloquent of their moment. For this reason, their value may be more permanent than that of the productions of either Chéret or Grasset, delightfully decorative as are the latter.”117 In England, Pryde and Nicholson, the British artists known as the Beggarstaff Brothers, were prime representatives of the invention of modernist aesthetics in the poster during the 1890s. The poster was the most important and productive site for the experimentations of the Beggarstaffs, who began collaborating on posters in the summer of 1894,118 producing highly innovative posters that were “quite dissimilar” to the paintings they made individually.119 Their work elicited the highest appreciation by their contemporaries, with Hiatt describing their posters as “at once striking and artistic,”120 noting approvingly that they “force themselves on the collector’s attention.”121 The twenty-­two-­year-­old Nicholson and the twenty-­eight-­year-­old Pryde invented their collaborative identity in order to design posters. They took on their alias — initially “J. & W. Beggarstaff” and later on “the Beggarstaffs”— in order to present themselves under “a striking name,” which was “a good, hearty, old English name.” They were also motivated by an aesthetic concern for the appearance of their name on the poster — the alias was “a more compact signature” than both of their surnames, which would have been “rather clumsy” on the sheet.122 Colin Campbell, the principal scholar of the Beggarstaffs’ posters, notes that their “unique partnership was formed at a time when both men were finding that 62  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

the stimulus of each other’s ideas went some way towards compensating for the failure of conventional academic training to set them on the road to their artistic goals.”123 Their collaboration on posters lasted only two or three years — the time required for them to “develop their individual identities as artists.”124 That they chose to focus their collaboration on the poster and that it proved to be the primary site for their radical departure from academic conventions was no accident. After initially considering doing illustrations for the press and realizing that they could not work in the “conventional style,”125 Nicholson and Pryde concluded that the poster could afford them the greatest freedom to innovate. The two artists developed a special collage technique for the process of making their poster design. They used a knife or scissors and a stack of colored papers to experiment with their reductive compositions: to get a “flat effect, we cut out the designs in coloured paper and pasted them on flat boards or paper.”126 This yielded a “silhouette treatment,” which was innovative in its radical stripping down of figures to flat forms. It had the added advantage of being “a very economical way of producing a poster for reproduction, for the tones were all flat.”127 The Beggarstaffs’ posters “Kassama” Corn Flour, 1894, and Rowntree’s Elect Cocoa, c. 1897, exemplify this technique (Figs. 1.13 and 1.14).128 The radical effect of the cut paper is evident in the silhouetted figures. The Kassama girl’s black garment is starkly contrasted with the background of bright yellow and subtle gray. The black-­attired figure in Rowntree’s Elect Cocoa is similarly contrasted with the flat background, and both are situated in a blank space. The high level of abstraction eliminates all details in the Kassama figure, and the color scheme is limited to yellow, gray, and black, with just a touch of red on the lips. What was it that led the Beggarstaffs to invent this radical technique? As demonstrated by the fact that they declined press illustration because it would have required them to adhere to a conventional style, they possessed a strong interest in innovation, and saw the poster as affording them the opportunity for it. But what drove their innovation? Pryde’s short autobiographical article provides a rare testimony concerning the important extra-­artistic factors involved in poster innovation, explaining that the artists invented a poster design by taking into account the conditions of viewing on the street, including the short attention span of a passerby: “Posters are of course different from pictures, for while one can stand quietly and look at the latter, a poster has to attract the attention of the passer-­by, who might be moving relatively quickly on a bus — even though those were the days of horse buses — or walking along a pavement.”129 Late nineteenth-­century critics often offered the observation that posters had to be legible to the passerby on the move, the pressed and distracted spectator of Art and Mass Media in the 1890s  ‡ 63

1.13 The Beggarstaffs, “Kassama” Corn Flour, 1894. Henderson & Co. London. 152.4 × 101.6 cm. 1.14 The Beggarstaffs, Rowntree’s Elect Cocoa, 1896 (printer not listed). 96.52 × 72.7 cm.

urban spaces.130 But Pryde’s statement stands out as a rare admission on the part of an artist that recognizing the street’s viewing conditions was at the core of his invention of a radically simplified modernist language. The radical simplification of style of the Beggarstaffs often made it difficult for potential advertisers and for viewers on the street to accept their posters. An 1896 article based on an interview with the two artists discusses these difficulties, citing several anecdotes showing that potential advertisers who considered their posters objected to their style and declined to commission posters from them.131 As for the responses of viewers who saw the posters on the street, the article notes: “Strange as their treatment of subjects is to the British eyes, even the man in the street — resentful as he may be of the fact that they paint their characters flat, and not round, as he sees them — is held to stop, to throw back his head, and to admit there is something wonderfully striking about the posters which are now becoming the rage.”132 The article reveals, then, that despite the viewers’ trouble in accepting the modernist poster, the most important criteria for the poster’s success — its ability to draw attention and be memorable — were met with these works. The shock value of the still new modernist language worked in favor of the posters. As one contemporary critic reported, even those who did not like the austerity of the Beggarstaffs’ Hamlet poster “could not forget it and found themselves talking about it” (Fig. 5.4).133 Such works were striking not only in comparison to academic conventions of painting but also in comparison to conventional poster advertising. The posters removed all anecdotal details — thus the Beggarstaffs’ avoidance of the smiling faces that usually graced posters advertising the kind of products they promoted in “Kassama” Corn Flour and Rowntree’s Elect Cocoa. Another British poster designer notable for his innovative style was Aubrey Beardsley. Discussing Beardsley’s poster Avenue Theatre, A Comedy of Sighs!, 1894, the designer and critic W. S. Rogers noted that the poster “compelled notice by its novel colour scheme — a most harmonious combination of green and blue, and the original effect obtained by the use of a transparent curtain to partly veil the figure” (Fig. 1.6).134 He urged other poster designers to learn from Beardsley’s “principle” of “breadth and simplicity,” which is what made his posters effective, but cautioned from “designing à la Beardsley.”135 Hiatt explained the innovation in Beardsley’s poster by noting that, whereas the old theater posters represented “in glaring colour the hero in a supreme moment of exaltation, or the heroine in the depths of despair,” Beardsley “did not condescend to illustrate, but produced a design, irrelevant and tantalizing to the average man.”136 The test of the poster, Hiatt explained, was whether it was able to draw the gaze and appeal to Art and Mass Media in the 1890s  ‡ 65

a broad spectrum of the public, including diverse classes. Beardsley’s poster succeeded in this. Hiatt, who was based in London and witnessed the appearance of Beardsley’s posters on the streets, remarked in 1895: “Everybody . . . from the labourer hurrying in the dim of light of the morning to his work, to the prosperous stockbroker on his way to the ‘House,’ was forced to stop and look at it. Hence it fulfilled its primary purpose to admiration; it was a most excellent advertisement.”137 Although the posters of Beardsley and the Beggarstaffs displayed distinct styles, both invented images that could function as shorthand signs, and both rejected the glorification of pleasure. In this they differed from Chéret’s posters. In the words of the preeminent British art critic Marion Spielmann, the Beggarstaffs’ gloomy posters were “about as like to Chéret’s posy-­like affiches as a grim and ascetic old Carmelite is like to a lady of the corps de ballet.”138 As discussed earlier, Lautrec’s and Bonnard’s integration of a new formal language with the representation of a sense of alienation prevalent in the sites of Parisian pleasures amounted to a rejection of the formula Chéret had invented of distancing contemporary realities through an apotheosis of urban pleasures with evocations of eighteenth-­century styled seductions. In Chéret’s artistic poster, the advertising function was sublimated by references to the admired high art of the previous century. Chéret visualized a middle-­class modernity whose vulgarities were transformed by nostalgic allusions to a bygone era of aristocratic pleasures. Almost twenty years before Bonnard’s and Lautrec’s posters, Édouard Manet reversed Chéret’s levity in his only color lithograph, his Polichinelle, 1874 (Fig. 1.15). As Phillip Dennis Cate notes, Manet, the first artist to make an original color lithograph, was undoubtedly inspired to experiment with color lithography by Chéret’s colorful posters.139 The latter were remarkable at a time when the Impressionists still made only black-­and-­white prints.140 Although Chéret was not nearly as well known in the 1870s as he would become in the following decades, Manet was a dedicated flâneur and could not but notice Chéret’s posters on the streets of Paris. That he took note of these works is evident from his inclusion of the lower part of a Chéret poster in his 1878 painting At the Café (Fig. 5.8).141 Chéret had included Polichinelle and other commedia dell’arte figures in scenes of nighttime pleasures in his posters, for example in Valentino, samedi et Mardi Gras, grand bal de nuit as early as 1869 (and again in 1872) (Fig. 1.16). Manet’s Poli­ chinelle counteracted Chéret’s treatment of the theme, which was characterized by “lightness,” a “happy freedom,” “ease,” “grace,” and “superficiality.”142 Rather than depicting Polichinelle enjoying himself in the company of a young dancer, Columbine, as Chéret had in his posters advertising nighttime entertainments, Manet situated Polichinelle on a white page, looking out at the spectator in a 66  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

1.15 Édouard Manet, Polichinelle, 1874. Lemercier, Paris. Color lithograph, 52.1 × 32.4 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Alisa Mellon Bruce Fund, 1995.10.1. Courtesy National Gallery of Art. 1.16 Jules Chéret, Valentino, samedi et Mardi Gras, grand bal de nuit, paré, masqué & travesti, 1869. J. Chéret, 18 rue Ste Marie, Paris. 126.5 × 88.5 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

serious mood.143 Manet used the entertaining figure of Polichinelle for an entirely different purpose — as an ambiguous disguise for Marshal MacMahon, a politi­ cal figure representing violence, repression, disillusionment, and governmental authority.144 MacMahon, who had led the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune in May 1871, was the chief of state when Manet made the lithograph.145 The French police identified Manet’s Polichinelle as representing MacMahon and halted the lithographic reproduction after a printing of only twenty-­five proofs, thus thwarting Manet’s exceptionally ambitious distribution plan.146 Scholars have tended to focus on the iconography of Manet’s Polichinelle, interpreting its political meanings, and commenting on its link to political caricature. Less noted is the significance of Manet’s innovative plan for mass distribution. His idea was to pursue what was, at the time, a large print-­run of eight thousand, and to distribute the color lithograph as a free insert for subscribers of the Republican journal Le Temps.147 Although Manet was prevented from executing his plan, the concept itself is noteworthy. The mere mass publication of Manet’s lithograph would not have been particularly innovative (indeed, a publisher had earlier expressed an interest in buying the Polichinelle watercolor in order to turn it into a lithograph; the deal fell through perhaps because Manet demanded a high price of 2,000 francs).148 Rather, Manet’s plan to use the distribution system of the press was innovative insofar as it represented a breach of the consecrated realm of art by inserting it into the mass media. Manet’s aim was to bring his lithograph into the realm of low culture — the everyday environment of the newspaper. His self-­published color lithograph represented an early response by an avant-­garde artist to the potential of mass distribution of color lithography. Planning in effect to spread his political critique through an insert in the newspaper, Manet pioneered the idea of the mass dissemination of an artist’s work as subversive action. Had it materialized, Manet’s Polichinelle insert would have been the first color lithograph to be distributed in this way in France (where the first instance occurred only in December 1881 with L’Illustration’s insert in the Christmas issue).149 Manet’s distribution plan likely drew on his awareness of the British practice of inserting free color reproductions of artists’ paintings in the illustrated press. The Illustrated London News pioneered this practice (initially using woodblock) in 1855, and its first highly popular insert was in 1863 — the Little Red Riding Hood, based on James Sant’s 1860 painting. One of the most famous instances occurred after Manet’s death, with the mass distribution in the London Illustrated News of a lithographic reproduction of John Everett Millais’s painting Bubbles in 1886, around the time that it was also turned into a poster advertis68  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

1.17 A wall with posters including Toulouse-Lautrec’s Aristide Bruant poster, c. 1892. Photograph. Private collection.

ing Pears’ Soap.150 Manet’s plan differed from the British precedent insofar as the artist himself had initiated it and engaged the lithographic print company (Lemercier), and because the objective of the mass distribution of his artwork was unrelated to promoting the newspaper (or another product). Manet was undoubtedly keenly aware that distributing his lithography in this way would promote his own name in an unprecedented manner. His plan was a precedent for the hybridity of mixing high and low culture. The mass distribution of an original lithographic art print through the press questioned the auratic artwork in “its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”151 Mixing fine art and mass media was a controversial endeavor. La Vie Parisienne lamented this adulteration of art with the street, writing of Lautrec’s poster: “Bruant [Aristide Bruant, the cabaret performer and owner, featured in Lautrec’s poster] is supposed to be an artist; why, then, does he put himself up on the walls beside the gas lamps and other advertisements? Doesn’t he object to neighbors like these?”152 In fact, Lautrec approved of the appearance of his posters on the street, where they were displayed edge to edge with other posters, as seen in a rare photograph that shows his poster for Bruant posted on a wall (Fig. 1.17). Lautrec treated his poster like his other artworks, even writing to critics to request Art and Mass Media in the 1890s  ‡ 69

that they write about his new poster just as he did when a new print of his was published or an art exhibition was about to open;153 and critics and publications tended to be responsive.154 Lautrec also exhibited some of his paintings in the low-­culture context of the café concert. For example, his large oil painting Training the New Girls, by Valentin, “the Boneless” (Moulin Rouge) hung in the foyer above the bar at the Moulin Rouge, next to his painting Au Cirque Fernando: Écuyère.155 Moreover, Lautrec mixed posters and paintings in his art exhibitions. He first took this audacious step in the February 1892 exhibit of  Les XX (Les Vingts) in Brussels, where he included proofs of his poster La Goulue (Moulin Rouge) in two states, along with seven paintings.156 The following year he included two posters in his submissions to Les XX, along with three-­color lithographs and two paintings.157 Anticipating controversy, Lautrec asked the organizer of the Les XX exhibit: “Will I be able to show my poster that has just been published? I hope the answer is yes, and that Les XX won’t be afraid of it.”158 That some considered it unacceptable to exhibit posters along with his paintings, and that Lautrec insisted on doing so in the face of objections, is clear from Lautrec’s own report on an incident in which he planned to exhibit seven works, including his Moulin Rouge poster (second state). In response, the president of the Salon des indépendants asked him to frame the poster and cover the words Moulin Rouge because they made it look like an advertisement. Lautrec flatly refused: “I replied to the President that I would frame it but that I would not remove the words, which I consider part of the work of which I am the only judge.”159 Lautrec’s first solo exhibition, at Boussod and Valadon in 1893 (concurrently with Charles Maurin), included paintings, pastels, and posters, like other Lautrec exhibitions.160 He also exhibited his posters in large-­scale poster exhibitions, including the two international exhibitions held at the Royal Aquarium in London (1894 and 1896) and the 1896 international exhibition of posters in Reims, which included 21 Lautrec works among the 1,690 posters featured in the exhibit. In his art exhibits, Lautrec extended to his posters the practice that Camille Pissarro had initiated with his prints (in the 1880 Impressionist exhibition), namely, exhibiting different states of the same print.161 Nonetheless, the discrepancy between the print runs of posters for street distribution and the special editions of posters and prints contributed to the print’s rarification.162 The limited edition of prints created rarity in a way that the larger print run of his posters — estimated to be between one thousand and three thousand in Lautrec’s case — did not.163 Lautrec was interested in the rarity of his prints. In 1892, having produced his first art print, La Goulue and Her Sister, printed in an edition of one hundred, 70  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

Lautrec wrote to the Belgian critic Émile Verhaeren: “I hope this will be only the first in a series that I am doing and which will at least have the merit of being very limited and consequently rare.”164 The relative rarity of the print coexisted with the wide distribution of posters and was used to distinguish the former.165 In addition to its function as a site for experimentation, innovation, and a mixing of art with the street, advertising, and mass media, the poster had another role in the emerging modernism of the 1890s: it was instrumental in spreading the modernist language internationally. The organizer of the large exhibitions of posters at the Royal Aquarium reported that he saw a significant change when reviewing posters in 1895 (for the 1896 exhibition) as compared with 1894, the year of the first poster exhibition at the Royal Aquarium. By 1895, the modernist language had replaced a more traditional artistic language in posters not only in the large metropolises of London, Paris, and New York, but even in remote places: “The Triumph of the Silhouette” is the verdict we must arrive at after a survey of the posters of 1895. And this verdict refers not only to London . . . but to the United Kingdom, and generally to every country in Europe and America. A trip made through Ireland during the past summer was the first thing to open my eyes to the completeness of the victory won by the new theory (as applied to the hoardings) of the superior effectiveness of a bold silhouette with flat masses of colour. I do not say that all these posters were successful, but the majority (many of them in out-­of-­the-­way places and produced locally) had more or less seized upon the tricks of the latest fashion. . . . [A] very small number of posters employed the “older principles” of too many details, excessive three-­dimensionality and printings.166

Art and Mass Media: Two Modernist Narratives As Jacques Rancière observed, the modernist idea of the “autonomy” of art was a “reversal of historical modernism, which was clearly about the crossing of borders between different arts and between art and life.”167 In the following pages I propose that the poster and poster criticism played an important role in “historical modernism,” although both were largely written out of the canonical history of modern art, which was based on twentieth-­century modernism. More recent revisionist approaches, such as Vanessa R. Schwartz’s and Jeannene M. Przyblyski’s definition of modernism as the avant-­garde’s “particular set of aesthetic responses, qualifications, priorities, and problems formulated with respect to the Art and Mass Media in the 1890s  ‡ 71

experience of modern life,” make room for the inclusion of posters in the history of modernism.168 Following Rancière’s insights, I propose an alternative narrative that posits two modernist discourses, one developed primarily in Paris during the 1890s, the other in New York beginning in the late 1930s. This involves historicizing the twentieth-­century modernist narrative within the longer trajectory of the late nineteenth-­century avant-­garde’s engagement with posters, graphic design, and mass print media. My claim is that the historical modernist discourse of the 1880s and 1890s forms an important part of the history of modernisms, which is distinct from the later modernist narrative, developed in twentieth-­century America. I will begin by examining the historical modernist discourse developed by critics during the 1880s and 1890s, including J.-­K. Huysmans, Beraldi, Roger Marx, and Mellerio in Paris, Hiatt in London, and Brander Matthews in New York. During the late nineteenth century the poster was at the crux of a progressive struggle to redefine the relationship between high and low culture and democratize the access to art. It is noteworthy that even before the development of the modernist poster by Lautrec and Bonnard in France in the early 1890s, Huysmans, in his review of the 1879 Salon, had already situated Chéret’s posters as belonging in the camp of modernist aesthetics alongside Impressionism.169 Critics who were closely associated with avant-­garde print culture in the 1890s, notably Marx and Mellerio, saw lithographic color posters and prints as central to the avant-­garde tendencies of their time. Furthermore, their writing about posters and prints formed part of their broader struggle to eliminate the hierarchy of the arts. Unlike twentieth-­century modernist critics, who reasserted a dichotomy between art and mass culture, progressive critics of the 1890s called for dismantling the hierarchy within the arts and for accepting contemporary posters and color prints as art, foreseeing a modernist future in which the “minor” arts (often referred to as “decorative arts”) were considered of equal value with the “major” arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture. In their view, the “minor” arts played an increasingly important role in the private and public spheres of a democratized society and an industrial era. Marx, a leading critic of the poster and print and an influential state arts administrator, called for abolishing the hierarchy of the arts and embracing a “social art” (l’art social), an art that played a social function in an industrialized society.170 He discussed this in 1899: “The esteem in which it [the poster] is held today can also be explained by the evolution of ideas and by a belated renunciation of biased arbitrary classifications. For many years, the shackle of hierarchies 72  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

deflected the attention from the poster to arts reputed to be ‘major’ — outside those there was no salvation. Even more, the characteristic of utility appeared to be a cause for contempt, a sign of degradation.”171 Marx went on to proclaim, “Let us sweep away these rank prejudices that obscure good judgment; the time of disdain and silence is past. . . . The poster is similar to the print in technique, and it is no lesser than painting in the richness of its impact.”172 Mellerio, in his essay on original color lithography, which focuses on the fine-­art color print and its origins in the poster, concurs with the aim of making art available beyond earlier hierarchies by championing a new form of original art — the original color art print — easily accessible to a wide population. Mel­ lerio clarifies that in seeking this form of equality in access he does not advocate lowering artistic standards. He asks what role can the color print and especially lithography play in the present social order. He responds by noting that it is a time that can be described as democratic. Yet, “If one searches for equality at a common level, it is the death of art, because one can bring down the highest levels, but one can never raise the lowly to the highest levels. This would be the triumph of mediocrity.”173 He then suggests that there is a different and worthy mode of democratization, as lithography can be used to reproduce museum masterpieces at modest prices, making them accessible to everyone.174 For Mellerio, the original color print of the 1890s, whose origins in the illustrated advertising poster he fully acknowledged, was not marginal minor art but art situated at the center of an important movement of its time, and the poster itself, in the hands of such artists as Toulouse-­Lautrec, was a modern art print.175 Mellerio concludes his volume by asserting that true artists working in the color lithographic medium have created “a distinct flowering that is particular to our epoch.”176 Although he states that he is not certain what the future of lithography holds, he asserts that the number of fine works produced by true artists is already large enough to have had a real impact in the history of prints and consequently of art.177 Beraldi, the foremost scholar of the nineteenth-­century print and an early admirer of Chéret’s posters, wrote in 1886, before the color lithography print revolution took off and at a time when the illustrated color poster was still a relatively new phenomenon, “Let us leave aside the question of high art [grand art] and minor art [petit art]; is not the ideal for art to be everywhere, even in the most common objects?”178 These ideas were already familiar from William Morris, whom Marx acknowledged as an important influence. Yet their application to the illustrated poster, which functioned as advertising, and the inclusion of the poster in the category of the decorative arts were a new phenomenon. Moreover, Art and Mass Media in the 1890s  ‡ 73

including the poster in the decorative arts was at odds with the views of those who were close to the Arts and Crafts ideas in England. Ruskin passionately objected to any form of advertising, even at the cost of the demise of one of his own cherished projects.179 As Hiatt noted, Ruskin, who “delighted to expend his best bad language” on advertising, acknowledged its “deplorable vigour.” Ruskin recognized that “in England at the present time there was only one living art — the art of advertising. Painting, sculpture, architecture and the rest were dead.”180 In France and in the United States, the Arts and Crafts ideas were applied to the poster as part of an argument for valuing the minor arts. The American writer Brander Matthews, a professor at Columbia University, author of numerous books, recipient of the Legion of Honor cross, and a poster collector who was deeply familiar with European and American posters, recognized as early as 1892, in an article published in the American Century magazine, that the poster was “one of the most interesting manifestations of decorative art” seen in Paris and New York. He located it within a broader phenomenon of the artistic excellence of the “minor arts.”181 In Matthews’s judgment, the nineteenth century was distinguished for its “little things . . . our silverware, our pottery, our tiles, our wall-­paper, our wood-­cuts, our book-­covers, each in its kind, and when it is at its best, are better than our historic painting, our heroic sculpture, or our grandiose architecture.”182 He asserted that the minor arts “have their place in the hierarchy of the beautiful . . . they have a charm of their own and a value likely to be as lasting as those of their more pretentious elder sisters.”183 Matthews differs from Marx in not clearly challenging the hierarchy of the arts but putting forth a more modest argument for the value of the minor arts.184 He suggested that we are “prone to underestimate the value of contemporary labor when it is bestowed on common things. Often we fail altogether to see the originality, the elegance, the freshness, — in a word, the art, — of the men who are making the things which encompass us roundabout.”185 He included posters in this category, noting, “It is small wonder that the pictorial posters which adorn our blank walls pass unperceived, and that we do not care to observe the skill which has gone into their making.”186 Matthews redefined art, in the spirit of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, as “the originality, elegance, and freshness” of common objects, and placed the poster within this context. He developed the case for the pictorial poster’s place, “however humble its position, in the temple of Art.”187 To bolster his argument he asserted that the artist who made the poster lent his status to it, calling forth historical precedents of canonical artists who engaged with minor arts. One does not doubt, he wrote, the 74  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

artistic value of the shop card designed by Hogarth or the bookplate designed by Dürer.188 Robert Goldwater’s 1942 article “L’Affiche Moderne, a Revival of Poster Art after 1880,” recognized the poster as “more representative” and thus “from a historical point of view more significant” than it was during any other period before or after the 1890s because during this period the poster was an integral part of the development of a new style, a new art.189 He asserted that the poster and print were “among the best and most characteristic examples of the style of the time,”190 and clarified that the impetus for the innovation in color lithography during the 1890s came from Chéret’s posters (Pissarro, and the younger-­ generation artists Toulouse-­Lautrec and Bonnard, only began to work in color lithography in the early 1890s, two and a half decades after Chéret).191 Gold­ water was the first to introduce these insights into twentieth-­century art history, that is, from some historical distance. In a 1958 article, Robert Herbert, who was likewise deeply familiar with the late nineteenth-­century modernist narrative, analyzed the paintings of Georges Seurat in terms of their stylistic, iconographic, and compositional relationship to Chéret’s posters.192 Goldwater’s and Herbert’s studies appeared before a new twentieth-­century modernist narrative advanced primarily by Clement Greenberg became predominant, and were grounded in a profound knowledge of the historical modernism of the 1890s. As Rancière points out, the twentieth-­century narrative on modernism reversed much of what was central to modernism in the 1890s. It reasserted a dichotomy between art and life, and a separation between the arts, based on a theory of medium specificity.193 Under its influence, the late nineteenth-­century poster remained a separate category lingering at the margins of art history. The twentieth-­century modernist narrative excluded the poster from the history of the avant-­garde and its development of modernism during the 1890s. Greenberg charted a dichotomy between modernist art and a degraded mass culture, dismissing posters, along with other mass media, as kitsch.194 He named Maxfield Parrish, whose posters had already been known during the 1890s (one of them was included in the selection of the Maîtres de l’Affiche), as a prime example of kitsch. Greenberg’s stance responded to his own American culture of the late 1930s, by which time the poster had become a negligent part of a growing field of commercial advertising and mass media, and photographic print processes replaced hand-­drawn lithographic posters. The status of the poster in the United States in the twentieth century was entirely different from that of the poster in Europe and the United States during the 1890s.195 Whereas in twentieth-­century America advertising had become a Art and Mass Media in the 1890s  ‡ 75

huge field, with posters playing a far less central role than in the past, in the final decade of the nineteenth century the poster was still considered a new medium that served an emerging field of visual advertising, attracted numerous artists, and was valued by critics and collectors. In his seminal article “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts,” Thomas Crow replaced the negative terms of Greenberg’s dichotomy of kitsch and avant-­garde art with the notions of a “positive interdependence” and a “crucial interchange.”196 Interested primarily in modernist art rather than mass culture, Crow offered important insights about the former yet refrained from discussing the latter with any specificity, using the overall term “mass culture” without drawing distinctions between different functions, genres, and media. His article characterized avant-­garde artists as agents of innovation and experimentation, who used “mass culture” as “materials,” and in the case of  Cubism and Dada introduced “the actual debris” of the world into their art.197 Crow’s much-­ quoted formulation posited a hierarchical distinction as characterizing the interdependence of high and low culture: the “avant-­garde serves as a kind of research and development arm of the culture industry.”198 His revision of the modernist position, replacing an antithetical separation between art and mass media with interdependence, thus assumes a largely unidirectional process of avant-­garde artists using low culture.199 Nonetheless, the theoretical model Crow proposes allows for a meaningful bidirectional exchange between art and mass culture, as indicated in his observation that “the most powerful moments of modernist negation have occurred when the two aesthetic orders, the high-­cultural and the subcultural, have been forced into scandalous identity, each being continuously dislocated by the other.”200 Building on Crow’s insights about the historical inseparability and interdependence of modern art and mass culture, I have tried in this chapter to shed light on a particular area originating within “mass culture,” namely the illustrated poster, and to examine its productive role in avant-­garde art of the 1890s. Analyzing the interdependence of art and mass media, specifically in advertising posters, this chapter demonstrated that artistic innovation was not antithetical to mass media but inextricably tied up with it. In the period of the historical modernism of the late nineteenth century, artists such as Toulouse-­Lautrec, Bonnard, Beardsley, and the Beggarstaffs were stimulated to innovate precisely because the non-­sanctioned space of the street and the casualness of the medium — unframed cheap paper posters pasted on the walls for short periods — afforded freedom from the tradition of high art. Their innovations were responsive to a territory situated outside of a traditional autonomous aesthetic regime, and hence to new 76  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

challenges — primarily the demands of the advertising function, the conditions of viewing posters on the street, and the necessity of attracting the gazes of a broad audience. Their posters show that innovation was not confined to high art but rather took place in the very engagement of artists with conditions of mass media. Paraphrasing Crow, we may say that the case of the 1890s poster shows that avant-­garde artists used the demands and opportunities of mass media and advertising to develop “a kind of research and development arm” for artistic innovation.201 Would a renewed understanding of the historical modernist discourse of the 1890s enable a different view of the role of posters in modernism? Could the study of the poster encourage a reinsertion of the historical modernist discourses into art history? And would it pave the way for resituating the later modernist narrative of the twentieth century within a longer and more complex trajectory? These remain open questions. Huysmans’s position (charted in his art criticism in 1879, 1880, and 1889) of viewing the posters of Chéret as belonging to the camp of modernism along with the Impressionists and in particular Degas, did not become part of the canonical twentieth-­century narrative on the late nineteenth-­century avant-­garde. It is typically acknowledged only in specialized studies of Chéret and of the poster. Chéret has only been central in a separate history of the poster, whereas his place in the canonical art historical narrative remains marginal and founded largely on Seurat’s interest in him. By contrast, Toulouse-­Lautrec, Bonnard, and Beardsley have been integrated into the twentieth-­century modernist narrative, while the Beggarstaffs, who remain best known for their posters, usually feature prominently in the history of graphic design.202 As proposed in this chapter, considering posters can shed new light on the development of the modernist language and the representation of modernity, and stands to contribute to a reconsideration of the modernist narratives.

Art and Mass Media in the 1890s  ‡ 77

2 t Toulouse-­Lautrec, Jane Avril, and the Iconography of the Female Print Connoisseur in Posters Now, at this time, when paintings, statues, and all works that have a value as unique exemplars, by their rarity become desirable, costly collector’s items accessible only to a limited number, what remains? Prints and original prints. Their artistic value is indisputable. . . . Already there exist numerous representatives of the middle class who dedicate their leisure time, and a portion of their intelligence and their money, to browsing, taking an interest in, and buying prints. There is among ordinary people an easily triggered potential enthusiasm for this art, which is not yet perfect but is already more refined. They recognize and abhor the chromo, preferring the original print. — André Mellerio, La lithographie originale en couleurs, 1898

During the 1890s, members of the middle classes, unable to afford unique artworks such as paintings or sculptures, began to collect the modestly priced color art print and came to recognize its artistic value relative to the cheap reproductive color print (known as the chromo).1 This was, not coincidentally, the moment when artists and designers of lithographic color posters developed a new iconography of a female print connoisseur. Typically, this new figure was a fashionable woman directing a sustained gaze at an original print she has selected from a portfolio or else at prints displayed on the walls of a gallery, and on rare occasion looking at a print in the print shop. This iconography, in which the woman

2.1 Louis Léopold Boilly, Les amateurs de tableaux ( The Art Connoisseurs), 1823–28. Hand-colored lithograph from the series Recueil des Grimaces (Collection of Grimaces), 31.4 × 25.5 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, A. Hyatt Mayor Purchase Fund, Marjorie Phelps Starr Bequest, 1989.1062. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art; photo: Art Resource, N.Y.

was the central figure representing a collector, differed significantly from earlier instances when, on occasion, a woman appeared among a group of male amateurs, but only in a secondary status. She then accompanied a male amateur whose gaze was typically depicted, while hers was not — for example in Honoré Daumier’s The Print Amateur, c. 1855.2 Her marginality, compared with the male connoisseurs whom she accompanies, can also be seen in two earlier works by Louis-­ Léopold Boilly. In his small painting Les amateurs d’estampes, 1810 (Louvre), she functions merely as a decorative figure seen from the back, her gaze remaining invisible;3 in his caricature The Art Connoisseurs (Les amateurs de tableaux), 1823–28, her marginality is glaring: most of her face is hidden (by the hand-­held small canvas that commands everyone’s attention) (Fig. 2.1); her lowered eyelids contrast conspicuously with the eager and penetrating gazes of all five male ama­ teurs. Whereas Boilly does not reveal any expression in the small visible part of her face, he depicts the individualized facial features of the male amateurs and highlights their intense expressive reactions to the artwork. In contrast to such representations from the early to mid-­nineteenth century, Lautrec’s print, which 80  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

2.2 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, cover for the print portfolio L’Estampe Originale, 1893. Edw. Ancourt, Paris. 58 × 74 cm. Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Estate of William S. Kinkead 1984–44–9.

functioned as the cover for the print portfolio L’Estampe Originale (Fig. 2.2), and the posters that followed it constituted a new iconography in which a woman was represented as the principal amateur of prints, whether she was in the company of a man (rarely) or, more frequently, by herself or with a female companion. An important inspiration for the new iconography that appeared in posters during the 1890s was Toulouse-­Lautrec’s 1893 color lithograph depicting the café concert performer Jane Avril closely examining a print (Fig. 2.2). In the following years, numerous artists represented a similar new “type” of female print connoisseur in posters that promoted galleries, exhibitions, and portfolios of original prints. The iconography originated in France and became particularly popular there but occasionally also appeared in other European countries, including Belgium and Germany (Figs. 2.11 and 2.17). In French posters, however, it was so common as to make the male print connoisseur the exception — in stark contrast to the predominance of the representation of the male print collector in the previous decades, particularly in Daumier’s works (Figs. 2.7 and 2.10). Iconography of the Female Connoisseur  ‡ 81

In several respects the representation of the female print collector in French posters can be viewed as part of a broader phenomenon of late nineteenth-­ century posters representing modern women in numerous roles, including, prominently, consumers of various cultural products such as journals, books, and entertainments, and of such commercial products as fashion, cosmetics, and various kinds of foods and beverages.4 Some of these posters updated existing iconographies. For example, the artists of posters promoting a book by depicting a reading woman could draw on a long tradition of the figure of the woman reader in painting. But other posters produced a new iconography of women in modern life that did not previously exist in painting — for example, posters depicting women using a variety of new technologies, from the bicycle and typewriter to the sewing machine and telephone. Within this broader category of poster iconography of women as consumers, the new iconography of women as print connoisseurs (and therefore consumers of prints) was particularly groundbreaking, since whereas nineteenth-­century French paintings often depicted women as models and muses, and sometimes as painters, none represented women as connoisseurs. Indeed, more was at stake in depicting women as refined connoisseurs of art prints than as mere consumers of commercial products or even of mass-­media cultural products like books or journals: the graphic discourse of a female print connoisseur explicitly contradicted an earlier nineteenth-­century French iconographic tradition of the art collector as male. Why, then, did poster artists and those who commissioned posters from them during the 1890s choose to feature a female print collector? This chapter addresses these questions through an integrated iconographic, textual, historical, biographic, and theoretical analysis. It examines the shift in the iconography of connoisseurs/collectors from a male to a female subject in posters, and argues that posters introduced an intriguing and significant change in the visual discourse on collecting prints that was related to the status of the color print and of modern women. It begins by analyzing Toulouse-­Lautrec’s color lithograph of Jane Avril as a print connoisseur; continues with an analysis of a selection of posters that represent a female print connoisseur; and concludes with a comparative analysis of the written and visual nineteenth-­century discourses on print collectors.

Toulouse-­Lautrec’s Jane Avril as Print Connoisseur Toulouse-­Lautrec was the first to represent a contemporary woman as a connoisseur of prints in a color lithograph (Fig. 2.2). His 1893 lithograph for L’Estampe 82  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

Originale was commissioned by André Marty for the cover of the unbound collection of original lithographs by some seventy-­four artists, including both young avant-­garde and established artists.5 Printed by Ancourt and published by the Journal des Artistes between 1893 and 1895, L’Estampe Originale offered an annual subscription for 150 francs, which consisted of quarterly installments of ten prints, each published in an edition of one hundred.6 Lautrec’s print was made for the first installment of the publication and promoted the entire subscription. In addition to functioning as the cover of the unbound prints, Lautrec’s image was also used as a prospectus and an invitation card,7 thus playing a promotional role, as posters typically did, while at the same time constituting one of the original prints of the series. Toulouse-­Lautrec carefully considered the choice of iconography for the cover, consulting the critic Roger Marx, a state museum official and an important authority on posters and prints who wrote the preface to L’Estampe Originale. After Lautrec met with Marx to discuss the cover and subsequently showed him the proposed cover design, both artist and critic apparently agreed that the cover should represent the café concert dancer Jane Avril as a print connoisseur.8 What were their reasons for this unusual choice, and what was the meaning of the image they chose? Addressing the latter question, scholars have offered a number of suggestions: Claire Frèches-­Thory proposed that Lautrec was paying tribute to Avril’s interest in art;9 Phillip Dennis Cate, that Avril reflected the modernity of the originally designed print and represented “a modern audience eager to appreciate the creative efforts of Marty’s selection of artists”;10 Julia Frey claimed that the artist paid homage to Avril’s “intellectual and artistic sensibilities”;11 Mary Weaver Chapin proposed that Lautrec’s choice reflected his friendship and collaboration with Avril but that he actually used the café concert celebrity for his own promotion;12 and Nancy Ireson interpreted Lautrec’s positioning of Avril as a connoisseur and an “overseer” who passes judgment on his and his colleagues’ work as testimony to the importance he attributed to her opinion.13 These interpretations all strike me as correct but incomplete. To attempt a fuller answer I propose considering the meaning of Avril’s depiction as a print connoisseur in the following contexts: who she was and what she represented for Lautrec and his circle in the 1890s; the iconography of the print collector more generally; and the contemporaneous status of the originally designed color print. Lautrec’s use of the iconography of the connoisseur in this lithograph is straightforward and unambiguous, as emerges clearly from its comparison, for example, to Daumier’s painting The Print Collectors, c. 1860–63, in which the print collector seated in the middle holds a print in his hands and contemplates Iconography of the Female Connoisseur  ‡ 83

it closely (Fig. 2.7). Yet despite the fact that the iconography of the print connoisseur (who is typically a collector) was so clearly indicated in Lautrec’s lithograph, the sole critic who actually mentioned it at the time was Arsène Alexandre. In his 1893 article on Jane Avril, “Celle qui danse” (“She Who Dances”), Alexandre wrote that Toulouse-­Lautrec’s lithograph for L’Estampe Originale “presents us with the idea of Jane Avril as a connoisseur of fine prints, closely examining with the unblinking eye of a collector the proof that the worthy old printer has produced by turning the cross-­shaped lever of his good old press.”14 The fact that Alexandre was the only one who explicitly stated in words what was perfectly obvious in the visual language points to the near complete exclusion of the female print connoisseur from the written discourse of the time (indeed, the application of the term “connoisseur” to Avril’s figure in Lautrec’s lithograph remains rare to this day).15 In light of Foucault’s observation that “in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed by a certain number of producers whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers,”16 it is significant that in the case before us, that which was almost entirely excluded from written discourse was in fact repeatedly visualized in posters using a new and bold visual language. This tension renders the analysis of this visual discourse particularly salient. Depicting Avril examining a proof, Lautrec situates her in the lithographic workshop while the master printer, Père Cotelle, is busy producing the prints. She seems at home in the space of production, which unlike open gallery spaces was accessible only to those who knew the artist or master printer personally. The prominence of Avril’s figure in this print is more pronounced still than what is evident when the print (or its reproduction) is seen as a single continuous image, since when it was folded in the center in order to function as a cover, the print featured only Avril, standing beside the stack of fresh white paper atop the press machine; the printer and his press appeared only on the back cover. Lautrec emphasizes the handcrafting of the art print by depicting the single hand press and the sole printer in a small space, at a time when major Parisian print shops typically ran numerous advanced large presses in huge industrial spaces and employed numerous printers, as seen for example in a c. 1893 photograph of the Imprimerie Paul Dupont in Paris (Fig. 2.3). The sloppy pots of ink and the printer’s manual rolling of the press in Lautrec’s print further associate the handcrafted nature of Cotelle’s printmaking with the “the realm of art, not industry.”17 In actuality, Avril was not a print collector, yet this does not mean she was simply role playing. Rather, from what was written about her by her contemporaries, she was known for her sophistication and her deep interest in art. Arthur 84  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

2.3 Imprimerie Paul Dupont, Paris, c. 1893. Photograph. Marius Vachon, Les Arts et les industries du papier en France, 1871–1894 (Paris: Librairies-imprimeries Réunis, 1894), 194.

Symons testified that she was “a frequent visitor to artists’ studios.”18 She was more than a celebrity café concert dancer. Both her own mode of performance, and her association with a circle of artists and writers, distinguished her from La Goulue and other cancan dancers.19 Moreover, she was an artist who developed her own aesthetic by improvising and choreographing her dances in a unique style, as well as by designing her own dancing costumes, which were an integral component of her dance.20 Avril’s nickname, “La Mélinite,” denoting a type of explosive, expressed her dance style, which was, as Alexandre explained, “always a dazzling surprise, this sudden grace of her skipping, her dance perpetually improvisational. For dynamite has its whims and sudden mysteries; only, in its effects, the woman is infinitely more graceful than the explosive.”21 After seeing her performing at the Jardin de Paris in 1892, Symons described Avril’s dance as “feverish.”22 Writing about Avril’s dance, Alexandre recognized the role of her costumes, noting, “dance alone does not mean enough in itself . . . without the silent music of costume.”23 Avril created her aesthetic by integrating her choreography with the visual spectacle of the garments she designed. Alexandre wrote that she strove Iconography of the Female Connoisseur  ‡ 85

to dance in “beautiful dresses that complement her conception of movement,” noting in particular that she “compose[d]” a bright orange outfit with a few black notes of gloves and stockings.24 This was unique because white undergarments were mandatory for cancan dancers, whereas Avril insisted upon and was granted the freedom to experiment with colors.25 She created an original color palette, composing carefully chosen tints and personal color combinations for her underskirts and costumes; thus, under a cherry-­colored silk gown she wore “petticoats fading through tones of heliotrope and lavender. Under a flame-­coloured gown that made her hair look almost platinum blonde, she wore tulip green, ice-­ blue under cyclamen, primrose under green.”26 These chromatic compositions designed by Avril played an important role in her dance, mixing further as she moved and thus becoming an active component of the performance. The constantly changing multicolored, layered undergarments framed her legs, which were accentuated by black stockings. Toulouse-­Lautrec’s 1893 poster depicts Avril’s black-­stockinged legs, contrasting them with the yellow and white under­ garments of an orange skirt and coordinating their coloration with that of her hair (Fig. 2.4). Though this particular costume may have been Lautrec’s invention, it corresponded to Avril’s own practices and differed markedly from his representation of La Goulue’s white skirt and undergarments in his 1891 poster La Goulue, Moulin Rouge (Fig. 1.3). Toulouse-­Lautrec appreciated the aesthetic sophistication and unique qualities of Avril’s dance performance and painted her dancing in a way that was quite contrary to his sexually provocative poster image of La Goulue’s kick. Alexandre, who regarded the 1893 poster of Avril as one of Lautrec’s most daring works, described Lautrec’s conception of the dancing Avril as a delicate ephemeral spectacle: Lautrec “trapped and pinned [Avril] down, like a dazzling butterfly.”27 The critic emphasized Avril’s unique blend of brazenness and finesse: “Far from the commotion, this solitary dance that embellishes the heavy quadrilles (which are as regulated as the ad-­libs at the Comédie-­Française), enlivens the automatic and monotonous turns of the polka and the waltz. This is a gentle improvisation that is brazen to its core, but which excuses itself and even encourages its transgressions, through the power of finesse and inventive flexibility.”28 According to Alexandre, Avril dances like a serpent but imbues her steps with an irony that is tailored to her Parisian audience: “[She] knows her public, does not ignore the fact that she doesn’t perform in an unexplored jungle. The paying guests in the Parisian wild prefer less disturbing, less venomous dances. And so our ‘dancing serpent’ wriggles more vigorously; not that there isn’t a little philosophy hidden there, but she disguises it with a joyful rhythm and ironic pirouettes.”29 86  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

2.4 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Jane Avril, 1893. Chaix, Paris. 125.4 × 91.5 cm.

Avril guarded her artistic liberty fiercely, to the point of refusing the contract offered to her by the Moulin Rouge to dance in the quadrille and preferring instead to perform her individualized solitary dancing and guard her “beautiful independence,” as she referred to it in her memoirs.30 She also cherished her personal independence, declining several marriage proposals during her Mont­ martre years. None of her amours, she wrote, was “absolute enough for me to sacrifice my Dance!”31 Avril was no less passionate about dance than Lautrec was about art making. Furthermore, she participated in the avant-­garde intellectual and artistic circles from a young age, learning from the company of artists and poets at the Café Vachette, including Jean Moréas, Villiers de l’Isle-­Adam, Théodore de Banville, Stéphane Mallarmé, J.-­K. Huysmans, occasionally Oscar Wilde, and many others.32 Her early romantic relationships and friendships with poets and critics contributed to her education.33 Lautrec’s regard for Avril is notable in several works, including a large canvas he made for a La Goulue tent in 1895 (La danse mauresque ou les Almées, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), in which Avril is featured as an equal among prominent intellectuals of the day. Her distinguished figure, elegantly dressed, appears in Iconography of the Female Connoisseur  ‡ 87

2.5 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Divan japonais, 1893. Edw. Ancourt, Paris. 83.9 × 64.9 cm.

the company of Oscar Wilde, Félix Fénéon, and Lautrec himself, watching a performance by La Goulue. In his 1893 poster the Divan japonais, Lautrec represented Avril as the chief figure watching a performance of  Yvette Guilbert (Fig. 2.5). Donning a smart black outfit, Avril is seated next to the critic, editor, and dramatist Édouard Dujardin, a founder of the literary journal La Revue Wagnérienne and of La Revue Indépendante, whose attention is clearly fixed on Avril rather than on the performance. Moreover, Avril is the poster’s most dominant figure, with Dujardin appearing partially cropped in the margins, and with the artist clearly giving priority to Avril over the performer, Guilbert, who is depicted headless in the background. Toulouse-­Lautrec no doubt appreciated Avril not only for her art but also for the fact that she was one of the earliest performers to commission posters from him. The contribution of his posters to Avril’s success has often been noted, and Avril herself acknowledged it years later,34 yet little attention has been paid to the fact that Avril was the one who selected Lautrec to design the posters that made her famous. She commissioned the artist to do her first poster in the spring of 1893, and since she had not yet signed a contract with any particular café concert at the time, her name was the only lettering on this initial poster (Fig. 2.4).35 At 88  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

2.6 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Jane Avril, 1899. H. Stern, Paris. 55 × 36.9 cm.

Avril’s request, Lautrec made twenty impressions of the poster’s first edition and signed them individually.36 Soon after, when she began performing at le Jardin de Paris, a café concert located off the Champs-­Élysées, she obtained the approval of the establishment to use the poster to promote her performance there. The name “Le Jardin de Paris” was added to the poster, and it was printed in a larger print run.37 Avril’s choice of Lautrec at the time was audacious and testified to her own avant-­garde taste. Lautrec’s posters for the Moulin Rouge (featuring La Goulue) and for Aristide Bruant were already highly successful, but they were equally controversial. Avril commissioned more posters from Lautrec — in 1895 she asked him to design a poster for her cancan group, Mlle Églantine, to promote performances in London,38 and in 1899 she commissioned Lautrec to do another poster, which proved to be his last for her. It was never actually used to promote any particular performance, featuring only her name next to the figure (Fig. 2.6).39 Avril’s commissioning of posters from Lautrec shows that she had a deep appreciation for the aesthetics of his posters and also that she understood their value for her own career. For Lautrec, the commissions were particularly significant, since Avril was one of the few performers who commissioned posters from him. The French diva Guilbert, and the American star Loie Fuller, who Iconography of the Female Connoisseur  ‡ 89

became a sensation in Paris, never commissioned a single poster from Lautrec, though both performers chose quite a few other artists to design their posters.40 Jane Avril, we may conclude, represented for Toulouse-­Lautrec not merely a model, muse, and friend, as she is most often described in the Lautrec scholarship, but also a creator in her own right, who, like him, was deeply involved in the café concert culture and shared his artistic passion for creating original modern expressions. Alexandre, in his perceptive article about Avril (published in the year that Lautrec made his first poster for her), was the only critic who fully acknowledged an equivalence between Lautrec and Avril as creators: “There is an equal measure of instinct and willpower in Mélinite’s art, and I suppose that’s how her art came to meet that of Lautrec, which is also very spontaneous in its execution, yet very deliberate in its conception.”41 He went further, making a strong statement that was at the time and remains still unparalleled in any writings on Lautrec and Avril: “Together, the painter and model have created a true art of our time, one through action, the other through representation.”42 In order to transform Avril into a print connoisseur, Lautrec took pains to obliterate any signs of her identity as a café concert dancer, hiding her legs, which had become her trademark, as is evident in his poster Jane Avril, 1893 (Fig. 2.4), and representing her in a voluminous cape, which may have been inspired by ukiyo‑e prints. The cape fully envelops her and conceals her “incredibly thin and supple” dancer’s body, which was highlighted in his 1899 poster for Avril (Fig. 2.6).43 While he joked that the cape worn by Avril made her look like a firefighter, Lautrec was calculated in his choice of this costume.44 Though he kept her body invisible, the artist lent Avril a fashionable air with an extravagantly decorated black hat that matched the sinuous black border of her high-­collared red cape. Lautrec’s lithograph depicted her holding the proof in her hands and examining it closely (as clearly indicated by her absorbed facial expression) — the two essential characteristics of the print connoisseur’s representation, as can be seen in Daumier’s works (Fig. 2.7). Holding the print was also the actual common practice of a print collector looking at prints. As André Mellerio, the editor of the journal L’Estampe et l’Affiche and the most important critic and theorist of the originally designed color print, observed in his groundbreaking volume La lithographie originale en couleurs, the print was “made to be held in the hand and closely contemplated,” as it necessitated an examination that “naturally involves research and a greater refinement.”45 Contemplating the color lithographic print produced by Ancourt’s printer, Avril appears no less absorbed than the male connoisseurs depicted by Daumier three decades earlier; but unlike them, she is examining the print alone 90  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

2.7 Honoré Daumier, The Print Collectors, 1860–63. Oil on panel, 30.7 × 40.7 cm. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass., 1955.696. Image © Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass. (photo by Michael Agee).

rather than sharing the experience with other collectors, and she is in a print shop rather than a gallery. The final differentiating factor is her Parisian fashionability, which Lautrec underscores. Lautrec’s representation of Avril holding up the print for close scrutiny may remind one in some ways of Manet’s representation of The Illustrated Journal, 1879–80, where a fashionable woman sitting at a table in a café is holding up an illustrated journal close to her face.46 Yet Manet’s woman, a consumer of Parisian cafés, beer, and popular journals, is more interested in a sophisticated display of herself in the public spaces of the metropolis than in reading. Her distracted look contrasts with the intensely focused gaze of Avril, who is absorbed in the print in the secluded interior space of the print shop. There was a precedent for the representation of a female print collector some four years before Toulouse-­Lautrec’s lithograph, albeit one that was far less visible than Lautrec’s print — Maurice Leloir’s illustration for Henri Beraldi’s Les graveurs du XIXe siècle: Guide de l’amateur d’estampes modernes (Fig. 2.8).47 Unlike Lautrec’s large color lithograph, Leloir’s was a small black-­and-­white illustration. It depicted a woman in the characteristic iconography of the print collector, recognizable, again, by her absorbed contemplation of a hand-­held print. Like Iconography of the Female Connoisseur  ‡ 91

2.8 Maurice Leloir, illustration for Henri Beraldi, Les graveurs du XIXe siècle: Guide de l’amateur d’estampes modernes, vol. 9 (Paris: Conquet, 1889). 9.8 × 13.8 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Courtesy National Gallery of Art.

Lautrec after him, Leloir stresses the woman’s high sense of fashion, while her gloves and hat indicate that she is not in her own space but has come in from the outside. Leloir links the woman to print collecting also through the interior space in which she is situated, although the exact nature of this space remains ambiguous (as in Daumier’s works, where it is not clear if the space in which the print collectors are depicted is a commercial gallery or a private collection). The space depicted in Leloir’s illustration may be an interior space belonging to a dedicated print collector or the back room of a gallery, but is more likely a room in the studios of a printmaker. The large unframed prints casually hanging overhead, which represent the printer’s tools (a burin, a lithographic crayon, and an etching needle, each held up for display by a fashionable woman); the relative disorder, with prints strewn on the desk, stacked in bulging portfolios on the floor, and stored on the shelves behind the desk, all suggest that this room is an 92  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

extension of a creative space rather than a gallery or the well-­ordered home of a bourgeois print collector. Roger Marx, who was himself also a collector of modern prints (among other artworks), and Lautrec were undoubtedly familiar with Leloir’s illustration because Beraldi’s volumes were the publication of record on nineteenth-­century prints, a topic of great interest to them both.48 Despite this, I am not suggesting that Lautrec was “influenced” by Leloir, but rather that these two images maintained a more complex relationship. First, there are significant differences between them, including, importantly, the fact that Leloir’s female print connoisseur has less weight and potency within her environment, since she is depicted in a relatively small scale in a room dominated by the prints themselves, whereas Lautrec’s representation of the voluminous figure of Jane Avril gives her a prominent presence, standing tall and taking up the entire front cover. Thus, Lautrec’s lithograph depicts a female print connoisseur endowed with a marked authority, whereas Leloir’s print connoisseur is an unassuming figure in a genre scene. Second, Leloir’s and Lautrec’s images both occupy a somewhat ambiguous position — each is an image (one a book illustration, the other a print port­folio cover) that simultaneously functions as an advertisement — and in this sense both resemble a poster, which always advertises something, without actually being a poster. Third, both these images are situated in a work that is directed at print collectors (the subtitle of Beraldi’s volumes states that it is a guide for collectors of the modern print, and the L’Estampe Originale portfolio of prints was geared to print collectors). Leloir’s illustration is one of several made by various artist printmakers for Beraldi’s volumes, and like them appears not merely as an illustration of the artist’s work (it faces Beraldi’s entry on the artist) but also as a mini-­poster advertising Beraldi’s own book. Clearly, these illustrations were specifically commissioned for Beraldi’s volumes, since each prominently includes Beraldi’s name as author next to the title of his publication. Thus, in both Lautrec’s and Leloir’s images, the female print connoisseur makes her entry in an image that also functions as an advertisement and which is designed to appeal to print collectors. Lautrec’s representation of Avril introduced a new kind of collector, which the avant-­garde color print sought and which was not limited by gender stereotypes. Why did Marx and Lautrec find Avril suitable for this role? The answer lies in the unique complexity of Avril’s persona and the needs of promoting the lithographic color print, a new form of original art. A daring female creator known for her taste for avant-­garde art, Avril represented the most extreme contrast to the traditional print collector, who was male and conservative in his tastes. And Iconography of the Female Connoisseur  ‡ 93

as a well-­known café concert performer and member of the bohemian literary and artistic circles, she formed part of a popular culture that attracted a mixed and wide audience. The original avant-­garde print needed to find a new type of collector, as Michel Melot has clarified.49 The traditional print collector had no interest in it. Print connoisseurs were notoriously conservative and largely shunned the avant-­ garde color print. Even Henri Bouchot, a historian of the print who in 1898 became the director of the Cabinet des estampes of the Bibliothèque nationale, shared this conservative attitude when commenting on L’Estampe Originale in his 1895 volume La lithographie.50 Print collectors looked for “technique and impression,” admiring “the orthodox technical slickness of handling and the velvet smoothness of impression.”51 For this reason, the painters “who were doing new things, saw their prints lag far behind those of the professionals in popularity and renown.”52 Most print collectors preferred prints by professional printmakers to prints by such artists as Delacroix, Daumier, or Degas, not to mention younger and less established artists of the 1890s.53 In original prints by innovative painters they saw “signs of incompetence” rather than the marks of “great daring.”54 Traditional print collectors were offended by the aesthetics and techniques of avant-­garde artists’ prints, as indicated, for example, by the comments of  Bouchot, who objected to the “cruel” and “violent” coloring of the color art prints, referring to their creators as “color-­blind.”55 He saw them as representing “a class of artists” who had fallen victim to “adolescent illusions” and constituted virtually a “pathological case.”56 Bouchot singled out Henri Ibels and Toulouse-­Lautrec for what he considered their raw, underdeveloped prints and violent “polychromic sensations.”57 He argued that such modernities needed to be subjected to some sort of orderly rule, and in contrast to the “visual tortures” he encountered in some of the prints in L’Estampe Originale, praised certain unoffensive prints he observed there of, for example, nymphs, or a lady with cats, as providing the gaze with “a much earned repose.” He also marveled at the consequence that, in this extreme company, Jules Chéret appeared “classic” and even “retrograde,” and Alexandre Lunois (discussed below) became almost an “ancestor!” At the conclusion of his critique, Bouchot admitted that the courage of these avant-­ garde artists was commendable, as was the fact that they were not guided by the desire to make a fortune.58 This last comment makes it clear that he expected this type of print to be of interest only to a very limited audience. This confirms Melot’s observation that original art prints were forced to find their own public, and were “renowned for attracting new buyers.”59 Publishers of art prints who issued portfolios of original art prints, such as Vollard, were “hoping to appeal 94  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

to a hundred as yet unknown collectors,” and avant-­garde artists like Degas and Pissarro were hoping to find a new, “hitherto unknown clientèle” rather than satisfying existing collectors.60 Throughout the period of publication of L’Estampe Originale, the status of the color print was contested — it was still excluded from the Salon (organized by the Société des artistes français) and was not yet included in the print rooms of museums.61 It thus had to attract new collectors whose tastes were not bound by the typical interests of traditional print collectors. Avril represented this new collector: she was anything but “traditional” in her own lifestyle, professional persona, and enthusiasm for avant-­garde art. This explains, I believe, why Lautrec’s print represented her as the connoisseur of the avant-­garde art print. Yet one may nonetheless wonder why so many other poster artists followed in his footsteps in the subsequent few years and represented a female print collector? What prompted them to do so, and how did the image of a woman absorbed in looking at prints function in their posters?

The Iconography of the Female Print Connoisseur in Posters Alexandre Lunois’s 1894 lithographic poster advertising the gallery of Edmond Sagot, the preeminent poster dealer, is an illuminating example of a poster that features a woman print collector (Fig. 2.9). It replaced the male figure looking through a portfolio of prints in Daumier’s watercolor with an elegantly attired female collector looking at a print selected from a portfolio set on a stand before her (Fig. 2.10). Lunois, whose own prints were sold by Sagot, had started out making lithographic reproductions in the 1880s; in 1888 he began making original lithographs, and from 1893 onward he made numerous original color lithographs.62 Sagot, who commissioned Lunois’s 1894 poster of the female collector, was likely involved in discussions with the artist about the choice of iconography. Known as the first and most knowledgeable dealer of posters, Sagot was held in very high regard by critics of the print and poster. The critic, author, and publisher Octave Uzanne described him as “a restless and active little man of a forceful intelligence and a rare certainty of taste,” who had a passion for the poster.63 Uzanne praised Sagot for his choices of artists who make original prints and for the extraordinary and vast collection of posters available in his gallery.64 Mellerio singled him out from among other dealers for his enthusiasm for the new tendencies in art prints: “He has placed himself resolutely in the avant-­garde and has stayed there since. Always eager for modernities, he is interested in each new effort.”65 Iconography of the Female Connoisseur  ‡ 95

2.9 Alexandre Lunois, Ed. Sagot, Estampes modernes, 1894 (printer not listed). 21 × 29.8 cm. Indianapolis Museum of Art, Gift of Harold Haven Brown, 21.136.

In Lunois’s poster we see the face and gestures of the female print connoisseur, but only the blank side of the print she is holding. The relatively small size and characteristic vertical format of the print suggest that it may be the kind of poster intended for indoor pasting, or else an art print.66 This ambiguity served Sagot’s intention to attract collectors who were interested in the print, the poster, or both, an objective echoed in the lettered message on the left: listing Ed. Sagot’s name and address at the top, the text announces the availability of “modern prints, lithographs and etchings by Eugène Delacroix, Fantin-­Latour, Bracquemond, Willette, Lunois” and “posters by Chéret and Grasset.” In their selection of a female print collector as the main figure in the poster, Sagot and Lunois took note of Toulouse-­Lautrec’s color lithograph published in the previous year for Marty’s portfolio of original prints, L’Estampe Originale, to which Lunois himself had contributed, but they changed the iconography from Lautrec’s modern, almost bohemian female connoisseur standing in a print shop to an upper-­middle-­class woman comfortably seated in her own home. Moreover, if we disregard the collector’s gender, we will find that Lunois’s poster for Sagot actually displays a greater affinity with Daumier’s The Print Collectors (Fig. 2.10) than with Lautrec’s lithograph in terms of its iconography 96  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

and style. Like Daumier, Lunois shows the main collector seated in front of the portfolio, with a secondary figure contemplating the print along with him/her. But whereas Daumier situates the two men in a space that is dedicated to art —  the room is densely populated with framed paintings, a sculpture, and more portfolios — Lunois’s representation of the middle-­class woman’s costume and in particular the absence of a hat suggests that she is depicted in her own home. The inclusion of a vase of flowers on a small side table and of several other domestic items such as cups and saucers lends the space a homey intimacy without overburdening the image with references to the bourgeois interior. The woman in Lunois’s poster is identifiable as a collector through her attentive gaze at the print, through her holding of the print in her hand, and through her proximity to the open portfolio. Perched on the edge of  her chair, she leans in to focus on the print she is holding up; her free hand rests on the portfolio, indicating that she is in the process of selecting the prints and, moreover, that she controls the pace of their inspection. The bourgeois man seated beside her (probably her husband) has to lean over in order to view the print. His secondary role is further implied by the partial obstruction of his face (as compared with the clear and prominent depiction of the female collector’s interested expression). Allusions to the comfort of the home interior were a common sales strategy during the nineteenth century, so that Lunois’s representation of the collector in her home was likely an attempt to help Sagot draw in a bourgeois clientele. The dealer Paul Durand-­Ruel, for example, presented Impressionist painting in a gallery environment that evoked the home interior.67 This same nineteenth-­ century marketing strategy was used to attract women to department stores. As described elaborately in Zola’s realist novel on the Parisian department store, Au bonheur des dames (which was based on extensive research), the department store offered a new kind of public sales space with the comforts of a luxurious home.68 The fact that Sagot’s poster features the bourgeois woman in the role of the print connoisseur raises the distinct possibility that he was aiming to appeal not only to men but also to middle-­class women as collectors of prints.69 This is further suggested by the fact that the female connoisseur of prints is not a sexualized figure with an erotic appeal typically aimed at men, nor an allegorical figure or muse, but rather a contemporary modern woman of the upper middle class. Though the representation cannot in itself be considered proof that women print collectors existed at the time — at all or in significant numbers — it is at least an indication that the advertising image was attempting to attract middle-­class women. This is corroborated by the consistent tendency of nineteenth-­century posters to represent a middle-­class female consumer when they appeal explicitly Iconography of the Female Connoisseur  ‡ 97

2.10 Honoré Daumier, The Print Collectors, c. 1860–64. Watercolor, 34.5 × 31.1 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum. Bequeathed by Constantine Alexander Ionides, CAI.118. Image © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

to women (for example, in promoting women’s cosmetics, corsets, fashions, and accessories) and a male consumer when appealing to men (menswear and male accessories, cigars, etc.).70 Indeed, a recent study of nineteenth-­century practices shows that “targeting specific groups according to gender, class and profession became commonplace through press ads, catalogues and billposting in specific areas.”71 For all these reasons I propose that the iconography of quite a few posters featuring women as print connoisseurs, Lunois’s included, likely aimed to attract women. This by no means excluded an appeal to male print collectors, who may well have viewed the appearance of a fashionable female print connoisseur as an intriguing modern phenomenon. The poster N. Lembrée, avenue Louise 17, Bruxelles, c. 1897, by the Belgian Théo van Rysselberghe, is directly influenced by Lautrec (Fig. 2.11). It represents a sophisticated redhead in an extravagant black hat and tall-­collared red cape that recall Avril’s attire on the cover of L’Estampe Originale. The poster promotes a gallery on a fashionable avenue in Brussels.72 The female print collector is holding up a black-­and-­white print for close inspection, yet her facial expression, unlike that of Lautrec’s Avril, is not visible. Furthermore, in contrast to Lautrec’s print, which encouraged the collection of contemporary prints, this poster depicts the female print connoisseur in a gallery that specializes in black-­and-­white engravings of the eighteenth century (as indicated on the cover of the portfolio resting at her feet). Nonetheless, the gallery itself is promoted through signs of modernity —  98  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

2.11 Théo van Rysselberghe, N. Lembrée, c. 1897. Monnom, Brussels. 68.8 × 51 cm.

the modern design of a well-­lit space and the prominent placement of a state-­of-­ the-­art telephone, whose number is clearly legible and whose red color matches the woman’s cape. The fashionable female print collector of course plays a major role in signifying the gallery’s modernity and distinction; and finally, the poster’s own modernist style, including its brilliant flat colors, associate the gallery with the latest artistic developments.73 Another color lithograph directly influenced by Lautrec’s depiction of a female print connoisseur is Georges de Feure’s 1896 Lithographies originales (Fig. 2.12), which shows a close-­up of a highly fashionable woman closely inspecting a print.74 The lithograph was not a poster, but was designed as the cover for two albums of original prints published by E. Duchatel (some versions of it do not include the lettering, which names the artists featured in the album).75 Lautrec’s Avril highlighted the female collector’s earnest concentration as she observes a fresh proof. Of the woman depicted in Lithographies originales the de Feure scholar Ian Millman notes similarly that “the intellectual and aesthetic acuity visible in her penetrating gaze” is reflected in “the crisp elegance of her attire.”76 Unlike Lautrec, however, de Feure introduces a certain ambiguity into the status of the female print collector. Although he represents her as engaged in an Iconography of the Female Connoisseur  ‡ 99

2.12 Georges de Feure, cover for the print portfolio Lithographies originales, album no. 1, 1896. Lermercier, Paris. 58.7 × 42.7 cm.

attentive gaze upon the print, he also depicts her as a highly decorative object to be looked at. De Feure’s Art Nouveau pastel patterns weave a gentle decorative continuity between the woman and her ornamental environment. Framed by an elaborately decorated oversize hat and a softly tied silk bow below her chin, she is an object of beauty to behold. Moreover, the white color of the pristine print seen from the back is identical to the tone of her pale face, and thus visually unites her with the artwork. This color may suggest passivity, but de Feure counteracts it not only through her act of focused looking at the print but also by investing her with subtle intimations of her own artistic agency. De Feure positions her at the table of artistic creation, very close to the lithographic stone bearing the artist’s signature (on the right); the white feather hovers within her reach, and the dark ink pot is prominently placed beside her. Thus, de Feure’s lithograph is animated by tensions and contradictions: he presents the female print collector as a woman of exquisite taste, herself a decorative creation, yet also associated with artistic creation. She is a female subject in the midst of contemplation but nearly overwhelmed by the predominance of ornamentation. Thus, the iconography and decorative patterning intertwine this feminine print collector’s agency with her aesthetic objectification. 100  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

2.13 Georges Alfred Bottini, Ed. Sagot, 1898. Color lithograph, 28.9 × 18.6 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Rosenwald Collection 1953.6.8. Courtesy National Gallery of Art.

Similar ambiguities are also found in Georges Alfred Bottini’s Sagot’s Lithography Gallery, of 1898. Bottini depicted an elegantly attired fashionable woman on the street observing prints in the window of the leading Parisian print and poster gallery (Fig. 2.13). The small scale of the lithograph and its minimal lettering — consisting only of the name of the Sagot gallery on the storefront, with none of the customary additional information about the gallery (as seen in Lunois’s poster) — suggest that the print was commissioned for posting in the interior of the gallery and intended to appeal to collectors of original color prints. More so than Lunois’s earlier poster for Sagot’s gallery, Bottini’s representation of the female collector emphasizes her fashionability; and in contrast to the sense of relative privacy that typically characterizes the representation of print collectors inspecting prints in interiors, here prints are observed in the public domain of the street.77 The principal figure, whose elongated silhouette is accentuated by a long dark dress, has already removed one of her gloves, indicating that her pausing at the window is a prelude to entering the gallery. Another woman in an elegant Iconography of the Female Connoisseur  ‡ 101

pastel-­green outfit and a man in a cape with a portfolio of prints under his arm are seen approaching the gallery window. The height, facial features, and blasé expressions of these last two figures are almost identical and, along with their similar hats, emphasize their androgynous flair. Another man, between the two women, his long blond hair extending below his hat, is seen from behind observing prints in the window. He is a secondary figure, obstructed by the more visible women, and his face and gaze remain invisible. The work depicts print collecting at the end of the century as a mixed-­gender urban activity that is not confined to the interior. It also depicts fashionable urban women as among the most prominent clientele of the Sagot gallery, followed by bohemian men. As Bottini’s lithograph shows, some of the posters depicting female print collectors stress not only their fashionability but also their physical bodies: the small waists and shapely figures. Nonetheless, there is a distinct difference between these posters’ representation of the modern woman and the seminude seductive fantasy figures featured in posters promoting a variety of products and entertainments, and in some cases art exhibitions. For example, Mucha’s 1896 poster promotes his own exhibition by depicting an allegorical female nude with long and curly stylized hair, mystical overtones, and an overall sexualized appearance (Fig. 2.14). Holding a brush and a plume — the implements of the writer and artist — she is an erotic muse of artistic creation whose magical powers are also indicated by her scepter. Her eyes shut, she is devoid of a waking consciousness, posed to be looked at with no ability to exercise a gaze of any kind, let along that of a print connoisseur.78 The modern women represented as connoisseurs of prints are also distinct from the type of sexually neutral allegorical figure that appears, for instance, in an 1895 poster by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Centenaire de la lithographie (Fig. 2.15). In stark contrast to the iconography of the female print connoisseur, Puvis’s figure is far removed from the contemporary world of exhibitions, galleries, and collectors — though his poster promoted an exhibition honoring the one hundredth year since the founding of lithography, held at the Galerie Rapp, Champs de Mars, in Paris.79 “Madame La Lithographie,” as the artist named her, is a static allegorical figure draped in timeless garb and standing in an unspecified bare landscape, casting a meditative gaze upon a small hand-­held print. So consumed is her gaze that she is oblivious to the presence of a winged putto, whom Puvis referred to as “Genius,” kneeling at her feet and looking up at her in the hope of showing her other prints from the portfolio.80 The celebrated artist known for murals commissioned by prominent official institutions in Paris (including the Hôtel de Ville, the Sorbonne, and the Panthéon) did not adapt his mural style, 102  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

2.14 Alphonse Mucha, Salon des Cent, 1896. Champenois, Paris. 64 × 43 cm.

iconography, or cool pastel palette to the conditions of viewing posters on the street,81 earning him harsh criticism at the time. So, for example, the German historian of the poster Jean Sponsel wrote in 1897 that Puvis’s poster was a failure because it lacked the kind of design that made a poster draw attention, and described the “antique” woman looking at the blank page, as well as the poster’s mat color, as “lifeless.”82 In diametric contrast to Puvis, Hugo d’Alési’s poster promoting the same 1895 exhibition, Exposition du centenaire de la lithographie, represents a contemporary Parisian woman in a fashionable black hat and matching long gloves (Fig. 2.16). Although her street encounter with the prints may link her to the kind of strolling and looking for which the flâneur was known rather than defining her as a full-­blown print connoisseur, she is nonetheless the type of woman who is likely to have an interest in prints and posters and to attend exhibitions of the sort promoted by this poster. D’Alési, a prolific poster designer who was among the organizers of the Centenaire de la lithographie, shows her scrutinizing a small black-­and-­white avant la lettre poster by Nicholas-­Toussaint Charlet.83 Without the original lettering included in the poster, the black-­and-­white Charlet looks more like a print than a poster.84 D’Alési includes the black-­and-­white small print, which was more acceptable to collectors of prints, also by depicting a stack Iconography of the Female Connoisseur  ‡ 103

2.15 (left) Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Galerie Rapp, Champ de Mars, Centenaire de la lithographie, 1895. Lemercier, Paris. 147.7 × 102.6 cm. 2.16 (right) Hugo d’Alési, Exposition du centenaire de la lithographie, Galerie Rapp, 1895. Courmont, Paris. 158 × 115 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, Gift of Mrs. J. T. Clarke, E.140–1921.

of black-­and-­white prints on the stool seen in the background. He highlights the color poster by showing the parisienne holding the print up next to a larger 1894 color poster by Chéret (promoting Victorien Sardou’s novel Madame Sans-­Gêne). D’Alési’s poster, unlike Lautrec’s lithograph for Marty, represents an urban type rather than a recognizable persona. He places the woman outdoors and associates her gaze with the practices of the flâneur. It should be noted that even though the male flâneur predominated at the time, some women did adopt modified versions of his practices.85 For example, Jane Avril, as her biographer states, was a “fervent ‘bouquineuse’ ” who “constantly visited the old bookstalls along the quaysides of the Seine.”86 Avril began to visit the bookstalls on the quais of the Seine during her youth, accompanied by her friends — poets, critics, and novelists. She held to this habit for years, liking especially “to wander there alone,” and knew all the book and print sellers.87 D’Alési’s poster represents the ambiguities that were inherent in the evolving status of the contemporary middle-­class woman, who may visit galleries and even collect prints yet also knows that she herself is looked at and therefore orchestrates her appearance and gestures. Like other fashionable parisiennes, she is a 104  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

spectacle in the city, but she is also an active agent insofar as she performs her own presentation as spectacle. Her active pose, dramatically silhouetted against the background of a sunset over the Seine, suggests she is aware of  her own performance.88 D’Alési’s choice to depict an upward gaze, conveyed by the tilt of the woman’s hatted head and the position of her gloved hands, adds an implied reverence for the print. In order to fulfill its advertising function, the poster had to attract as many people as possible of both genders to the exhibition of  lithography. Thus, the fashionable woman looking at the print is calculated to function in several different ways: for most women she could be a model to emulate, while male viewers might regard her as an added attraction enticing them to visit the exhibit; both genders were likely to be enticed by the modernity of the choice to depict a potential collector and print connoisseur as a woman rather than a man. Some of the posters representing the female print connoisseur were less ambiguous than others. The Maîtres de l’Affiche, which reissued some 240 popular posters in a smaller print format during the second half of the 1890s, chose to include four posters representing print collectors, of which three depicted the female collector (Figs. 2.16, 2.17, 2.18) and one depicted male collectors (Fig. 2.25). One of these posters was by the German artist Otto Fischer, who worked in the decorative arts and as a lithographer, and from 1895 was associated with the German avant-­garde art periodical Pan. His poster promoted a lithographic print shop and modern poster establishment in Dresden, Kunst-­Anstalt für Mo­ derne Plakate, Wilhelm Hoffmann, Dresden, 1896 (Fig. 2.17). The small scale of this poster (92 × 59 cm) indicates that it was intended for the interior of the establishment rather than for street posting and was designed to appeal to print collectors, most of whom could not easily accommodate large posters in their portfolios. This modernist-­style poster gives a central role to the aesthetic gaze of a woman collector. Her clothing and simple hairstyle associate her with the 1890s Aesthetic movement and with the “new woman.” Although the figure of the new woman was frequently caricatured, quite a few posters during the 1890s represented her favorably as an attractive, modern woman moving about freely in the city in all modes of transportation.89 Seated on a simple wood chair, Fischer’s female figure is wearing white gloves to ensure the conservation of the print in her hands (fashion gloves were generally not worn indoors, and if a woman had just walked in from the street and not yet removed her gloves, she would typically also be wearing a hat). The female collector’s aesthetic gaze at the print is utterly focused. This, along with the fact that she is the one holding the print, points to her primary role. A man with a beret and pipe standing at her side is an artist who is likely associated with the print shop promoted by the poster. He is also looking Iconography of the Female Connoisseur  ‡ 105

2.17 Otto Fisher, KunstAnstalt für Moderne Plakate, 1896. Wilhelm Hoffmann, Dresden. 95 × 64 cm.

intently at the print, but his role is secondary to the female collector’s, as he does not hold the print (much like the secondary status of the gazes of those figures who accompany the primary collector in Daumier’s works). The text above advertises the Dresden print shop as a place that specializes in the modern poster. Fischer’s modernist-­style poster uses a bright red, utterly flat background that eliminates all modeling and detail. Ironically, this new woman (along with her companion) is looking at an Art Nouveau–style print with a more traditional representation of young female figures placed in a stylized ornamental landscape. Whereas the posters by Lunois and Fischer represent a woman connoisseur accompanied by a man, some posters represent a single female connoisseur. The female figure in Fernand Gottlob’s 1898 poster promoting the second exhibition of the Peintres lithographes, held at the Salle du Figaro in 1898, exhibits certain superficial similarities with the (male) figure in Edgar Degas’s 1866 painting titled The Print Collector (Figs. 2.18 and 2.19). Both are depicted next to an open portfolio filled with prints; yet only Gottlob represents the collector intently looking at a print. Gottlob’s poster depicts a woman wearing a decorated hat, indicating 106  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

2.18 Fernand Gottlob, 2e exposition des peintres lithographes, 1898. Lemercier, Paris. 116.2 × 76.2 cm.

that she is seated in the public space of a gallery rather than in her home. Her aesthetic gaze is focused on a single black-­and-­white print, in a bare gallery space devoid of any distractions. The woman is holding up the print for inspection, having presumably selected it from the portfolio. The bright yellow background highlights the print and turns her upper body into a well-­defined silhouette while functioning as a glowing backdrop for the dark-­colored lettering announcing the exhibition. The figure in Degas’s painting, seated next to a portfolio of prints, has been assumed to be a print collector, but closer inspection suggests this may be a misidentification (Fig. 2.19). The first clue is that the man is not actually depicted looking at any of the prints, whereas the sustained gaze at a print is crucial to the representation of the print collector. A second clue is Degas’s portrayal of the man in a cramped, cluttered, and disorganized space, whereas the typical environment in which a print collector is depicted, as seen in Daumier’s repreIconography of the Female Connoisseur  ‡ 107

2.19 Edgar Degas, The Print Collector, 1866. Oil on canvas, 53 × 40 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929, 29.100.44. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

sentations, for example, features art displayed in an orderly fashion on the walls and visible portfolios. Here, by contrast, the wall displays a miscellaneous assortment of everyday printed items fastened haphazardly to a bulletin board. Cartes de visite, envelopes, notices, and photographs overlap and hang against wallpaper pieces and fragments of Japanese textiles.90 The casually mixed items on the board, as well as the table below it covered with carelessly placed small flower prints on top of an album, all suggest a work environment. A third clue is the fact that the man is about to add a small flower print to a portfolio that holds larger prints, clearly breaking with the collector’s practices of careful classi­ fication. Thus I believe there is good reason to suggest that this “collector” is in fact a designer of prints — and this, indeed, is how Louisine W. Havemeyer, the preeminent American collector, identified him.91 Because she (together with her husband) acquired the painting directly from Degas, her use of the title The Designer of Prints for this painting is another good indicator that this was how Degas himself referred to the painting in discussion with her.92 108  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

2.20 Edgar Degas, The Amateurs, c. 1878–80. Oil on panel, 27 × 34 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Bequest of Leonard C. Hanna, Jr. 1958.25.

If, as I propose here, the painting portrays a print designer with his work-­related collection of prints, this would explain the unusual assortment and its haphazard display. Furthermore, it fits Degas’s depiction of the man — an artisan of the working class, sitting informally with the portfolio between his knees in a pose that lacks the decorum of the bourgeois collector. It also fits the casual gesture with which the man is placing the small print in the portfolio. Most importantly, it is consistent with Degas’s decision not to depict the man as contemplating a print, which was a principal characteristic of the print collector’s representation. The intent gaze upon an artwork was the paramount indicator that a certain figure was a connoisseur, and the latter, in turn, was usually a collector. It is instructive also to compare the man depicted here to Degas’s own representation of collectors. The Amateurs, c. 1881, depicts his friends Alphonse Cherfils and Paul Lafond, an art collector and a scholar respectively, examining a small hand-­held canvas (Fig. 2.20).93 The two men are shown in a bare space with nothing to distract them. Degas would have identified with the kind of collector represented in The Amateurs since he himself was a passionate collector who amassed prized paintings and large quantities of prints, at one point even planning to open a museum.94 Yet he would also have identified with the designer of prints because his collection functioned as a resource for his own work. His huge print collection, containing lithographs and etchings, was focused on nineteenth-­century French artists, including almost all of Édouard Manet’s graphic work, thirty prints by Camille Pissarro, more than ninety prints by Mary Cassatt, Japanese prints, and prints and monotypes by Paul Gauguin.95 It contained some 2,000 lithographs Iconography of the Female Connoisseur  ‡ 109

2.21 Edgar Degas, Miss Cassatt at the Louvre, c. 1879–80. Pastel, 71 × 54 cm. Private Collection.

by Gavarni and about 750 by Daumier, including not only high-­quality lithographs but also mass-­reproduced prints cut out of Le Charivari.96 Although Degas collected many of Cassatt’s prints (and some of them in several different states, as was the practice of serious print collectors), and although he was well aware of Cassatt’s important role in advising collectors, he never depicted her as a connoisseur.97 He did depict a woman whose silhouette, seen from the back as she inspects paintings, was based on Cassatt (Fig. 2.21). Miss Cassatt at the Louvre, c. 1879–80, was one of several Degas works on the topic, including several prints and one pastel, representing his friend and esteemed colleague, usually along with her sister. Cassatt’s early biographer suggested that the figure looking at paintings in the Louvre conveys “something of Mary Cassatt’s tense, energetic character,” depicting “her slender, erect figure, neatly tailored, and her crisply furled umbrella.”98 Even so, the fashionable silhouette seen from the back was readable by most viewers as an anonymous cultured woman in a museum. In contrast to his painting The Amateurs, here Degas does not reveal the identity of the work’s protagonist by representing her facial features, nor does he portray her focused gaze upon the painting. Degas’s reluctance to depict a female print collector is noteworthy in part because there was already an important precedent in French painting for the rep110  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

2.22 Antoine Watteau, detail of L’enseigne de Gersaint, 1720–21. Oil on canvas, 163 × 368 cm. Charlot­ tenburg Castle, Stiftung Preußische Schlösser & Gärten, Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin. Photo: Art Resource, New York.

resentation of a female connoisseur: Antoine Watteau’s L’enseigne de Gersaint, 1720–21 (Fig. 2.22).99 The shop sign Watteau created for his dealer Gersaint shared some of the goals of later posters, namely attracting a clientele by depicting the gallery along with the kind of collectors toward which it was geared. Among the women Watteau depicts inside Gersaint’s gallery is an aristocrat, seen from the back, and identified as a widow by her black garb. Looking through her lorgnette, she examines a large oval painting from close range. By her side is an aristocratic man kneeling to get a close look at the painting. Andrew McClellan, who interprets this painting in the context of the practices of eighteenth-­century Iconography of the Female Connoisseur  ‡ 111

collectors and dealers, notes that the figures in this painting are types rather than portraits.100 It is significant that a woman appears as one of the only two types of aristocrats Watteau depicts in the connoisseur’s pose. Scrutinizing the oval painting from close up, with the aid of optic implements, both the male and female aristocrats are examining its formal traits and the artist’s “hand.”101 As McClellan observes, both are engaged in the kind of “close viewing of the picture surface [that] signals possession of what Pierre Bourdieu calls ‘aesthetic disposition’ — knowledge of how and what to look at in a picture.”102 The figure of the man kneeling on one leg shows a more energetic flair, his pose exuding the kind of bodily freedom in public space not available to female aristocrats. Furthermore, the part of the painting the man is so closely inspecting depicts enticing nude women, suggesting that the male aristocrat is not strictly motivated by a connoisseur’s passion for the artistic qualities of the painting.103 In contrast, the female connoisseur is directing her gaze at the upper portion of the painting, which depicts a landscape. Her singular focus on the artwork distinguishes her from the other female customers in the gallery who are luxuriously displaying themselves and their fashionable attire. The iconography of the male and female aristocratic connoisseur “types” suggests that women along with men were collectors/connoisseurs who frequented the Gersaint gallery. This corresponds to the actual existence of important female collectors during the eighteenth century. McClellan notes that although some written sources of the eighteenth century may lead one to believe that women were excluded from collecting, in fact one of the great collectors of the early eighteenth century was the comtesse de Verrue, who, like the female aristocrat in Watteau’s work, was a widow, and later in the century, another woman, Mme Geoffrin, also a widow, emerged as a collector and a leader of the French Enlightenment.104 In contrast to the lack of representation of female print connoisseurs in nineteenth-­century French paintings, they appeared in several of the forty-­three posters published by the journal La Plume between 1894 and 1900 to promote exhibitions in the journal’s gallery, the Salon des Cent.105 Founded in 1894 by Léon Deschamps, the founding editor of the literary and artistic journal La Plume, the gallery specialized in graphic art, exhibiting mostly works on paper, prints, drawings, and posters, and was known for showing the work of avant-­garde artists.106 According to the critic Alexandre, the Salon des Cent was the most vital center of exhibition.107 Although other journals in Paris, such as La Revue Blanche, also exhibited posters and prints on their premises and commissioned posters, La Plume had the most ambitious and durable exhibition program, as well as the most extensive coverage of posters, which included special issues dedicated to 112  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

2.23 Armand Rassenfosse, Salon des Cent, nouvelle exposition d’ensemble, 1896. Auguste Bénard, Liège. 64 × 43.8 cm.

posters. La Plume was also unique in consistently commissioning and printing a specially designed poster for each Salon des Cent exhibition. Adhering to a standard format and size, these posters formed an attractive group of original works for collectors.108 The Salon des Cent posters represent the female print collector either by herself or in the company of another woman. So, for example, the Salon des Cent, nouvelle exposition d’ensemble, février 1896, by the Belgian designer Armand Rassenfosse, features two fashionable middle-­class women in the Salon des Cent gallery (Fig. 2.23). The women’s decorated hats signal their fashionability and associate them with the street. Seen from the back, one of them is depicted using the characteristic iconography of the connoisseur — she is holding up a lorgnette to take a close look at a framed print on the wall. The other woman is holding an open journal in her hands, and looking away, perhaps at artworks hanging on a wall outside the poster’s frame. She represents primarily the cultured metropolitan La Plume reader, who is addressed by the copy at the bottom of the poster: “Read ‘La Plume’ the organ of the Salon.” That the two fashionable women are Iconography of the Female Connoisseur  ‡ 113

seen visiting the gallery together indicates the social aspect of looking at prints in the urban galleries. The poster by Fernand Fau, 14e exposition, 31 rue Bonaparte, Salon des 100, 1895, depicts a woman with a striking, fashionable flair visiting the gallery (Fig. 2.24). Standing in front of a wall hung with prints, she is focusing on one of them, the hand-­held lorgnette serving to accentuate her intent observation in the tradition of the print connoisseur. Here the aesthetic gaze is performed in solitude, and the gallery is presented as a space that enables undisturbed contemplation. Yet her pronounced fashionability, crowned by an extravagantly decorated hat, is a reminder that the woman is also all the while a spectacle to be looked at. Among the posters featuring connoisseurs, Frédéric-­Auguste Cazals’s 7me exposition du Salon des Cent, 31, rue Bonaparte, décembre 1894 is a rare case that depicts men at the gallery (Fig. 2.25). This poster is exceptional in diverging from the more common poster strategy of representing a “type,” opting instead, like Lautrec’s lithograph of the previous year representing Avril, to portray two recognizable personas — Paul Verlaine, the preeminent Symbolist poet, and Jean Moréas, the poet, critic, and author of the 1886 “Symbolist Manifesto” published in Le Figaro. The poster shows the spectacled Verlaine in the foreground examining a drawing (of himself by Cazals), while Moréas looks through his monocle, perhaps at a maquette of Jossot’s poster for the Salon des Cent.109 The literary stature of these figures and their contemplative focus on artworks elevate the status of the Salon des Cent gallery and by implication of the art it exhibits. The poster represents the gallery as a social sphere in which avant-­garde figures share their appreciation of prints; but unlike Daumier’s works on print collectors, Cazals’s poster no longer depicts an exclusively bourgeois male sphere. First, the two men are bohemians and well-­known avant-­garde poets rather than anonymous middle-­ class men; and second, the presence of women in the gallery is subtly indicated by a female figure seen from the back in the background. As seen in the posters by Rassenfosse, Fau, and Cazals (Figs. 2.23, 2.24, 2.25), La Plume’s Salon des Cent gallery differed significantly from the plush galleries of private dealers by avoiding any trappings of luxury, including gilded frames around the artworks. Instead, it was a space whose simplicity welcomed a wider, less exclusive public.110 The unadorned environment of the Salon des Cent kept the focus on the art and was closer to the preferred aesthetic of avant-­garde artists. Works displayed in the gallery were given simple frames, when framed at all, and were installed in no more than three rows so as to keep them as close as possible to eye level.111 The gallery presented drawings and prints on paper, which 114  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

2.24 Fernand Fau, 14e exposition,— 31 rue Bonaparte, Salon des 100, 1895. Chamerot et Renouard, Paris. 63.5 × 41 cm.

2.25 Frédéric-Auguste Cazals, 7me exposition du Salon des 100, 31, Rue Bonaparte—décembre 1894 , 1894. Bourgerie & Cie., Paris. 61 × 38.6 cm.

are by their nature more intimate than large oil paintings. The Salon des Cent and its posters conferred a sense of privacy on the experience of looking at art in a gallery. The gallery’s posters depicted just one or two individuals, shown in the midst of an attentive contemplation of an artwork. This differed markedly from earlier illustrations of gallery spaces, such as those of Goupil or Georges Petit, which depicted a broad view of the gallery as a luxurious social space frequented by numerous upper-­middle-­class male and female visitors, and which, unlike the posters, did not focus their attention on a single connoisseur gazing at an artwork.112

The Aesthetic Gaze and Discourses on Avant-­Garde Print Collectors in the 1890s This intimate focus of the posters of the Salon des Cent was diametrically opposed to Daumier’s caricature about the Salon of 1857, titled Aspect du Salon, le jour de l’ouverture, — rien que de vrais connaisseurs, total soixante mille personnes, 1857, which shows a dense group of mostly men filling the vast gallery of the Salon on a Sunday, the day of free admission (Fig. 2.26). Daumier’s depiction of this crowd, and his caption referring to “nothing but real connoisseurs, a total of sixty thousand persons,” exclude the possibility that the broad public might engage in an in-­depth contemplation of art, let alone take up the position of the connoisseur. Ironically Daumier appeals to the fleeting gazes of readers of mass media, who would see his caricatures in Le Charivari, to comment on the impossibility of a contemplative connoisseur’s gaze in the mass audience conditions of the Salon. Posters promoting print galleries, print portfolios, and exhibitions grounded the print and its collectors in contemporary urban life — in galleries, print shops, or the street. By portraying the connoisseur’s gaze, they elevated the status of both the print and the connoisseur. Pierre Bourdieu described the “aesthetic gaze” as “the ideal of ‘pure’ perception of a work of art qua work of art,” arguing that it not only consecrates the artwork but also endows the collector with the mark of distinction.113 This is achieved by virtue of “the unique capacity of the pure gaze, a quasi-­creative power which sets the aesthete apart from the common herd by a radical difference which seems to be inscribed in ‘persons.’ ”114 According to Bourdieu, then, that which is being consecrated is simultaneously “a certain type of work and a certain type of cultivated person.”115 Bourdieu’s ideas suggest that the iconography of the connoisseur’s aesthetic gaze in posters participated in the consecration process. As it elevated the role of the depicted Iconography of the Female Connoisseur  ‡ 117

2.26 Honoré Daumier, Le Salon de 1857, aspect du salon, le jour de l’ouverture,—rien que de vrais connaisseurs, total soixante mille personnes, 1857. Le Charivari, June 22, 1857. Gift of Mrs. Florence Victor from the David and Florence Victor Collection, M.91.82.305, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

female connoisseur of prints, it also associated the ephemeral street poster with a color print. Paradoxically, the street poster — notorious for its bright colors and stylistic simplification — aimed to capture the fleeting attention of the casual, passing spectator — the very opposite of the sustained gaze of the connoisseur. The posters that featured the female print connoisseur used the new iconography in order to embody a new type of middle-­class collector. Melot, in his discussion of the Impressionist print, notes, “Art, having belonged to a static élite, gradually became available to anyone wishing to stake a claim.”116 On one level it was of course a market expansion. In France, however, it represented the democratization of collecting.117 Commentators at the time saw the poster and color print as essential to the democratization process of art. Advertising posters depicting the female print connoisseur catered to wider circles within the middle classes than those traditionally associated with collecting. And the modest prices of posters and prints made them accessible beyond the exclusive milieu of major collectors. For example, Toulouse-­Lautrec’s posters were priced between two and twelve francs at Sagot’s in 1892, and his small-­edition color lithographs were available for twenty francs.118 As Roger Marx explained in his preface to L’Estampe 118  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

Originale, Marty’s selection brought together “recognized masters with bold creators, neglected and blasphemed,” aiming to make “these quarterly albums the tribunal of personal and new talent, and at the same time to constitute and maintain a repertory which would serve as evidence before history of the art of our time.”119 These statements, as well as the modest cost of the portfolio, suggest that L’Estampe Originale was seeking subscribers distinguished more by their daring taste than their financial wealth. Mellerio discussed an emerging breed of middle-­class collectors of modern prints.120 He described the collector of contemporary prints as differing from his predecessor in three respects — class, financial means, and level of true passion. Paintings and sculptures were unique objects, which “by their rarity” had become expensive and beyond the reach of all but a limited number of wealthy collectors. “What remains? Prints and original prints. Their artistic value is indisputable. The number of prints that can be printed, and the reasonableness of price, put them within reach of ever larger groups of people.”121 He recognized that the “more economic lithograph” aspired to play a role in “our present social order”122 as a mode of democratization enabling artists to reach many more potential collectors. The drive to appeal to a broad audience with artworks produced in the reproductive technique of lithography was in no small part commercially driven, but it was at the same time a matter of a democratic ideology for Mellerio, other progressive critics of the time, and artists who embraced the new technologies for art making. Mellerio defined middle-­class collectors of prints through their juxtaposition with “major collectors.”123 The latter “sometimes are lovers of art, but often are nothing more than wranglers over expensive objects, either because of vanity, or for hidden speculation.”124 In contrast to them, “numerous representatives of the middle class” have developed an interest in originally designed prints and abhor the reproduction chromolithograph.125 They had become, according to Mellerio, more knowledgeable and more passionate, “cultivated by the efforts of artists, publishers, and magazines,” and now constituted “a more educated public,” which he predicted “will become numerous.”126 The iconography of the nontraditional print connoisseur played a role in the emerging field of the original print and poster and in the acceptance of color lithography as a medium for original work. Within the context of the traditional taste of print collectors and the controversial status of the modern art print, depicting modern women in the role of the print connoisseur was the most tangible way in which posters could visualize the democratization of collecting. Women signified the accessibility of the print to new types of collectors. Advertising Iconography of the Female Connoisseur  ‡ 119

posters were not attempting to evade an air of cultural exclusivity traditionally associated with collecting, but rather marshaled it to their purposes. Toulouse-­ Lautrec’s Jane Avril and the anonymous women featured in numerous posters of the 1890s embodied the nontraditional modern collector of prints. This served the goals of print dealers who wanted to establish and expand their client base, and moreover corresponded to the widening participation, in Paris of the 1890s, of women in various aspects of modern city life, including museums, theaters, opera performances, and the new palatial department stores.127 Several factors enabled the representation of women in the role of print collectors in posters: first, the lower status of the print and poster as a “minor” art, along with the decorative arts, as opposed to the “major arts” of painting, sculpture, and architecture; and second, the accepted association of women with “minor” arts, particularly decorative arts. Both these factors combined to make the representation of women as print collectors less challenging to gender stereotypes and established iconographic traditions than their association with painting and sculpture collecting might have been.128 Although progressive critics such as Marx and Mellerio challenged the hierarchy of “major” and “minor” arts during the 1890s, and the appreciation for the “minor” arts grew substantially, the hierarchy did not disappear. Third, depicting women as connoisseurs of prints within the ephemeral poster medium rather than in painting enabled this breach with the normative iconography of male connoisseurship because the poster lacked the high status of painting. Fourth, the advertising function of the poster — typically promoting the print, print exhibition and gallery, or print portfolio — meant that it was well positioned to exploit a shift in the limits of who could constitute a collector. And finally, the medium of color lithography, itself still a controversial newcomer to high art, having been previously used for the reproduction of masterpieces, benefited from the association with a nontraditional collector. The study of women’s collecting in the modern period is in its infancy, and much more still needs to be learned about women’s collecting of prints during the nineteenth century. Women may not have constituted a significant percentage of print collectors during the 1890s, just as the number of female doctors and lawyers was still small but nevertheless indicated a significant change. Women were among the growing numbers of American collectors acquiring art in Paris toward the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, and some of them acquired prints in large quantities, in addition to paintings. Siegfried Bing, the decorative arts dealer and pioneering champion of Art Nouveau, told Goncourt in 1892 about an American woman who acquired from him Japanese prints for 30,000 francs. Married to one of the “richest Yankees,” she displayed some 120  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

of the prints along with paintings: in “her small drawing room, facing the most beautiful Gainsborough in existence, is an image by Outamaro.”129 Mary Cassatt, the American-­born painter who moved to Paris to pursue her career, where she joined the Impressionists (and collected paintings by Manet, Courbet, and her Impressionist colleagues early on), also collected Japanese prints (as did other artists, including Lautrec). Cassatt, herself an innovative printmaker, strongly believed in the importance of widening the circles of print collectors: I love to do colored prints, and I hope the Durand-­Ruels will put mine on the market at reasonable prices. For nothing, I believe, will inspire a taste for art more than the possibility of having it in the home. I should like to feel that amateurs in America could have an example of my work, a print or an etching, for a few dollars. That is what they do in France. It is not left to the rich alone to buy art; the people — even the poor — have taste and buy according to their means. And here they can always find something they can afford.130 Cassatt no doubt had women as well as men in mind when she referred to the “amateurs” whom she hoped would buy her prints and those of her contemporaries. Indeed, she herself advised American collectors, among them several important women collectors, including Louisine Havemeyer and Bertha Honoré Palmer. The extensive painting collection of Louisine and Henry O. Havemeyer included Cassatt’s prints, as well as some eight hundred Japanese prints.131 Mellerio did not specifically mention women as collectors when he advocated the democratization of collecting, nor did he explicitly exclude them. Both written and graphic materials supported the progressive discourse about the democratization of collecting, yet only the visual discourse explicitly represented women connoisseurs. By making the female gender of the collector so central to their iconography, posters produced a democratizing discourse that differed from contemporaneous written texts. Whereas a written narrative could remain nonspecific on gender, using the term collectionneur to stand for both genders (without necessarily having to make a specific reference to collectionneuse), this was simply not possible for an iconographic language. When a poster represented a print collector, it had to be explicit about gender, visually depicting a man or a woman (or both). And while many posters depicted the female print connoisseur, writings of the time did not specifically discuss contemporary women collecting prints during the 1890s. Alexandre stands out as the exception, with his reference to Lautrec’s image of Jane Avril as a “connaisseuse of fine art prints.”132 When Mellerio wrote about “numerous representatives of the middle class” who collect Iconography of the Female Connoisseur  ‡ 121

original prints, his text could implicitly refer to women along with men.133 Yet by not specifically stating anything about the collectionneuse, his discourse could at the same time perpetuate the very exclusion that the iconography of posters dispelled. Quite possibly, the contemporaneous iconography of the female print collector impacted upon readers’ interpretation of Mellerio’s comments about new middle-­class collectors. Moreover, during the 1880s, some books and articles were published in France on eighteenth-­century aristocratic women collectors, including Madame Pompadour and other women bibliophiles.134 And during the 1890s, the decade of the new woman, the depiction of women as print connoisseurs could find its place within a changing collective imagination and the new discourses and practices of women in a variety of areas, including education, the professions, and leisure activities such as sports and travel.135 The posters analyzed in this chapter display different levels of ambiguity with respect to the late nineteenth-­century battle of gendered representations, yet following Lautrec, they coined the modern woman’s icon as an urban print connoisseur. Exercising a greater agency than common consumers, she was represented as embodying a new kind of collector whose taste for prints was part of a modern lifestyle. Ambiguities persisted during the 1890s, when both the original color print and modern woman were in a dynamic state of emerging identity, and each faced the challenge of overcoming a contested status. The iconography of the female print collector exercising the aesthetic gaze of the print connoisseur was implicated in both these processes. We can only speculate that both men and women spectators of these posters could appreciate the modernity of the theme of women collecting posters and prints; that men enjoyed the spectacle of these attractive, fashionable women; that middle-­class women looking at the same posters could, in addition, identify with the chic, cultured female print connoisseurs depicted in them, and that for them these posters could be seen not merely as representing women as aestheticized objects but also as addressing them as knowledgeable subjects who are, or could become, print connoisseurs. Whatever their actual role in collecting prints in the 1890s, women were courted by an emerging iconography that no longer excluded them. On the cusp of mass culture during the 1890s, at a moment when lithographic fine-­art color prints, still a new and challenging phenomenon, participated in adjusting art to the new reality of a mass media age, one of its branches — the illustrated lithographic color poster — featured the nontraditional collector as a contemporary woman. I have argued that by inventing a new iconography and graphic discourse, posters associated the democratization of the collecting of a new kind of art — the originally designed color lithograph — with a new kind of 122  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s A r t

collector, the middle-­class modern woman. Moreover, the posters representing simultaneously the female print connoisseur and a new kind of visual culture testified to complex cultural processes in which written and visual media established different but interacting discourses. In these interactive discourses, ambiguous exclusions from the written discourse could be reread through the inclusion presented in the visual discourse, and conversely, the exclusion in the written discourse could serve to control, contain, and ward off the powers and dangers of a new discourse by keeping it quarantined in the realm of the visual.

Iconography of the Female Connoisseur  ‡ 123

u

PART II

The Poster and Print reproduction and consecration

3 t The Color Print A rt i n t h e Age of L i t hogr a ph y And so original color lithography was born, and a simple sheet of paper for which mechanical means procured the advantage of innumerable copies attained real value as an art form. . . .  Should it be considered simply as an encroaching and diminishing incursion into the domain of painting? Or, on the contrary, does it have an intrinsic essence, and its own particular field of action?   We lean resolutely toward the latter affirmation. — André Mellerio, 1898

The rise of the originally designed color art print during the 1890s necessitated new critical positions. Up until 1899, artworks made in color lithography were excluded from the Paris Salon (organized by the Society of French Artists), which accepted as art only black-­and-­white lithographic art prints,1 as well as chromolithographic reproductions, which were assessed by trade critics and became popular with the public.2 It thus was necessary to legitimize artworks made with color lithography. Roger Marx and André Mellerio, both preeminent critics of the original color print and of the poster in the 1890s, took on this task. While each advanced his own distinct arguments, both critics developed theories that validated the poster and the lithographic art print. Their respective articulations of the emerging artistic field of the original art print reflected an effort at once to transform and to preserve the domain of high art in the era of proliferating reproductive media.

This chapter explores the archaeology of the color art print in France, where the practices and discourses of the original color lithograph developed during the 1890s. My approach draws on media archaeology studies, which have emerged in the last two decades and have tended to focus on histories and technological devices previously excluded or marginalized in the prevailing histories of photography, film, television, and new media.3 Typically overshadowed by the primacy of photography in art history, the color art print here is explored at the moment when it was still new, having recently mutated from the originally designed lithographic color advertising poster. As Mellerio recognized in 1898, “If one can say that the poster is a print in vast format, then original color lithography by its very origin remains still very close to its big sister, the poster.”4 Clashing with existing traditions, practices, institutions, and discourses, the color art print claimed a legitimate place in the domain of high art during the 1890s, and as will be proposed, gave rise to new theories and possibilities for art in the era of mass media. My analysis of late nineteenth-­century theories on the color art print, which have largely been relegated to the margins, will demonstrate, perhaps surprisingly, their relevance to today’s developments. The chapter begins with an analysis of a little-­discussed poster by Pierre Bonnard, which addresses the relationship between the originally designed color lithographic poster — the predecessor of the color art print — and the well-­established black-­and-­white print; continues with an analysis of the theories of Marx and then of Mellerio; and concludes with an assessment of the contributions of these art critics as compared with Walter Benjamin’s highly influential ideas. In 1897, Mellerio, then the editor of the journal L’Estampe et l’Affiche, commissioned from Pierre Bonnard a poster as an advertisement for the journal, whose main target audience was made up of collectors of prints and posters (Fig. 3.1). The meanings of the unique iconography of this poster can only be understood in the context of the ambiguous status of posters at the time, especially among collectors of fine-­art prints. Bonnard’s poster made a visual statement about the tensions between the new lithographic poster and the well-­established black-­and-­ white fine-­art print. The poster, titled (like the journal) L’Estampe et l’Affiche, depicts an odd encounter between the personifications of the older black-­and-­white print and the raunchy newcomer, the poster. Both the print and the poster are represented by ambiguous figures of different generations and blurred genders: a bohemian youth is identified by large letters spelling out the words “The Poster” (L’Affiche) scrawled across the portfolio he carries, and a shapeless aged person looking on is marked by the large brown letters “The Print” (L’Estampe) above the head. This figure towers over the scene, reflecting the dominant status of the 128  ·  T h e P o s t e r a n d P r i n t

3.1 Pierre Bonnard, L’Estampe et l’Affiche, 1897 (printer not listed). 80.6 × 59 cm.

black-­and-­white print. Visibly startled, she (or he) may have just dropped several small prints in the rush to get a better look at the new phenomenon of the poster. The spectacled gaze associates this figure with the collector/connoisseur, yet her act of looking is not a disinterested aesthetic contemplation but a spontaneous response to sheer curiosity. She scrutinizes the unkempt youth passing before her and intruding into her space — the interior space of the print — her fascination suggesting an intuitive understanding that this new figure/medium is competing for the print’s turf. The androgynous youngster representing the poster hides his face in an attempt to avoid being scrutinized by the older print. A transient figure, he rushes by, a large portfolio containing posters tucked under his arm. He stands for the new generation of poster artists, most of whom (including Bonnard) were in their twenties when they first made posters. This representation suggests that the poster lacked the pedigree of the black-­and-­white print, which was long associated with the interior and with collecting. Instead, the youth’s link to the street corresponds to the poster’s low origins and typical site of display. His undomestiThe Color Print  ‡ 129

cated appearance, evoking the roughness of the street, introduces chaos into the tranquil and ordered interior. In addition to functioning as an advertisement for the journal, Bonnard’s poster also constituted a new kind of color print that competed more directly with the older black-­and-­white print insofar as it was almost monochromatic. Consciously courting the taste of print collectors, Bonnard avoided the use of the brilliant colors typically associated with posters and used even muted colors sparingly: the large portfolio at the center of the composition is green and black, and the letters at the bottom are dark blue. The status of the color print was tenuous in part because of the widening use of the chromolithograph in the mass media of the time. The process of color lithography, invented by Alois Senefelder in Munich in the late 1790s, was further developed in Germany, England, and France during the first decades of the nineteenth century.5 In 1837, Godefroy Englemann (who had opened the first lithographic establishment in Paris in 1816) coined the term chromolithography, which became associated with cheap mass reproduction.6 “Chromolithograph” referred to the same process as the color lithograph but was associated with “bad copies of paintings.”7 For example, discussing commercialism and “stupid vulgarization,” the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro wrote about making “chromos for grocers from figures of Corot.”8 When the color lithographic print emerged as an important medium for original art-­making in France, during the 1890s, color prints had already become highly visible both as a mass medium in the press and as freestanding reproductions. L’Illustration’s 1881 Christmas issue was the first French press publication to include color illustrations.9 Before then, mass color prints proliferated as freestanding reproductions of paintings, printed and sold internationally by firms such as Goupil.10 Over the course of the nineteenth century new reproductive technologies developed, supplementing traditional graphic techniques like engraving, mezzotint, and etching with forms of lithographic and photographic reproduction.11 Nonetheless, as the British poster designer and author W. S. Rogers reported in 1901, lithography continued to be the primary medium for posters.12 This was primarily because lithography lent itself to producing large-­scale posters, whereas the photographic process of the halftone was limited, at the time, to more small-­scale work.13 The status of the color lithographic print as artwork was still tenuous during the 1890s both in France and elsewhere. In Britain, for example, posters, like other color lithographs, were not admitted into the annual exhibition of the Royal Academy of Art. As the British poster critic Charles Hiatt noted, they were not even allowed into the “corner far removed from the flaunt and flare of 130  ·  T h e P o s t e r a n d P r i n t

the principal rooms where the other forms of graphic art were bundled up.”14 The Royal Academicians did not practice lithography, and Hiatt ironically dubbed their exhibition “the most important picture sale-­room in Europe,” an event that celebrated “that triumphant English fetish, the oil painting in the heavy gilt frame.”15 Nor were contemporary prints represented in museums at the time. The British author of a 1901 volume on collecting prints explained that the British Museum, which made thousands of acquisitions of prints each year, is “weakest in the work of modern artists” since it does not purchase prints by living artists.16 As late as 1907, Maurice Jonas, the British author of a book about collecting, stated, “critics have been a little too severe on the colour print, condemning it.”17 He noted the challenges faced by collectors of color prints, since collections of the British Museum and Kensington Museum did not include color prints: “a collector can only learn by experience, examining the prints either at the dealers’ or at Christie’s.”18 France was at the forefront of the development of the original color print, as it had been with the lithographic poster, but the acceptance of the color print remained limited there, too, and even more so elsewhere. In Germany, even the avant-­garde journal Pan espoused conservative views about the original color print. The journal’s September/October 1895 issue published Toulouse-­Lautrec’s print Marcelle Lender, which had been commissioned by Julius Meier-­Graefe, a founding editor of Pan (Fig. 3.2). The vehement objections of its editors to the print, which ultimately cost Meier-­Graefe his position as editor, reflect the controversial status of avant-­garde color lithographic art prints during the 1890s.19 Meier-­Graefe’s colleagues opposed Toulouse-­Lautrec’s lithograph because it was “in the style of a poster.”20 A cofounder of Pan acknowledged that “the Parisians” were “splendidly schooled in technique” but added that Toulouse-­Lautrec’s prints showed that the French “had scorned it.”21 Similar objections to the new stylistic qualities of the avant-­garde color art print were voiced in France, but in Germany the works were further condemned as representing the height of “the worship of things foreign.”22 One Pan editor, Eberhard von Bodenhausen, accused Meier-­ Graefe and his likeminded colleague, the editor Otto Julius Biernbaum, of wanting “to represent the peak of art by the superficial and still imperfect technique of a Frenchman.”23 As Phillip Dennis Cate notes, whereas the color lithographic poster “began to emerge in the second half of the 1880s as an independent aesthetic force in French art, the color lithographic print was almost non-­existent.”24 Japanese color prints had become popular among avant-­garde artists and collectors, yet within the contemporary context of France, the poster pioneered the use of color lithography The Color Print  ‡ 131

3.2 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Bust of Mademoiselle Marcelle Lender, 1895. Ancourt, Paris. Color lithograph, 35.8 × 28 cm. Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art, Rosenwald Collection 1951.10.431. Courtesy National Gallery of Art.

for original designs, and critics credited it with the birth of the color lithographic art print. From the mid 1880s and throughout the 1890s, posters generated a great deal of interest among critics and collectors. Thousands collected posters in Europe and North America.25 And in 1897 it was estimated that there were some one thousand collectors of artistic posters in Paris.26 From just four establishments selling posters in Paris during the 1880s, chief among them Ed. Sagot, the field grew to some twenty-­four dealers, printers, and journals selling contemporary posters by the end of the 1890s.27 Some of the dealers who had set up galleries specializing in posters and prints also reissued posters or published original prints. Ambroise Vollard, who would become a legendary twentieth-­ century dealer of avant-­garde art, made his debut in Paris in the mid 1890s with an exhibition of Cézanne’s work, simultaneously commissioning artists to create original prints for portfolios. In 1895, Vollard commissioned Bonnard’s portfolio of twelve color lithographs; in 1896, he published the first volume of L’album des peintres-­graveurs, containing twenty-­two prints in an edition of one hundred, and in 1897 he published his second L’album d’estampes originales de la galleries Vollard, containing thirty-­two prints.28 132  ·  T h e P o s t e r a n d P r i n t

3.3 Pierre Bonnard, Les peintres-graveurs, 1896. A. Clot, Paris. 61 × 46.9 cm.

Vollard commissioned Bonnard to design a poster for the 1896 exhibition of the prints in Vollard’s first portfolio, L’album des peintres-­graveurs, shown in his own gallery (Fig. 3.3). Published in an edition of one hundred, the original prints in the album were an eclectic selection that included Bonnard, Denis, Fantin-­ Latour, Munch, Redon, Renoir, Vallotton, Vuillard, and others.29 The lack of color in Bonnard’s mostly monochromatic poster was diametrically opposed to his own brilliantly colored 1891 France-­Champagne poster (Fig. 1.1). Twelve of the twenty-­two prints in the album were lithographs, and ten of those were in color.30 Bonnard used a similar strategy here as in the 1897 poster described above (Fig. 3.1). With just a touch of muted green in the portfolio cover, his predominantly black-­and-­white 1896 poster associated the color prints in Vollard’s portfolio with the accepted tradition of the black-­and-­white art print. All other elements in the poster — the woman looking at the print, the print itself, the background, the large letters spelling out the name of the portfolio and exhibition, as well as the smaller letters noting the gallery name and address — are limited to black and white, a choice designed to legitimize the portfolio prints in a culture that still withheld official recognition from color prints. The relatively small scale of the The Color Print  ‡ 133

poster, 63.5 × 46.5 cm, made it suitable not only for interior posting but also for collectors’ portfolios. Vollard’s idea was to commission prints from artists who were not professional printmakers.31 In this he followed André Marty, who published L’Estampe Originale from 1893 to 1895, the most ambitious production of contemporary art prints, which included ninety-­five prints in nine installments, each printed in an edition of one hundred.32 Subscribers to Marty’s L’Estampe Originale received forty prints every year at the cost of 150 francs. The portfolio featured seventy-­ four artists, mostly French but some Belgian and British, representing a wide range of styles and status, from the young avant-­garde to the established.33 The ambitious publication included a preface by Marx, which articulated the justification for the original art print. Marx had initially taken up this task in 1888, when he wrote the preface to an earlier and more modest portfolio of original prints published under the name L’Estampe Originale.34 The earlier L’Estampe Originale, organized by a small number of “courageous artists” and assembled by the artist Auguste Lepère for the Société de l’estampe originale (Society of the original print), published two and possibly three port-­ folios between 1888 and 1891.35 The first of these albums broke new ground by including prints created in diverse media, thus emphasizing the “common bond of the various print processes in the dissemination of original artistic expression,” rather than limiting itself to a particular printing process, as all previous nineteenth-­century portfolios had done.36 It was also the first to place woodcut “on an absolutely equal footing with that of engraving” despite its status as a low-­culture medium used for press illustration (until its replacement by photo­ mechanical printing processes, beginning around 1875).37 Though the intention was to publish a limited edition of 150 prints each, the actual edition was much more limited.38 Henri Beraldi, the preeminent scholar of the nineteenth-­century print, wrote in 1889 that “the effort was not particularly encouraged by collectors”39—  most likely because the market of collectors of contemporary original art prints had not yet sufficiently matured.40 Furthermore, the public may have needed “greater inspiration, or education to accept the arguments for the limited-­ edition,” which was perceived as expensive, especially in view of the fact that wood engravings and illustrations by some of the same artists were readily available in illustrated journals at little cost.41 Beraldi’s comment supports this when he writes about collectors who included in their portfolios of engravings images cut out of journals, such as caricatures from Le Charivari, and even “posters torn off of walls!”42 As these practices and their reception imply, the period was one of 134  ·  T h e P o s t e r a n d P r i n t

great flux, in which, as Michel Melot states, “the relationship between craft, art, and industry was being redefined and artistic hierarchies reordered.”43 An ardent champion of the nineteenth-­century original print, Beraldi represented a progressive position when he asserted in 1889 that the contemporary print was no less precious than seventeenth-­century Dutch prints. He credited Charles Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers, Champfleury, and Philippe Burty with discovering and explaining “the modern print,” noting that they found in it “modernity, life, color, knowledge, liberty, individuality, spontaneity.”44 Referring to contemporary lithography, he recorded his distinct impression that “the renaissance of an original art is in the air,” yet was cautious about the long-­term future of the color print.45 This, then, was the context in which Marx and Mellerio — the two most important advocates of the contemporary color print — wrote during the 1890s. As we will see, their theories played a key role in the struggle for the acceptance of the originally designed color print as fine art.

Roger Marx: Originality and the Print as Drawing Marx, the critic and esteemed state arts administrator who had consistently promoted an abandoning of the established hierarchy of the arts, was a great champion of the decorative arts, the poster, and the original art print. Supporting the modern print as an art form was part of his broader agenda concerning the equality of the arts.46 His prefaces to the two ventures titled L’Estampe Originale provided arguments for the legitimization of the original print as art.47 His 1893 preface to L’Estampe Originale offered a theoretical underpinning for the print as an original artwork. He explained the innovations of Marty’s portfolio, noting its unprecedented scope, diversity of print media, stylistic inclusiveness, and the prominence of the color print.48 Whereas former albums had published prints in black and white, sanguine and bistre, L’Estampe Originale was “the first to combine monochrome prints with those of the widest range of color.”49 Unlike earlier portfolios, produced by artistic societies that published prints by their own members and were dedicated to a single print medium “according to the technique in vogue at that moment,”50 L’Estampe Originale “had the distinction of challenging this separatism and of recognizing the equal rights of copper, stone and wood to interpret thought and establish among print-­makers of all media the bond of a common organ.”51 Marx’s preface grounds the legitimacy of the original art print in its status as The Color Print  ‡ 135

an original “invention” made by a “creator,” as opposed to the work of a “copyist”: “What would be the use henceforth of insisting on what differentiates an original print from a reproductive engraving? We are forbidden to make any comparison between the one and the other. In the former case, the subject and form burst forth simultaneously from one stroke; in the latter, on the contrary, the skill of the interpreter replaces invention, and the artist declines in rank from that of creator to that of copyist.”52 Marx valued prints for their personal expression (“works in which the author’s personality is revealed and where the instinctive aptitude is not destroyed by acquired skills”) and stressed the importance of “the initial surge of improvisation,” which teaches us more about “the inner reaches of the temperament” than does “the finished state, the outcome of patient, labored work, which dampens enthusiasm and diminishes individual sentiment.”53 Marx’s defense of the print as original artwork also involved an argument for the priority of the drawing even over painting: “one’s curiosity will derive more profit from examining the sketch than from studying the painting; thus no statement equals the eloquence of a drawing.” He downplayed the significance of the particular print medium: “Whether this drawing be the stroke of a pencil, a pen, a paintbrush on paper, whether it penetrates into the depths of the copper plate, whether it emerges on the surface of the wood, whether it is written on stone . . . little does it matter to us.” All that mattered, according to Marx, was that the print “transmits the force of action of the original thought.” Marx cites Burty, who asserts the “full worth” of the print when he “defines it as ‘a drawing in several copies.’ ”54 He even goes so far as to state that “in fact,” L’Estampe Ori­ gi­nale “contains only drawings.”55

André Mellerio: Medium Specificity and the Multiple Original Whereas Marx had defended the status of the original print as art by downplaying the significance of the reproductive medium, Mellerio, writing four years later, devised a new strategy for legitimizing the lithographic color print. In 1898, L’Estampe et l’Affiche published Mellerio’s slim volume La lithographie originale en couleurs. It provided the most extensive account and theory of the color lithography movement of the 1890s. Mellerio’s innovation can only be appreciated when viewed within the context of a culture that, as yet, had not officially embraced or validated the originally designed color art print. As Cate notes, Mellerio’s importance as a critic was in recognizing that the original lithographic color print was “the distinctive artistic form”56 of the 1890s, at a time when many of his colleagues still did not approve of color lithography as original art.57 Mellerio’s 136  ·  T h e P o s t e r a n d P r i n t

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

Pl. 2. Eugène Grasset, Librairie romantique, 1887. J. Bognard, Paris. 85.7 × 127.3 cm.

Pl. 3. Photographie vulgarisatrice, c. 1880–1900. S. Glaise, Paris. 57.5 × 80 cm. Graphic Arts Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Pl. 4. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, P. Sescau, Photographe, c. 1894–96 (printer not listed). 61 × 79.5 cm. Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Gift of the Estate of William S. Kinkead 1984–44–57.

Pl. 5. Pierre Bonnard, France-Champagne, 1891. Edw. Ancourt, Paris. 79 × 59.4 cm.

Pl. 6. Champagne Scohyers de Dorlodot, Reims, 1890. J. Haly, Brussels. 122 × 81 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Pl. 7. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, La Goulue, Moulin Rouge, 1891. Ch. Levy, Paris. 193.6 × 119.38. cm. Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Gift of William S. Kinkead 1975–11–5.

Pl. 8. Jules Chéret, Moulin Rouge, 1890. Chaix, Paris. 84 × 60 cm.

Pl. 9. (left) Alphonse Mucha, Gismonda, 1894. Lemercier, Paris. 74 × 216 cm. Pl. 10. (above) Aubrey Beardsley, Avenue Theatre, A Comedy of Sighs! 1894. Stafford & Co., Nottingham, Eng. 76.1 × 50.8 cm.

Pl. 11. Jules Chéret, Quinquina Dubonnet, 1896. Chaix, Paris. 122 × 82.5 cm.

Pl. 12. (above) Henri de ToulouseLautrec, Troupe de Mlle Églantine, 1896 (printer not listed). 58.4 × 78.2 cm. Pl. 13. (right) Henri de ToulouseLautrec, Reine de joie, 1892. Edw. Ancourt, Paris. 137.2 × 91.7 cm.

Pl. 14. (left) The Beggarstaffs, “Kassama” Corn Flour, 1894. Henderson & Co. London. 152.4 × 101.6 cm. Pl. 15. (below) Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, cover for the print portfolio L’Estampe Originale, 1893. Edw. Ancourt, Paris. 58 × 74 cm. Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Estate of  William S. Kinkead 1984–44–9.

Pl. 16. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Jane Avril, 1893. Chaix, Paris. 125.4 × 91.5 cm.

Pl. 17. (above) Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Divan japonais, 1893. Edw. Ancourt, Paris. 83.9 × 64.9 cm. Pl. 18. (left) Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Jane Avril, 1899. H. Stern, Paris. 55 × 36.9 cm.

Pl. 19. Théo van Rysselberghe, N. Lembrée, c. 1897. Monnom, Brussels. 68.8 × 51 cm. Pl. 20. Georges de Feure, cover for the print portfolio Lithographies originales, album no. 1, 1896. Lermercier, Paris. 58.7 × 42.7 cm.

Pl. 21. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Galerie Rapp, Champ de Mars, Centenaire de la lithographie, 1895. Lemercier, Paris. 147.7 × 102.6 cm. Pl. 22. Otto Fisher, Kunst-Anstalt für Moderne Plakate, 1896. Wilhelm Hoffmann, Dresden. 95 × 64 cm.

Pl. 23. Edgar Degas, The Print Collector, 1866. Oil on canvas, 53 × 40 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929, 29.100.44. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

advanced theories challenged established academic values.58 Cate emphasizes the importance of Mellerio’s writing in several respects: its recognition of the legitimacy of artists’ use of any process for their expression; its appraisal of artists working in color prints during the 1890s; and its view of color lithography as a democratizing force that made original art widely accessible.59 In the following pages I elaborate on several other key aspects of Mellerio’s theoretical innovation: his analysis of the poster as stimulating the art print; his discussion of the medium-­specificity of color lithography; his theorizing of what I shall call the “multiple original”; and his contribution to the understanding of how a medium initially used in a nonartistic territory is appropriated and legitimized as a new art medium. Mellerio asserted that Chéret’s posters directly influenced the advent of the color art print. His views contrast with those of most twentieth-­century theo­ rists, who saw mass media as de-­auratizing original art and functioning, at most, as sources or materials for avant-­garde art.60 Mellerio, on the other hand, acknowledged that the lithographic color print was an offspring of the poster: Should we be asked, given the present movement, how chromolithography penetrated the domain of original art, we would not hesitate to state that it was the work of Chéret. The renovator of the poster, or rather its true creator from the modern point of view, he not only achieved a personal statement, but also exerted a large and resounding influence. . . . The print — in its ardent search for regeneration — was naturally affected. Chéret’s posters opened up a new path — a path which the print happily followed. . . . How did the modern print break with the old and banal chromolithography to the point that today, for the first time, one has to search for a name that would distinguish it? Clearly, in the way Chéret freed his work and made it a creative form.61 Mellerio’s most important strategy for legitimizing the lithographic color print as an art medium was his theorizing of its medium-­specific qualities. He argued that color lithography was different from but equal to painting. Moreover, it had the added benefit of enabling multiple originals: “It is neither a facsimile of, nor a substitute for painting; it is another process, lacking certain elements, but with its own charm, an equivalent to art and with the appreciable advantage of a print-­run with numerous copies.”62 Mellerio’s ideas arrived on the scene during a dynamic period in which artists claimed the reproductive process of color lithography as a new medium for original artmaking, distinct from photography’s role in producing copies. The printmaker Charles Maurin expressed The Color Print  ‡ 137

many artists’ views when he wrote enthusiastically in 1898: “The future is with the artists, the creators. Let’s work, comrades! And for God’s sake let’s not be used as a photograph.”63 Mellerio distinguished between reproductive printmaking (in his words, a fac-­simile), and the originally designed art print. Mellerio’s idea of the facsimile of an original painting corresponds to the later theories of Walter Benjamin, which define the reproductive copies of a singular painting as lacking the aura of the original. Yet Mellerio’s premise is fundamentally different from Benjamin’s. For Benjamin, those mechanical media that involve only multiple exemplars in the first place, with no singular original copy, like lithography, photography, and film, are non-­auratic. Mellerio, by contrast, like Marx, did not consider the production of an artwork in multiples as in any way inferior to a singular original. On the contrary, Mellerio claimed that “mechanical means” (meaning lithography) gave the “advantage of unlimited copies,” and that they attained a “real value as an art form.”64 To him, the decisive difference was between the originally designed print — that is, one that is conceived “directly as a print”— and a mere facsimile, which copies an existing painting or watercolor in the medium of lithography.65 Thus I suggest that, through the case of the art print, Mellerio expanded the definition of art to include the multiple original. What distinguished the multiple original from the (multiple) reproduction was the originality of its design and its medium specificity. The facsimile used the medium of lithography merely to reproduce an existing painting, with no concern for the particular traits of the medium of lithography. The multiple original, on the other hand, entailed designing the artwork specifically for the medium in which it was made. Mellerio elaborated on the characteristics of the medium of art lithography, developing an initial theory on medium specificity. He articulated the characteristics that distinguished the original art print from painting on the one hand, and from facsimile reproduction on the other. Mellerio’s insightful discussion of the medium of color lithography is an intriguing precursor to Clement Greenberg’s ideas on medium specificity, developed in the twentieth century. According to Greenberg, What had to be exhibited was not only that which was unique and irreducible in art in general, but also that which was unique and irreducible in each particular art. Each art had to determine, through its own operations and works, the effects exclusive to itself. By doing so it would, to be sure, narrow its area of competence, but at the same time it would make its possession of that area all the more certain. 138  ·  T h e P o s t e r a n d P r i n t

It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium.66 Greenberg hints at the impact of mass media on the need for medium specificity, writing that it looked as though the arts were “going to be assimilated to entertainment” and “could save themselves from this leveling down only by demonstrating that the kind of experience they provided was valuable in its own right and not to be obtained from any other kind of activity.” Thus, in Greenberg’s account, the context of mass media was a catalyst for the process of self-­criticism within each artistic discipline, by which each discipline would “be rendered ‘pure,’ ” self-­defined, and “independent.” In the particular historical context of the 1890s, the decade in which the notion of medium specificity first emerged, color reproductions of paintings, commonly referred to as chromolithographs, were the mass medium of the day. Thus, the initial theorizing about medium specificity was stimulated not only by color lithography itself but also by the dialogical interaction of lithography with painting, on the one hand, and with lithographic reproductions of paintings on the other. Mellerio clarified that the print should not be considered as encroaching into the domain of painting, but rather as possessing “an intrinsic essence and its own particular field of action.”67 He asserts, “In our time, in lithography, as in all colored prints, there is a bifurcation of tendencies representing two opposing principles.”68 The retrogressive tendency is the facsimile, the reproductive print that imitates an existing painting without developing the potential of the medium for an original expression: it is “a mania to imitate not nature, but an artistic creation which has already been achieved. It is the eternal resort of crafts people, which is useless and repugnant to true and original artists.”69 The progressive tendency, which characterizes original artists, “consists in conceiving the subject directly as a print, and as a color print.”70 Mellerio contends that “original color lithography, by the nature of its techniques, possesses a range of possibilities that belong to it alone — both resources and limits that are inherent to it.” In order to achieve medium specificity, the artist must, “conceptually as well as technically . . . take into account the means at his disposition, to be satisfied with them, and to saturate himself in them.” He then defines the medium specificity of the print by outlining the difference between a painting and watercolor, on the one hand, and color lithography on the other: The color lithograph is a print, and so the general laws of the latter must be applied to it. What are they? Logically and necessarily we find them in the essence of the print itself: a piece of paper on which, by mechanical printing, The Color Print  ‡ 139

a drawing is reproduced numerous times. The medium is neither as solid nor as sturdy as that of oil painting, just as the process does not have the same deep and bountiful richness. Nor does it have the texture or the brilliance of pastel, the penetrating lightness of the watercolor. Nor can it claim to have the imperceptible delicacies of an original drawing. It is indeed the mechanical printing, even when perfectly executed, that takes away the tiny refinements of the brush strokes, the pronounced artist’s touch or the impact of his fingers by which he directly transmits his sensation apart from any particular skill and without being embarrassed by anything.71 For these reasons, Mellerio recommends that prints “avoid ambitious effects” and work with a “simplicity of means.” The medium-­specific features of the color lithograph he spelled out thus: “Successive printings do not mix colors thoroughly, but rather superimpose them, maintaining transparency. It thus seems wise to avoid excessive mixtures ending in the pretentious dullness of chromo. It is to the advantage of the modern multicolor print to keep the color areas separated, with a simplicity of tone, aiming more for the harmony of the ensemble than for complicated nuances.”72 Mellerio also distinguishes the originally designed print from the poster, noting that the print has a goal different from that of the poster and that because it is “made to be held in the hand and closely contemplated, it naturally involves research and a greater refinement.”73 The art print tends to harmonize colors and lines “that might even be described as decorative.” Its range of tones may be “light, gay, very lively,” but differs from “the boisterous burst of color called for by the utilitarian goal of the poster.” The print has its own characteristics, using simplified lines and compositions, while “elusive delicacies of atmosphere do not seem to fall within its competence.”74 Given that it has its own unique qualities, the originally designed print competes neither with oil painting nor with “the texture and sparkle of the pastel or the washes of the watercolor.”75 The “special charm” of the print “is the way the matte impression inks the paper without seeming too heavy.”76 The poster and original color print were usually made with a few stones (as little as three colors, often four). By contrast, the lithographic reproduction of paintings was made with a large number of stones — as many as thirty and sometimes forty-­five — in order to render the various shades and hues. The buildup of inks and the use of oils and varnish in chromolithographic reproductions produced thick, heavy, opaque images.77 Art lithography was distinguished by its simplicity of means — a condition, observed Mellerio, that “requires true artists.”78 140  ·  T h e P o s t e r a n d P r i n t

Mellerio mentions Bonnard’s light application of color and skillful use of the white paper, and also singles out Toulouse-­Lautrec’s prints.79 Lautrec’s eight-­color lithograph of Marcelle Lender, 1895 (Fig. 3.2), can serve as a good illustration for Mellerio’s ideas. It shows Lautrec’s use of the original paper tone — in the face and décolleté of the actress and in the background, seen through the yellow pattern. This affords the print a light quality, asserts the paper ground, and highlights its flat surface. The work also demonstrates Mellerio’s observation that Lautrec “uses a little of everything in his prints: flat tints, outlines, bright spots, spatter, fine strokes of the pen, etc.”80 And yet, the work “always remains a true color print,” defined by Mellerio as “a piece of paper decorated with colors and lines that are part of it without hiding it or weighing it down.”81 Mellerio theorized medium specificity at a moment when the use of color lithography for original art was still relatively new and controversial, unlike its widespread use as a reproduction technique. His most fundamental insight was that “the right of the color print to exist derives directly from the axiom that any method or process that an artist finds to express himself is, for that very reason, legitimate.”82 Marx expressed a similar idea in 1899: “The quality of work is independent of the process of expression; the means are as good as the artist.”83 Self-­ evident though it may seem today, this principle was not widely accepted in the 1890s, since it clashed, as Cate noted, with the established idea that art students learn from their masters how to work with traditional techniques.84 The legitimization of the use of color lithography for the making of art at a time when thousands of color reproductions of paintings were circulating set an important precedent for twentieth-­century avant-­garde artists working with nontraditional materials and media processes. It was, furthermore, a model for the eventual legitimization of any reproductive process as a medium for original art making. Though different media have their own reproductive processes, the principle Mellerio affirmed in response to color lithography in the 1890s is far-­ reaching. It provided, and provides still, the foundation for legitimizing artists’ appropriation of new forms of mass media even while the same media modes are used also for extra-­artistic purposes. In this respect, it applies to photography, video, and digital media, among others. Marx’s and Mellerio’s concerns in the 1890s were quite different from Benjamin’s when he wrote “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in the 1930s, in view of the wide diffusion of photography and the ascendance of film, and under the shadow of fascism. Benjamin asserted that, in the age of reproduction, the aura of the original painting was dwindling, but he also discussed the ascendance of what he considered the non-­auratic technologically The Color Print  ‡ 141

produced media, which included lithography, photography, and film (he focused primarily on the latter two). In the non-­auratic media, no single original exists. Marx and Mellerio, by contrast, aimed to preserve the auratic artwork in the heyday of reproductive print media of the 1890s. To accomplish this, Marx focused on the originality of the print, disregarding its particular medium and claiming that the print captured the originality of the artist’s mind. Mellerio, on the other hand, developed the idea of the medium-­specific qualities of lithography, distinguishing those prints designed specifically for the lithographic medium from lithographic reproductions of an existing artwork. Whereas Benjamin later saw the singular “original” as “the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity,” during the 1890s, modernist critics were most concerned with legitimizing the reproductive medium of color lithography as a medium for original art making.85 Applying Benjamin’s later ideas about the aura, we may say that progressive critics of the 1890s perceived the contemporary original print as auratic despite its existence in multiples and the absence of a singular “original” work. Their notion of what I have described above as the “multiple original” indeed can be recognized retroactively as a foundation for the professional practices of the art world in the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries. The latter, however, emphasized the limited edition, which differentiates the work from its unlimited reproduction and establishes preciousness, relative rarity, and art market value. Rather than embracing the democratic ideal of the unlimited multiple original propagated in the late nineteenth century by Marx and Mellerio, in the following decades the art field and market adopted the multiple original for their own purposes. This continued the legitimation, pioneered by these critics, of the artist’s use of new media that are not limited to singular originals and are nonetheless considered original art. Yet, in spite of the enormous influence of Benjamin’s ideas on artists, critics, and scholars of the twentieth and twenty-­first century, practices common in the art field and market correspond instead to the ideas of Marx and Mellerio, especially in constituting the auratic status of the multiple original. Medium specificity was essential to establishing the auratic status of art in general and more specifically of multiple originals to distinguish them from mere reproductions and the mass media. In examining the archaeology of medium specificity, the multiple original, and the issue of auratic and non-­auratic works, we thus gain a more complex historical view of issues that too often are considered outside of their historical contexts, even though they have evolved through the dialogic relations between theories, practices, technological innovations, and the art market. Finally, although the theories of  Marx and Mellerio helped estab142  ·  T h e P o s t e r a n d P r i n t

lish the artistic status of the originally designed work produced in reproductive media, these critics formed part of a larger field that was developing in the 1890s, consisting of producers and various intermediaries. As Pierre Bourdieu argues, the role of a whole range of “agents of consecration” is central to the status of the artwork.86 This was crucial, as we shall see in the case study of advertising posters reissued as collectible prints.

The Color Print  ‡ 143

4 t Les Maîtres de l’Affiche Au r a a n d R eproduct ion One had to strive hard to replace the originals suitably, to give the illusion of a large poster, in short, to find the street in one’s home. . . . Les Maîtres de l’Affiche will fulfill the aim that collectors dream of. — Charles Saunier, 1895

In 1886, Henri Beraldi, the preeminent historian of the nineteenth-­century print and author of the monumental twelve-­volume Les graveurs du XIXe siècle, urged Jules Chéret, who was considered the father of the illustrated poster, to produce “an album of fifty to one-­hundred of his best compositions, on the most lively and most up-­to-­date subjects” and offered a catchy title for this publication: Paris en affiches, par Jules Chéret (Paris in posters, by Jules Chéret).1 Beraldi’s idea was based on seeing Ernest Maindron’s 1886 volume Les affiches illustrées, which was the first history of the illustrated poster and included high-­quality color illustrations of posters in reduced scale.2 Beraldi was not concerned about the transition from originals to reduced-­scale copies of posters. On the contrary, printing the original posters in a reduced format in a book was of high value from his point of view as a collector, print connoisseur, and historian, insofar as it transformed the original poster’s status: “Will this not ensure them for the future? Because, by comparison to the ephemeral duration of the poster, that of the book is almost an eternity.”3 About a decade later, the imprimerie Chaix, where Chéret was in charge of lithographic posters, initiated an ambitious project that had much in common

4.1 (right) Joseph Sattler, cover for the maga­ zine Pan, 1895. Frisch, Berlin. 35 × 28 cm. 4.2 (below) Alexandre de Riquer, Ayuntamiento de Barcelona; Industria, Arte; 3ra. Exposición de Bellas Artes é Industrias Artísticas (Barcelona City Council, Industry, Art, Third Exhibition of Fine Arts and Artistic Industries), 1896. J. Thomas and C. Barna, Barcelona. 90 × 147 cm.

with Beraldi’s suggestion. The publication, titled Les Maîtres de l’Affiche (The masters of the poster), featured selected posters in reduced size. It compiled a total of 240 posters and 16 originally designed lithographs, offered in sixty installments composing five volumes, and was distributed by subscription. It was an international selection that favored French posters but included a substantial number of British and American ones, quite a few Belgian works, and a handful by Dutch, German, Italian, Swiss, Spanish, Hungarian, Czech, and Danish artists (Figs. 4.1, 4.2, 4.3).4 Les Maîtres de l’Affiche appealed to a growing public of poster collectors, both domestic and international, and accordingly offered three price categories for the twelve-­month subscription: Paris; provinces, Al146  ·  T h e P o s t e r a n d P r i n t

4.3 Ethel Reed, Miss Träumerei, 1895. Lamson, Wolffe & Co., Boston. 35 × 22 cm.

geria, Tunis; and foreign counties and colonies.5 Members of the general public could subscribe to the selection printed on regular paper at the relatively low cost of twenty-­seven to thirty francs. A one-­month subscription (four posters) sold in Paris for two and a half francs, only slightly higher than the Folies Bergère’s entry fee of two francs.6 For eighty to eighty-­three francs, more serious collectors could purchase a version printed on Japan paper. This chapter examines the little-­studied Maîtres de l’Affiche as a case study for a reconsideration of Walter Benjamin’s theories on the original, copy, and diminishing aura of art in the age of reproduction.7 Benjamin’s theory is often applied with little consideration of historical specificities, such as particular media practices and discourses, and their social, institutional, and market groundings. Writing in the mid 1930s, Benjamin focused primarily on two processes — the cultural effect of mass reproduction on the experience of original art, which he identified with the withering of the aura, and the rise of the reproductive, non-­auratic mass media. Benjamin mentions lithography only briefly and refers exclusively to its use in press illustrations, with no mention of posters. His primary interest was photography and film, the major media of his time. Stephen Aura and Reproduction  ‡ 147

Bann, whose exemplary study Parallel Lines focuses on the first half of the nineteenth century, explicitly questions the Benjaminian paradigm by emphasizing “the fecundity of processes of reproduction” instead of “the opposition between ‘cult’ and ‘exhibition value,’ original and copy.”8 Bann discusses black-­and-­white prints, photography, and painting, but not posters or color prints. This chapter pursues a related questioning of Benjamin’s paradigm, focusing on the final two decades of the nineteenth century, by which time three types of color lithographs played a major role in visual culture: reproductions, posters, and art prints. It reconsiders Benjamin’s ideas on the original and on the diminishing aura, by asking whether and to what extent these ideas illuminate Maîtres de l’Affiche and the larger movement of which it was part. According to the influential original-­copy dichotomy, grounded largely in Benjamin’s “Work of Art” essay, multiples occupy a universal category of reproduction/copy and do not possess the aura of the original unique art object, but rather an exhibitionary value. Made in reproductive media, the reissued posters in Maîtres would be non-­ auratic by definition, according to Benjamin, unlike original artwork such as painting, which is unique, existing as a single object rather than in multiples. And yet, as we shall see, Maîtres de l’Affiche engaged in a variety of strategies to auratize its prints. Examining these strategies in detail, and drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s observations about the aesthetic gaze and consecration in the field of cultural production, I propose in what follows that a process of auratization emerged in the late nineteenth century that did not negate but complemented the process of de-­auratization later articulated by Benjamin. Following Benjamin, the notions of the diminishing or loss of aura of original art, and the non-­auratic status of photography and film, have been widely studied and generally embraced. By contrast, the complementary process of auratization has not been acknowledged, let alone discussed, by most critics and historians of visual culture. This chapter analyzes Maîtres de l’Affiche as a case study of auratization in the late nineteenth century and a precedent for practices that continue to be relevant today. Ultimately, its analysis will shed light on the broader issues of the simultaneous vulnerability (i.e., de-­auratization) and resilience (auratization) of art under the conditions of the industrial revolution, reproductive processes, a capitalist marketplace, and the broadened public for images. I will argue that the imprimerie Chaix’s Maîtres de l’Affiche used several strategies whose combination amounted to a “repurposing” of the original advertising poster into an auratized art print rather than a mere reproduction of it. Unlike contemporary repurposed images or texts, which often cross over from one medium to another (a printed book transformed into a digital text, for instance), 148  ·  T h e P o s t e r a n d P r i n t

the lithographic images of Maîtres did not migrate across media, since both the smaller prints and the original posters were produced in color lithography. Nonetheless, they did migrate from a practice of and discourse on publicité (advertising) to art-­related practices and to discourses on “decorative arts,” “applied art,” or “minor art.”9 The repurposing of the poster into an auratic print was not only a matter of its production but also of its reception and circulation in the field of the poster and print in the late nineteenth century.10 It could not have taken place without an active public interest in collecting posters, without critics writing about them, and without the practices of publishers, dealers, and journals. By the mid 1890s, when Chaix launched the Maîtres project, several dealers and publishers had already published original color lithography by young and established contemporary artists.11 The most extensive project was André Marty’s L’Estampe Originale, 1893–95.12 Ambroise Vollard, who became the most important dealer to publish original prints by avant-­garde artists, commissioned his first selection in 1895.13 But whereas Marty and Vollard commissioned original color prints from artists, Les Maîtres de l’Affiche published a large selection of existing illustrated advertising posters.

Les Maîtres de l’Affiche: Origins and Scope Les Maîtres de l’Afffiche did not have one clearly named “author” or curator. It was the collaborative product of a large printing business, the imprimerie Chaix, and the firm’s pioneering poster artist and artistic director, Jules Chéret. Chaix’s centennial publication, which provides a concise history of the firm, credits Alban Chaix (1860–1930), the founder’s grandson, with introducing the idea for Maîtres in 1895.14 The project was one of many initiated by the firm, which was founded by Napoléon Chaix (1807–65) in 1845 and initially went by the name the Central Printing Firm of the Railway. In 1881 it became a société anonyme and changed its name to imprimerie Chaix. Always seeking out new opportunities that would maintain and expand its business, Chaix acted as a publisher and printer of a wide variety of materials, including railway guides, itineraries and tickets, an atlas of the railway, newspapers, election propaganda, and a popular book series Bibliothèque des familles.15 By 1892 the firm had become a massive enterprise, employing twelve hundred workers in the company’s imprimerie and bookshop. It owned ninety-­two steam presses for typography and lithography, thirty-­five hand presses, and another twenty-­two diverse machines, including for fonts, fabrication of inks, engraving, and bookbinding.16 Among its specialized production spaces was Chéret’s atelier, as seen in a photograph of c. 1893 Aura and Reproduction  ‡ 149

4.4 The Atelier of Jules Chéret in the Imprimerie Chaix, Paris, c. 1893. Photograph. From Marius Vachon, Les Arts et les Industries du Papier en France, 1871–1894 (Paris: Librairies-imprimeries Réunis, 1894), 199.

(Fig. 4.4). In 1881, the founder’s son, Edmond Alban Chaix (1832–97), responded favorably to an offer by Chéret to take over the latter’s small imprimerie, founded in 1866. In its first years, Chéret’s independent print shop printed a wide array of lithographic products, including but not limited to posters, as suggested by his 1874 entry in the annual Didot-­Bottin, which states “dessins et impressions.”17 During the 1870s, Chéret gained notoriety for his lithographic posters. He approached Chaix in 1881, the year in which the freedom of the press law went into effect, likely foreseeing an enormous growth of the poster industry.18 Alban Chaix agreed to the deal on the condition that Chéret assume the responsibilities of artistic direction, while Chaix himself would retain exclusive control of the enterprise’s industrial and commercial services.19 Although Chéret had his own lithographic print shop space under Chaix, and his position was defined as “artistic director,” he inevitably was responsible for numerous technical and administrative aspects of running the print shop involved in ensuring the success of the commercial enterprise. These included not only designing posters himself, but also contact with advertisers, training designers to design posters in his style, overseeing the printing, and directing various projects such as the Maîtres. Inevitably, most of these responsibilities could not actually be separated from the 150  ·  T h e P o s t e r a n d P r i n t

business aspects of the operation. Chéret intimated to Goncourt in 1892 that his association with Chaix had not brought him a small fortune, but “was the source of a thousand problems, a thousand harassments, and a thousand difficulties!”20 Alban Chaix, who had taken charge of the firm in 1887, expanded its operations into new business areas. His idea “to reproduce in color the most beautiful illustrated posters by the French and foreign ‘great artists’ ”21 did not in fact require remarkable foresight, since by the mid-­1890s it was evident that poster collecting had become “a type of infatuation.”22 Since Chéret oversaw the Maîtres project and was its leading professional authority, he was the one to select the posters on behalf of Chaix,23 with the stated intention of including “all artists of talent, whatever their style . . . the young artists side by side with their seniors.”24 In practice, however, the selection of posters was not quite so impartial.25 The compilation’s 240 prints included 180 posters printed in France and only sixty posters by artists from other nations. It privileged Chéret by including sixty of his posters, and the Chaix firm by including eighty-­eight posters it had originally printed, as compared with five or fewer posters by each of the other printers.26 Chéret rightfully deserved a place of prominence in the publication. The British poster critic Charles Hiatt, in his review of Les Maîtres de l’Affiche, wrote of Chéret that “others have achieved isolated successes, which are perhaps more striking and of finer artistic interest, but he alone has gained a series of triumphs extending over an entire generation.”27 By 1896 Chéret had been designing and overseeing the printing of posters for over thirty years, and had designed more posters than anyone else.28 As early as 1884 Maindron stated that Chéret had already made “more than one thousand posters.”29 A recent catalogue raisonné by Réjane Bargiel and Ségolène Le Men identifies 1,430 Chéret posters.30 Chéret’s body of work was recognized already in the late nineteenth century not only for its remarkable volume but also for its quality and innovation.31 In 1890 the state named him a chevalier of the Legion of Honor for creating “an industry of art since 1866 by the application of art to commercial printing and industry.”32 As early as 1886 Beraldi credited Chéret with “creating an entirely new genre” as well as “an industry.”33 After Chéret’s 1889 retrospective exhibition at the Galeries du Théâtre d’application (also known as la Bodinière), which included posters, pastels, and drawings, numerous critics lauded the artist in the French press and internationally. He had been recognized as early as 1879 by J.-­K. Huysmans as showing “a thousand times more talent” than most of the paintings in the official exhibition of the Salon, and he recommended that people “cleanse their eyes” by looking at Chéret’s posters on the street.34 After 1889 Chéret’s achievements and key role Aura and Reproduction  ‡ 151

in turning the advertising poster into the artistic poster were widely and enthusiastically acknowledged.35 In addition to Huysmans, Beraldi, and Maindron, writers who sang Chéret’s praises during his lifetime include Roger Marx, Victor Champier, Félicien Champsaur, Gustave Geffroy, Frantz Jourdain, Gustave Kahn, Charles Saunier, Achille Ségard, and Octave Uzanne. By the time Maîtres was launched in the mid 1890s, Chéret was already nurturing a successful career as an artist, producing wall decorations for private residencies of collectors, notably the villas of his patron, Baron Vitta in Évian, and the Neuilly villa of the French Petroleum industrialist and art patron Maurice Fenaille.36 He also received a prestigious commission to decorate a room in the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, for which he received the considerable sum of 30,000 francs.37 It was therefore timely for Chéret to work on a project that would help consolidate his place in the canon of poster artists. The overwhelming predominance in the Maîtres’ selection of posters by Chéret and posters printed by the Maison Chaix points to the publication’s promotional value for both artist and printer/publisher. Though Chéret was not officially named as the editor or curator of Maîtres de l’Affiche, his authorial presence was implied by a recurring image appearing each month on the title page. This image was also given to subscribers as one of the Chéret bonus lithographs during the first year (Fig. 4.5). Depicting an artist dressed as a commedia dell’arte entertainer, the image fit the character of the late nineteenth-­century illustrated poster, which was closely associated with entertainment both because of its frequent depiction of performance venues and because the poster itself was a free spectacle on the street. It alluded to a self-­ representation of Chéret. Through iconographic and stylistic allusions to the eighteenth century, Chéret distanced the figure from contemporary reality and associated it with his own source of inspiration in rococo painting. Turning his face back to look at the spectator, the figure is presented as an artist in the process of painting, seated before a large poster positioned ambiguously in a way that suggests a tilted canvas. Yet it is not a canvas but a paper poster that includes the word “concerts.” Two similar posters seen tumbling down to the floor make it clear that this is not a one-­of-­a-­kind painting. The iconography and style of the drawing are closely associated with Chéret’s artistic identity, since he frequently depicted eighteenth-­century commedia dell’arte figures. Coming from an artisanal background and trained in a lithography shop during his teens, Chéret, who had no formal art education and later learned about high art from museum visits and drawing from the model, developed a style that was inspired by Watteau and Fragonard.38 Chéret’s signature is clearly visible in the upper right corner of the 152  ·  T h e P o s t e r a n d P r i n t

4.5 Jules Chéret, drawing for the title page of Les Maîtres de l’Affiche, February 1896. Chaix, Paris. Lithograph. 39 × 28.8 cm. Cleveland Institute of Art Library.

lower poster. He thus embedded his artistic presence in the title page through the visual means of iconography, style, and signature. This image, which appeared in the top left corner of the cover sheet of each installment, effectively functioned as a logo alluding to Chéret’s role and complementing the copy at the center of the page crediting the imprimerie Chaix as the publisher (Fig. 4.6). Thus, the Maîtres de l’Affiche, which could not claim a single artistic authorship, constructed its authorial “figure” ambiguously between artist and printer/ publisher. Chéret gave the publication prestige by acting as its de facto curator and by overseeing the high-­quality lithographic printing. The publication enlisted another authorial presence to enhance its artistic legitimization when it commissioned a preface for each annual installment by the esteemed critic and state arts administrator Roger Marx. Marx was a natural choice, given the views expressed in his 1894 preface for the L’Estampe Originale, the most important and extensive album of original prints, where he had argued for the acceptance of the modern art print as an original artwork.39 Aura and Reproduction  ‡ 153

4.6 Title page, Les Maîtres de l’Affiche, February 1896. 39 × 28.8 cm. Cleveland Institute of Art Library.

Auratizing Les Maîtres de l’Affiche Les Maîtres de l’Affiche, published by the imprimerie Chaix in Paris from 1896 to 1900, employed several other strategies to translocate posters from their commercial context into a habitat of collecting. The combined effect of these strategies contributed to the auratization of the repurposed posters. The very title of the series claimed the status of “master” for those who designed the selected posters. The brief text on the title page, appearing under the title Maîtres de l’Affiche, affirmed the claim, stating that the monthly publication contained “the color reproduction of the most beautiful illustrated posters by French and foreign great artists.” Commenting on the title Maîtres de l’Affiche, Toulouse-­Lautrec (five of whose posters were included in Maîtres) wrote in a letter from 1895: “This title is somewhat pretentious, and makes me blush.”40 Nonetheless, he recommended that his aunt acquire Les Maîtres de l’Affiche to “give [to] her poster-­loving neph154  ·  T h e P o s t e r a n d P r i n t

ews” as “a gift,” and explained that it was a subscription “which costs 28 francs per year, and [includes] four color reproductions per month of all the famous posters.”41 Maîtres reshaped the material traits of large-­scale advertising posters destined for the streets, turning them into precious objects through size reduction and by using higher quality paper and inks. Advertising posters were printed on cheap paper for a short-­lived display on the street. This fact, along with the effect of weather and the constant pasting over of new posters, dictated a typical life span of no more than a few days for outdoor posters. The higher-­quality materials helped with conservation and earned Maîtres critical praise. Maurice Talmeyr, who was highly critical of the poster, viewing it as a negative social phenomenon, nonetheless commented on the “care” with which the edition was produced, its “remarkable skill in reproduction” and “luxuriousness.”42 Responding to the transformation of posters in Les Maîtres de l’Affiche, he noted that some of these “art posters” are not necessarily “posters” and properly belong in a collector’s album rather than on the wall, while other posters in the selection have a mural character.43 Hiatt too complimented Maîtres de l’Affiche on “a fine taste in selection and a remarkable skill in reproduction.”44 The material changes brought the poster in line with the characteristics of the art print and adapted it to the needs of the collector. These strategies, and others discussed below, contributed to a process of auratization that counteracted the poster’s original association with the street and with commercial advertising. The issue of scale was of paramount importance to collectors. The manageable size of the Maîtres prints made it possible to store them without difficulty in portfolios of moderate dimensions or display them in the home. The sheet size of the Maîtres prints was uniform — 28.5 × 39.5 cm (11.2 × 15.5 in) — though the image area differed.45 By comparison, the largest-­size advertising poster was the quadruple colombier (164 × 122 cm), and to achieve a larger size several posters were sometimes combined. Beraldi noted that the large scale of posters made collecting them prohibitive for most print collectors, leading these posters to be destroyed almost immediately, unless they were “salvaged by a few special collectors.”46 By contrast, those posters by Chéret that were smaller in size were preserved in portfolios and popular with “the bibliophile and print collector.”47 Thus, the large scale of the fragile poster printed on industrial paper presented collectors with problems of preservation, storage, display, and viewing, leading Hiatt to observe that collecting advertising posters required “nothing more than a little heroism.”48 Elsewhere he elaborated: Aura and Reproduction  ‡ 155

A number of posters three yards long by one and a half broad are liable to be somewhat in the nature of a white elephant. If they are folded up for the portfolio, each crease diminishes their charm, while to frame them one would require a gargantuan purse, and a Chicago Exhibition [the 1893 World’s Fair] in which to hang them when framed. The only practical solution of the problem seems to be to mount them on linen like wall-­maps with rollers and tape. In this way when rolled up they would not occupy much space, and they could be hung on a wall.49 Critics also commented on the difficulty of viewing the large-­format poster in small interiors, which did not afford the viewer adequate distance. Chéret stated in 1894: “My posters are not intended for close or detailed examination, but to be looked at from a distance of five or six meters. They should never be placed in a room.”50 A further dissonance involved in the domestic display of street posters resulted from the fact that the poster’s mode of address was designed specifically to attract, captivate, and leave its imprint on a passerby. Noting that posters were well-­suited to being viewed on the street, Hiatt observed in 1893 that “seen in an ordinary sized room they are liable to be a little too aggressive, for the great patches of bitter red and burning yellow insist on recognition, and the daring of the designs is more likely to be appreciated than their beauty.”51 The English designer Lewis F. Day similarly noted that, seen anywhere but on the hoardings, posters were “too aggressive,” and while aggressiveness was a virtue on the street, it was incompatible with interiors.52 The French critic Émile Straus, of La Critique, thought the poster was incompatible with interior spaces because it “suffocates, becomes anemic, when it is on the small walls of apartments. This free girl of the streets loses vitality when encased.”53 The reduced measurements helped Maîtres de l’Affiche adapt the poster/print to the viewing conditions within interior spaces and to temper its aggressive appeal. Saunier, reviewing Les Maîtres de L’Affiche in 1895, observed that Maîtres tamed the poster for collectors’ homes but did not altogether eliminate its association with the street: “One had to strive hard to replace the originals suitably, to give the illusion of a large poster, in short, to find the street in one’s home.”54 He thought the publication fulfilled collectors’ desires: “The most beautiful works of the past and those of the future will be reproduced with all the perfection desirable, thanks to the superb equipment now available to publishers.”55 An important element in distinguishing the collection of posters that appeared in Maîtres from regular posters was the critical context created by Marx’s prefaces. Marx, who served as inspector general of France’s provincial museums 156  ·  T h e P o s t e r a n d P r i n t

beginning in 1889, had organized the Centennial Exhibition of French Art at the Exposition universelle. He played a leading role in the decision to include applied and decorative arts in the exhibition of the Salon de la Société nationale in 1891, and, from 1895 on, in the Salon des artistes français. He was an important art critic and major champion of the decorative arts and of the poster. Thus his prefaces amounted to an endorsement by a well-­known critic and esteemed state museum official. They advanced various arguments in favor of regarding the poster as art print in an expanded field of decorative arts. For Marx, legitimizing posters was part of the wider struggle “to sweep away” the hierarchy of the arts, its “rank prejudices,” and to affirm the recognition of the decorative arts.56 Marx claimed the status of art for the poster from his first preface in 1896 to the last in 1900. In 1896 he asserted that the poster had “become a veritable art print.”57 Earlier, in his laudatory preface to the 1889 catalog for Chéret’s exhibition, Marx had already claimed that it was “under the pretext of advertisements” that Chéret’s “genius” produced “a thousand charming, merry evocations” and “raised the poster to the level of the art print.”58 In his prefaces to Les Maîtres de l’Affiche Marx repeatedly asserted the status of the poster as art: “The poster is like the print in technique and it is second to none, including painting, as to the richness of its impact.”59 “On what authority,” he asked rhetorically, “could one still refuse the poster the respect rightfully gained by the print to which it has been assimilated?”60 To establish the status of the poster as art Marx also referred to a wider art field, pointing out that the poster “gave rise to critics’ studies” and had its own historian (a reference to Maindron).61 He might have added, as other critics did, that the poster had its own specialized dealers. The leading print and poster dealer Ed. Sagot was highly esteemed among collectors and critics. Mellerio noted that Sagot was “always avid about things that are modern.”62 Uzanne marveled that in his tiny gallery, “barely a twelve square meter space, [Sagot] has found a way of keeping kilometers worth of rare pieces” and many ancient and modern illustrated posters.63 Another strategy for distinguishing the Maîtres poster/prints was embodied in the very fact of their presentation as a collection. Along with exhibitions, collections were central to the process of legitimizing art in a field made up of dealers, collectors, critics, and institutions, all of which participate in what Bourdieu has described as the consecration of art.64 Maîtres presented the potential collector with posters/prints that had not only been detached from their original function of advertising and commercial context but were also planted in a new context: a selection of works by the world’s best poster artists. In doing so, it Aura and Reproduction  ‡ 157

performed what Benjamin describes as the “decisive” act in collecting, namely detaching the object “from all its original functions in order to enter into the closest conceivable relation to things of the same kind.”65 In a note to its subscribers in 1897, Maîtres de l’Affiche described itself as a “collection” that formed “a gallery.”66 Marx emphasized the role of Maîtres de l’Affiche in forming a carefully selected collection from the rapidly increasing number of posters. He noted the fact that thousands of posters were being printed annually, making the selection by individual collectors more challenging. Maîtres eliminated the element of chance that governed the display of advertising posters on the street, “where the work of genius jostles the mediocre, the exquisite joins the vulgar.”67 Marx asserted that the Maîtres collection “offers a selection, which proves the diversity and brilliance of today’s talents.”68 He stressed the significance of the process of selection by referring to Maîtres de l’Affiche as “a Panthéon of the modern poster”69 and “a selection made for posterity.”70 Maîtres offered a ready-­made collection, freeing individual collectors of the need to view everything, whether on the street, at dealers, in large exhibitions or private collections, and make their own selection. Yet supplanting the individual collector’s search was problematic. Beraldi asserted that the mark of the true collector was precisely his ability to make personal choices based on having seen everything.71 This demanded cultivating both knowledge and taste. In Beraldi’s view, French print collectors formed their collections with “the most reasoned and assured taste, with a lot of personality in the research, and with a combination of prudence and audacity.”72 He objected to purchases of works en bloc. “The personality of the amateur, his taste, does it not reveal itself precisely in the originality of his choices?”73 Furthermore, Beraldi wrote, the amateur of prints, like the bibliophile, must never rest on his laurels, but always be on the lookout for a better épreuve. One strategy popular with contemporary collectors was to exchange works among themselves, as “it is in the permanent renewal of  his collection that [the collector] finds pleasure.”74 Beraldi asserted that the “incessant modification is the life of collections, their stagnation in an immutable state is their death.”75 We do not know what Beraldi thought of Maîtres de l’Affiche, but we can speculate that he would have approved of it for several reasons. Above all, the high quality of printing resulting in the preservation of versions of originally ephemeral posters would surely have been valued by Beraldi, who had explicitly recommended that Chéret publish a selection of his posters in reduced format so as to preserve them. As for the publication’s undermining of the traditional practice of individual collection, Beraldi would likely have assumed that serious 158  ·  T h e P o s t e r a n d P r i n t

collectors who subscribed to Maîtres would not have thereby stopped their own active collecting. As we have seen, Maîtres took various measures to auratize the poster, including its repurposing into an art print, size reduction, quality of paper and print, the placing of the poster in the context of a preselected collection, and the inclusion of Marx’s critical framework for each installment. These measures distanced the Maîtres print from the original poster, but Marx also reaffirmed the value of the street to the poster genre when he noted that the display of the poster on the street assured that it had contact with common people in the animated street, the site of discussions where everyone has a say.76 Furthermore, Marx elevated posters by comparing their appearance on the streets to the first Salons, the exhibitions of French paintings presented outdoors on the Place Dauphine and in the courtyard of the Palais Royal in 1673.77 He suggested that posters, like the paintings of academicians in these early Salons, were “subjected to the judgment of the street,”78 referring to the poster-­filled street as a contemporary “open-­air museum” (musée en plein vent).79 Thus he tied posters’ appearance on the street not to low culture but to the esteemed tradition of fine art of the academicians of the seventeenth century. The auratization of the poster began with publishers and collectors, but as Marx realized, it ultimately required a museum. In his final two prefaces Marx called on the state to establish a museum dedicated to the modern poster.80 Eight full decades later his call was answered with the foundation of the Musée de l’affiche.81 Marx recognized that the responsibility for founding a museum lay outside “the publisher’s realm.” It was, he said, “incumbent upon the State. Our museums’ Print Rooms must collect, shelter and transmit to posterity the entire poster production of our time. In this manner, day by day, a documentary collection will be formed which will be called upon to testify about art and life of our times; thus the museum will be founded which in the beginning will not escape ridicule, yet one which posterity will demand and open, logically, inevitably: The Modern Museum of the Illustrated poster.”82 Marx took up the issue again in the final preface in 1900. By then, the journal L’Estampe et l’Affiche had published the responses of artists and collectors to the idea of such a museum.83 Marx optimistically interpreted their varied views for and against such a museum as reflecting “few or hardly any differences of opinion” on “the principle of the project and its opportuneness.”84 On the other hand, he admitted that issues related to “the display, protection and communication of the posters did not fail to stir up some difficulties.”85 These, he proposed, Aura and Reproduction  ‡ 159

could be easily overcome. He envisioned the museum as “a Department of the future Musée des Arts Décoratifs, an annex of the Bibliothèque Nationale, or a separate building.”86 Marx imagined it “as deriving its features from the Cabinet d’estampes as well as the Salon, and decorated accordingly.”87 He discussed issues of exhibition, storage, preservation, classification, and curation. He also outlined the various sources for acquisitions of posters by the museum, including “gifts, bequests, and the fund of copies deposited with the State in accordance with law.”88 He recognized the complementary roles of state legislation, on the one hand, requiring the publisher to deposit a copy of each poster in the dépôt légal, and on the other, donations from private collectors.89 Marx’s justification of the call for the museum rested primarily on the poster’s ephemerality and the consequent need to preserve it.90 Unlike the individual collector, whose selection was typically governed by personal taste and inclination, the museum would acquire and preserve a systematic collection that aspired to completeness.91 Furthermore, the museum would have the beneficial effect of stimulating the poster artist with the “conviction that his work will survive the capriciousness of an ephemeral exhibition.”92 Responding to Marx’s vision, the editors of L’Estampe et l’Affiche echoed his arguments when they noted that the museum’s selection would be “at the same time a consecration.”93 Ironically, the very processes of repurposing posters into collectors’ prints led to a renewed appreciation of the original advertising poster as an object worthy of a state museum. The altered reproduction of the poster, though auratized through various means in the Maîtres de l’Affiche series, was not a substitute for the original, yet it was only once the repurposed versions of the poster existed that the status of the poster as an original was fully recognized, spurring the call for a specially designated museum. Marx himself was well aware that it was the very process of reproduction that led back to the original. In a pre-­Benjaminian discourse, there was nothing paradoxical about this. He commented on this issue in his last preface: “The interest taken in the reproduction of the most beautiful mural images [the posters in Les Maîtres de l’Affiche] has suggested the wish to preserve for posterity the originals from which the national movement obtained a legitimate dividend of glory, and the logic of reasoning induced us last year to call for a Museum of the Modern Poster.”94 Maîtres did not avail itself of one important tactic for the auratization of prints, namely the limited print run. The publisher of Maîtres included no information on the print run, probably in order to allow the freedom to print as much as the demand required. This was possible because rarification of prints was still in flux. As Michel Melot pointed out, Millet and the Impressionists invented the 160  ·  T h e P o s t e r a n d P r i n t

autonomous art print, which was not a reproduction of a painting. Degas and Pissarro limited their editions artificially, and numbered and signed their proofs by hand, regularizing a system that was already in practice.95 Thus rarity became relative, and print runs varied significantly. During the late 1870s and early 1880s Degas planned to publish fifty copies of the prints in Le Jour et la Nuit, a project that also involved Cassatt, Pissarro, Bracquemond, and others, but which did not materialize.96 Many of the art prints by Toulouse-­Lautrec were published in editions of one hundred, whereas the print run for most of his posters is estimated to have ranged between one thousand and three thousand.97 Some posters, for example by Chéret, Steinlen, and Privat-­Livemont, were printed in even higher print runs of ten thousand, though such large print runs were relatively rare and elicited special comment.98 Marx’s comments in the prefaces to Maîtres suggest that he did not view the multiple copies of lithographic reproduction as problematic but rather as a natural historic evolution: “In the course of the centuries, public life has been modified. . . . Tapestries no longer line the king’s path; signs are no longer patiently colored, cut into oak trees or hewn in the stone. Just as society, so the street has been transformed; it no longer witnesses the splendor of royal pomp nor the slow undertakings of the old master painters. The street’s adornment was exceptional, intermittent and unalterable; now it is always present and always renewed.”99 Likewise, for Beraldi, the “simple means of industrial production” were not in conflict with the acceptance of some of its products as art. As early as 1885, writing about Chéret, he asserted that “many of his posters are paintings [tableaux], — paintings executed with the simple means suitable to an industrial production and inexpensive, but paintings.”100 Nor did Mellerio require rarity to establish artistic value or original status. The important distinction for him lay between lithographic works that were a replication of an existing artwork (which he termed facsimile), and lithographic works of an original design.101 Both the advertising poster and the art lithographic print came under the latter category. Thus the “original” in the discourse on color lithography during the 1890s was not circumscribed by a binary distinction between multiples and a unique work but constituted as the opposite of the reproductive print, which lacked original design. Mellerio stressed that the multiple copies of the print represented an advantage, and credited Chéret’s posters with providing the foundation for the development of the original color lithographic art print in its multiple exemplars.102 The advertising poster was an original design, whereas Maîtres de l’Affiche featured repurposed reproductions of it. However, the fact that color lithography Aura and Reproduction  ‡ 161

was used in both, and that the poster was originally designed for the medium of lithography, helped distinguish it from the case of the chromolithograph (described by Mellerio as facsimile), which copied a painting, drawing, or watercolor, in the lithographic medium.103 Marx’s prefaces treated both the advertising posters and their reissues in Maîtres as originals. Rather than dwelling on their reproductive processes, he viewed the wide dissemination of ephemeral posters as suitable to an era of change, and saw them in the context of a historical continuum as successors to frescoes and paintings. He also stressed the originality and “inventive faculties” of those who designed them: On the outside and in the home it [the poster] has replaced the paintings that used to be visible at the doorstep of palaces, under the vaults of cloisters and churches; it is the mobile ephemeral picture that an era, infatuated with popularization and eager for change, called for. Its art has neither less meaning nor less prestige than the art of the fresco. . . . To meditate on their [poster artists’] works is to hasten the return of basic originality to the depraved inspiration, to stimulate the free expansion of inventive faculties.104 Marx emphasized originality, elsewhere stating also that the Maîtres collection was “the international tribute of original talent.”105 For all these reasons, Maîtres (as well as original art lithographs) was not subject to a binary division between a single original and its many copies. Within the parameters of the discourses of the 1890s, an “original” included the poster, the poster/print in the collection of Maîtres de l’Affiche, and fine-­art lithographic prints. So far we have considered the auratization of the print/poster by looking at the production and selection strategies of the Maîtres publishers and analyzing the discourses surrounding the original art print as formulated primarily by Beraldi, Marx, and Mellerio. These critics all agreed that the lithographic color print was an artwork so long as it was originally designed for the medium. None of them saw multiples as undermining this status; being a unique material object was simply not among the requirements for being regarded as “art.” In this respect, late nineteenth-­century critics of the poster and print diverge from Benjamin’s later theory about the aura as existing only in the experience of the singular painting. Turning to Bourdieu, we find that one of the most important practices in transforming an object into an artwork is the aesthetic gaze. This factor was particularly important in the case of color prints and posters whose status as art was, in the 1980s, still contested by many.

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The Collector’s Aesthetic Gaze Bourdieu argues that an artwork’s demand to be perceived aesthetically is grounded not solely on the intention of its artistic producer but also in “the beholder’s intention.”106 The beholder’s aesthetic point of view, which Bourdieu also calls the “pure gaze,” plays an important role in constituting the artwork. It bestows upon it the “aesthetic legitimacy” that constitutes “a relatively autonomous field.”107 Though he does not use Benjamin’s terminology, Bourdieu’s comments shed light on the idea of the aura. He reformulates the notion that an artwork derives its aura from being produced as a unique singular object and displayed in its original site, casting it instead in terms of the artwork’s consecration in the process of reception through the aesthetic gaze. According to Bourdieu, the aesthetic gaze also confers distinction on the person exercising it.108 It denotes class and requires an education that is not available to the masses, who generally prefer more accessible modes of photography and figurative art.109 By contrast, the “aesthetic mode of perception” is concerned with form over subject matter.110 The Print Amateur, 1900, a pointillist painting by the Dutch painter Jan Toorop (who also designed some posters), depicts the aesthetic gaze of the collector (Fig. 4.7). Applying Bourdieu’s insights, we may note that the collector’s gaze, his intent observation of the color print held in his hands, simultaneously establishes his own erudition and the status of the avant-­garde print as an auratic artwork. This is born out by a more detailed analysis of the painting, which is a portrait of Aegidius Willem Timmerman, a Dutch classical scholar, author, and collector. The painting represents the collector’s focused gaze in the solitude of his study, looking through his spectacles at a hand-­held print. The print he is scrutinizing is Toulouse-­Lautrec’s 1895 color lithograph of Marcelle Lender, the French dancer and entertainer (Fig. 3.2).111 Commissioned in the mid-­1890s by Julius Meier-­Graefe while he was an editor of the German periodical Pan, Toulouse-­Lautrec’s print was controversial at the time even with some of the editors of the avant-­garde journal, because it was perceived as too close in style to the poster. By showing the collector studying this contentious avant-­garde color print, the painting validates the collector’s advanced taste. This may have been apparent only to other progressive print collectors, because Toorop chose to tone down one of the print’s key features, its bright colors, in order to harmonize it with the painting’s overall color scheme. Timmerman’s identity as a collector is reinforced by the presence of artworks on the wall behind his desk, but above all is established by his contemplative gaze, which is the primary subject of the Aura and Reproduction  ‡ 163

4.7 Jan Toorop, The Print Collector (Dr. Aegidius Timmerman), 1900. Oil on canvas, 66.5 × 76 cm. Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands.

painting. The print characterizes Timmerman as belonging to the class of erudite collectors of fin-­de-­siècle avant-­garde art, while legitimizing the controversial print through his aesthetic gaze. Bourdieu’s discussion of the significance of the aesthetic gaze is partly anticipated by Benjamin’s analysis of the differences between the modes of perception of a painting, of mass media, film, or architecture. Benjamin does not discuss the viewing of posters or prints in his “Work of Art” essay, but his comments on the crisis of viewing paintings in the public spaces of the museum, and on the alternative mode of perception of architecture in urban spaces, are directly relevant to the viewing of posters. He notes that, unlike cinema and architecture, painting does not lend itself to a collective viewing by masses: “A painting has always exerted a claim to be viewed primarily by a single person or only by a few.”112 The viewing of “paintings by a large audience, as happens in the nineteenth century [in the Salon], is an early symptom of the crisis in painting.”113 Benjamin argues that this crisis was “triggered not only by photography,” that is to say, by repro164  ·  T h e P o s t e r a n d P r i n t

ductions of originals and the diminishing aura, but also “by the artwork’s claim to the attention of the masses,”114 since there is a “strongly adverse effect whenever painting is led by special circumstances as if against its nature, to confront the masses directly.”115 Honoré Daumier’s caricature Le Salon de 1857 depicts the opening of the Salon, “nothing but real connoisseurs, a total of 60,000 persons,” satirizing the inevitably failed attempt of the petit bourgeois to engage in a contemplative gaze in the midst of the crowd (Fig. 2.26). Film and architecture, on the other hand, lend themselves to collective reception. Benjamin proposes that “architecture has always provided the prototype of an artwork that is received in a state of distraction and through the collective.”116 Therefore the mode of reception of buildings is an alternative model to that of painting. Perceiving buildings does not demand individual concentration and a contemplative gaze (the aesthetic gaze in Bourdieu’s terminology) and does allow for the relationship of masses to the work of art.117 Buildings are received “by use and by perception.”118 Furthermore, the tactile reception of buildings “comes about not so much by way of attention as by way of habit. The latter largely determines the optical reception of architecture, which spontaneously takes the form of casual noticing, rather than attentive observation.”119 Thus, reception “through habit” is an alternative to deliberate contemplation of an artwork, namely to the aesthetic gaze.120 Unlike the aesthetic gaze, it occurs in a state of distraction, a mode that is “a symptom of profound change in apperception.”121 Benjamin’s comments on architecture are particularly useful in thinking about the reception of posters, since the latter, like buildings, were seen at a distance in a bustling urban environment by passersby with no deliberate intention of observing them. Posters were a form of mass media, providing entertainment and perceived in a state of distraction.122 The relatively private encounter with paintings belonged to the past, taking place in monasteries or churches, or in princely courts up to the eighteenth century (as mentioned by Benjamin),123 and also to major art collectors of the financial elite in modern times (which Benjamin does not discuss). In the late nineteenth century, collecting original prints gave members of the middle class access to the experience of private aesthetic contemplation. The kind of fully focused, sustained looking by an individual at an artwork, which was no longer available in the exhibition of art to masses in the Salon, was available to collectors of prints. It is in this sense that, as Peter Parshall observes, the print satisfied “a longing for a private aesthetic experience.”124 Collectors of prints exercised a focused, contemplative gaze on selected prints from their portfolios in the privacy of their homes or relative privacy of a gallery. The difference between their gaze Aura and Reproduction  ‡ 165

and the distracted mass viewing of posters on the street is analogous to the difference between viewing a painting in a private gallery and viewing architecture on the street or film at the cinema hall. In transforming selected large-­scale posters into a collection of small prints in a portfolio, Maîtres aimed to elicit a mode of looking entirely different from the one elicited by posters on the street. At a time when, as Benjamin recognized, reception in the state of distraction increasingly characterized urban experience, the aesthetic gaze cast by collectors on the prints in their private homes or semiprivate galleries provided a precious opportunity to exercise a more contemplative appreciation of an artwork. Moreover, since prints were sequestered in portfolios rather than readily visible at all times, collectors had to make a deliberate decision about when and which ones to view. Like other art prints, the Maîtres de l’Affiche prints were intended for collectors and thus designed to elicit a mode of private and focused viewing that was the diametric opposite of encountering large-­scale posters on the street. Passersby who had no intention to look at posters haphazardly pasted on walls and hoardings may have noticed them at a distance without paying them any close attention, as with buildings they passed by on their way. By contrast, collectors selected particular prints from the many works kept in portfolios, observing them one at a time and at close range. Whereas some late nineteenth-­century observers complained that the street poster imposed itself upon them, even going so far as to describe themselves as feeling assaulted and invaded by posters,125 the print collector could always control the timing, content, and pace of his viewing. And unlike the ephemeral street posters that were here today and gone tomorrow, prints could be enjoyed by print collectors in repeated viewings on demand. These differences of circumstance brought a unique intimacy to the print collector’s looking at a given print; Beraldi called the relationship an “intimate communion.”126 This special rapport is aptly captured by Toorop’s painting.

Auratization and De-­auratization: Resilience, Vulnerability, Adaptation Did the poster, with its advertising function and multiple prints, contribute to the loss of the aura of original art? Or did it rather lead to a fine-­art print, thereby contributing to the acceptance of a new form of art and making art accessible to widening circles of the middle classes? The first view reflects the ideas developed in Benjamin’s influential “Work of Art” essay; the second reflects the thinking of major late nineteenth-­century poster and print critics like Mellerio and Marx. 166  ·  T h e P o s t e r a n d P r i n t

Among Benjamin’s important innovations, I contend, were, first, his consideration of art and mass media as interrelated cultural phenomena and his resultant reflection on the fate of art in a radically changing environment of reproductive media, and second, his understanding of unique artworks as well as reproductive media (such as reproductions of paintings or cinema) as inseparable from the sites and modes of their reception in the social arena. Both these insights have been important to my analysis in this chapter. Yet the analysis of particular late nineteenth-­century case studies, such as Les Maîtres de l’Affiche, also raises further questions regarding the complex relations between what is considered original art and reproduction. Benjamin’s later paradigm that pits the original against the copy does not fully apply to Maîtres and to other high-­quality reissuing of posters during the 1890s. In the case of posters, it was not the original — the poster printed on cheap paper and pasted on street walls — that was most valued. What mattered more to collectors at the time was the high quality of the printed version. As Chaix and dealers like Sagot, who reissued selected posters during the 1890s, understood well, reissues were expected to improve upon the material quality of the original poster by printing it on better paper and with better ink. Often these repurposed posters were also endowed with relative rarity by being numbered and signed, as in the case of Sagot’s reissuing of selected posters by Chéret. Sometimes the advertising function was altogether obscured by the poster’s being printed without any text or captions, thus producing the avant la lettre poster. These last two strategies of auratizing were not applied to the posters featured in Maîtres, which were neither numbered nor signed, nor cleansed of their original advertising function. Benjamin’s influential theory about the withering aura of art in the era of reproducibility, then, accounts for an important process but appears to overlook counteracting dynamics. Benjamin discussed, on the one hand, the dwindling aura of art of cult value, and on the other, the rise of non-­auratic mass media of an exhibition value, such as lithography, photography, and film. Yet he did not provide an explanation for a third process, closely related to these two, namely the auratizing of certain visual objects made in reproductive media. The Maîtres de l’Affiche prints exemplify this process. Auratization occurred within the social and institutional “field” (Bourdieu’s term), not only in production and dissemination, but also in the process of reception. This is already implied in Benjamin’s discussion of the contemplative gaze on artworks versus its liquidation when viewed in the context of the masses. Collecting practices, including the collector’s aesthetic gaze, played a significant role in the reception of the art print, including the repurposed poster turned into a print, as in the case of Maîtres. Bourdieu’s Aura and Reproduction  ‡ 167

theories on distinction, the aesthetic gaze, and the crucial role of the art field constituted by intermediaries and institutions are all useful in expanding our understanding of the social dimension of Benjamin’s theory. The illustrated poster of the 1880s and 1890s was born at the moment when industrialized products became consumable goods that depended on a new kind of advertising. It was, however, also part of a development in the arts of the fin-­ de-­siècle. Supporters of democratization championed an art made in reproductive processes accessible to a broad public of the middle classes, as opposed to expensive, rare, or unique art objects collected by the financial elites. In this they anticipated Benjamin’s embracing of the dominant mass media of his time —  photography and film. Yet, unlike Benjamin, they maintained that the art print made in the reproductive process of lithography and not confined to a single unique object was indeed (in Benjamin’s later term) auratic. They insisted on the importance of original design for the reproductive medium, distinguishing the original prints from mere copies of existing artworks. Progressive critics such as Marx and Mellerio championed the production of affordable original art prints for a wide public, advocating a democratizing of the unique art object through the expanded territory of the art print. Rather than focusing their discussion on the diminishing aura of art in the chromolithographic reproductions of paintings then flooding the market, they argued that art should adapt to the use of late nineteenth-­century reproductive technologies. Art’s ability to adapt itself to the use of reproductive processes for the creation of new forms of original artworks was a testimony to its resilience. But it was also the crux of its vulnerability. The 1890s phenomenon of mass reproduction of chromolithographs that replicated paintings exemplifies Benjamin’s later ideas about the diminishing aura of the artwork. Yet if we break with what has been a foundational assumption of a binary dichotomy between de-­auratized copies and an auratic original to consider a wider range of simultaneous practices, we find that the late nineteenth century also saw the emergence of a field of original art as multiples in print media. An important distinction between an original and mass reproduction did remain in place, but the original was no longer necessarily unique; rather it came to be accepted as one object of a limited edition. This fits Bourdieu’s views that the determination of the aesthetic dimension of art, as distinct from other objects, takes place in the social arena of the field, composed of intermediaries in the form of individuals and institutions, including the collector’s aesthetic gaze. Late nineteenth-­century practices already included an application of the limited-­edition model developed in prints to numerous other media, especially 168  ·  T h e P o s t e r a n d P r i n t

the decorative arts, including furniture, stained glass, textiles, and ceramics.127 And while these practices have certainly evolved, today’s reigning model remains, perhaps surprisingly, grounded in that of the late nineteenth century. As mass reproductions — whether degraded copies, super-­high-­resolution images, or hand-­painted copies — circulate at ever increasing rates, the art world has adopted the model of a restricted number of multiple originals. In spite of powerful challenges — including contestations by artists and others who deem rarification strategies reactionary, and repeated attempts to subvert the paradigms imposed by the art market — a conflicted adherence to the model of the limited edition prevails. Applied over the years to a wide variety of media, including sculpture, photographic prints, videos, and CDs, the late nineteenth-­century model is constantly adapted to contemporary needs. It continues to be based on the field of art, including the art market, which defined what counts as an “original” and later redefined it as a multiple in a limited edition. The analysis of Les Maîtres de l’Affiche has demonstrated the complexity of the process of auratization in the late nineteenth century, which distinguished the hybrid print/poster featured in the Maîtres portfolio from cheaply printed large-­scale posters through material characteristics such as size and quality of paper and ink; through the context of curatorial selection and the formation of a collection; through critical discussion, and mode of reception. This case study suggests that the vulnerability and resilience of art are in dialogic interaction in eras that give rise to new modes of reproduction. Qualifying the twentieth-­ century modernist dichotomy that has been so influential after Benjamin, the analysis of the Maîtres case suggests that auratization of certain visual objects made in reproductive media occurs simultaneously with the de-­auratization of mass-­produced reproductions in dynamic and interdependent cultural processes of adaptation. In the late nineteenth century the championing of the decorative arts was integral to the wish to break down the hierarchy of the arts. Félix Fénéon’s late nineteenth-­century utopian vision of the mixing of art with everyday life attests to the great innovation of these ideas at the time. Employing the slang of the journal in which he published, Fénéon wrote: “Day’ll come, Goddam, when art will fit into the life of ordinary Joes, just like steak and vino. The plates, spoons, chairs, beds — the whole works, what d’ya think! . . . Everything, great funs, will have nifty shapes and fabulous colors. When that happens, the artisse [sic] won’t look down his nose at the worker: they will be united.”128 This was not quite the democratized modernist future that Mellerio and Marx had envisioned, since they believed in preserving the category of fine art and extending it to demoAura and Reproduction  ‡ 169

cratic, accessible, manifestations of the art of their time, namely the decorative arts in general and poster and print in particular. Their efforts to bring about an equality of the arts did not succeed. Instead, the emerging field of “design” replaced the late nineteenth-­century concepts of “decorative arts,” “minor arts,” and “social art.” Design would go on to become an important component in a complex distinction drawn by twentieth-­century culture whose other components were fine art, advertising, and mass media.

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u

PART III

The Poster as Design and Advertising

5 t Art and Advertising in the Street The conditions under which the pictorial placard has to be seen are so stringent and peculiar as almost to constitute the designing of posters a separate art with conventions and limitations of its own. — Charles Hiatt, 1899

Practitioners of the poster recognized that a new field was developing. As early as 1900, the supplement of the British publication the Poster announced that “the use of the picture is increasing and a new field has been opened for many an artist who has struggled in vain to exhibit a painting at the Royal Academy, in designing catchy and attractive advertisements.”1 The British poster designer and critic William S. Rogers noted that successful painters who were members of the Royal Academy “grievously failed” because “they had not sufficiently mastered the function of the poster.”2 Drawing an observation from his own “firsthand knowledge” he concluded that designing a successful poster required knowledge of design and of the “poster-­craft.”3 And the poster craft required not only being a painter, but also knowing the possibilities of the lithographic process and understanding “the modern exigencies of advertising.”4 The role of the illustrated poster in pioneering urban advertising and laying a foundation for modern graphic design has yet to be fully recognized. The field of graphic design was already beginning to take shape during the formative years of the illustrated poster — the 1880s and 1890s — several decades before it was thus named. Late nineteenth-­century commentators used a variety of terms to designate the field in which the poster participated, from “decorative arts,”

“applied arts,” “minor arts,” “lesser arts,” “crafts,” and “decoration,” to “social art,” “industrial art,” and “commercial art.”5 The proliferation of terms, some of which primarily distinguished posters from the major arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture rather than defining them on their own terms, reflected the need for a new and more precise terminology.6 By the time the term “graphic design” was introduced, in the second decade of the twentieth century,7 posters no longer occupied a central place in the professional activities of most graphic designers because the bulk of illustrated advertising had shifted to billboards, newspapers, and periodicals. Even though the invention of the term lagged behind the practice, as is so often the case, as will be argued here, the earlier design for the poster was an important precedent for the design of advertising, which became central in graphic design. It was not, of course, a mere lack of terminology that left the medium of the poster on the outskirts of what would become “graphic design.” In historical surveys of graphic design, the role of the late nineteenth-­century poster in developing this emerging field was largely overshadowed by the prevailing focus (derived from the discipline of art history) on individual artists and styles.8 As Steven Heller has argued, aesthetic formalist accounts tended to overlook the function of advertising and the role of the public and client.9 More recently, new histories and specialized studies of graphic design have explored graphic works, including posters, within various cultural, social, political, institutional, and technological contexts.10 Yet their discussion of posters has necessarily been limited, given that it is situated within a comprehensive survey spanning in some cases from as early as prehistoric mark-­making to postmodernist graphics. More specifically, studies of design history have rarely paused to explore the impact on poster design of the unique context of urban display, with its characteristic mode of looking, or to study the poster’s critical reception;11 nor have they pinpointed the origins of a modern design discourse in poster criticism of the 1890s. These questions are at the center of the current chapter,12 which contends that the design of late nineteenth-­century posters was shaped by the dialogue between the poster’s use of artistic means, on the one hand, and its response to its urban display site, on the other: born on the street, the poster was the offspring of an encounter between art and advertising, aesthetics and function.13 In what follows, I propose also that a new design discourse developed mostly by British poster critics in the late nineteenth century played a significant role in the emergence of graphic design. These critics did not treat poster design as an autonomous artistic activity but rather evaluated its success in terms of an effective integration of aesthetics and function, stressing repeatedly that poster artists had to take into ac174  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

count the fact that posters had to be effective as advertisements and were viewed on the street. Thus this primary physical site of the poster played a decisive role in enabling the designers’ innovations. The designer of the poster was compelled to invent a mode of appeal that would be noticed by its intended audience, the general public, amid the chaos of a bustling urban environment. This simple fact has been largely obscured by the proliferation of the most often repeated myth about the poster during the late nineteenth century (especially in the French context), namely that it turned the street into a museum for the masses. During the 1890s, numerous critics and commentators referred to the Parisian street as a gallery, a museum, or a Salon. Indeed, the idea became a worn-­out cliché, repeated mostly by French critics. Examples abound, including Jules Clare­ tie’s statement in 1893 that the poster has given Paris its “museum of images, its exhibition . . . in the open air,”14 and Marius Vachon’s observation that the “Salon of the street,” created by the illustrated poster, was an “essential décor of Parisian life.”15 The Courrier Français wrote of the “Salon of the poor.”16 Roger Marx, the French critic and a state museum official who was a staunch and eloquent advocate of the poster, even likened the poster’s display on the street to the first French Salons of painting — the seventeenth-­century academicians’ exhibitions on the street — thereby offering an allusion that suggested a high-­culture pedigree for the poster.17 At the same time, he also associated the street with postrevolutionary democracy, describing it as an animated public space where discussions took place and everyone had a voice and a vote about the posters they saw — and indeed using the term suffrage universelle (universal suffrage).18 The myth of the street-­as-­museum was reiterated even on the Parisian stage. Vive la liberté! Revue libre, rapide, incohérente et aristophanesque . . . , a show whose stage set consisted of a wall covered with posters by Jules Chéret, featured a central figure who declares: “The poster has reached perfection and the walls of today have become the Salons of the people.”19 French critics used this popular idea for a twofold purpose: to elevate posters to the esteemed category of art, but at the same time to distinguish them from the high art associated with the elites by underscoring the democratic aspect of this art form that was free for all and accessible to all on the streets. Despite these many enthusiastic proclamations, the preeminent French print expert Henri Beraldi, one of the most astute observers of the visual culture of the late nineteenth century, sounded a skeptical note. Posing the question “Should one call posters the ‘museum of the street’?”20 he answered a resounding no. He noted that one could walk an entire day, covering some ten or twelve kilo­ meters of Parisian streets, without encountering a single poster. Posters were Art and Advertising in the Street  ‡ 175

displayed primarily on the temporary fences erected around construction sites, on designated hoardings, and in various other places where they were posted surreptitiously. One had to know where to find them and to possess inquisitive eyes trained to seek them out. The so-­called museum, Beraldi concluded, in fact existed not on the street but “only in the poster exhibitions and with the poster collectors,” especially in the portfolios of major collectors like Ernest Maindron and Constant Dessoliers.21 Today we can easily agree with Beraldi that, despite the numerous claims to the contrary, the poster did not turn the street into a museum for the people nor even a Salon of the poor. Rather, posters turned the street into a commodified space where advertisers paid the municipality or building owners for the right to post posters and appeal to passersby by providing a free spectacle that was not merely art nor even entertainment, but commerce. Critics typically did not claim that the street in London was an art gallery. To the contrary, British commentators affirmed that the London street was very far from this ideal, already in an 1881 article, titled “The Streets as Art-­Galleries,” published in the Magazine of Art.22 The article urged that the London street should become an art gallery, by artists designing posters that would replace the ugly, even “evil” advertisements posted on hoardings, in order to educate the working classes, elevate their poor taste, and ultimately “improve the overall culture of the nation.”23 Several years after London did have its own artistic poster advertising, an article about Dudley Hardy in 1898 mentioned that the sensation caused by his Yellow Lady poster raised the hope that ”London might in time be turned into a vast picture gallery, where it would be possible to feast their eye free, gratis, and for nothing.”24 Marion Harry Spielmann, who wrote an in-­ depth article on the development of the English poster, praised the artistic poster and contrasted it with the “horrors” of mid-­century posters.25 The earlier vulgar English posters “made a walk in London streets past London hoardings a matter of tribulation.”26 Spielmann quoted an artist saying, “To imagine London billed with good figures by good designers is, I fear, to imagine a Utopia.”27 In the late 1890s British commentators continued to criticize. The column “The Hoardings” in the London-­based journal the Poster repeatedly criticized the paucity of artistic posters seen in London.28 Charles Hiatt, the British critic who wrote regularly for the Poster, lamented in an 1899 article, “Posters and the Beauty of London,” that “travelling by the Underground Railway is a nervous operation,” aggravated by the “bewildering and forever changing maze of advertisements” which dazzle “the tired eyes of the traveller.”29 He followed this with a rare more positive comment: “All these are as detestable as can be, but the pictorial placard, seen under proper conditions, so far from disfiguring the streets 176  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

of London, materially adds to their gaiety and interest.”30 Hiatt, however, made a more modest claim in the rest of his article. Arguing for the covering of London’s hoardings with posters, even though they only rarely featured posters of a high artistic quality, he acknowledged that “the poor man’s picture gallery” was usually quite limited in its offering. This despite the fact that London was being built up more rapidly than any other European city and thus had more hoardings than any other city, and these “should be covered with posters, even when the posters have small claim to consideration as works of art. Surely more amusement is to be derived from ‘the poor man’s picture gallery’ than from square yards of sightless deal.”31 As was typical for Hiatt, he made a clear distinction between “the banal designs of commerce, or the ferocious orgies of the colour-­printer’s hack,” and posters “which are really works of art” such as those by Hardy and the Beggarstaffs.32 Hiatt argued for the artistic poster on the street on the pragmatic ground that “nothing is more certain than that the hoardings will still continue to be used for the purposes of advertisement, and it behooves reasonable men to see to it that they are made as agreeable to the eye and as refreshing to the mind as possible.”33 Although the street-­as-­art-­gallery was more a myth than reality in Paris, and only an aspiration in London, the street did play an important role, as argued here, in the development of the poster and hence of advertising and ultimately graphic design.34 Indeed, some late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century critics, and not only from France, recognized that “the poster was born on the Parisian boulevard.”35 In actuality, posters were pasted not only on boulevards, but also on many small streets, as is evident in many of Atget’s photographs. As I propose, the significance of the street for the poster was that it necessitated a new “speech type”— to borrow Mikhail Bakhtin’s term coined to describe verbal utterances in the novel. The new speech type of the poster was suited to its particular environmental conditions rather than to those of art exhibitions displayed in museums and galleries, or of art displayed in domestic interiors. Bakhtin understood the importance of the environment to the development of any utterance, noting that the living utterance takes shape and meaning at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment.36 In the case of the poster, it took shape in the chaotic material environment of the hoarding and wall on the street. Like other living utterances discussed by Bakhtin, the poster “cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by socio-­ideological consciousness” and thus becomes an “active participant in social dialogue.”37 Applying Bakhtin’s ideas, we may envision the poster as a new type of language born of multiple dynamic relationships. Among these was the Art and Advertising in the Street  ‡ 177

conflicted interchange between the established field of art and the emerging, still controversial field of advertising. Whereas artists and critics sometimes made the case that art made for good advertisement, this was typically not the opinion of advertisers. As a result, a chronic tension persisted between the priorities of advertising and aesthetics, and by extension, as we will see, between the poster designer and the commissioner/client. The cultural interchanges and conflicts that played a major role in the birth of the poster have become all but invisible in most subsequent historical accounts. In an effort to recuperate them, the remainder of this chapter analyzes both written and visual materials by way of exploring the emerging design discourse of the 1890s. This simultaneous analysis of writings (by critics and designers) and of visual depictions of posters in diverse media treats texts and images as equally important platforms that mediate the poster to its designers and to the public.

Design for the Street The street itself was experienced as a spectacle even before the illustrated poster. The Parisian boulevards were famous for their attractions for flâneurs. In London, as Linda Nead shows, streets were the focus in John Murray’s Handbook of Modern London (the most widely used guide at the time), which affirmed that “there is not a more striking sight in London than the bustle of its great streets.”38 Whereas contemporary scholars have paid much attention to various media, particularly photography and film, the crucial role played by the illustrated poster in the explosion of image making and urban visual experience has yet to be fully studied.39 It was a modern design genre that was inextricably tied to the street. And it was the first graphic genre that mobilized artistic skills to the presentation of an image-­centered advertisement on the street. Many designers, critics, and commentators wrote about the importance of designing for the street. As they realized, the conditions in which the poster was encountered on the street did not allow spectators to practice an ideal contemplative gaze, the kind of gaze long associated with looking at paintings in galleries and museums, and even more so in private collections. Rather, the poster had to attract the attention of an ambulatory potential viewer in a busy urban setting that offered many competing stimuli. Furthermore, given the constant turnover of posters displayed side by side on the city hoardings and walls, the design of every individual poster had to be effective in an unpredictable and rapidly changing environment. 178  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

To grab the attention of distracted, rushing passersby, the poster had to be designed to communicate in a split second.40 This was the case whether it was stationary (as when posted on a wall) or itself mobile, displayed on the bodies of walking “sandwich men” or on the exteriors of moving carts and specially designated vehicles. Critics and poster artists, both French and English, repeatedly pointed out that a fundamental feature of any successful poster design was its ability to be taken in at a glance, to make a fast impression and fix an image in the minds of its passing viewers. For example, French critics noted in the 1890s that posters “summarily synthesize, with a clear intensity. . . . Their symbolism imposes itself on everyone in brief and rapid traits”;41 that the poster had to make its announcement “immediate,” and to “influence instantaneously.”42 In Britain, Hiatt was one of several critics who commented that the poster’s central challenge was to catch the eye and deliver its message simply and directly because “the man on the street” will not “spend a long time in unraveling the meaning” of a poster.43 The ultimate goal of the poster, however, as both British and French critics acknowledged, was that of “persuading the buyer.”44 Posters advertised a wide range of commercial industrial products (such as cosmetics, fashionable clothing and accessories, packaged biscuits, alcoholic beverages, lamp oil, sewing machines, new kitchen appliances, bicycles), cultural products and entertainments (such as books, newspapers, journals, exhibitions, theatrical and musical performances, café concerts, circuses), establishments (department stores, restaurants, taverns, brasseries), and services (such as train transportation).45 Their efficacy in this capacity was the foremost measure of their success. Hiatt put it bluntly when he wrote that the poster artist “is the servant of the tradesman. His first business is not to achieve a decoration, but to call the attention of the man in the street to the merits of an article.”46 French and English poster designers themselves commented on the necessity of tailoring their designs to the street environment. The leading British poster designer, Dudley Hardy, noted in 1894: “When designing a pictorial advertisement, the object to be kept in view should surely be to produce something novel and striking, which will attract the passer-­by and compel his attention.”47 Like many other designers, he regarded “simplicity” as the “secret of success.”48 His posters were highly effective in implementing these ideas, as seen in an 1899 photograph of a hoarding displaying his poster A Gaiety Girl, advertising a revival of the show of the same title at Daly’s theater (Fig. 5.1). Even without being able to show the bright red dress lit up by a yellow background, the black-­and-­white Art and Advertising in the Street  ‡ 179

5.1 (above) Mills, Posters on a hoarding by Daly’s Theatre, including Dudley Hardy’s poster for the revival of A Gaiety Girl, 1899. Photograph. Aerofilms of Borehamwood. 5.2 (right) Dudley Hardy, “A Gaiety Girl,” Prince of Wales’ Theatre, 1893. Waterlow & Sons, London. 224 × 100 cm. Image © Victoria and Albert Museum. Given by Mrs. J. T. Clarke, E.376–1921.

photograph of the hoarding conveys how Hardy’s poster asserts itself boldly in a group of several other theatrical posters. Hardy’s A Gaiety Girl, 1893 (for the Prince of Wales Theatre) features a large-­scale female figure in mid-­action, her dynamic silhouette sharply delineated against the flat background (Fig. 5.2).49 Hardy notes that the poster’s border is particularly broad so as to throw it into “greater prominence” when it is surrounded by “every conceivable kind of advertising.”50 A Gaiety Girl encapsulated Hardy’s ideas about the well-­designed poster, which, as he defined it, “both from the artistic and the commercial point of view, should be as simple and striking as possible, very little background, very little details, a bold, striking outline, which arrests the eye of the passer-­by.”51 Chéret, who had designed over one thousand posters by the time Toulouse-­ Lautrec made his first poster in 1891, and was considered in the nineteenth century the father of the illustrated poster and credited with making the poster artistic, similarly stressed the importance of a poster design’s responsiveness to its environment. In his 1894 article he stated, “Designing illustrated advertising is like fresco painting, one must take into account the special atmospheric conditions under which one’s work will appear, and must employ the means best adapted to the end in view.”52 But the poster was a fresco painting in the age of advertisement, as Chéret was well aware: the designer’s “aim should be to find something that will arrest the attention and appeal to the imagination of the average passer-­by as he glances at the advertisement from the street pavement or the top of an omnibus.”53 Chéret explained that he designed posters to be seen on the street from “a distance of about five or six meters,” and that they “are not intended for close or detailed examination.”54 Posters thus demand an aesthetic strategy different from that of painting: “In the case of illustrated posters which are intended exclusively for walls and advertising boards, an artist may with impunity employ combinations and contrasts which would be totally inadmissible in a carefully executed oil or water-­color painting. For instance, such bold contrasts as scarlet on green, dark blue on yellow, or red on light blue, would be utterly out of place on a canvas intended for the salon, whilst they may be most effectively used by a skillful designer of illustrated advertisements without seeming incongruous.”55 Likewise, Rogers also stressed that posters must communicate effectively at a distance, requiring a design that possesses a “breadth of effect” and avoids breaking up color masses: “Many designs . . . when viewed at a distance of sixty feet —  say across an ordinary thoroughfare — merge into a mere smudge of greys, when with a little more knowledge and a great deal less labour they might have been made to tell their tale clearly at that distance.”56 The American author and critic Art and Advertising in the Street  ‡ 181

H. C. Bunner, in an 1895 essay titled “American Posters, Past and Present,” published in Scribner’s Magazine, listed a long list of “the points by which every poster should be judged,” including the following: It is sufficiently striking to catch the eye. It is sufficiently attractive to hold the gaze and to invite further inspection. It conveys its advertisement directly, literally, and pictorially.57 Despite certain distinct differences in the urban environments of Paris, London, New York, and numerous other cities, critics and designers in Britain, France, and the United States all agreed that the bustle of urban street life dictated certain common characteristics of design for posters: bold shapes, clear outlines, a simplified style, brilliant colors, an emphasis on the surface, flat color areas, and the elimination of detail, shading, and three-­dimensional space. These features characterized the decorative poster, as opposed to the realist poster, to which critics in both France and England objected. On other points English and French critics differed. Roger Marx and André Mellerio, the most prominent French poster and print critics, were concerned above all with paving the way for a broad acceptance of the poster and its offspring, the originally designed color print, as art.58 British critics, meanwhile, focused their efforts on defining the constitutive elements of a good poster design. They stressed that while the poster designer must possess artistic skills of “fine colour and accurate drawing,”59 a poster could not be judged by considering aesthetics in their own right but, rather, in the first place, by judging the design’s effectiveness within its conditions of display and in fulfilling its advertising purpose. Hiatt, the foremost British poster critic, wrote repeatedly about the criteria for successful poster design. After publishing his book on posters in 1895 at age twenty-­five, he contributed regularly to the London-­based journal the Poster, becoming one of its editors in late 1898.60 In January 1901, he became the sole editor of the magazine, which was renamed the Poster and Art Collector.61 It was in his writings in the Poster that Hiatt most consistently developed progressive ideas about design, of which the following passage is typical: “[The designer] must recognize the circumstances under which his designs will be seen, and work within the comparatively narrow limitations which those circumstances impose upon him. He is almost forced into emphatic contrasts of colour and bold simplicity of pattern. The so-­called realism which comes with much highly wrought detail is fatal to the object which he has in view.”62 Hiatt regarded the success of the poster as a function of several factors: the distance from which the poster is 182  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

seen, its height of display, and its ability to get its message across quickly without necessitating close examination and to stand up to the loud competition of neighboring posters. He observed that Alphonse Mucha’s posters for the actress Sarah Bernhardt, such as La dame aux camélias, Sarah Bernhardt, Théâtre de la Renaissance, 1896, work well as advertisements only when displayed outside the theater at the eye level of pedestrians (Fig. 5.3). Given these conditions, one would certainly “stop a considerable time, to examine them. A glance at them induces minute inspection for every inch covered with elaborate pattern.”63 But Mucha’s poster would not be effective if posted high up on the hoarding, where “it would simply be killed by its less august and refined neighbors.”64 Moreover, its subdued color schemes were unsuited for holding the spectator’s attention: “The whites, creams, mauves, dull purples, and sober reds and greens . . . fail to produce startling and vivid impressions, and small broken masses of gold and silver go for nothing when seen from a distance.”65 The French critic G. de Saint-­Aubin also praised the dazzling aesthetic complexity of Mucha’s posters while noting that their subtle speech fell short of being noticed on the street. When seen next to immense, brightly colored posters, Mucha’s works would be “fatally eclipsed.” Their “artistic superiority is remarkable,” wrote Saint-­Aubin, but as posters they are inferior because “the eyes are not immediately struck” by them, and the gaze, though “dazzled,” is “not convinced.”66 Hiatt, whose critical writing on the effectiveness of posters on the street was particularly comprehensive, considered any poster by the British Beggarstaff Brothers (James Pryde and William Nicholson) as superior to most because it “simply cries its neighbours down; designs which are merely graceful and pretty sink into complete insignificance, and the ordinary placard of commerce stands no chance when placed in juxtaposition to these victorious decorations.”67 Comparing works by Mucha and the Berggarstaffs, he observed that whereas in Mucha’s posters “complicated details run riot,” in the Beggarstaffs’ “detail is reduced to an absolute minimum,”68 and while “Mucha’s poster yields up its story only after close examination . . . the Beggarstaffs’ placard cries its message to every passer-­by.”69 The Beggarstaffs’ Hamlet, 1894 serves as a good example of their radically simplified poster design (Fig. 5.4), its austerity diametrically opposed to Mucha’s rich opulence, as evident in his La dame aux camélias. Mucha situated the elegant actress in the vertical poster within a sumptuous decorative context, using hand-­drawn letters to form a decorative pattern that frames the image. The Beggarstaffs’ Hamlet, originally designed for the W. S. Hardy Shakespeare Company, is also a vertical poster, yet unlike Mucha’s La dame aux camélias, here the Art and Advertising in the Street  ‡ 183

5.3 (left) Alphonse Mucha, La dame aux camélias, Sarah Bernhardt, Théâtre de la Renaissance, 1896. Champenois, Paris. 205 × 72 cm. 5.4 (right) The Beggarstaffs, Hamlet, 1894. Stencil, 171.2 × 73.4 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, E.371–1921. Image © Desmond Banks.

designers stripped away all detail and rigorously avoided ornamentation, placing the flattened silhouette of the black-­clad Hamlet contemplating a skull against a flat, beige background. Below the figure they included the single word “Hamlet” in sans serif hand-­drawn dark lettering.70 Hiatt’s essay on the Beggarstaffs analyzed the features of their highly successful artistic posters and judged them in terms of their performance on the hoardings: “Absolute simplicity of pattern, flat masses of sober yet telling colour, amazingly effective lettering, are three of the distinguishing features of the Beg184  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

garstaff posters which perfectly fulfill their first business of advertisement in that they call aloud for recognition on the hoardings.”71 Following the same criteria, Hiatt judged as a failure a poster by the esteemed French academic artist Puvis de Chavannes because it could not “hold its own on the hoardings with the gleeful mondaines of Chéret’s, or the sensuous and decorative dames of Mucha” (Fig. 2.14).72 Though he recognized Puvis’s works as “distinguished,” Hiatt described his poster as “ornaments more suited to the quietude of the cloister than the feverish flaunting whirl of the boulevards.”73 It should be noted that Hiatt directed this criticism at a poster that was actually a reproduction of a Puvis mural for the Panthéon, L’enfance de Sainte Geneviève (printed in 1896 by Lemercier for the Union for Moral Action, reissued by the Maîtres de l’Affiche in 1897). But his comments apply no less validly to the one poster that Puvis designed specifically as such, Exposition du centenaire de la lithographie, Galerie Rapp, 1895 (Fig. 2.14).74 Although this poster presented a simplified composition and was not burdened by much detail, still, the stoic figure, the overall static composition, and the muted pastel colors that were so effective in Puvis’s celebrated murals did not serve well a poster vying for attention in the street environment. Rogers, who dedicated a chapter of his 1901 book to the designing of posters, echoed Hiatt, cautioning designers against rendering “details too literally” and enjoining them to avoid “too much realism” of figures.75 Referring to the physical conditions in which posters are displayed, Rogers noted that the “heavy smoke-­laden air of our cities demands strong and vivid tints” that are visible at a distance and not “rapidly obliterated” by the accumulation of dirt on the poster’s surface. Thus, in some 75 percent of English posters, “reds and yellows predominate, these being the colours that most easily penetrate our misty atmosphere.”76 Dudley Hardy’s A Gaiety Girl, 1893, and Rogers’s own poster Automobile Club Show, c. 1901, show the use of the red color to great effect (Fig. 5.2 and 5.5). The female automobile driver’s dress and hat, as well as the lettering on the front of the car announcing the dates of the show, stand out thanks to their bold red coloring in a way that calls attention to the poster as a whole. The white sash and scarf, whose decorative pattern is emphasized with black outlines, are among the modern features of the poster, as is the iconography of the young female driver. Yet, despite Rogers’s call for a simplified design, his own poster does not do away with modeling (particularly noticeable in the face and tires) and highlights the three-­dimensional space of the scene. Unlike British critics, who were often dissatisfied with the quality of British posters and tirelessly urged British designers to practice good design, French critics tended to be pleased with French posters. Some of them did, typically in the Art and Advertising in the Street  ‡ 185

5.5 W. S. Rogers, Automobile Club Show, c. 1900. Waterlow & Sons, London. 76.2 × 51.3 cm.

course of singing Chéret’s praises, briefly discuss certain design elements of the illustrated poster in terms of their effectiveness on the street, but such concerns were marginal to their writing on posters. For example, Marx’s 1889 essay for Chéret’s exhibition catalog stated concisely: “His posters are designed with the strictest consideration for the needs of the object which they are destined to advertise. Everything is arranged and harmonized in view of the place the poster is going to occupy.”77 He praises Chéret’s “simple design,” which “explains the subject” quickly, “even at a distance.”78 However, elsewhere in the same essay Marx elaborates on the artistic qualities of the posters and even claims that advertising was merely a pretext for Chéret’s charming posters, which raised the poster to the level of an art print. Maindron made a similar claim.79 Unlike such major French critics of the poster, Victor Champier, who founded the Revue des Arts Décoratifs in 1880, a publication committed to denouncing the “absurd hierarchy” of the arts, fully recognized the poster as advertisement, stating that it was born from “the needs of advertising in our contemporary society.”80 Champier stood out among French critics for his explicit statements about the artist’s need to consider the “material conditions in which the illustrated 186  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

posters are viewed and the functions they fulfill.”81 He likened a good poster to theater décor insofar as it is “made to produce an effect in the conditions determined by where it is placed.”82 Chéret was considered by Champier to be a true innovator precisely because he rejected the procedures of oil painting as well as of the regular print and composed the poster with those means of execution that “are appropriate for it.”83 A further difference between British and French critics was the latter’s emphasis on seduction as a predominant strategy of poster designers. Marx pinpointed seduction as distinguishing the artistic poster of the late nineteenth century from earlier posters. Writing in 1896 he contrasted the contemporary poster with “the poster of days past, lacking seduction.”84 He stated that “even the busiest, most skeptical passerby must submit to the charm of the sight that has been flung onto his path, follow the spirited arabesque of the design.”85 Champier’s statements were bolder still. Expressing a masculinist viewpoint, he likened the French poster to a seductress, “provocative like a young woman and often more décolleté, she displays herself in the windows of bookshops” to “tempt the buyer.”86 Likening the poster to the overly seductive woman, he implied seduction to be necessarily for masculine viewers, ignoring the fact that some posters had to address and seduce women consumers, certainly in the case of posters promoting such products as fashion and cosmetics for women.87 For Champier, the aggressive seduction of the poster was tantamount to an assault on the viewer, but he did not object to being seduced. When the poster set itself apart from the art print, wrote Champier, it had to “raise its voice, put on rouge like actors to be seen from afar, spice up its language, vibrate on the walls, in the stupefying noise of the cities in the middle of the crossroads, the iconographic sales pitches which address the crowds have above all to be clearly intelligible, jolt the nerves, assault the gaze with very simple means of lines and colors.”88 Seduction as a preferred mode of address in Chéret’s posters fit particularly well into his late nineteenth-­ century appropriation of the tradition of “Gallic gaiety.”89 Many French critics wrote admiringly about the pleasure-­stricken, eroticized, often partially nude women in Chéret’s posters, the chérettes (Fig. 1.4). Branded with their master’s lauded artistic touch, the chérettes became synonymous with the provocative seduction of posters.90 And while most French critics profusely praised the chérettes’ seduction, one writer stood out from among them in his opposition. Maurice Talmeyr, the novelist, essayist, and conservative journalist, laid out an extensive critique of the poster in his article “L’âge de l’affiche,” published in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1896.91 Talmeyr not only discussed the seductive women depicted in posters but also Art and Advertising in the Street  ‡ 187

defined the very mode of address of the poster as a seductive solicitation. He likened the poster to a woman who attracts attention by applying ample cosmetics, and emphasized that the poster was designed not just to elicit aesthetic pleasure, but also to sell a product. Unlike most French critics, Talmeyr considered the poster’s seduction to be immoral and immodest. The poster never respects “women, the laws, authority, the family, religion property, justice.”92 Instead of depicting or promoting “virtue, chastity, renouncement, probity and wisdom,” posters show “rape and looting.” Posters employ all possible means of seduction, titillating and shimmering with their vibrating colors, “inviting the passer-­by at every step to enjoy something new,” an effect that “adds more to the poster’s corruption.”93 The poster is destructive, Talmeyr concluded, like a mad passion. It has “a scandalous character,” so frequently depicting the cancan dancer that one no longer knows what the seductive woman in the poster is trying to sell.94 Talmeyr noted that the poster’s colorful image of women departed sharply from the typical representation of women in earlier relief sculpture: The sculptural bas-­relief is lost in the shadow and the grayness of the stone, it fears the light of day. The insolent poster, on the contrary, is equipped for war, harnessed for the pavement, decked out for the promenade or the theater, and its nudity itself . . . is an orchestrated nudity, made-­up, whitened, a nudity enhanced with cosmetics. It is a show-­off, and a creature who is there “to do business”; in all of this the poster sums up its times well. Prostitution and playing to the audience, the entire epoch is in it and this is the esprit of the poster.95 Poster design, wrote Talmeyr, was a “shameless profession, subject to the requirements and tricks of a trade.”96 From its place on the wall, the poster solicits passersby with its seductive images of nude women and its brilliant vibrating colors as the prostitute solicits clients on the street corner: “The agile quick woman in the poster who dresses and undresses as she wishes, shows off her nude body, who muffles herself with furs, shows us her shoulders . . . with an intention of showing off, for the street, for the young gentleman who will pass by and the old man who will stare at her.”97 Hers is a predatory solicitation: “She calls us, she winks at us, she sways her hips, laughs, trots along, thrashes about so that one follows her.”98 She is “on the lookout for us, in order to rob us.”99 Octave Uzanne, the dedicated French bibliophile, publisher, and prolific author, responded to Talmeyr’s complaints about the lack of a moral poster. Like Talmeyr, Uzanne compared the poster to a young woman on the corner of the street, but unlike Talmeyr, he approved of its function as “a seductress” who “appeals to our senses,” and “intoxicates us” with colors “and arouses our appetite 188  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

for profane beauty.”100 A speech type for the street, Uzanne believed, required the opposite of modesty and morality. Explaining that the French word for posting posters, “affichage,” implies “boasting,” “exaggerated exhibition, ostentation, immodesty,” he noted that none of these attributes go hand in hand with “a sweet and persuasive moralization.”101 Unlike many of their French counterparts, British critics did not typically discuss posters in terms of sexual seduction. Some did complain about the aggressive nature of posters. In 1906, the English designer Lewis F. Day commented that posters “outrage” our eyes “violently.”102 By this time, posters had become part of the larger phenomenon of modern advertising, which dominated the environment with a “riot of unseemly self-­assertion everywhere.”103 Whether praising or criticizing the poster for its mode of address, French and British critics recognized that the poster’s design was stimulated by the encounter with the street. The British critics more than their French colleagues recognized the function of advertising, as they called for good design that adapted its speech type to the street.

Design for the “Man on the Street” Poster design’s introduction of a new speech type that could communicate with the masses inevitably brought up class issues. Whereas art was intended for the elite, poster design aimed to appeal to everyone. In actuality, however, most posters addressed the middle classes and therefore also typically portrayed middle-­ class figures.104 British critics writing about the illustrated poster in the 1890s even explicitly linked the use of artistic means in poster design to the aim of elevating the taste of the middle classes — or, as their members were often described, of “the man on the street.” Class distinctions were present, either implicitly or explicitly, in the bulk of British poster criticism, with critics often citing an inherent “problem” in attempting to appeal to publics that lack the education necessary to appreciate art in general and modernist design in particular. The preeminent English art critic Marion Spielmann, in his article “Posters and Poster-­Designing in England,” published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1895, recognized the necessity of appealing to the middle classes but lamented what he regarded as the corresponding need to abandon artistic aspirations: “To the end of time vulgarity will be for the vulgar, and I much fear that the best means of enlisting middle-­class sympathy and attracting middle-­class cash, is to appeal, without any show of artistic superiority, to middle-­class taste and understanding.”105 The poster artist Dudley Hardy broke with this typical British line of commentary when he Art and Advertising in the Street  ‡ 189

stated, with an apparent absence of class prejudice, that the poster artist “cannot have a more critical audience than that of the London streets.”106 Announcing his “dream” of a “picture gallery for the millions,” Hardy embraced the idea of the mass public.107 Rogers, the pragmatically inclined British poster designer, recognized that “the poster must have an element of character that appeals strongly to the crowd”108 and accepted that, for this reason, it “should not only attract, but should interest and possibly entertain.”109 The poster must “embody” an “idea” that allows the spectator a way “of identifying it with the wares it is intended to advertise,” and doing this “in the simplest way possible.”110 If it “fails to interest the spectator, or conveys its message in an obscure or distasteful manner, it is likely to be passed by before it has performed the important function of advertisement.”111 British artists and critics writing for the Poster repeatedly criticized what they characterized as the public’s conservative taste with respect to posters, referring to their preference for realistic posters. For example, in 1899, the designer P. F. Ritchie complained that “English posters are improving steadily, but the public taste remains exactly as it was.”112 Hiatt was disappointed by the discrepancy between the Englishman’s appreciation of the decorative products of the Arts and Crafts movement and his lack of acceptance of the artistic poster: “Even the Englishman, whose walls are covered with [William] Morris papers, whose grates are decorated with De Morgan tiles, likes a picture poster to tell him a story directly and with as much detail as possible. He tolerates ‘the house beautiful’ because it is the fashion to do so but he will not have his Christmas pantomime [a theatrical genre] announced by means of decorative symbols [in posters].”113 Pierre Bourdieu’s twentieth-­century study found that members of the working classes preferred figurative photography to abstract art.114 Likewise, according to the critics and artists whose opinions were published in the Poster in the late nineteenth century, most members of the middle classes as well as advertisers themselves preferred a realistic poster. By contrast, critics, designers, and other culturally sophisticated groups appreciated and championed the artistic poster and the modernist design in posters, namely simplified forms and lines, flat color application, elimination of modeling and excessive details, and frequently, the use of bold colors (Figs. 5.2 and 5.4). Although critics tended to recognize that the wide public was necessary for the acceptance of the artistic poster and thus advocated educating the masses, some remained highly ambivalent. For example, in an 1899 article by Karl Kloufe published in the Poster, the author acknowledged that the poster could not succeed unless the wide public showed its preference for “an artistic advertisement,” 190  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

but then proceeded to write with a marked disdain about the milkman, the tobacconist, the wine merchant: The great fault lies in the fact that the tradesman has an opinion about art and will not leave the designing of his advertisements to those who have studied such things. He does not suggest a method of his own to his electrical engineer, nor does he dispute the verdict of his doctor, or his legal adviser; and yet he thinks because he buys popular etchings and Munich reproductions and photographic “art” studies, that he knows what art is; and this feeling is increased a thousand fold if his wife and daughters paint tambourines and put ferns in golded saucepans.115 The references to the preference of the tradesman for popular etchings, Munich reproductions, and photographic studies all confirm that Bourdieu’s conclusions in his study of the twentieth century were relevant to the nineteenth. Kloufe betrays a powerful class prejudice when he suggests further that when tradesmen send their children to technical schools to become artists, “this of course, in a large majority of cases, they [the children] will find an impossibility, but they will have received an education which will show them how to choose the good and leave the inartistic.”116 In France, where the term “man of the street” was not used, the common term was “the crowd.” Whereas Gustave Le Bon’s widely read 1895 book, La psychologie des foules, stressed the derogative characteristics of the crowd, some progressive French critics saw the poster’s appeal to the general public as part of the process of democratization.117 Victor Champier, for example, accepted that posters were “a young, lively, vibrant art, made for the crowds.”118 Likewise, the cultural critic of La Critique, Émile Straus, was nonjudgmental when he observed that “the poster has to produce a rapid impression” in order “to influence instantaneously without prior reflection, the floating masses who are absorbed in material worries or simply distracted,”119 and Maindron was emphatically approving when he asserted that the illustrated posters formed “veritable museums where the art-­ loving thinking masses find some of their aspiration satisfied.”120 The French critic Roger Marx, who was committed to the view of decorative arts as a “social art” integrated with society and the economy, credited William Morris, the socialist designer, writer, publisher, and theorist of the English Arts and Crafts movement, with providing the “decisive argument” for the importance of an art that was in “contact with the common people.”121 Marx affirmed the broad appeal of the poster as a positive value — the poster is “understood by persons of all ages, loved by the people”122 — and even when referring to the acArt and Advertising in the Street  ‡ 191

tivity of poster collecting, indicated that it was not reserved for a few, with “amateurs by the legions” searching for posters and offering them a safe haven in their portfolios.123 Marx believed that, for these increasing numbers of collectors, the poster had come “to satisfy new aspirations and this love of beauty which the education of taste spreads and develops.”124 In his 1895 essay on American posters, H. C. Bunner, an author and the editor of the American comic weekly magazine Puck, which was addressed to a broad middle-­class public, displayed a rather different view of the public from that of the English critics concerned with elevating the taste of the middle classes. Bunner noted that the tastes of the two groups described in England as “the hopelessly vulgar ‘middle class,’ ” comprising the readers, and “the ‘upper class’ who write art criticisms,” were in fact not so far apart — as demonstrated by the fact that both embraced Aubrey Beardsley “in all his offensiveness.”125 Moreover, alone among art critics Bunner credited the public itself with the poster’s progress: “Development of this sort is to be credited partly to the artist, but in no slight measure to the public that accepts or rejects his work.”126 Bunner recog­nized the American public for having “so far kept pace with the progress of American art [posters] that once in awhile its foot may even be in the lead.”127 Whether they endorsed democratization and championed the educating of the masses or decried the latter’s uneducated and conservative taste, nearly all critics agreed that the reception of the poster by the broad public was critical to its success. Thus, the poster and poster designer were situated at the focal point of a late nineteenth-­century debate on how to design for the new conditions of the street and for the era of a mass public.

Visual Representations of Posters on the Street My analysis so far has drawn primarily on written comments, but visual sources of the period — including photographs, illustrations, paintings, and the posters themselves — are no less telling as representations of the poster’s addressees and their particular mode of looking. Both British and French photographs depicting poster displays on the street rarely show anyone looking at the posters. Eugène Atget took numerous photographs of Parisian streets that show typographic and illustrated paper posters on walls, as well as permanent advertisements painted on panels or walls (Fig. I.10). Of all those that I have seen, which depict posters on walls or fences, not one depicts so much as a single person pausing to observe the posters, echoing Walter Benjamin’s observation that Atget’s photographs are uncannily void of human presence.128 On a rare occasion Atget did photograph 192  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

5.6 William George Joy, Bayswater Omnibus, 1895. Oil on canvas, 140 × 194 cm. (framed). Museum of London.

a man reading typographic posters displayed on a Morris column (Paris place Denfert Rochereau: Lion de Belfort, 1900). Morris columns were used primarily to advertise the daily information on theatrical and musical performances in typographic posters, and thus one had to read the information on them. Photographs depicting street posters in New York and in London also tend to feature no onlookers for illustrated posters (see Figs. I.11, I.12, and 5.1). It may be that shutter speeds and exposure times made photographs showing onlookers problematic in street photographs, but the cause was likely not only technical. Rather, posters on the street did not usually elicit a museum-­like viewing — namely, standing to contemplate a work — but were seen in passing, if at all. This kind of very brief, usually unintended viewing while moving (discussed below) could not be directly and literally figured in visual representations, be they photography or paintings. This was perhaps why most paintings that included posters in their depictions of urban scenes did not show anyone looking at the posters. The 1895 painting by the British artist George William Joy, Bayswater Omnibus, is a case in point (Fig. 5.6). It shows a row of posters above the seated passengers in the interior of a bus. These were most likely the actual posters on a particular bus, since Joy reported that he induced the London General Bus Art and Advertising in the Street  ‡ 193

Company to lend him one of their vehicles for his work on this painting.129 The posters advertise various items, including Pears’ Soap in the poster Bubbles based on a painting by Sir John Everett Millais (with whom Joy had studied at the Royal Academy) (Fig. 6.8). Seated below the posters are a poor working-­class mother with her two children, a fashionable young woman, a gentleman, and a “blue-­eyed wholesome-­looking nurse,” while a young milliner who has just boarded the bus is seen pressing past the nurse.130 The standing milliner is the only passenger who could potentially take in the posters visible to us, but she too is clearly oblivious to them. While such realist paintings were not necessarily documentary, it is significant that the painter did not choose to represent any of the seated passengers looking up at the posters posted across from them, on the opposite panel of the bus (not included in the painting). Instead, Joy portrayed the caring look of the working-­class mother at her child; the sympathetic glance, with “kindly thoughts,” of the young middle-­class woman upon the mother;131 the man engrossed in his newspaper, and the enigmatic gaze of the nurse at the young milliner.132 The American Walter Dill Scott, who pioneered the application of psychology to the study of advertising and conducted experiments to determine the effectiveness of advertising at different sites, found that advertising in streetcars was effective because city dwellers spent a considerable amount of time in them on a daily basis and in monotonous circumstances.133 In such an environment, advertisement is particularly potent “because the suggestion is presented so frequently that we soon forget the source of the suggestions.”134 Thus, seeing posters becomes, as Benjamin wrote of seeing buildings, incidental rather than deliberate — “a casual noticing, rather than attentive observation.”135 It is a scarcely noticed habit because posters, like buildings, become part of the daily urban environment. This, indeed, is how they appear in Joy’s work, as well as in most photographs. Mending the Pots, by the French painter and sculptor Louis Robert Carrier-­ Belleuse, is a rare example of a painting that represents a man and a woman who are looking at posters (Fig. 5.7). Painted several years before the flowering of the poster in the later 1880s and during the 1890s, it depicts an old brick wall fully covered with colorful Chéret posters. Showing the posters pasted edge to edge, with some posters partially obscuring others, the painting emphasizes the impact of color and the decorativeness of this tapestry-­like display of illustrated posters in a way that seems to correspond to the popular French idea of the Salon of the street. At the same time, its depiction of several tattered peeling posters suggests the characteristic ephemerality of posters and their cheap paper. 194  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

5.7 Louis Robert Carrier-Belleuse, Mending the Pots, 1882. Oil on canvas, 64.8 × 97.8 cm.

Although the painter’s highly accurate representation of specific Chéret posters gives the impression that he documented an actual Paris wall featuring Chéret’s work in 1882, the year the painting was created, this is in fact not the case. We know this, first, because nowhere would an entire street wall or hoarding have been dedicated exclusively to posters by a single designer, the preeminent Chéret included. Street displays of posters invariably featured a mix of typographic and illustrated posters by diverse printers and designers (Figs. 5.1, I.10–I.12).136 Second, several of the posters represented in the painting advertise musical performances that took place in 1877 and 1878, and were surely no longer posted on Parisian walls in 1882, when the painting was made. We must assume, therefore, that Carrier-­Belleuse represented an imaginary wall of Chéret posters. His detailed depiction of various actual posters by the artist was accomplished by working from posters that he was able to access and consult in his studio thanks to a family connection: his sister was married to Jules Chéret’s brother, Gustave-­ Joseph Chéret.137 Carrier-­Belleuse paid homage to Chéret by depicting an entire wall of the designer’s posters in a way that rendered them easily identifiable and by showing two fashionable spectators actually looking at them. A notably different treatment of Chéret’s work appears in Édouard Manet’s Au Café, 1878 (Fig. 5.8). Art and Advertising in the Street  ‡ 195

5.8 Édouard Manet, Au Café, 1878. Oil on canvas, 77 × 83 cm. Oskar Reinhart Collection, Winterthur, Switzerland.

Manet includes only the lower fragment of a single, frayed poster, made further illegible by the fact that it is pasted on the exterior of a café glass front and seen in reverse from the inside. In this painting, no one is looking at the tattered poster — though even if customers or passersbys had bothered to look, they would surely not have been able to identify it as a work by Chéret, let alone as the particular poster promoting the Hanlon-­Lees clown and acrobat act, which opened at the Folies Bergère in the spring of 1878, around the time Manet painted his painting.138 Carrier-­Belleuse’s painting juxtaposes the fashionably attired middle-­class couple intently looking at some of the posters on the wall, near a working-­class youngster who is busy mending pots. Each seems to occupy a distinct class-­coded space on the street — the boy is at work, while the couple is at leisure, taking in the row of posters with their promises of entertainments and consumer products. The boy himself appears to be oblivious to the posters, whose advertised goods are all beyond his modest economic means, yet his presence in the scene, toiling away at his traditional, preindustrial, local and manual service, throws into relief the newer phenomenon of the large-­scale industrial enterprises — the only clients that could actually afford to advertise through posters. One wonders, at the same time, if the street-­smart youngster did not choose this location in front of the colorful hoarding as a calculated way to attract clients to his own trade. The upscale couple, engrossed in the details of particular posters, probably reading the text 196  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

in a poster, represent the middle-­class public that constituted the primary target of most poster advertising. The different directions of their gazes suggest that they are not jointly admiring a single specific poster, for its aesthetic qualities or otherwise. Rather, each finds a different poster of interest. The woman leans in to look at a poster on the lower row; perhaps she is reading the text in the red typo­ graphic poster advertising a hair product for ladies, Cheveaux pour dames bon marché, in which case her interest would conform to socially prescribed gender roles. Or else she may be looking at the adjacent poster, Théâtre de la Renais­sance, La Tzigane, musique de Johann Strauss, 1877, promoting an operetta.139 The man looks at a poster at the top, promoting entertainment, perhaps the one for Léon Vasseur’s three-­act opéra comique, Le droit du seigneur, performed at the Théâtre des fantaisies-­parisiennes, 1878, or the poster to its left, for the Eden café concert. Though middle-­class women did occasionally attend such venues accompanied by a male family member, surely no respectable woman would show an eager interest in an entertainment venue whose sexually charged environment both on and off the stage appealed to a predominantly male audience. Unlike most photographs and paintings featuring posters, which typically included them as mere ambient urban décor, French advertising posters did depict the idealized gazes of men, women, and youngsters at posters. This iconography enhanced the advertising function of posters by modeling the kinds of gazes advertisers sought to attract. For example, Affiches Brondert, a Parisian print establishment specializing in posters, advertised itself by showing a scene of onlookers of diverse classes gazing at posters (Fig. 5.9). Designed by Léon Louis Oury c. 1897–1900, the poster accentuates class distinctions by depicting two kinds of poster spectators. The crowd densely packed in the background is of mixed class, gender, and age. Among the figures in this group are a working-­class man, a top-­hatted man, an older woman, and a youth, all depicted in small scale and seen from the back. These figures are clearly distinguished from the few larger, individualized and unmistakably upscale spectators depicted in the foreground luxuriously contemplating posters on a Morris column. Their gazes are clearly visible, as are the objects of their attentions — posters in French, English, and German, advertising the Affiches Brondert firm (suggesting the company’s international reach), mixed in with some illustrated café concert posters. An elaborately bedecked upper-­middle-­class woman, in a red cape, white stole, and decorated hat, who is accompanied by her no less elegantly dressed daughter, is the most prominent figure. She is shown looking at the posters on one side of the column, while a well-­groomed middle-­class man and his teenage daughter, perhaps British tourists, contemplate posters on the other side. The imagery of Art and Advertising in the Street  ‡ 197

5.9 Léon Louis Oury, Affiches Brondert, c. 1897. Affiches Brondert, Paris. 83.5 × 57 cm.

Affiches Brondert is aimed at convincing advertisers to choose the print establishment by exhibiting its ability to attract and hold the gazes of the general public while at the same time stressing, through the poster’s privileging of the upper-­ middle-­class figures in the foreground, that it offers its potential commissioning clients an upscale viewership. Théophile-­A lexandre Steinlen’s illustration for the June 9, 1893, cover of Le Mirliton similarly privileges the upper-­middle-­class spectator — in this case, a male spectator (Fig. 5.10). Named after Aristide Bruant’s café concert, Le Mirliton publicized Bruant’s establishment by singling out an elegant dandy standing on a Montmartre street before a Toulouse-­Lautrec poster featuring Bruant. The illustration represents what it aims to achieve, namely the captivated attention of a refined audience to Lautrec’s poster of Bruant and by extension to Bruant’s cabaret. Like other Montmartre café concerts, Bruant’s establishment appealed to middle-­class audiences that enjoyed the low-­culture entertainment and the opportunity to mix with working-­class and bohemian crowds while retaining their own social standing. Yet the poster does not show a mixed-­class audience 198  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

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

but focuses, rather, on the single dandy scrutinizing Lautrec’s poster with his full concentration, as in a gallery, undeterred and undistracted by the low culture of the street as represented by the cluster of sniffing and urinating dogs.140 This evokes once more the utopian idea of the Salon of the street, but with a difference: in place of the more typical representation of a hoarding full of posters, Steinlen’s illustration singles out Lautrec’s poster, as if it appeared solo, thereby elevating the single poster to a work of art. In reality, even Lautrec’s Bruant posters were shown amid a busy medley of posters, as seen in a photograph of the time (Fig. 1.17). Steinlen’s La Rue (The Street), 1896, a particularly large poster (233.1 × 298.2 cm), which advertises the Parisian print establishment of Charles Verneau, does not show anyone looking at posters (Fig. 5.11). Instead, it represents a paved street in Montmartre as the common democratic ground for members of the middle and working classes. Women and men, both young and mature, are all depicted in close proximity as occupying the urban space on an equal footing. This was surely an idealized rendition of the poster’s mixed audience. Note, however, Steinlen’s representation of gender tensions as the corpulent man in top hat is Art and Advertising in the Street  ‡ 199

5.11 Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, La rue, 1896. Affiches Charles Verneau, Paris. 236.2 × 304.8 cm.

ogling the young bourgeois woman in a fashionable white outfit, and she in turn is averting her gaze, attempting to pass by accompanied by a young girl carrying a large package. Miriam R. Levin notes that the poster evokes “the very process of democratization within the public spaces of the Republic,”141 a description that fits Steinlen’s own political inclinations. In reality, however, his poster, like posters in general, harnessed the democratization of public space for advertising, turning it into a commodified space. Nonetheless, the democratic notion of the close proximity of the “popular” and middle classes on the street is being celebrated and mythologized at the same time as it is being commodified in such depictions. Even as Steinlen was celebrating the street as a democratic space, with his poster La Rue, one of the major Parisian lithographic print establishments chose to promote itself by producing a billboard-­size poster, also by Steinlen, featuring a socially mixed group of people, representing the potential of posters to reach a diverse urban crowd. Steinlen’s depiction of this group, harmoniously associating in close proximity on the street, represented an idealized version of the poster’s true audience. In actuality, as Maindron noted in 1896, advertising 200  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

was intensely class-­conscious, with bill-­posting companies choosing streets for particular posters based on the neighborhood’s class profile. So, an adventure novel might be posted in a working-­class area, a science book in more intellectual quarters; if a political poster defended the throne and altar, it would not be posted in the socialist-­anarchist neighborhood of Belleville.142 Target advertising, which carved up audiences based on gender, class, or professional affiliations, was already being developed in France around the mid-­nineteenth century.143 Poster advertisers could select specific streets for the display of their posters with the help of agencies that possessed the census breakdown of the population according to rent and profession.144 The display of posters on the streets became far more prevalent following the enactment of the 1881 freedom of the press law, which made it legal to post on walls excluding certain public buildings (marked “Défense d’afficher Loi de 29 Juillet, 1881”).145 Street posting spaces thus became a source of considerable revenue for the municipalities and individual building owners, with companies renting spaces for posting and maintaining posters on regulated hoardings, fences, or other designated spaces.146 Most of the visual evidence, whether documentary or not, does not support the myth of the Salon of the street, where art is free and accessible to all. On the other hand, those representations that do depict spectators looking at posters —  Carrier-­Belleuse’s painting, the Affiches Brondert poster, and Steinlen’s illustration for Le Mirliton — represent looking at posters or reading the information they provided as an act associated primarily with upscale viewers. Such posters promoted the products, events, or the printing companies they advertised, by elevating their own design to the status of art. This type of imagery, which appeared in various French posters, equalized, and often even privileged, the status of upper-­middle-­class women in the public space in terms of looking at posters. Yet these types of images disavowed the reality that critics repeatedly addressed (even as many of them held on to the myth of the museum of the street), namely that the poster was barely looked at by passersby. How did people on the street in Paris or in an underground station in London actually respond to posters they encountered inadvertently? Such evidence is rare; but comments by the American-­born author and journalist Elizabeth Robins Pennell (who lived in London with her husband, the artist and author Joseph Pennell) provide a glimpse into this dynamic by suggesting that not even a cultured spectator like Robins Pennell, who wrote numerous books, including about artists, necessarily looked at posters with great interest when she came across them. Indeed, she found them to be something of a nuisance in 1885: “Today I can afford to recognize their value as color and decoration. But as long Art and Advertising in the Street  ‡ 201

as my sole anxiety was to know exactly where the train was when it stopped, there was no leisure to note harmonies in the casual arrangement of posters. The one important inscription — in modest white letters on the blue ground — was that which my eyes sought; they were confronted, instead, with flamboyant notices of soap and mustard, with the cast of the newest play, and the sensation of the latest ‘special.’ ”147 A decade later, in 1896, the scene had not changed much, although Robins-­Pennell sounds more reconciled to the advertisements: “In eleven years little has been done to point out the way to the unenlightened. Mustard and soap and new popular favorites still hold their own. But to banish the advertisements would be to leave the stations in unendurable gloom. One comes to cherish an affection even for Nestle’s milk and Maza Wattee tea, for though the posters are hideous in clear daylight, they borrow something of beauty and mystery when seen through the smoke-­laden atmosphere.”148 When she describes a full aesthetic experience of the London underground station, however, the posters on the walls are just one element among many others: “the bits of color that tell so well in the somber surroundings — here the posters on the walls, here the books on the stalls, and there it may be the gay gown and flaunting feather of a lingering passenger; and above all, in the wonderful effects of the trailing, outspreading smoke, as the train comes thundering in.”149

Designing for Advertisers The commissioning advertiser was a mediator who remained invisible to the public. Yet his influence on the process of creating an advertisement poster was as contentious as it was pervasive. Judging from numerous comments by nineteenth-­ century British artists and critics, the interaction between poster designers and advertisers during the 1890s was characterized primarily by conflict. Concerned with reaching their market rather than with art, advertisers had priorities different from those of designers, and this, in the late nineteenth century, was still unacceptable to many designers and critics. This was an issue both in France and in England, yet artists’ complains, so numerous in England, appeared on rarer occasions in France.150 The British journal the Poster was filled with designers’ complaints. In an article titled “Autobiography of a Poster,” T. Turner describes, through the voice of a disgruntled poster, the advertiser’s cumbersome approval process and crude money-­making priority, testifying that the poster was printed only “after sundry inspection by inquisitive boards of directors, and the subsequent additions and repairs in accordance with the inartistic requirements of those bellicose capitalists.”151 Designers made their posters with reference to the 202  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

field of art, which is, in Bourdieu’s terminology, a “field of restricted production,” even while they were expected to appeal to a broad market.152 Advertisers and designers belonged to two different cultures, with the former’s “professional ideology” constructing “an opposition between creative liberty and the laws of the market.”153 Not a few British critics and designers protested the limited artistic freedom of designers, complaining that most advertisers exhibited conservative taste and lacked any real appreciation for the aesthetic qualities of the modern poster. Hiatt addressed the relationship of the designer and advertiser on several occasions. In a somewhat extreme example, he asserted that the Beggarstaffs “are artists and submit only to the dictates of their own fancy.”154 But their fancy, as the designers themselves acknowledged, was clearly formulated with an understanding of the demands of poster advertising under its viewing conditions on the street.155 Hiatt made a bold claim about artistic independence when he wrote about the Berggarstaffs that they “have never condescended to compromise. They will give the advertiser the best that it is in their power to give, but they will be no more induced to modify their designs to suit the supposed taste of the public than Whistler would be induced to alter his etchings of  London to oblige a house agent, or Degas his studies of the ballet to fulfill the requirements of a professor of deportment.”156 Though he compares the Berggarstaffs’ artistic freedom in designing posters to that of avant-­garde artists, his point was arguably more complex, expressing his belief that the poster designer could maintain artistic freedom so long as the aesthetic means he used were suited to an effective advertising on the hoardings. Still, the reality of poster design fell short of the professional ideal of artistic freedom, as we learn from the accounts of numerous British poster designers. Mosnar Yendis (the anagram of Sidney Ransom), a British poster designer, observed, “English artists are terribly handicapped, having to choose between the buyer’s individual taste and certain rejection.”157 Moreover, whereas British designers “frequently have to submit to alterations and improvements,” French poster designers were “permitted to be original.”158 According to the British poster designer John Hassall, advertisers frequently suggested “alterations that are extremely inartistic.”159 He highlighted the absurdity of the advertisers’ demands: “For instance, I was recently asked to draw the back view of a figure, which was also to be winking; while another wanted a man with a long overcoat, buttoned up, and showing a huge watch chain suspended from his waistcoat, pockets. They are particularly fond of having a figure shifted, to the utter destruction of the composition. In this way buyers are often responsible for a great Art and Advertising in the Street  ‡ 203

deal of the bad work seen on the hoardings.”160 Hassall asserted that advertisers do not accept “original ideas,” to the point that, “if nothing like it has been seen before, it is put down as bad, at once.”161 Indeed, this aversion to the new was the foremost obstacle in the eyes of British poster designers. The poster designer Stewart Browne addressed this difficulty in 1899: “Advertisers are nearly all chary of new ideas. They are, most of them, afraid to open up new ground for designs. They like to stick to the old stereotyped style, and would sooner follow in the footsteps of some design already proved successful, than risk something new and up-­to-­date.”162 And Rogers similarly testified: “I have to complain, like many brothers of the brush, of the capricious treatment received by some of my clients who would rather I made a base imitation of a hackneyed design, than produce an original notion of my own.”163 Another recurrent source of disagreement was the preference of advertisers for realistic over symbolic poster designs, dictating what designers regarded as a deplorable lack of subtlety: Our modern advertiser is not content that the merits of his article be insisted on symbolically; he is propitiated only by an arrangement which cannot be misunderstood by even the most ingeniously stupid passer-­by. If infants’ food be the subject-­matter, the obvious pictorial comment is an over-­gorged baby; if cigarettes, then an idiotic masher or frivolous lady is deemed surprisingly effective. And when it is desired to proclaim the merits of anything in a bottle or tin, it is before all things necessary that the receptacle be reproduced with photographic accuracy.164 Some designers, like the British Lewis F. Day, conceded that artists could at times be high-­minded to a fault: “A year or two of stern shop work would do many a young artist all the good in the world; it would knock some idea of practicality into him”; but even this was followed immediately by the cautionary note that “abject submission to the dictates of employers whose one idea is business, can only end in the degradation of the artistic faculty.”165 A rare conciliatory note was sounded by Rogers in his counsel to the poster designer to “be a wise man” and “make a compromise with his client and his conscience, and . . . occasionally do things he would rather not do.”166 The most frequent objects of blame by critics and designers speaking up in the pages of the Poster were theatrical managers. In 1899, for instance, the journal asserted that London’s theatrical managers were responsible for “the horrors of the affiches of melodrama” that “are, in fact, assaults upon the popular eye.”167 the Poster cited the following passage approvingly from the Globe: “The ugliest 204  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

thing on our street hoardings is frequently the theatrical poster. . . . Some theatrical managers are still content to plaster the walls with placards that offend the eye and irritate the mind of everybody who knows anything about drawing and colouring.”168 In a rare moment of appreciation, the Poster admitted that “a few of the London managers have . . . taught us to recognize the principle that art should serve the purposes of modern commerce. The hoardings of London are, at the present time, embellished with a few artistic theatrical posters.” But it quickly added that the latter were “so few that they could be counted on one hand.”169 British writers in the Poster judged British theatrical managers, who commissioned posters for the music hall and theater, as far inferior to their French counterparts.170 Claiming that in France, Mucha’s posters for Sarah Bernhardt were superior to theatrical posters in London, they overlooked the fact that the actress herself (rather than a theatrical manager) had chosen the poster artist, as did other prominent performers in France. Aristide Bruant and Jane Avril, for example, chose Toulouse-­Lautrec to design their posters;171 Yvette Guilbert chose Steinlen (among others poster artists) and refused an offer from Toulouse-­ Lautrec to design a poster for her; and Loie Fuller chose Chéret (among others) to design posters for her Paris performances. Contrary to the assumption of most British critics, in France, too, as in Britain, some theatrical and café concert managers were conservative. So, for example, Pierre Ducarre, a manager of the café concert at which Bruant performed, rejected the poster Bruant had commissioned from Toulouse-­Lautrec, Ambassadeurs . . . Aristide Bruant dans son cabaret, 1892, most likely because, as a contemporary critic observed, the poster showed “the fierce, slightly wild and imposing side of the street singer.”172 Eventually, however, Ducarre relented in the face of Bruant’s insistence. British critics writing in the Poster repeatedly offered advice to commercial advertisers and especially theatrical managers. In 1899 they proposed to “show them the good work from a business point of view as well as from the loftier aspiration of the world of art.”173 But the advertising field was by then beginning to develop its own experts, especially in Britain. By around 1900, a growing number of advertisers believed that good advertising was not dependent on art and indeed that advertising that focused on artistic values was not effective.174 Some also pointed out that, since the artistic poster had become an object of interest in its own right, it competed with the advertised product. The advertiser’s point of view soon became the focus of advertising industry journals.175 Throughout most of the nineteenth century, advertising agencies primarily sold advertising space in the press, but toward the end of the century new positions of advertising directors were opened in agencies, offering design to clients.176 Art and Advertising in the Street  ‡ 205

Very large companies had their own advertising directors who commissioned the company’s posters and other advertising. The art director also helped with marketing by establishing a house style that created product identity.177 A rare glimpse into the mind-­set of the advertising profession around 1900 is provided by an interview, in the Poster, with John Maltwood, the advertising manager of the Leibig Extract of Meat Company. Lemco, as it was called, was a gigantic British company with “branches in nearly every capital in Europe and the colonies,” which claimed to supply its product “to countries having a population of some 900,000,000 souls.”178 Founded in 1865, the company was awarded a gold medal at the 1867 Paris exposition for being “the founders of a new industry productive of an article eminently cheap and useful.”179 A longtime employee of Lemco, Maltwood worked in the London office, which commissioned posters for England, the United States, and the colonies. Posters for the various capitals on the Continent were designed locally, since, as Maltwood explained, they would otherwise not be effective. The interview illustrates the contrasting viewpoints held by advertisers and poster designers. As John Hewitt observes, “It is as if two discourses are operating within the same interview: the artistic one, which prompts the interviewer’s questions, and a commercially inflected one, which frames Maltwood’s replies.”180 Maltwood preferred effective posters to artistic ones, leading his interviewer to conclude that he “would make mere artistic merit subordinate to the main idea of catching the public eye.”181 From the perspective of the advertising manager, the poster has to draw “the attention of the public to the wares the advertiser wishes to sell, and the poster which does this most effectively is the best poster.”182 Unlike the critics of the Poster, Maltwood did not prefer a leading British poster designer such as Dudley Hardy to a lesser-­known designer. Indeed, he found Hardy’s poster for Leibig “a trifle too subtle” (Fig. 5.12).183 Its only merit, as he saw it, was that it brought “a considerable amount of free notice by the press.”184 Hardy’s Leibig Company’s Extract, depicting a stoic-­faced uniformed boy walking forward carrying the packaged Leibig Company’s Extract in his hand and on his shoulder, was a relatively static and restrained image compared, for example, with Hardy’s dynamic and exuberant A Gaiety Girl (Fig. 5.2). This was not in principle due to the fact that one was a theatrical poster and the other a poster for a commercial food product. Compare Hardy’s Leibig poster of 1900, for example, with Leonetto Cappiello’s Chocolat Klaus, 1903, which represents a dynamic image featuring an exuberant young woman clad in green riding a red horse to advertise chocolate (Fig. 6.21). What Maltwood considered most important was “to be in close touch with the feeling of the public, and to key one’s advertisements in such 206  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

5.12 Dudley Hardy, Liebig Company’s Extract, the Future Butcher Boy, 1900. Waterlow & Sons, London. 295.91 × 195.58. Image: Swann Auction Galleries.

a manner as to appeal to them through the medium of their pleasures and the various ideas which are occupying their minds.”185 Though it would soon be overshadowed by just this kind of advertising discourse, the late nineteenth-­century British design discourse that developed around the poster was innovative insofar as it established design criteria that were not solely aesthetic and which functioned as a precursor to ideas that developed in the twentieth century in the fields of graphic design and architecture. British critics and design practitioners like Hiatt, Rogers, Hardy, and Day cared a great deal about the aesthetics of the artistic poster but fully recognized that the poster also had to function as advertising. Their innovation lay in producing a design discourse that integrated the values of the art field — aesthetics and originality — with both the function of advertising and the viewing conditions on the street. Their French counterparts, while aware of this necessity, tended to focus more on the artistic standing of the poster and on its elevation to the status of an art print. As Hewitt observes, after 1900 the growth of the mass market and mass production led to a more explicit advertising discourse, and by 1914 “commercial Art and Advertising in the Street  ‡ 207

art” had replaced “art for commerce.”186 The poster continued to be displayed in the city, but companies no longer were willing to spend their resources on expensive artistic designs. In 1899, in his column “Murailles” in L’Estampe et l’Affiche, Ernest de Crauzat lamented the poor quality of posters displayed on Parisian boulevards. He recalled with nostalgia the days when posters by Chéret, Willette, Steinlen, and Grasset were posted around the city, deploring the fact that by the end of the century, the works of these artists were no longer seen on the hoardings.187 Around 1900, the new frontiers of advertising shifted away from the artistic poster, rendering it one player among others — billboards, large signs, illuminated advertising, illustrated or photographic advertising in the press, and illustrated covers of books and magazines.188 Yet many of the design innovations first developed in the artistic poster were adapted and applied to other forms of advertisement. Ads in journals became more visually oriented, using less schematic and more well-­articulated images, and sparse text; magazines and books, which had previously been promoted by special posters, replaced the latter with colorful illustrated covers designed in the style of the poster; and gigantic billboards appealing to car and train travelers adapted the principles that poster designers had initially developed to attract pedestrians.189 Despite its fall from prominence, then, the poster, which evolved out of the dialogic interplay of art, advertising, and the street at a time when modern visual advertising was in its infancy, played a significant historical role in developing a new kind of communication: it was the initial and primary site of experimentation for an advertising design that privileged images and thus, in hindsight, was an important precedent for graphic design.

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6 t Poster Design T h e Di a logics of I m age a n d Wor d How to force the attention on a word? The thickness of characters is not a sufficient means, nor is it reliable. The letters do not attract. An image is needed to attract the gaze captivated by chance. This has brought about the illustrated poster.— Lucien Muhlfeld, 1896 Mural advertising was made to be seen, not read. — Lucien Muhlfeld, 1896

Late nineteenth-­c entury poster designers helped usher in a culture in which images played an increasingly prominent role. Departing from the earlier typographic poster, which privileged words, they invented an image-­centered, multicolored advertising, which included words in a secondary role. In fact words were obligatory in the poster in order to fulfill its advertising function by spelling out the name of the promoted product or entertainment, along with some brief relevant information (usually address, and often price). Yet words became an important element in defining the poster as such, as is evident by the fact that although some of poster collectors preferred avant la lettre posters (the poster image before lettering was added), others insisted that a poster was not a poster if it did not include lettering. This was a hotly debated issue, as reported by André Maurel in his 1897 article “L’amateur d’affiches” (The poster collector).1 The importance of the inclusion of words notwithstanding, the great innovation of late nineteenth-­century posters was the design of well-­articulated color images that

had a priority over words. At the time advertising in periodicals and newspapers was still largely limited to small black-­and-­white schematic images, “often ugly monotone, repetitive, without invention.”2 As argued below, late nineteenth-­ century poster designers launched a new mode of attractive public address by recontextualizing the word within the color image, producing a hybrid communication mode still influential in advertising today. Whereas earlier in the nineteenth century the image had been associated primarily with painting and illustration and to some extent with photography, it became central in an emergent graphic design. The role of posters in the paradigm shift from the dominant word to the predominant image has yet to be fully acknowledged. Numerous studies explore the relationship between words and images in art, but these do not typically include posters.3 The poster’s mixed status as advertising, art, and design has contributed to its exclusion from most art historical scholarship on text-­image relations,4 and, for that matter, from art history more generally. With rare exception, the topic of text-­image relations is largely absent from the analysis of posters.5 David Scott’s semiotic analysis of “image-­text” is such an exception, but focuses primarily on twentieth-­century posters;6 and Anne-­Marie Christin addresses lettering in the French poster, yet the broad scope (ranging from the sixteenth to the twentieth century) and her primary interest in the history of writing, which leads to the focus on text, necessarily limit the exploration of the relations between image and word in the nineteenth-­century poster.7 It was the lithographic method of printing, used by poster designers, that first enabled the simultaneous printing of word and image. Dennis Bryans, who points out that lithography solved the predicament of the separate printing of image and text, describes lithography as “an integrated method of information transfer.”8 Although his discussion does not include the poster (focusing instead on lithographic printing of books, music, maps, plans, and scientific illustrations), his insight is no less applicable to the poster. Bryans observes that because lithography did not contribute to the development of typography, it did not have a place in the history of mechanical printing, which was “largely based on telling and retelling the story of the glories of typographic design.”9 This may also help explain why the important issue of the changing relationship between word and image in the poster has not been addressed in depth, even in histories of graphic design. This chapter explores the relationship of image and word as it developed in posters, tracing the transformation of the typographic poster into the illustrated poster and the subsequent development of graphic design, which freed the poster 210  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

from the tradition of illustration. To provide these issues with a historically specific context, the chapter first presents the views of late nineteenth-­century poster designers, critics, and commentators on the relationship between word and image in the poster. It then proceeds with an analysis of word and image in the typographic poster of the early to mid-­nineteenth century. This is followed by an analysis of word-­image relations in the illustrated poster of the late nineteenth century, and of new directions manifested in the first years of the twentieth century. To demonstrate the international scope of these developments, my discussion includes posters from France, England, Austria, and Germany. The chapter concludes with an analysis of a rare detailed account by Walter Benjamin of his response to a particular poster that left a deep impression on him, showing that the poster’s unique manner of merging word and image was crucial to the formation of his experience and memory of the poster. In what follows I argue that designers of the illustrated poster established a genre of a hybrid language that forged new relationships between verbal utterances and visual images. Although the theoretical framework of Mikhail Bakhtin on hybridization and dialogic relations between different types of languages was about the novel and thus not about images, I find it useful to investigate the relations between image and word in the poster because it theorizes encounters between different languages and is attuned to everyday utterances. According to Bakhtin, a “double-­voiced discourse” comprises two voices that “are dialogically interrelated . . . as if they actually hold a conversation with each other.”10 Thus, the “double-­voiced discourse is always internally dialogized.”11 It is “a concentrated dialogue of two voices, two worldviews, two languages.”12 My own concern here is with the different ways in which the double language of word and image is visually designed in posters. I propose that, in their attempt to join image and word into a single visual utterance, designers of the illustrated poster invented a dialogized genre comprising two modes of communication that, in the nineteenth century, were largely alien to one another, despite being increasingly juxtaposed in illustrated journals.13 Poster artists and designers molded a genre that could not exist without the word but which reconfigured the word within the context of the image. Neither spatially quarantined on a page nor confined to illustrating the printed word, large-­scale poster images dominated the poster, harboring words sparsely within their terrain. Below I analyze how poster designers experimented with various modes of hybridization — that is, combinations of the two languages within a single utterance — inventing different design solutions for the union of image and word. In the process they developed a new kind of print-­media communication that Dialogics of  Image and Word  ‡ 211

united image and word in innovative ways. In the words of Roland Barthes (who contributed a brief preface to the catalog of a French exhibition on the English poster), the illustrated poster of the late nineteenth century “accomplished the historic assumption of the Sign.” He links this new sign to the “tyranny” of economics, noting that this “apotheosis of the Sign coincides with the mercantile explosion which marked the height of capitalism in western countries.” He refers to it as the “imperialism of the sign” and concludes that through this “the poster is historic”14 Following Barthes, it could be said that the poster’s historic place in modern visual culture consisted in its invention of a new kind of sign. In what follows I trace the historical formation of this sign as a dialogue between word and image.

Late Nineteenth-­Century Designers on Word and Image Drawing on the lithographic stone, late nineteenth-­century designers could design both hand-­drawn letters and a picture on the same stone. Moreover, the combination of sparse words with a prominent picture became a useful tool for communicating on the street. Words made their sparse appearance under the auspices of the figurative image. The colorful images of the illustrated poster embedded a minimum of typographic lettering. Before proceeding to analyze particular design solutions in posters, I turn here to investigate the ways in which designers as well as poster critics and commentators viewed the role and relationship of words and image in the illustrated poster. Designers of the poster all seemed to agree that it was of utmost importance that they themselves design the words in their posters and make them an integral part of the poster’s overall design. For example, the English poster designer Dudley Hardy stressed that poster designers had to insist on “having the arrangement of the lettering left to them” so as “to work it into the design,” or in some cases to accommodate the design of the image to the lettering.15 Ensuring this was more difficult in England, where poster designers usually had no direct access to the print establishments, than in France, where many designers worked on the stone in close collaboration with the printers.16 W. S. Rogers, the British poster designer and author of a book on posters, stressed that the letters should be conceived by the artist as part of the figurative image rather than left to the lithographic printer “who may ruin an otherwise admirable drawing by some inharmonious combination of writing.”17 Like many others, he warned against expressing too much “descriptive matter” in words, thereby undermining the poster’s “effect as a picture.” Furthermore, letters in 212  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

posters should not “demand effort to decipher.” He noted that whereas in book design the concern was to harmonize the picture with the prevailing text, in posters, letters should “always form an integral part of the [figurative] composition.” Rogers observed the need for a hierarchy: “The story cannot be effectively told at the same time in picture and in words with equal force. One or the other must be subordinate, and if the picture tells its tale with directness and proper emphasis, the lettering may be reduced to a minimum.” The failure of advertisers to recognize this dynamic sometimes resulted in good designs being “spoiled by too much lettering.”18 During the late nineteenth century, many critics and practitioners wrote about the need to prioritize the image over words in posters. Ned Arden Flood, an American printer and poster collector who published a brief essay titled “The Modern Poster” in a slim catalog for an 1897 poster exhibition in Chicago, argued that the fin-­de-­siècle poster had “no prototype in any preceding century, for its predecessors were not pictorial in the same sense and were never exploited on a wide scale.”19 Flood articulated the priority of the image in the illustrated poster: A poster must, first of all, express an idea, preferably in pictorial form, and so forcibly, so directly, and so clearly that the picture, were it to appear without lettering or title, would seem nevertheless to speak, in part of at least, its own title. . . . Preferably, the poster should be beautiful but it may be strikingly odd, broadly humorous, conventional or unconventional, or both, and still make its point, as if, indeed, its appeal were totally aesthetic. . . . It must tell a story briefly and simply, so that he who runs may read.20 Despite the priority of the image, the quality of the lettering and its place in the composition were crucial, as many designers well understood. Jules Chéret, the renowned French poster designer, who was credited by nineteenth-­century critics with inventing the artistic illustrated poster, expressed his view of the importance of effective lettering in emphatic terms, stating that “the text may make or mar a design.”21 It was the lettering, he wrote, which “to a great extent” provided “the clue to the design” and thus should “be so arranged as to explain the illustration at a glance, without spoiling the artistic effect.”22 The historian and poster collector Ernest Maindron noted in his 1886 volume on the poster that Chéret’s work indeed reflected his close attention to the arrangement of the text: “The vivid and original letters, intimately tied to the whole subject, contribute to a great extent, as it should be, to the physiognomy of the composition.”23 Chéret, a most prolific poster designer as well as the artistic director of a lithographic poster print establishment in Paris (he moved from running his own Dialogics of  Image and Word  ‡ 213

small, independent imprimerie, founded in 1866, to the artistic direction of the large imprimerie Chaix in 1881), had a longtime assistant, Juliano Madaré, who drew the letters on stone for him. Chéret had spent several years in his youth as an apprentice in a lithographer’s workshop, doing nothing but drawing letters in reverse on the lithographic stone. Once he had established his own print shop and later as director of the poster division at Chaix, he understandably no longer cared to draw the letters on stone himself;24 yet he stressed that he always gave his assistant detailed instructions on the letter design.25 During the 1890s, harmonizing text and illustration was the goal of both book and poster designers, but each group approached the task within a different framework: the former lending priority to typographic text, and the latter to the figurative image. William Morris, writing about the design of his own book in 1896, noted that “I had to consider chiefly the following things: the paper, the form of the type, the relative spacing of the letters, the words, and the lines; and lastly, the position of the printed matter on the page.”26 Morris gave the word priority over the image: the function of the illustration was “to ornament my books suitably” and “[I] always tried to keep in mind the necessity for making my decoration a part of the page of type.”27 Speaking of the “magnificent and intimate woodcuts” that adorned several of the books he had recently published, Morris clarified that the designer, Sir Edward Burne-­Jones, “never lost sight of this important point, so that his work will not only give us a series of most beautiful and imaginative pictures, but form the most harmonious decoration possible to the printed book.”28 For Morris, the dual priority of book design was staking “a definite claim to beauty” and being “easy to read”— though it “should not dazzle the eye, or trouble the intellect of the reader by eccentricity of form in the letters.”29 While this fit the needs of the book reader, who typically made a deliberate choice to turn his attention to the book, it was not an effective prescription for posters on the street, whose target audience was the hurried passerby who glimpsed the poster unintentionally. Responding to the poster’s need to seduce its audience, late nineteenth-­century designers of the illustrated poster created a new form of communication based on the priority of figurative images. They realigned the ratio and relationship of image and word as compared with illustrations that appeared in books and journals. In the latter, illustrations were typically framed by typographic text, referenced by a caption, and circumscribed within a limited, designated space. Furthermore, the primary function of an illustration in a book, as in the press, was to illustrate the printed word. Thus, illustration was subordinate to words, letters, and typography, not only in its positioning on the page 214  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

but also in its function. Like the text, illustrations in books and in journals were typically still black and white. Discussing posters in 1896, the French novelist and critic Lucien Muhlfeld stressed the limited appeal of letters, insisting that only an image can attract the gaze and suggesting that this is what “has brought about the illustrated poster.”30 The illustration was perceived as key to the aggressive appeal of the poster. The critic Émile Straus expressed this most blatantly in describing the work of the designer Jossot: “Without the help of letters, by the sole fanaticism of their compositions, M. Jossot violates the gaze [viole le regard].”31 In addition, the artistic quality of illustrated posters was said to enhance the seductive powers of the image. John Grand-­Carteret expressed this view in the mid 1890s: “Yesterday, it was commerce, industry, the réclame, which called upon the vignette. Today it is the image, it is art, which uses as pretext publicité to execute often remarkable compositions.”32 As these statements by late nineteenth-­century designers and commentators in England, France, and the United States suggest, it was generally agreed that poster design, in contrast to book or journal design, had to privilege the image. Rather than placing an image within a page of text, posters had to embed words and their letters within an overall image, usually a figurative illustration. Designers and commentators also agreed that it was important for the poster designer to be the one who drew the letters on the stone or at least designed them as part of the overall poster image. Some more than others stressed the importance of the words that appeared in the poster, sparse as they were and despite the predominance of the image. Others wished for a poster that could tell its tale through the image alone. All agreed that words should be kept to a minimum and that it was the power of the image and of color that attracted the gaze to the poster. These views were developed in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, along with the rise of the illustrated color lithographic poster.

From the Typographic to the Image-­Centered Poster Earlier on, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, spoken words announced by criers had been the principal mode of advertisement, both of royal ordinances and of commercial wares.33 Alfred Franklin, the historian, librarian, and prolific French author, noted in 1887 that before typographic posters became ubiquitous, the spoken word predominated and posters were merely “an accessory to advertising.”34 This was the case despite the fact that governments adopted the print medium early on, as evidenced, for example, by the decree of Francis I of Dialogics of  Image and Word  ‡ 215

France, as early as 1536, that official announcements be delivered through posters rather than public criers.35 It was only in the nineteenth century that the poster gradually became the main means of street advertising. In C’est qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris, published in 1858, the French journalist and historian of Paris Victor Fournel provides an eyewitness account of typographic posters in Paris, noting that they filled the urban space: “Paris of today is nothing but an immense wall of posters” of all formats and colored paper.36 His writing also reveals that typographic posters sometimes appealed to passersby through bold and direct verbal orders, such as “stop there! [halte là!] Do not go any further without taking my address. Your interest commands it.”37 Fournel’s account suggests that even in the time of the typographic poster, those who designed the largely text-­based posters nonetheless used certain nonverbal means to create a sensual visual appearance, appealing to the senses through “the seduction of the vignettes” and with the aid of the most brilliant paper colors and a stunning variety of tints.38 Prior to the nineteenth century, the typographic poster reigned, featuring word-­based communication, typically to the exclusion of images. In some cases images were included in a small, circumscribed vignette surrounded by profuse text. For example, a small schematic illustration appears at the top of a 1715 poster promoting pocket-­size umbrellas and parasols, which otherwise features mostly text (Fig. 6.1). The poster advertisement was still carried primarily by typography, and its framed, wood-­engraved figure was situated amid text. Nonetheless, as Maindron notes, it was within this genre of the typographic poster that the illustrated poster made its “first and timid appearance” in the eighteenth century.39 Although most early posters placed small schematic wood-­engraved images within ample text, on a few occasions, monochromatic wood-­carved illustrations predominated in a small-­scale poster, as seen in Orlando Parry’s 1835 watercolor of hoardings in London (Fig. 6.2).40 Such early examples differed from the late nineteenth-­century illustrated posters in their small scale, lack of color, crude wood-­carved image, and lack of integration of word with image. During the first half of the nineteenth century and into its third quarter, typographic posters predominated in Paris, London, and other cities. This can be seen for example in Émile Mermet’s La publicité en France, guide manuel, published in 1880, which includes a foldout panoramic illustration of the street, titled Advertising in the Streets of Paris in 1880 (Fig. 6.3). Mermet’s text refers to the “charming plate,” which, in its pittoresque mode, shows the full variety and brilliance of a wall filled with poster advertising.41 The illustration shows the different modes of poster display: posters cover the wall of an entire three-­story 216  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

Pl. 24. Pierre Bonnard, L’Estampe et l’Affiche, 1897 (printer not listed). 80.6 × 59 cm.

Pl. 25. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Bust of Mademoiselle Marcelle Lender, 1895. Ancourt, Paris. Color lithograph, 35.8 × 28 cm. Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art, Rosenwald Collection 1951.10.431. Courtesy National Gallery of Art.

Pl. 26. Ethel Reed, Miss Träumerei, 1895. Lamson, Wolffe & Co., Boston. 35 × 22 cm.

Pl. 27. Jan Toorop, The Print Collector (Dr. Aegidius Timmerman), 1900. Oil on canvas, 66.5 × 76 cm. Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands.

Pl. 28. (above) Dudley Hardy, “A Gaiety Girl,” Prince of Wales’ Theatre, 1893. Waterlow & Sons, London. 224 × 100 cm. Image © Victoria and Albert Museum. Given by Mrs. J. T. Clarke, E.376–1921. Pl. 29. (right) Alphonse Mucha, La dame aux camélias, Sarah Bernhardt, Théâtre de la Renaissance, 1896. Champenois, Paris. 205 × 72 cm.

Pl. 30. W. S. Rogers, Automobile Club Show, c. 1900. Waterlow & Sons, London. 76.2 × 51.3 cm.

Pl. 31. William George Joy, Bayswater Omnibus, 1895. Oil on canvas, 140 × 194 cm. (framed). Museum of London.

Pl. 32. Louis Robert Carrier-Belleuse, Mending the Pots, 1882. Oil on canvas, 64.8 × 97.8 cm.

Pl. 33. Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, La rue, 1896. Affiches Charles Verneau, Paris. 236.2 × 304.8 cm.

Pl. 34. Émile Mermet, La publicité dans les rues de Paris en 1880 (Advertising in the Streets of Paris in 1880). Fold-out lithographic illustration, 17 × 32 cm., in La Publicité en France, Guide Manuel, 1880. New York State Public Library, Albany.

Pl. 35. Alfred Concanen, Modern Advertising: A Railway Station in 1874. Printed by Stannard & Son. Fold out lithographic illustration, 15.5 × 31.1 cm. Henry Sampson, A History of Advertising from the Earliest Times (London: Chatto and Windus, 1874), n.p. University of Michigan Library.

Pl. 36. John Everett Millais, Bubbles, Pears’ Soap, 1886. 95.8 cm × 63.5 cm. Reproduced with kind permission of Unilever from an original in Unilever Archives. Pl. 37. Jules Chéret, Eau de Botot, seul dentifrice approuvé par l’Académie de Médecine de Paris, 1896. Chaix, Paris. 84 × 60 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Pl. 38. Jules Chéret, Vin Mariani, Popular French Tonic Wine, 1894. Chaix, Paris. 123 × 86.3 cm. Pl. 39. Francisco Tamagno, La Framboisette, c. 1905. Robin, Paris. 156.8 × 111.5 cm.

Pl. 40. Aubrey Beardsley, Publisher. Children’s Books, 1894. 76 × 50.7 cm. Pl. 41. Leonetto Cappiello, Chocolat Klaus, 1903. Vercasson, Paris. 96.5 × 137 cm.

Pl. 42. Lucian Bernhard, Manoli, 1910. Hollerbaum & Schmidt, Berlin. 71 × 94.5 cm. Pl. 43. Jane Atché, Papier à cigarettes JOB, 1896. Cassan Fils, ToulouseParis. 150 × 120 cm.

Pl. 44. Alphonse Mucha, JOB, c. 1896. Champenois, Paris. 66.7 × 46.4 cm. Pl. 45. Fritz Rehm, Der Kenner, Cigaretten Laferme, Dresden ( The Connoisseur, Laferme Cigarettes), 1897. Grimme & Hempel, Leipzig. 88 × 58 cm.

Pl. 46. Adolphe Crespin, Paul Hankar architecte, 1894. Ad. Mertens, Brussels. 54.2 × 40 cm.

Pl. 47. Eugène Vavasseur, “Hammond” Machine à écriture visible, 1904. Arts Industriels, Paris. 81.3 × 38.7 cm.

Pl. 48. Jules Chéret, Ernest Maindron, cover illustration, Les Hommes d’Aujourd’hui 6, no. 299 [1887]. 20.32 × 15.24 cm. Author’s collection.

6.1 Parapluyes et parasols à porter dans la poche, 1715. Published in Gazette des Beaux-Arts 30 (November 1884): 421.

6.2 John Orlando Parry, A London Street Scene, 1835. Watercolor. Alfred Dunhill Museum and Archive, London.

6.3 Émile Mermet, La publicité dans les rues de Paris en 1880 (Advertising in the Streets of Paris in 1880). Fold-out lithographic illustration, 17 × 32 cm., in La Publicité en France, Guide Manuel, 1880. New York State Public Library, Albany.

building, are pasted on a Morris column, carried by sandwich men, and pasted on a cart pulled by a horse.42 The illustration shows to what extent the typographic poster relied not only on words but also, to great effect, on brilliant colors (the colored paper was mandated by the fact that the use of white paper was preserved for official government posters). The illustration emphasizes the prominent role of the brilliant colored paper on which the posters were printed — glaring yellow, glowing red, and bright blue — with the vivid, colorful collage of posters on the wall standing out against the monochromatic cityscape. The posters depicted here feature black and color typography, as well as some white typography highlighted by brilliant color backgrounds, and include the occasional vignette or marque de fabrique (the company symbol). The illustration suggests that, as late as 1880 — well over a decade after Chéret first began to produce illustrated lithographic color posters in his own print shop — Paris walls were still dominated by typographic posters. Of the numerous posters depicted in the illustration, only a single poster — advertising the department store À la ville St. Denis, shown in the top right corner of the illustration — features a figurative image. Although Chéret’s illustrated posters had only limited impact during the 1870s, by the late 1880s they transformed the urban environment, as attested by J.-­K. Huysmans’s 1889 description of Chéret’s posters as breaking the monotony of the standardized urban space imposed by the Haussmannized redesign of Paris with their dazzling colors and images of gaiety.43 The illustration in Mermet’s book suggests, however, that the enlivening effect of posters on the city began even earlier than this, with the colorful papers of the typographic poster. 218  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

6.4 Alfred Concanen, Modern Advertising: A Railway Station in 1874. Printed by Stannard & Son. Fold out lithographic illustration, 15.5 × 31.1 cm. Henry Sampson, A History of Advertising from the Earliest Times (London: Chatto and Windus, 1874), n.p. University of Michigan Library.

Another foldout illustration, this one depicting a railway station in London in 1874, appearing in A History of Advertising from the Earliest Times by Henry Sampson, shows the extent to which profuse text was still dominant in poster advertising of the time (Fig. 6.4). The text was punctuated by small and clearly contained images. For example, the poster advertising Edes Patent Eye Liquid (fourth from the left) includes a small icon of an eye. Next to it, the poster for Allan Royal Mail Steamers includes an icon of a sailing ship, and next to it, the poster for watches and clocks includes an icon of a clock. The illustration also shows the use of red typographic letters interspersed with black typographic letters, as well as the use of a greenish blue as a background color in some of the posters, but the paper colors are muted compared with the ones in the Mermet illustration of Paris posters on the street. Several decades before Chéret, during the 1830s and ’40s, French artists and illustrators such as Nicolas Charlet, Bertall (Charles Albert d’Arnoux), Tony Johannot, Paul Gavarni, J. J. Grandville, Auguste Raffet, and many others (including anonymous illustrators) designed lithographic image-­centered posters promoting books and publishers.44 These posters were small-­scale, mostly monochromatic, and many were enlargements of the frontispieces of books or adapted versions of illustrations in the book.45 These posters promoted sales of popular novels and illustrated books. The first such poster, produced in 1828, was by the illustrator, painter, and lithographer Achille Devéria for a version of Goethe’s Dialogics of  Image and Word  ‡ 219

Faust illustrated by Eugène Delacroix.46 Though there were, as Bradford Collins notes, isolated incidents of illustrated posters promoting books prior to the mid-­ 1830s, it was only from around 1835 that their use became systematic.47 Opinions vary on the role of the book poster in the development of the later illustrated poster. Collins proposes that the book poster contributed to the rising status of the poster but was not significant in the developments that led to the emergence of the illustrated poster of the late nineteenth century.48 Ségolène Le Men suggests that the art in the book poster was “the first impulse of the modern illustrated poster,”49 and Réjane Bargiel argues that the book poster represents an intermediate phase in the history of the poster, functioning as “a step between the poster that was almost entirely typographic . . . and the illustrated poster of Chéret, Toulouse-­Lautrec, Steinlen and Mucha.”50 Anne-­Marie Christin contends that “the first decisive mutation in posters, inspired by books,” brought “a shift of structural priority from text to image.”51 My own emphasis here is on the significant differences that existed between the book poster of the 1830s and 1840s and the late nineteenth-­century illustrated poster, despite the fact that the figurative image was predominant in both. These differences show that the book poster took an initial but ultimately rather limited step toward the transformation in the relationship of word and image that would later contribute to the evolution of graphic design. Consider, first, that the book poster design was based on an illustration, and the accompanying words were typically not fully integrated with the image. Furthermore, because they were based on illustrations, book poster designs were typically elaborate and highly detailed in style. By contrast, the late nineteenth-­century illustrated poster abandoned the detailed illustrative style in favor of graphic clarity and simplification. It did not merely juxtapose word with image but integrated words into the image. And employing color lithography, it featured brilliant colors, whereas the book poster, despite its use of lithography, remained monochromatic.52 Moreover, the illustrated poster was typically larger than the book poster, and because it was displayed on hoardings and walls, it required a mode of communication more impactful and striking than anything the book poster, seen in bookshop windows, had to strive for.53 The shift, in the later illustrated poster, toward a thorough integration of image and word is of particular importance for the present discussion. The earlier book poster was predominantly image-­based, with minimal typography whose integration with the image was limited. So, for example, in Tony Johannot’s Don Quichotte illustré, 1836 (Fig. 6.5), the words are kept on the outskirts of the image, framing the illustrated scene from above and below. Thus, although these earlier book posters were innovative insofar as they were image-­centered, they still kept 220  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

6.5 Tony Johannot, Don Quichotte illustré, 1844. 73 × 56 cm. Charles Hiatt, Picture Posters (Wakefield, UK: EP Publishing, 1976) [1895]).

lettering and image largely apart, presenting each as a unitary language demarcated within its own compositional territory. Édouard Manet’s 1868 poster promoting Champfleury’s Les chats, histoire, moeurs, observations, anecdotes, is a particularly striking book poster (Fig. 6.6). The black-­and-­white illustration featuring two cats — one white, the other black — on the roofs of Montmartre was innovative in its dramatic character and use of silhouette, both of which boldly attract the eye. Unlike most book posters, it avoids a detailed illustration of a scene from the book, using instead a simplified graphic image, inspired by Japanese prints, that commands attention and can be quickly apprehended. Scholars have paid attention to the iconography, noting that Manet uses a sexualized theme (a strategy that poster artists would use later on), the mating of cats on a rooftop, with “sheer delight in the voluptuous nature and barefaced, shameless sexuality of his cats. His lithograph is a tour de force of whimsical, mocking wit and of concise graphic tension.”54 Manet’s lithograph was framed by lettering so that the black-­and-­white image remained intact, untouched by words. The orange letters spelling out the author’s name and the book title appear at the top, and other information is inserted in the margins, on the white frame surrounding the icon. The poster was registered with the dépôt légal in October 1868. Another version of it, used for the second edition of Champfleury’s book in 1869, features a much smaller version of  Manet’s illustration surrounded by significantly more typographic text, radically shifting the Dialogics of  Image and Word  ‡ 221

6.6 Édouard Manet, cover for Champfleury, Les chats, 2nd ed., 1868. 55.5 × 44 cm. Charles Hiatt, Picture Posters (Wakefield, UK: EP Publishing, 1976 [1895]).

ratio of image and text.55 These two different posters, using the same illustration by Manet, were presumably “designed” by the printers rather than by Manet. Nonetheless, as Charles Hiatt noted, the innovation of Manet’s poster lies in making the illustrated poster “artistic” and not “merely pictorial.”56 Likewise, in Britain, The Woman in White, 1871, was both a pictorial and artistic poster (Fig. 6.7). The large-­scale theatrical poster by Frederick Walker, an illustrator and artist who was a member of the Royal Academy of Art — broke new ground relative to earlier typographic posters. The first artistic image-­centered poster in England, The Woman in White promoted the Olympic Theatre’s production of Wilkie Collins’s adaptation of his own novel to the stage. The title of the play and the name of the venue occupy a horizontal line framing the image at the top and bottom. Walker thus kept the flat white words strictly separated from the black-­and-­white three-­dimensional scene, except for a single point of contact at the lower end of the woman’s clothing, which partially overlaps with the y of “Olympic,” adding subtly to the three-­dimensional illusion of the scene while forging a connection between word and image. Although some smaller-­scale posters featuring wood-­block illustrations preceded it on London hoardings (as seen in Parry’s A London Street Scene, Fig. 6.2), Woman in White represented the first time that an eminent artist was commissioned to design a theater poster in England, and was considered the first 222  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

6.7 Frederick Walker, Woman in White, 1871. Woodcut (original poster lost).

image-­centered English poster of artistic quality.57 Furthermore, the large-­scale poster (Walker described it as door-­size) was innovative not only in giving priority to image over typography, but also, as the influential British critic and art journal editor Marion Spielmann explained, because rather than illustrating a scene from the play, it represented a single symbolic image: “a magnificent design of a woman, with her finger to her lips, stepping out into the starlight night.”58 Based on this poster, Spielmann articulated the principle of the artistic poster: it “should not be a pictorial illustration of the object or commodity advertised at all, but a decoration, which, completely harmonizing with its spirit, should yet attract by its independent originality and artistic beauty.”59 Walker entrusted M. W. H. Hooper to turn his design into a black-­and-­white woodcut. On September 14, 1871, he wrote Hooper about Woman in White: “I have got it on to the big paper, but not on to the blocks. These I have had fastened together by a carpenter, and I don’t quite know whether you’d say they fit close enough. I don’t like to ask you to come round again, but you could tell in an instant whether they’ll do to proceed upon. . . . I have got more ‘go’ and purpose in the figure, and it strikes me we shall make a good thing of it.”60 Dialogics of  Image and Word  ‡ 223

Walker’s letter to Hooper suggests a greater involvement in production than Spielmann and Hiatt — who were both writing in 1895, a year before the publication of Walker’s letters — reported.61 Spielmann and Hiatt were writing about a poster made over twenty years earlier, the original of which was no longer available, which may also explain why both referred inaccurately to Walker’s poster as advertising Wilkie Collins’s “new story” and novel respectively, rather than the play. Well-­liked by Walker’s friend Wilkie Collins, who had commissioned the poster, Woman in White was considered both an artistic and commercial success, but it remained Walker’s sole poster design.62 Walker foresaw the importance of the illustrated poster with admirable clarity, stating: “I am bent on doing all I can with a first attempt at what I consider might develop into a most important branch of art.”63 It was not until the early 1890s that artists in Britain, inspired by the French illustrated poster, developed a new type of poster design that gave priority to images and integrated images and words. A decade and a half after Walker’s poster, the British hoardings displayed image-­centered posters advertising soap based on contemporary paintings by prominent Royal Academicians. Major soap executives bought the paintings and their copyrights and produced high-­quality lithographic color reproductions of them, inserting the name of the brand, a few words of advertising copy, and a depiction of the product, sometimes with its packaging. The first and best-­ known example is John Everett Millais’s painting whose original title A Child’s World was changed to Bubbles in 1886 (Fig. 6.8).64 Thomas J. Barratt, the managing director of Pears’ Soap, revered as “an advertising genius,” was credited with launching “the first systematic advertising campaign to sell soap.”65 He acquired Millais’s painting when the artist was already well established as a full member of the Royal Academy (in fact, he bought the painting and copyright from the London Illustrated News, which had acquired them from the artist for a mass-­reproduced color print for a supplement in its Christmas issue). Barratt obtained the painting and exclusive copyright for £2,200 (not much more than what Millais received at the time for portraits), and spent another £30,000 on an advertising campaign that used the painting, including an initial £17,500 for producing a high-­quality mass reproduction of the painting.66 He hired artists and craftsmen who copied the painting, using twenty-­five lithographic stones, each stone for a different color (most posters used only three or four colors and a corresponding number of stones). As in other soap advertisements by Pears’ Soap and its competitor Sunlight Soap, the words were placed in the paintings by the advertisers rather than the artist. 224  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

6.8 John Everett Millais, Bubbles, Pears’ Soap, 1886. 95.8 cm × 63.5 cm. Reproduced with kind permission of Unilever from an original in Unilever Archives.

At the time, some critics spoke in favor of using academic paintings for poster advertising because it raised the aesthetic level of earlier vulgar advertising, but the most prominent ones criticized this genre and regarded it as inferior to the originally designed poster. Writing in 1895, Hiatt, the most important British critic of the poster, was decidedly unimpressed: “The thing [the Bubbles poster] is pretty enough, but cannot compete as an advertisement with a really good poster properly so called. . . . It is not an experiment one cares to see frequently repeated.”67 In this particular case, Hiatt did not think much of the original painting to begin with: “Looked at as a mere oil-­painting, Bubbles is a very agreeable example of the ‘Kiss Papa’ style of picture,” which “did nothing to increase the great painter’s reputation.”68 Even Spielmann, who was a dedicated advocate of Millais (and of the illustrated poster), admitted that the painting may have been a “pot-­boiler,” but did his best to defend it, claiming that “ ‘pot-­boilers’ . . . are usually better and more freely-­painted pictures than those which are more deliberately thought out and more restrainedly executed.”69 He recognized, however, that the true innovator in the case of Bubbles was not the artist but the advertiser. Bubbles “introduced, through one man’s initiative (and he is not Millais), a revolution in favour of ‘artistic advertisement.’ ”70 Dialogics of  Image and Word  ‡ 225

Though none of the nineteenth-­century critics addressed its role in any detail, clearly the brand name and ad copy — the text itself — was crucial in transforming the academic paintings into advertisements. Words branded the paintings with product identity by appropriating the picture for their advertising purpose. Along with images of the promoted product, they associated the picture in the viewer’s mind with soap. Indeed, the insertion of the brand name was crucial not only for the transformation of the painting into an advertising poster but also for the product itself, as soap bars that had previously been sold as unbranded bulk were now stamped with the name of the brand and wrapped with paper or packaged in a carton featuring the brand name. Selling soap in this new way, as a distinctive brand, required extensive advertising targeting the final consumer rather than the wholesaler.71 Soap manufacturers exploited the familiar paintings by prestigious academicians to lend aesthetic cachet to their advertisements, and perhaps also as a way of rendering their advertising message easily digestible to the public72 — though this latter goal was ultimately achieved through the sheer ubiquity of the poster and the consistent and repeated use of the same image in other types of advertisements (for example, in the press and in show cards). In the case of  Millais, a vast amount of copies and versions using his painting were reproduced, and the poster kept reappearing for some years. Spielmann observed that Bubbles “spread over the world by the million by illustrated newspaper, print-­dealer, and shop manufacturer.”73 Joseph Pennell, the American artist, lithographer, and critic living in London, reported that for several years no figure was more familiar in London than the golden-­haired child in a green velvet outfit blowing bubbles. The poster appeared on hoardings, sometimes by the dozen, in railway stations, on buses, and in the press.74 As Pennell described it, Bubbles dominated the streets as the dome of St. Paul dominated the city view of London; “No poster was ever better known.”75 This was the first instance of what would become known in the twentieth century as saturation advertising. The painting’s figurative image became so synonymous with the soap advertisement that, after a while, viewers of the poster no longer had to read the words — they directly associated the image of the bubble-­blowing boy with Pears’ Soap. By the early 1890s, when young British poster designers began to create artistic posters, they rejected the academic tradition and the use of academic-­style painting in posters, drawing inspiration instead from the likes of Chéret and Toulouse-­Lautrec in Paris. Before Chéret developed the artistic poster in France there was a precedent for large-­scale color advertising posters in Paris, which differed substantially from both the earlier book poster and the later illustrated poster. These posters 226  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

6.9 Jean-Alexis Rouchon, Absinthe-chinoise brevetée, S.G.D.G., 1862. Rouchon, Paris. 136 × 80 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

were printed by Jean-­A lexis Rouchon and made using the fabrication process of wallpaper before color lithography was employed for posters.76 Rouchon’s posters differed from the small, monochrome, lithographic book posters of the 1830s and ’40s in their scale, brilliant colors, lack of detailed illustration, and in their display in prominent locations on the walls of buildings in the city. Yet like the earlier book posters, they usually kept image and words apart, presenting them side by side, as seen, for example, in Rouchon’s Absinthe-­chinoise brevetée, 1862 (Fig. 6.9). Rouchon’s large-­scale posters, made between the 1840s and the mid 1860s, often featuring large and seemingly three-­dimensional color figures, differed from the later illustrated posters in several ways: they only rarely elaborated a visual context for the figure, and they typically confined letters to lines within horizontal bands at the top and bottom of the poster rather than integrating them into the image. Rouchon’s posters thus presented image and words as distinct languages — juxtaposed, supplementary, and in most cases hermetically separated.

The Late Nineteenth-­Century Illustrated Poster During the 1880s and 1890s, designers of the illustrated poster, led by Chéret, radically changed the interrelations of image and word. Typically credited with making the commercial poster artistic, Chéret has rarely been discussed through Dialogics of  Image and Word  ‡ 227

6.10 (left) Jules Chéret, Eau de Botot, seul dentifrice approuvé par l’Académie de Médecine de Paris, 1896. Chaix, Paris. 84 × 60 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France. 6.11 (right) Jean-Alexis Rouchon, Poudre de Duchesne dentiste, 1860. Rouchon, Paris. 100 × 87 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

the prism of his innovation with respect to modes of interrelating image and word.77 As I propose below, Chéret replaced the separation of image and word with an evolving dialogic interrelationship between them. Consider, for example, his 1896 Eau de Botot, seul dentifrice (Fig. 6.10). Here, as in most of his other posters, a picture takes up the entire poster, and words are used sparsely, in stark contrast with earlier typographic posters. Unlike the posters of Johannot, Rouchon, Manet, and Walker, which segregated words and images, in Chéret’s poster words infiltrate the image. The difference is clearly visible in the comparison of Chéret’s Eau de Botot with Rouchon’s Poudre de Duchesne dentiste, 1860 (Fig. 6.11). Whereas in the latter the figurative image is confined to a relatively small vignette surrounded by words, Chéret boldly inserts sparse words into the illustration, thereby recontextualizing words within the overall image. Furthermore, he uses his trademark seductive female, who occupies most of the poster, as contrasted with the “proper” woman confined within Rouchon’s vignette. Chéret also set up a more fully articulated hierarchy among words that represent different types of information. In Eau de Botot he uses white shading around the large red letters spelling out the product name, affording it a pronounced presence and integrating the words into the three-­dimensional space of the picture. In many of his late posters, Chéret developed this strategy into a proto-­logo 228  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

6.12 Jules Chéret, Vin Mariani, Popular French Tonic Wine, 1894. Chaix, Paris. 123 × 86.3 cm.

graphic representation of the name of the establishment or brand. Alongside the pronounced name of the product, smaller letters are used to convey secondary information, such as the store’s address. In such illustrated posters, a reciprocal relationship is generated between words and image: the overall figurative image recontextualizes the words under its auspices, and the words participate in transforming the image-­based poster into an interactive communication system made up of a double-­language of image and letters. Using Bakhtin’s term, the illustrated poster is dialogized. In Chéret’s posters, the larger words — names of brands, establishments, and such — are iconized, appealing to the passing gaze with the immediacy of an image. By contrast, the smaller text is informational and conforms to the earlier regime of letters composed in lines. A clear example of this pronounced hierarchy in the types of typographic words is visible in Chéret’s poster Vin Mariani, Popular French Tonic Wine, 1894 (Fig. 6.12). The most important words — in this case, the name of the brand — are treated separately and essentially turned into an image; here they are as dominant as the figurative image below them. The large red letters of special typographic design that spell out the name of Dialogics of  Image and Word  ‡ 229

the product, Vin Mariani, break out of the regime of the line on a page of text, instead appearing curved. Here and commonly in Chéret’s work, the dominant words are dynamically positioned to echo compositional directions within the figurative image. In many of his posters, Chéret designed the letters of the brand or establishment so as to invest them with a material, object-­like, or architectonic presence. This kind of letter design drew attention to the brand, made it legible from afar and at a glance, and helped imprint it on the viewer’s memory. By contrast, secondary information, such as an address, was usually presented in small, flat letters arranged on lines at the bottom of the poster and only legible from closer range. As seen in Vin Mariani, besides giving brand names (or other vital information) an authoritative character, Chéret also integrated them in subtle ways into the limited three-­dimensional space of the picture. For example, the large-­scale brilliant red letters spelling out “Vin Mariani” are incorporated into the overall regime of the image through their dark shading, which gives them a three-­ dimensional presence; through the gradually changing scale of the letters, which creates an allusion of three-­dimensional space; through the dynamic curve of the letters, which echoes the movement of the female figure; and finally, through the placement of the letters against the same painterly blue background as the figure. In all these ways, the designer set up a dialogic relationship between image and words. Although the solid letters representing the brand name stand out from the fluid pastel illustration, the words they spell out are themselves presented like an image. The red-­haired chérette dressed in a scant yellow outfit and seductively pouring the Vin Mariani into a glass while she descends from above in a gracious and provocative bare-­legged stride is almost secondary to the pronounced red brand name; yet the name itself has in turn been transformed into an icon. Thus, two types of images interact within the design — the word-­image and the figure-­icon. Chéret tailored his choice of letter type and design to the object of promotion in a given poster. Posters of his mature poster period display a more or less established formula for the relationship of word and image, while his earlier posters, from the late 1860s to the mid 1880s, are more experimental in this respect. Sometimes the poster topic itself encouraged an unconventional solution. For example, announcing an 1886 exhibition of the Incohérents, an irreverent artists’ group to which Chéret belonged, he used letters whose design expressed the meaning of the group’s name (Fig. 6.13).78 The irregular, tumbling red letters with their black shading spell out incohérents while themselves embodying a visual disorder or incoherence. A dialogic interrelationship between images and words transforms 230  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

6.13 Jules Chéret, Exposition des Arts Incohérents, 1886. Chaix, Paris. 122 × 86 cm.

the words into expressive images, sharply contrasted with the solid, linear regime of words that appears at the bottom of the composition and conveys information about fees, dates, etc. At the top, the informational word Exposition is similarly composed on horizontal lines without transgressing an established order. In some of his early posters Chéret forged a particularly playful relationship between letters and images. For example, he produced whimsical combinations of miniaturized entertainment figures interacting with large letters that spelled out the name of the entertainment establishment or group. This appears in several posters, including two with a similar design: Folies-­Bergère, les Girard, dated 1875–78 or 1880–81, and L’ horloge, Champs Élysées, les Girard, 1877.79 Chéret staged an extravagant graphic performance with the agility of the dancers portrayed in the poster: the extremely elongated limbs of the contorted figures in the center of the composition — two male dancers and one female dancer — are literally interlaced with the large letters of “Folies-­Bergère” (Fig. 6.14). One of the male dancers hooks his foot through the letter B,80 while his other foot rests lightly atop the R of “Girard” (the group’s name); the other male dancer lays his foot on the G. An even more audacious dialogue between word and image takes place below with the horizontally stretched miniature male dancer weaving his unnaturally long arms and legs through the large letters of “Girard.” The flat background highlights the graphic character of both the words and the images, Dialogics of  Image and Word  ‡ 231

6.14 Jules Chéret, Folies-Bergère Les Girard, 1877. J. Chéret, 18 rue Brunel, Paris. 56 × 43.6 cm.

making this poster one of the most daring and memorable in Chéret’s oeuvre. In this graphic stunt, he choreographed a playful dialogical dance of the poster’s typographic and figurative elements. If Chéret’s duets of word and image can be described as whimsical, the American designer Will H. Bradley, in his 1895 poster Pegasus, the Chap Book, depicts a playfully conflictual relationship (Fig. 6.15). In this poster’s self-­conscious interaction between word and image the letters convey meaning not only by forming words but also by themselves becoming objects, that is, by acting at once as image and letter, figure and word. Whereas in the upper portion of the poster the Greek winged-­horse Pegasus gallops freely in midair, its repeated figure below is entangled in the letters spelling out “The Chap Book” (the name of the journal for which the poster was made). Staging a teasing encounter between the figurative image and typographic letter, Bradley depicts the small-­scale Pegasus jumping through the large letter O as if it were a hoop and getting entangled in the letter B as if it were a fence. Thus, the letters act as barriers to the free movement of the figurative image of the winged horse. Pegasus encounters the letters as an inhospitable obstacle course. In turn, a dense decorative pattern composed of the repeated miniature Pegasuses engulfs the letters and partly obscures them. 232  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

6.15 Will Bradley, Pegasus, The Chap Book, 1895. Stone and Kimball, Chicago. 53.8 × 36 cm.

The tight weave of icon and word is thus transformed into a dynamic battleground where neither element has the upper hand and both remain permanently enmeshed. Toulouse-­Lautrec’s first poster, Moulin Rouge, 1892 (Fig. 1.3), sets up a heightened dialogism between word and image in an altogether different manner. He inserts flat letters spelling out “Moulin Rouge” into the image, borrowing from the convention of “iteration copy” used in newspapers at a time when advertising copy was still confined within columns and relied solely on words. Iteration copy repeated the name of the product in capital letters, often for the full length of a column, as follows: USE PETER’S SOAP USE PETER’S SOAP USE PETER’S SOAP81 Lautrec’s enlarged M, which extends over the three iterated rows, is also borrowed from the common modes of this type of press advertising. By highlighting the red letters with a thin black outline and repeating them three times, he gives the name of the establishment the most prominent word status in the poster, but Dialogics of  Image and Word  ‡ 233

6.16 Francisco Tamagno, La Framboisette, c. 1905. Robin, Paris. 156.8 × 111.5 cm.

unlike Chéret, he keeps his letters utterly flat. Lautrec interrelated these letters not only to the image but also to other types of lettering, notably the fourth appearance of “Moulin Rouge” in pale undulating red letters that overlap with the undergarments of La Goulue. By contrast, the name “La Goulue” is spelled out in smaller black letters echoing the black frieze of silhouettes. As was widely recognized at the time, repetition was a useful strategy in advertising. Sometimes it was carried out through the repeated insertion of the product and its label into the poster’s visual narrative, as in Francisco Tamagno’s La Framboisette, c. 1905 (Fig. 6.16). At the top appears the brand name in a straightforward typographic representation, but it appears again in various objects within the picture: on the bottle label, the match holder, and the train travel-­ guide. Here, iteration works pictorially. Incarnated in the objects, letters become a hybridized language of object, image, and words. Materialized, words are recontextualized within a scene of everyday life. Their presence and status in these representations differ markedly from those that designate the product or brand graphically, as seen at the top of the poster. Another convention used by many designers as a strategy for interrelating words and images was to place a typographic poster within the illustrated poster. 234  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

6.17 Jules Chéret, Le Petit Moniteur, L’Ogresse, 1874. J. Chéret, 18 rue Brunel, Paris. 115 × 82 cm.

Jules Chéret used this strategy in Le Petit Moniteur, 1874, advertising the newspaper by highlighting the appearance of Paul Féval’s novel L’ogresse (Fig. 6.17). In addition to the prominent typographic information in the front, he repeats the name of the newspaper more subtly in a poster pasted on a Morris column behind the figure. Whereas Chéret depicts a street urchin in a realistic manner holding up the typographic poster within a three-­dimensional space of the city, Aubrey Beardsley produced a modernist poster that flattens out the image of the woman behind the transparent dotted curtain as much as the typographic information that takes up the other half of the poster in Avenue Theatre, 1894, including detailed information about the performance (Fig. 1.6). Beardsley employs a similar strategy in another poster from the same year, Publisher. Children’s Books., 1894 (Fig. 6.18), where he promotes children’s books published by T. Fisher Unwin by actually dividing the poster into two halves, with the highly stylized flattened image on the left-­hand side and the text on the right. An elegant woman with a prominent curved feather in her hair is seated in a large armchair reading a small book, while the opposite side of the poster lists the book titles and prices. In both this poster and in Avenue Theatre, Beardsley designs the vertical shape that holds the typographic information as a flat comDialogics of  Image and Word  ‡ 235

6.18 Aubrey Beardsley, Pub­ lisher. Children’s Books, 1894. 76 × 50.7 cm.

positional form that “converses” with the other vertical flat shape that holds the female figure. This kind of composition, which preserves the integrity of both image and words, was especially useful insofar as it allowed advertisers to update the typographically presented information while reusing the illustrated portion of the poster unchanged. Posters that harbored a smaller typographic poster within the larger, all-­encompassing figurative image could similarly alter the text without upsetting the picture. An example is Grasset’s Librairie romantique, 1887 (Fig. I.6), which Henri Bouchot dubbed “A graphic triumph,” referring to the poster’s ability to convey its message without the aid of words.82 These kinds of blatantly double-­language posters presents both types of languages, the iconic and the typographic, in their own separate spaces. In the first years of the twentieth century, the Austrians Koloman Moser and Alfred Roller, both associated with the Vienna Secession, designed posters that have been credited in design histories as leaving behind “the decorative excesses of Jugendstil.” They tended toward decorative abstraction,83 rejecting the French floral style in favor of “flat shape and greater simplicity” with an “emphasis on geometric patterning and modular design construction.”84 236  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

6.19 (left) Alfred Roller, XIV. Ausstell[un]g der Vereini­ g­ung Bildender Künstler Österreichs Secession, Wien (14th Exhibition of the Secession), 1902. A. Berger, Vienna. 95.5 × 62.5. 6.20 (right) Koloman Moser, XIII. Ausstellung d[er] Vereini­ g­ung Bildender Künstler Österreichs Secession ( The 13th Vienna Secession Exhibition), 1902. A. Berger, Vienna. 76 × 50.7 cm.

Here, too, the issue of the designers’ experimentation with new relations of word and image has received little attention, though it is a prominent feature of their work. Shunning narrative and figurative image, these posters gave lettering a prominent role without resorting to conventional typographic presentations. In some cases, lettering appears with no figurative image at all, and at times it appears next to abstracted figures, as in Roller’s 1902 poster for the fourteenth exhibition of the Secession (Fig. 6.19). Roller transformed letters into a decorative pattern, with some appearing in compressed compositional blocks. The earlier dialogics of word and image is metamorphosed into letters and words as decorative pattern to the point of reduced legibility. Both word and figurative image are flattened, abstracted, and integrated into a dialogic sign system. So, for instance, Moser’s poster 13th Secession Exhibition, 1902, incorporates stylized lettering into an ornamental pattern of blocks in the lower part of the poster as an integral extension to the abstracted image of three female figures above (Fig. 6.20). Both word and image are utterly flattened and presented against a flat, Dialogics of  Image and Word  ‡ 237

6.21 Leonetto Cappiello, Chocolat Klaus, 1903. Vercas­ son, Paris. 96.5 × 137 cm.

color background in a way that creates a new kind of graphic design composition free of traces of the tradition of the figurative image in illustration and painting.85 The Italian-­born Leonetto Cappiello, who worked in Paris since his first visit there in 1898 and made his first poster there in 1899, broke with the tradition of a realist-­style painting by creating graphic design posters based on powerful icons that mixed fantasy with the promoted product, or else altogether eliminated any link between the image and the product. An example of the latter is Cappiello’s Chocolat Klaus, 1903 (Fig. 6.21). The flat yellow letters spelling out the product name at the bottom of the poster invest the figurative image — a green-­clad blond riding a red horse in midair — with new meaning. These words share a common flat dark background with the image, unlike the additional product information that appears in a separate band of text set against a white background. As Jack Rennert observes, “It was with this poster . . . that Cappiello firmly established himself as the master of the modern poster — if not modern advertising itself.” Rennert explains that it was the very incongruity between text and image that “indelibly etched” the Chocolat Klaus company “in the consciousness of the viewer”; so much so, that this powerful image became, and remains to this day, the company’s trademark.86 In a later interview Cappiello explained: “Even if you look carefully you will probably not be able to mention one poster which has become famous because you remember the image of the product. All the posters 238  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

you remember have stuck in your memory in the form of an image invented by the artist, and which no longer can be dissociated from the product and its name. Surprise is the foundation of advertising: it is its necessary condition.”87 German poster design of the early twentieth century arrived at a rather different solution in its own search for a new type of effective poster advertisement. In 1906, the twenty-­three-­year-­old German Lucian Bernhard (né Emil Kahn), who resided in Berlin, revolutionized the advertising poster with Priester, promoting a match company. Design historians have rightly acknowledged Bernhard for rejecting “the ornamental complexity of Art Nouveau,”88 incorporating the influence of Japonism and the Beggarstaffs, and moving “graphic communications one step further in the simplification and reduction of naturalism into a visual language of shape and sign.”89 They also often cite Bernhard’s own account of his making of this poster as providing reinforcement to the narrative of his rejection of Art Nouveau in favor of modernist innovation.90 Less noted is the fact that the story is also an excellent example of the dialogical process of design as an interactive process between the designer and the poster’s receiver.91 Bernhard made the design for a contest (a common way for young designers to obtain a commission from advertisers). Originally, he had depicted a lit cigar in an ashtray, which was placed on a checkered tablecloth next to a box of matches, with the cigar’s smoke forming undulating female dancers. The dancers, a clear vestige of Art Nouveau, were eliminated early on from drafts of the poster; and then, after a friend assumed the poster was an advertisement for cigars rather than matches, Bernhard proceeded to remove also the tablecloth, cigar, and ashtray, retaining nothing but the two red matches with their yellow tips. Above the image, he inserted the company name, “Priester,” in blue. The jury rejected the unusual poster, but a juror who arrived late, Ernst Growald, reversed this decision. Growald, who was the director of Berlin’s leading lithography and proto-­advertising agency, Hollenbaum and Schmidt, promptly hired Bernhard as his artistic adviser.92 And that, in Bernhard’s telling, is how the Sachplakat (object poster) was born. Bernhard’s Sachplakat introduced an early twentieth-­century poster whose graphic design no longer relied on the artistic strategies of the illustrated poster. It eliminated not merely the intricacy of the Art Nouveau style but also the entire narrative context of the illustrated poster, which drew on the tradition of painting and illustration. The Sachplakat presented word and figurative image as equal: neither element was subordinate, nor could it exist by itself. It placed the image of the product (as an object) and the brand name as two distinct elements against a blank flat background. Next to the brand name, it represented the figurative image of the product as nothing but a commodity, “shining, new Dialogics of  Image and Word  ‡ 239

6.22 Lucian Bernhard, Manoli, 1910. Hollerbaum & Schmidt, Berlin. 71 × 94.5 cm.

and coded for sale.”93 It gave the product an air of desirability yet removed it from any association with either production or use.94 Letters and image stand apart in these works, but are crucially interrelated. They appear independent yet act interdependently, mutually constituting each other without a trace of narrative context. Thus, the principle of the Sachplakat was based on a balanced dialogical encounter of word and image, brand name and product. Bernhard often designed his own typeface. His posters also gained their distinction in part through the use of new inks developed at the time. These achieved a saturated color produced by a lithographic printing that used up to sixteen ink color separations, avoiding any allusion to brushstrokes or the tradition of painting.95 This, along with his graphic design, gave his posters an industrial rather than a painterly quality. This can be seen, for example, in his poster Manoli, 1910 (Fig. 6.22). Unlike Chéret’s Vin Mariani (Fig. 6.12), Bernhard’s single word — the brand name “Manoli” or “Priester”— is no longer given an object-­like presence. Rather, it is distinct from the object world but endows the image with its commodity identity. Bernhard subtly uses two different relationships to space — one is determined by the word and the other by the represented object. The flat letters of “Manoli” and “Priester” appear to be set against a flat background, whereas the diagonally placed cigarette box in Manoli and the two diagonally placed matches in Priester suggest an object placed in three-­dimensional space. Thus, the flat background doubles as a space that accommodates the three-­dimensional object yet retains its flatness as a support for two-­dimensional letters. Bernhard used this formula in other posters, sometimes adding an overlap between the object and the letters, as in Manoli and Stiller, 1907–8. A comparison of the early 240  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

6.23 (below) Lucian Bernhard, Stiller, 1907–8. Hollerbaum & Schmidt, Berlin. 69 × 93.8 cm. 6.24 (right) Chaussures modernes. Mon[sieur] Sutter, 1860. Van Geleyn, Paris. 100 × 52 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

twentieth-­century Stiller to an 1860 poster printed by the French Van Geleyn, Chaussures modernes, Mon. Sutter (Figs. 6.23 and 6.24), throws into relief not only Bernhard’s radical simplification but also his innovative use of word and icon as equal building blocks for brands. The comparison of these two works makes clear that Bernhard’s posters constitute a new kind of double-­voiced discourse, in which the image no longer illustrates a profusion of words (as it does in the Van Geleyn poster). His design leaves out any vestige of the page-­like space previously associated with the book and press, lettering and vignettes, and at the same time also abandons the pictorial tradition on which Chéret had earlier drawn to make the commercial poster artistic. Most importantly, Bernhard left behind two earlier design paradigms: the regime of the page/text (which reigned in the typographic poster but also persisted in the informational part of illustrated posters), and the primacy of the illustrated image, with words embedded or incorporated into predominant pictures, as in Chéret’s posters. Instead, the Sachplakat constituted a new kind of intentional hybridization of word and icon. To use Bakhtin’s formulation, it was a mixture of two languages “within the limits of a single utterance”; “an encounter.”96 In Bernhard’s new paradigm, word and icon became independent building blocks that interacted without being beholden to the concept of the Dialogics of  Image and Word  ‡ 241

“picture” based in the nineteenth-­century tradition of painting and illustration. Letters and icons are, in his work, separate systems of interdependent signs whose respective power maintains a productive stalemate.

Poster Reception: Walter Benjamin on Bullrich Salt “Response,” according to Bakhtin, is “the activating principle” that prepares the ground “for an active and engaged understanding.”97 Understanding and response are dialectically merged; one is impossible without the other.98 Although nineteenth-­century critics commented a great deal about their general responses to posters by Chéret and others, it is quite rare to find a detailed account of a critic’s response to a particular poster. Walter Benjamin’s writing about his early twentieth-­century encounter with an anonymous poster for Bullrich Salt is therefore unique and illuminating for our purposes (despite the fact that it occurred several decades after the flowering of the illustrated poster). It is especially valuable in this context because, as I propose below, his response to the poster stresses the dialogic relationship between word and image, or in Benjamin’s phrasing, “poem” and “painting.” Benjamin tells of a poster he originally saw many years earlier, on a streetcar. He expresses his admiration for it: “If things had their due in this world,” the poster “would have found its admirers, historians, exegetes, and copyists just as surely as any great poem or painting. And in fact, it was both at the same time.”99 He describes his “very deep, unexpected impressions” of his first encounter; “the shock was too violent: the impression, if I may say so, struck with such force that it broke through the bottom of my consciousness and for years lay irrecoverable somewhere in the darkness.”100 Bullrich Salt was an industrially produced patent medicine — and not, as Benjamin mistakenly referred to it, a food seasoning.101 Invented by a Berlin pharmacist, after whom it was named, the “salt” was first marketed in the 1820s, and during the 1930s was the focus of one of the most influential advertising campaigns.102 Benjamin describes his experience of a “momentous afternoon,” when, several years after his first glimpse of the poster, he encountered it again. His description highlights the fluidity of word and image in the poster and shows how it coalesced in his memory. Bound together by the poster’s design, image and word blend into and constitute one another: I stood with my two beautiful companions in front of a miserable café, whose window display was enlivened by an arrangement of signboards. On 242  ·  T h e P o s t e r a s D e s i g n a n d A d v e r t i s i n g

one of these was the legend “Bullrich Salt.” It contained nothing else besides the words; but around these written characters there was suddenly and effortlessly configured that desert landscape of the poster. I had it once more. Here is what it looked like. In the foreground, a horse-­drawn wagon was advancing across the desert. It was loaded with sacks bearing the words “Bullrich Salt.” One of these sacks had a hole, from which salt had already trickled a good distance on the ground. In the background of the desert landscape, two posts held a large sign with the words “Is the Best.” But what about the trace of salt down the desert trail? It formed letters, and these letters formed a word, the word “Bullrich Salt.” Was not the preestablished harmony of a Leibniz mere child’s play compared to this tightly orchestrated predestination in the desert? And didn’t that poster furnish an image of things that no one in this moral life has yet experienced? An image of the everyday in Utopia? In Benjamin’s understanding, the dialogics in the poster extend not only to word and image but also to material (salt) and word (the name “Bullrich Salt”), which are inserted into the desert scene. The “everyday Utopia” is represented by a dialogics of word and image. Why Benjamin was so deeply moved by the Bullrich Salt poster remains something of a mystery, not only because the poster itself has not come to light, but also because it was firmly grounded in Benjamin’s own moment and place. Nonetheless, his account forcefully demonstrates how words and images merge — within the poster as well as in the mind of the receiver. The interrelations of word and image continued to be in flux during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in posters as in other genres and media, and they continue to evolve in each new medium. What appears surprising from a contemporary perspective is the central role played by the illustrated poster in ushering in an age of spectacle. Although the illustrated poster’s role in developing this paradigm shift was largely overlooked in later scholarship, late nineteenth-­century commentators, as the next chapter demonstrates, were highly conscious of and deeply affected by what they perceived as a radical transi­ tion, enacted in posters, from a word-­based culture to an image-­centered world.

Dialogics of  Image and Word  ‡ 243

u

PART IV Collecting and Iconophilia

7 t The Poster at the Origins of the Age of Spectacle T h e R ise of t h e I m age a n d Moder n Iconophobi a The image is sovereign. Anywhere there are human beings, it exerts its tyrannical power, its irresistible seduction. It is the most agile agent and the most fecund one for either truth or lies. It has become one of the most threatening forces of civilization.— Gabriel Mourey, 1900 This is what distinguishes the poster, that it does not propose its ideas more or less persuasively, but it imposes itself on me. I read a book if I want to do so; I go to see a painting if I feel like it; I do not buy my newspaper despite myself. But the poster? I see it, even if I do not want to see it. . . . I am obliged to breathe it and to have its force enter my blood!— Maurice Talmeyr, 1896

Late nineteenth-­c entury critics viewed the illustrated poster as a prominent player in a broad cultural transformation that replaced the priority of the word with that of the image. Georges D’Avenel discussed the image-­centered advertising poster, “la publicité imagée,” in his 1901 article on advertising:1 “To celebrate in a decent manner its diverse products, needs and institutions,” he wrote, “imaged advertising has placed just about all one can do in the world, under the eyes of humans of all ages and all conditions.”2 Emphasizing the visual appearance of the poster, he referred to it as the “crier that made one listen with the

eyes at a distance of fifty meters.”3 Although numerous late nineteenth-­century commentators discussed the major role of images in general and of the poster in particular, the “pictorial turn,” as W. J. T. Mitchell famously termed it, has until recently been typically considered a twentieth-­century phenomenon.4 In the late twentieth and early twenty-­first century, some scholars addressed nineteenth-­century visual culture beyond the usual emphasis on photography and film. Neil Harris, who focused on turn-­of-­the-­century American culture, argued that a revolution took place when the halftone engraving process became commonly used for printing photographs in newspapers, magazines, and books. In the eyes of nineteenth-­century observers, this change brought about “an outburst of pictorialism” and an excessive use of illustrations in the print media.5 Vanessa R. Schwartz (in a study on early cinema, panoramas, dioramas, the morgue, and the wax museum) notes that “a culture that became “more literate” also became more visual as word and image generated . . . spectacular realities.”6 Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski contend that the notion of “visual culture” so central to our own time “was made possible by its nineteenth-­century history, namely the many changes in image production during this period, particularly lithography and photography.”7 Finally, Stephen Bann observed that the decisive “change in the relative status of word and image” occurred in the nineteenth century, noting that it is “not obvious what needs to be taken into account to explain the genealogy.”8 Despite such insights, the late nineteenth-­century poster has been largely overlooked in the genealogy of modernity’s culture of spectacle.9 The poster’s absence from most twentieth-­century accounts of the history of the culture of spectacle was precipitated by the rise of photography and cinema, which had preoccupied Walter Benjamin in the 1930s and numerous subsequent critics and scholars.10 Yet cinema, as Schwartz and Leo Charney point out, “constituted only one element in an array of new modes of technology, representation, spectacle, distraction, consumerism, ephemerality, mobility, and entertainment.”11 Indeed, for those living in the 1890s in a metropolis such as Paris, London, or New York, the experience of images invading everyday life at every turn was not yet associated primarily with photography or with the moving image. Photographs first appeared in the print media in the 1880s, but only in small numbers, since the halftone, through which photography was mass printed in the press, was a relatively recent invention and therefore subject to the considerable time lag from invention to wide diffusion that is typical of new technological processes.12 It was not until the early twentieth century that photographs printed with the halftone became more common in the press. When cinema was first publicly projected, in a Parisian café concert in 1895, the height of the 248  ·  C o l l e c t i n g a n d I c o n o p h i l i a

poster decade, it was still years away from wide dissemination. By contrast, posters and other hand-­drawn print-­media images, such as illustrations in books and journals, trade cards, music sheets, and book covers, were prominent in modern life during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. As Marcus Verhagen notes, the poster was “both a manifestation of the emergence of mass culture in France and a catalyst in the development of other mass cultural forms.”13 In what follows, I analyze the emergence of the poster as spectacle by examining the responses of (mostly) French and British nineteenth-­century critics and commentators to the shift toward an image-­centered culture, in which the poster, as these observers recognized, played a central role. Beginning the chapter with a survey and discussion of critics’ writings about the invasion of daily life by the poster in Paris and London, I then focus my analysis on those French responses that were marked by a distinct fear of images — iconophobia.

The Invasion of Images into Everyday Life From the perspective of our current image-­saturated world it is difficult to imagine the historical transformation experienced by late nineteenth-­century urban dwellers with the rise of printed images. Printed images were produced in huge numbers as mass reproductions of paintings,14 but print-­media images that were designed specifically for the mass media flooded everyday modern life in numerous forms, including the illustrated poster, illustrated weeklies, and illustrated books.15 Images also appeared on the covers of books and music sheets. They predominated in popular print products such as trade cards and illustrated calendars. For example, the Paris print establishment Champenois printed calendars in great numbers using its in-­house designer Alphonse Mucha. Critics writing at the time recognized this as a new phenomenon of consequence. Albert Wolff, Le Figaro’s critic, noted that “by adding an image to the text, illustrated newspapers . . . have made a decisive advance in modern communication.”16 In 1894, Marius Vachon explained the commercial motivation for including illustrations in the daily press, observing that they helped “to retain the clientele by an always renewing attraction.”17 Nor was this merely a French phenomenon. In 1895, a German author wrote in the German avant-­garde journal Pan that “the wide public much prefers seeing pictures to reading,” and voiced the hope that Pan would contribute to refining the taste and artistic understanding of its public.18 In England, Arthur Symons recounted that, in 1895, the publisher of the Savoy asked him “to form and edit a new kind of magazine, which was to appeal to the public equally in its letterpress and its illustration.”19 The Image and Modern Iconophobia  ‡ 249

Numerous commentators observed that the invasion of the image transformed everyday life. In 1889–90, Victor Champier noted that “today the print is no longer content to be an ornament in the study room of bibliophiles, it has a much larger role . . . it conquers the world.”20 The printed image, he wrote, appears to be everywhere: “In illustrated journals, it makes up the postage stamp and the banknotes and no lottery can take place without it. It transforms menus, industrial labels and programs of performances. . . . It illustrates the novels . . . it displays itself in windows of bookshops, on the covers of volumes, to tempt the buyer with the enigma of its bizarre caprices.”21 Vachon observed that during the last quarter of the nineteenth century one encountered the printed image from early childhood to adulthood: “In the last fifteen, twenty years, the print has prevailed everywhere. It is the joy of childhood. . . . ‘If you are well-­behaved I will give you an image’: how often has this sweet maternal promise been music to our delighted ears! [The printed image] is a precious memorial to each important event of intimate, religious and public existence. The memories it puts in the familial home . . . hit the hearts of young and old.”22 The illustrated poster held a particularly prominent place in public spaces. As J.-­K. Huysmans and many critics following him noted, the poster countered the gloomy monochrome of the metropolis with an always changing colorful décor.23 It appeared on walls, fences, hoardings, and Morris columns, in both designated and undesignated areas; on the exterior of carts and special vehicles; inside buses, tramways, and boats; in train stations and their waiting halls; in kiosks, inside shops, and in their display windows; on the bodies of sandwich-­men in the city and on enormous billboards in the countryside along the train routes.24 The latter phenomenon, of billboards, was decried in England as well as in France. Charles Hiatt, an enthusiastic supporter of the illustrated poster, lamented: “Every green field which is near to the permanent way of a railroad is defiled by a hideous reminder of dyspepsia in the shape of advice to take somebody’s pills.”25 As one writer complained in 1899, such “eyesores” only multiplied, despite having been targeted for several years by SCAPA, a society against the abuse of advertising.26 In contrast to these maligned billboards, the artistic poster was admired. Typically, it appeared on hoardings, fences, or walls, dispersed among many other commercial posters that were not considered artistic. There was, however, a unique circumstance in which various selected illustrated posters formed a condensed spectacle in a public space, outside of poster exhibitions. A rare photograph from 1895 shows the café concert curtain at Les ambassadeurs covered edge to edge with Chéret’s posters (Fig. 7.1). It was sponsored by the illustrated journal Le Courrier Français (whose name appears at the top), which also promoted 250  ·  C o l l e c t i n g a n d I c o n o p h i l i a

7.1 Café concert curtain at Les Ambassadeurs, Paris, decorated with posters by Jules Chéret, 1895. Photograph in Revue Encyclopédique, no. 113 (August 15, 1895).

Chéret by publishing his posters inside the journal and offering posters by the artist for sale. Though it is little known today, the advertising curtain (rideau-­ annonces) was at the time a common phenomenon in Paris. As early as 1880 Émile Mermet reported in the volume Advertising in France that the advertising curtain was adopted by most of the theaters in Paris, excluding the subsidized ones — l ’Opéra, les Français, l’Opéra comique, and l’Odéon — whose academic pretensions led them to resist the advertising curtain.27 Such advertising curtains (which in some theaters replaced the original curtain altogether, while in others coexisted with a second, ad-­free curtain), were the precursors of the twentieth-­ century advertisements on film screens. In addition to their prominence in public spaces, posters were reproduced in journals (many of which also sold posters) and in books. Posters influenced the design of various print-­media genres, including sheet music and books. Arsène Alexandre discussed this at some length in an 1895 Scribner’s article.28 The first publisher to commission illustrated book-­covers was Jules Lévy, the organizer of The Image and Modern Iconophobia  ‡ 251

the Incohérents, a group of artists and writers who exhibited anti-­Salon art and organized prominent costume balls in Montmartre (Fig. 6.13).29 Having noticed “the analogy between the colored poster and the possible cover of the book of the future,” Lévy commissioned illustrated book-­covers as early as the 1880s. He asked Chéret, the premier poster designer and a member of the Incohérents, to design covers for the books he was publishing.30 At the time of this commission, designs of posters, book covers, and sheet music were still very similar, and Chéret contributed to innovations in all these forms. Other artists known for their posters, such as Toulouse-­Lautrec, Bonnard, Steinlen, Willette, and Grasset, also designed book covers. Alexandre’s comments highlight the fact that full-­blown images on book covers were construed as a special case of the illustrated poster, and, like the latter, featured images. In his 1895 article, at the height of the poster movement, Alexandre observed that whereas in the past, book covers might feature “a modest vignette . . . a thin black vignette, doomed to disappear before the binder’s shears”— and even this only rarely — now, “we live in the age of advertising” and “crafty publishers . . . said to themselves that a book might be so made as to be its own advertiser.” The goal and visual characteristic of the illustrated book-­cover were similar to those of posters: it “sported the most brilliant colors . . . made its bid from the window of the bookshop and threw dust in the eyes of the credulous passer-­by.” Thus, “the book became its own sandwich-­man. The substance was inside, and the advertisement wrapped it as the silver coating wraps the pill.”31 Although “the cover of the book may become an adornment, it was at all events at first an affiche.” Alexandre recognized that advertising was “a necessity of our day and the very soul of  business, especially in bookselling”;32 but he was also critical of the use of this powerful new tool, noting that “the more insignificant and commonplace the book, the ‘louder’ was the cover.”33 He asserted that the cover image was replacing the importance of the content, and that for many books, the “sole reason for being was in their cover.” Nonetheless, he also noted the positive potential of images in books: “If the flag of illustrations did not always cover a good cargo, and if to some extent it favored the launching of very commonplace performances, it made perhaps an additional opportunity of refinement for a truly beautiful book.”34 The poster’s influence on journals is attested by comments made in 1900 in the London-­based journal the Poster about the evolution of magazine covers from “the simple wrapper to the present gorgeous and often highly artistic designs.”35 It was in the 1890s that journals first launched the habit of changing their cover with every new issue.36 Poster artists (such as Dudley Hardy, J. Hassall, Cecil Aldin, and Hal Hurst) designed many of the covers of British journals.37 The 252  ·  C o l l e c t i n g a n d I c o n o p h i l i a

English artist and designer G. Howell-­Baker stated that “it is a short step from the poster on the placards to the covers of the magazine on the stationer’s bookshelf, and what is more to be expected than a magazine that is placarded for sale to also find its cover a poster in miniature.”38 In addition, quite a few posters were reused in reduced format as journal covers in Britain, including Maurice Greiffenhagen’s poster The Pall Mall Budget, reprinted as a cover for the 1897 Christmas issue of the weekly Pick-­Me-­Up, W. H. Low’s poster for the Century, and Aubrey Beardsley’s for Unwin’s Chap-­Book.39 Also undergoing change was the role of the image in relation to the lettered text in both the press and books.40 Marius Vachon reported in 1894 that “artists and eminent bibliophiles estimate that [book] illustrations will not limit themselves to simply serving” the text, but will themselves be a work of art.41 Some images in the print media were becoming more autonomous vis-­à-­vis the typographic text. Maurice Denis, the Nabis artist and theorist (who also designed one poster), wrote that in some cases an illustration in a book “should not be subordinate to the text; its subject does not have to correspond exactly to the writing; it should be, rather, an embroidery of arabesques on the pages, an accompaniment of expressive lines.”42 Overall, images in the print media were perceived to have transformed everyday culture in France, and especially Paris, during the 1890s. In London, too, contemporaries responded to the onslaught of images in posters. Criticism appeared in the form of satiric images and verses in the illustrated journal Punch, and was directed at the commercial poster that preceded the artistic poster. An 1888 caricature in the journal depicted the bill-­sticker as a demon, showing him pasting a large new poster on a brick wall above a poster featuring a woman sprawled out on the ground with a knife stuck in her bosom and a horror-­ stricken face (Fig. 7.2). The bill-­sticker, a “Demon” in “a novel disguise,” spreads the “new Pandemonium Poster” all over London, leaving no spot unoccupied on the city’s walls, hoardings, and fences. The caricature, titled “Horrible London: Or the Pandemonium of Posters,” is accompanied by a text that complains about the subjects of these so-­called pandemonium posters —“the whole sordid drama of murder and guilt,” the “horrors of crime and the terrors of fate, as conceived by the crudest of fancies.”43 It also objects to the posters’ garish colors with their emphasis on red and black, and to their “terrible tints”: Oh, the flamboyant flare of those fiendish designs, With their sanguine paint-­splashes and sinister lines! Punch criticizes “the style of the vilest sensational print / Or the vulgarest penny romances,”44 and contends that posters bring “coarse horror” to the city: The Image and Modern Iconophobia  ‡ 253

7.2 “Horrible London; or, The Pandemonium of Posters,” Punch, October 13, 1888. E. H. Butler Library, Buffalo State (suny).

How strange that a civilized City — ho! Ho! ’Tis their fatuous dream to consider it so! —  Which is nothing too lovely at best, should bestow Such a liberal license on spoilers! These mural monstrosities, reeking of crime, Flaring horridly forth amidst squalor and grime. . . .45 Thus, Punch presents the vulgar poster as shocking and traumatizing by virtue not only of its sensationalist iconography but also of its visual means more broadly. A Punch caricature from 1890 depicts the commodification of London by showing the sky above the metropolis flooded with advertisements, featuring gigantic icons (an assortment that includes hands, an umbrella, a bottle, a boot, and a pair of opera glasses) as well as letters (advertising cigars, hot lunches, wines, coffee). Such advertising of mundane commodities dwarfs even St. Paul’s 254  ·  C o l l e c t i n g a n d I c o n o p h i l i a

7.3 “Picturesque London; or, Sky Signs of the Times,” Punch, September 6, 1890. E. H. Butler Library, Buffalo State (suny).

Cathedral (Fig. 7.3). The text accompanying the caricature protests the fact that these “sky-­horrors” were allowed, and that commerce had displaced the “Scant Urban Beauty from its last frail hold, / On a Metropolis given up to Gold.”46 The satirical image and text describe advertising gone wild, overshadowing not only architectural monuments and civic space on the ground but even the sky above. These satiric images were published several years before British artists including Beardsley, Hardy, Hassall, the Beggarstaffs, and others began to design posters in the early 1890s. Although after 1893 posters by such leading British poster artists were seen on the London hoardings, they were far outnumbered by the many “commercial” posters, which were deemed eyesores. Charles Hiatt and other critics for the Poster vigilantly monitored the posters appearing on London hoardings. The editorial policy of the journal dictated a “constant admiration of the artistic and the beautiful, and “condemnation of the pictorial atrocities, which have at times been permitted to disgrace our hoardings.”47 The Poster’s regular column “The Hoardings” critiqued recent London posters, demonstrating a commitment to the artistic quality of English advertising posters and to the aesthetic appearance of the city itself but also testifying to the rarity of the artistic poster on the late nineteenth-­century hoardings in London. The Image and Modern Iconophobia  ‡ 255

Iconophobia and the Poster “Images,” as W. J. T. Mitchell notes, “are not just a particular kind of sign, but something like an actor on the historical stage.”48 And indeed, the late nineteenth-­ century responses in France and England to the shift toward a culture dominated by images indicate that poster images were experienced as historical agents. This change spawned two contradictory types of responses: iconophilia (love of images) and iconophobia (fear of images). The former included an enthusiasm for posters and the new print-­media images as a welcome expression of modernity and led (as I discuss in the next chapter) to the widespread practice of collecting posters and other everyday print images by individuals who were often called iconophiles. The latter response (discussed below) was characterized by a fear of mass-­print images as precipitating the loss of rational control and the erosion of class and gender distinctions.49 Commentators in this category deemed posters dangerous for their powerful appeal to the senses. Assuming that lettered text necessarily appealed to the intellect, they found images treacherous for their supposed ability to bypass rational judgment and directly influence the unconscious. As Mitchell, Martin Jay, and others have demonstrated, iconophobia, iconoclasm, and anti-­ocularcentrism all have a long philosophical tradition behind them, with scholars investigating the expression of these tendencies in the writings of numerous philosophers, from Plato to Wittgenstein.50 However, as Rosa­ lind Krauss points out, the focus of these investigations has been “on a certain nonmaterialist conception of the image: the image as fundamentally disembodied and phantasmatic.”51 The image as a mode of communication is always materialized in a particular medium, and in the nineteenth century, images in the mass print media of the time were the focal point for numerous commentators. By turning their attention to those discourses on the image constituted by philosophers and scientists, scholars have largely overlooked the perception of images reflected in the views of commentators and journalists. Yet it is the comments of these latter writers that portray the historically specific reception of the new images appearing in the mass media of the nineteenth century — including posters, the illustrated book, and the illustrated press. A theme that dominated the writings of late nineteenth-­century critics and journalists was the threat to human agency posed by the invasion of images in posters and other media into everyday life. Comments by the French critic Gabriel Mourey about the images in illustrated books are equally applicable to the poster and other media. Mourey clearly recognized the shift toward an image-­ centered culture, and expressed his ambivalence in a 1900 article in which he 256  ·  C o l l e c t i n g a n d I c o n o p h i l i a

defined the image as “sovereign” and the most “agile agent,” capable of producing “either truth or lies.”52 He concluded that the image “has become one of the most threatening forces of civilization.”53 Mourey observed the spread of “the taste for the image,” and proclaimed “the triumph of the modern image.” Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, he also recognized an upside to the impact of the image, namely its potential to allow for new kinds of experience and insight and to make them widely accessible: “Through the image, an infinity of new notions have penetrated the human understanding, an almost excessive profusion of previously unexperienced perceptions has shaken up one’s sensibilities. By multiplying the occasions of thinking and sensing, it has enlarged the field of intellectual activities, developed and refined the faculty of understanding and experiencing all the manifestations of the external world, so diverse and so full of contradictions. It has opened up to everyone the priceless treasures that for too long had been the privilege of only some.”54 Iconophobic comments about late nineteenth-­century posters echoed earlier nineteenth-­century fears about caricatures. Iconophobes repeated arguments made in the first decades of that century by governmental authorities opposed to the freedom to print images and display them in public. These arguments, discussed by Miriam R. Levin and Robert Justin Goldstein, centered on the claim that images presented a greater danger than words because they bypassed reason, stimulated action, and addressed everyone. Governmental authorities criticizing caricatures expressed a pronounced fear of the power of images to influence the masses and instigate revolutions.55 They claimed that whereas words address the mind, images appeal to the eye, and are not merely an expression of an opinion but also an action, a deed, a behavior, and thus not protected by anticensorship laws. For example, in 1880 the French deputy François-­Émile Villiers warned that the image “strikes the sight of passers-­by, addresses itself to all ages and both sexes, startles not only the mind but the eyes. It is a means of speaking even to the illiterate, of stirring up passions, without reasoning, without discourse.”56 Similarly, in 1878 the controller-­general of the French police objected to displaying illustrated advertising on sandwich-­men, claiming that illustrated images were more powerful than words and more hazardous to reason and to the established social order: “Illustrations have more drawbacks than writing; they strike the intelligence in a more vivid, more lasting manner. In exhibiting a drawing, especially in circulating it on a public street, one addresses people as a group; one speaks to their eyes; there is more there than the expression of an opinion; there is a fact, a putting into action, a life.”57 Iconophobic comments about posters often resorted to paternalistic proThe Image and Modern Iconophobia  ‡ 257

nouncements about women and children, labeling both as “illiterate.” Such assertions perpetuated a prejudicial stereotype that overlooked the fact that, by the end of the nineteenth century, the numbers of literate women and men were quite close, and the rates of literacy among young females may even have surpassed that of young males.58 Commentators reiterated the alleged illiteracy of women and their presumed vulnerability to images, caused, they claimed, by a lack of skills of resistance and weak rational capabilities. On rare occasions, concerns of this paternalistic nature were voiced over particular advertising posters. In 1889, Dr. Gillebert Dhercourt, the chief physician of the French police, expressed concern that posters advertising various remedies to sexually transmitted diseases, displayed near urinals and lavaratories, initiated young girls “into the mysteries of secret disease, shameful flows.”59 This example makes evident that the insistence on the vulnerability of women and girls to posters and other images was primarily a reflection of masculine anxiety. Apparently, females were imperiled not simply because of their alleged susceptibility to the suggestive powers of posters but also because they might, through posters, gain access to the kind of knowledge about bodies and sexuality that authorities and much of society still deemed unsuitable to them. Fear of images was also related to class anxieties about the loss of social control. As Levin argued, the call to “censor lithographed images, and keep the urban vista blank are filled with expressions of fear of violent acts of the middle-­ and working-­classes, of skilled workers and artisans — those people whom the republicans sought to integrate into French society and who had been granted new rights in the Revolution of 1789.”60 Since illustrated poster advertising was, as numerous commentators warned, visible, accessible, and comprehensible to everyone, the fear of posters was generally intertwined with anxieties over the obliteration of class and gender distinctions. Gustave Le Bon, in his influential La psychologie des foules (1895, soon after translated into English as The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind), discussed the susceptibility of the crowd to images.61 “A crowd thinks in images,” wrote Le Bon, observing that ideas are induced in the crowd by images and these in turn immediately call up a series of other images with no logical connection to the first.62 In keeping with the views of his time, Le Bon too claims that women and children are the poster’s most impressionable audience.63 And indeed, the characteristics he goes on to delineate for the “crowd” are remarkably similar to those that he attributed to women: a lack of reasoning power and a susceptibility to suggestive images, which leads it to action.64 Le Bon discusses the powerful influence of theatrical performances but otherwise does not mention specific ma258  ·  C o l l e c t i n g a n d I c o n o p h i l i a

terial images, focusing primarily on the images evoked by words.65 “Image-­like ideas” are presented to the masses “not connected by any logical bond of analogy or succession, and may take each other’s place like the slides of a magic lantern.”66 Note that the images produced by the magic lantern are used only as a metaphor for “image-­like ideas” and are not themselves the subject of discussion. Instead of adopting this negative discourse on “crowds,” some authors writing about posters in the last two decades of the nineteenth century used the term “masses” without iconophobic overtones. John Grand-­Cateret, for example, made the point that images attract the masses, while Émile Straus, the cultural critic at La Critique, referred to the “floating masses” and advocated the wide dissemination of the poster, to which he referred in this context as “the Song of the Disinherited.”67 Whereas the conservative viewpoint was associated with the fear of media images and their broad accessibility, Straus and other politically progressive critics wrote approvingly about the poster, associating it with “our democratic epoch.”

“Under the Influence of Spectacle” As early as 1858, in discussing the commercial, mostly typographic posters of his time in Paris, Victor Fournel articulated their regime as “the influence of spectacle.”68 Numerous critics writing in the 1880s and 1890s perceived the color-­ illustrated poster as a new kind of image-­centered design that appealed to the eyes in a manner different from that of a lettered text. Lucien Muhlfeld, the novelist and critic, addressed this in his 1896 article “Modern Posting,” stating that “mural advertising was made to be seen not read.”69 He explained that the illustrated poster bypassed the written word, creating meaning by nonverbal visual means: “illustrated does not mean that the picture poster has no meaning; illustrated means that the commercial message [of the poster] is boosted, commented on and synthesized with a few colors and appropriate traits.”70 A few years later, Georges D’Avenel observed: “The ideal poster necessitates no reading; it is enough to let one’s eyes fall on it to take the text in at a single glance, despite oneself.”71 Numerous commentators noted the visual rather than intellectual appeal of the illustrated poster and likened this form of appeal to female seduction. Straus observed that the poster “has a tendency to catch exclusively the gaze,”72 and equated the poster with the image and with a woman’s solicitation on the street: “The poster is the incontestable mistress of the street, from now on inseparable from the icon: with all its colors it dresses up the naked horror of the public edifices.”73 The Image and Modern Iconophobia  ‡ 259

Iconophobes were convinced that the image-­centered culture of the late nineteenth century threatened the literate, reasoned, critical reception that had been associated with the culture of the word, the book, literature. Image-­centered culture would endanger not only women and children but also the educated man who was believed to be in possession of himself. The latter, often referred to as the flâneur, represented an ideal of urban masculinity, a singular subjectivity diametrically opposed to the class-­and gender-­mixed crowd. Writing in mid-­ century about the impact of the typographic poster, which used “puffed” language, Fournel believed that the flâneur’s ability to maintain a critical approach was based on distance: “The flâneur observes and reflects . . . he is always in full possession of his individuality.”74 He contrasted the flâneur with the gaping badaud, who easily succumbed to the typographic poster’s seductions:75 “under the influence of spectacle,” the badaud loses his individuality: “he is no longer a man, he is public, he is crowd.”76 Prone to ecstasy and enthusiasm, and given to reverie, the badaud, an artist by instinct and temperament, lacks skepticism and is unable to maintain reflective distance.77 Fournel attributed to the badaud the characteristics that were later typically ascribed to women and to the crowd. His comments show that these concerns had already developed in response to the typographic poster in the middle of the century.78 The state described as “being under the influence of spectacle,” in other words, was attributed to the effect of the poster even before the development of the illustrated poster later in the century. When the illustrated poster was widely used in the 1890s, the “influence of spectacle” reached a new height. With somewhere between one thousand and three thousand copies of Toulouse-­Lautrec’s Ambassadeurs poster for Aristide Bruant pasted across Paris, La Vie Parisienne complained: “Who will rid us of this picture of Aristide Bruant? You cannot move a step without being confronted with it.”79 The illustrated poster, admired by many, was the subject of the most elaborate critique during the 1890s. Maurice Talmeyr’s article “L’âge de l’affiche,” published in 1896 in the Revue des Deux Mondes, voiced extreme iconophobic apprehensions about the image-­centered culture dominated by the illustrated poster. Talmeyr claimed that image-­centered posters were inhibiting critical reasoning and individual control, leaving spectators defenseless. Images were said to impose themselves on anyone in their vicinity and invade everyone’s psyche.80 They were inescapable: not even educated men, like the authors who wrote about them, could resist images, and neither literacy nor education or belonging to the male gender offered immunity against the perils of seduction by poster images. Though Talmeyr goes to great lengths to describe how the perfidious image 260  ·  C o l l e c t i n g a n d I c o n o p h i l i a

invades him, he also makes the typical assertion that women, young girls, and children are vulnerable because their “eyes are not able to read as yet anything but the image.”81 Talmeyr describes the deplorable effect of the illustrated poster on everyone: “Garish, loud and changing images, which irritate and call out to the passerby, flatter, provoke, laugh at him, drag and solicit him.”82 His lengthy essay on the poster expressed the despair at a loss of control related to the inability to shut out the poster. He made a passionate plea in the first voice about the intrusiveness of the poster. When he reads a book, buys a newspaper, or looks at a painting, wrote Talmeyr, it is his choice; “But the poster? I see it, even if I do not want to see it. Whether this offends me or suits me, I must endure it. The poster offends my sensibilities, convictions, my religion, my taste. It mocks me, and enters my eyes!”83 Moreover, the image-­centered advertising poster imposes itself on memory, leaving indelible traces: “The Parisian resident carries inside himself a perpetual internal ‘Moulin Rouge.’ Wherever we are and whatever the circumstances, we always carry with us some of the dust of the Folies-­Bergère stuck to our soles just as the Persians always carry some of the soil of Persia in their shoes.”84 Thus, Talmeyr points out that the poster transforms not merely urban space but also the psyches of its viewers. By the mid 1890s, when illustrated posters were widespread, commentators regularly complained that they overpowered everyone, yet held on to the opinion that women and the young were at greater risk and that “the crowd” was highly susceptible. This anxiety ran deeper than a concern for the corruption of bourgeois mothers and daughters; the very hegemony of classed masculinity was at stake. Talmeyr and many of his contemporaries believed that the culture of the mass-­printed image turned everyone into indistinct members of a feminized, infantilized crowd. The poster’s advertising images were seen as endangering a society in which the educated man was in possession of himself and topped the social hierarchy. During the 1890s, several positions about the phenomenon of the illustrated poster coexisted. Alongside those, like Talmeyr, who believed that posters forced themselves on their viewers with far-­reaching negative influences, some critics experienced posters as a welcome addition to the pleasures of city life. Numerous critics who appreciated the poster, and especially the artistic posters of Chéret, enthusiastically reported that the illustrated poster brought joy to the eye in the gloomy modern urban environment. For them, posters provided a welcome distraction during the practice of flânerie. Of Chéret’s work they particularly admired the chérettes posters, featuring scantily draped sexy Parisiennes who often flaunted shapely legs as they descended from an imaginary fairyland (Fig. 6.12). The Image and Modern Iconophobia  ‡ 261

Chéret’s attractive poster women augmented the pleasures of flânerie by infusing it with paradisial fantasy. A French critic writing in La Plume in 1893 expressed this clearly: That which we need and which Chéret alone has given us, is the art that distracts us, troubles and moves us during flânerie of long days. . . . It is the violent illusion of an unknown and delicious world that one haunts every day by chance traversing the neighborhoods. It is a perpetual symphony one hears singing, which charms the eyes as well as ears. In front of these luminous poems that have brightened our paths, in front of these glittering posters, one has the vision of a new country that one comes across for the first time, of entering a paradise.85 Many admirers of Chéret’s posters thus basked in the pleasures afforded by poster images, including the illusions they elicited and their effect of brightening the alienated spaces of Haussmannized Paris. Beyond such lighthearted poster-­ loving flâneurs, however, another type emerged for whom the poster was valued for its historical significance. Neither overwhelmed by an involuntary assault of poster images, nor simply succumbing to their seductive charm, this type — the iconophile — recognized the value of posters for future historians. The iconophile was no longer simply “under the influence of spectacle,” but became a dedicated collector, archivist, and amateur scholar, whose mission was nothing short of preserving a visual archive for the sake of  history.

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8 t The Iconophile’s Collecting Post er s a s a n Eph e m er a l A rch a eology of Moder n i t y “Iconoclast” signifies the destroyer of images, “bibliophile” means amateur

of books; why then not make up the word “iconophile” to designate an amateur of images, that is to say, the one who reunites all kinds of objects connected to the graphic and plastic arts, without limiting himself to any specialty.— Jean Duchesne Aîné, 1834 Everything passes, cracks, is effaced, disappears, and the printed page lives on. . . . This amply justifies that which at first sight one might find forced and artificial in the iconophilic passion.— Henri Beraldi, 1889

The iconophile played a unique role in the cultural history of the poster. The new term first appeared in 1834 in the title of a book by Jean Duchesne Aîné, the curator of the Cabinet des estampes, Bibliothèque impériale (later the Bibliothèque nationale): Voyage d’un iconophile, revue des principaux cabinets d’estampes, bibliothèques et musées d’Allemagne, de Hollande et d’Angleterre (Voyage of an iconophile: A review of the major print collections, libraries, and museums of Germany, Holland, and England).1 Duchesne Aîné invented the term “iconophile” to define his professional identity to his reading public, stressing that he was not “a simple amateur” but rather an expert, a scholar and a teacher, who, like a professeur, “must go up to the podium.”2 The term immediately came under attack: “Another new word, and for what?” critics asked; and why turn to

Greek — can’t one speak French to the French?3 Duchesne Aîné chose the word “icon” because it designated all varieties of images, regardless of their medium.4 His description clarifies that the iconophile valued images in all media but was nonetheless particularly dedicated to prints. The iconophile did not adhere to the prevailing hierarchies of the arts with respect both to a work’s medium and its subject matter. His innovation was that he collected objects not because they were rare, ancient, or about a noble subject, but because of their aesthetic qualities.5 Furthermore, when charged with the task of curating public collections, the iconophile promoted inclusiveness, ensuring a maximal variety of media, genres, and schools.6 This chapter analyzes the iconophile, his practices, identity, and representations in late nineteenth-­century French culture, and demonstrates his centrality to the cultural history of the poster. I argue that the iconophile was a precursor to collectors, curators, critics, and scholars of contemporary visual culture, and that his practices were an active response to a profound shift experienced by his contemporaries — the emergence of an ephemeral visual culture in an age of paper and printed images. Unlike the iconophobe (discussed in the previous chapter), who objected to the rise of the poster and other print media images, the iconophile enthusiastically embraced the new images, incorporating them into a tradition of art collecting. Whereas the iconophobe was overwhelmed and anxious that his mastery was being undermined by a profuse image-­centered visual culture, the iconophile produced a new kind of mastery by collecting and classifying images, articulating aesthetic judgments, and constituting an archive that preserved everyday images.

The Iconophile in the Eyes of His Contemporaries By the end of the nineteenth century, the inclusivity of the iconophile’s collection, study, and appreciation of prints extended to two kinds of prints shunned by the traditional print collector: avant-­garde art prints, and everyday prints, many of which were closer to mass media and popular culture than rarefied art. The iconophile’s views and practices were controversial. During the 1890s, as poster collecting evolved into what many thought was not just a passion but a mania, calling someone an iconophile, or affichophile, often expressed disapproval toward collectors and all those interested in lower-­status objects such as the poster, as opposed to painting, sculpture, or architecture. One British journalist writing in 1900 described his dismay when, on a trip to France, he “was admiring the architecture of the Palais des Beaux-­Arts” in Lille and exclaimed “C’est ma­ 264  ·  C o l l e c t i n g a n d I c o n o p h i l i a

gnifique!” only to be met with the same exclamation —“C’est magnifique!”— by a Frenchman who “was gazing at a cycle poster outside an adjacent shop.”7 In his article, aptly titled “Poster-­Neurosis,” the anonymous British author expressed his fear that admiring paintings would soon be a thing of the past: The time is near when it will be the correct thing for tourists to “do” the hoardings and not the so-­called art galleries of our towns. It will soon be your lot to see Mr. Cook’s flocks ignoring the Louvre and the Madeleine in their feverish haste to see the latest pictorial advertisement of Moonshine Soap. You will no longer talk of Titians and Raphaels, and will cease to be interested in the Madonna as a subject for artistic representation. Mucha’s decorative ladies and Chéret’s circus girls will command your attention and admiration.8 In light of such attitudes, it is noteworthy that ardent iconophiles nonetheless fully embraced the designation. For example, Henri Beraldi, an astute observer of the contemporary developments of the nineteenth-­century print, a print collector, bibliophile, leading print connoisseur, and scholar known for his monumental twelve-­volume oeuvre Les gravures du XIXe siècle (published between 1886 and 1892), used the term “iconophile” on various occasions, including in the preface to his catalog of Chéret’s posters and other prints, appearing in the 1886 volume.9 In other volumes Beraldi describes the iconophiles as collectors of a variety of print media, including posters, illustrated menus, and theatrical programs;10 ex libris (without collecting books);11 political caricatures;12 and humorous illustrations portraying print amateurs, dealers, and illustrators.13 Beraldi explained that the iconophile recognized that prints had transformed modern life. Prints were everywhere: one encountered them at work and while enjoying leisure time, on the way to the mairie or to church, in books, on display at the print merchants, and in kiosks on the boulevards. He observed that the print had come to mediate every facet of contemporary culture — it displayed the news, was used for portraits, caricatures, and fashions, and appeared on the covers of books and journals and on the programs of music and theater performances.14 When you entered a café, someone immediately offered you an illustrated journal. When you noted the label on the bottle placed in front of you — it was a print. The stamp you put on your letter was a small print. You paid with a banknote — yet another print.15 The icnonophile had a broad interest in these low-­culture functional prints, yet he also sought in them aesthetic values: “Thus surrounded by the print, the iconophile will be agonized if on all occasions he did not have under his eyes anything but horrors.”16 An iconophile like Beraldi was highly attuned to the quality of prints but at The Iconophile’s Collecting  ‡ 265

the same time not confined by the tradition of print collecting. He was both interested in widely disseminated non-­auratic prints of a variety of everyday uses, and fully appreciative of the auratic art print.17 His interest in prints that were widely circulating in visual culture led him to be the first to catalog the posters of Jules Chéret. This was a bold step at the time, staking the poster’s place within the category of the print and securing its status as collectable.18 Beraldi’s enthusiasm for collecting posters, stimulated in the 1880s by Chéret’s lithographic posters, was dampened a few years later by the massive production of posters and the poster craze. As he noted in 1891, many collectors of posters were now merely following a fashion; “they don’t choose, they run after everything that is posted on the walls.”19 He drew a distinction between posters worth collecting, like those by Chéret and a handful of other artists, and all the rest.20 The iconophilic print collectors themselves were also classified in different groups. In his 1892 article “Invitation à la physiologie de l’iconophile, et du marchand d’estampes” (An invitation to the physiology of the iconophile and the print dealer”), published in Octave Uzanne’s journal L’Art et l’Idée, Henry Nogressau examined the changes that had occurred in the practices and class identities of print collectors and print dealers, arguing that the abundance of monographs, catalogs, manuals, dictionaries, and guides for print collectors had resulted in a proliferation of “amateurs” and the decline of true “collectors” (collectionneurs).21 Being a collector required real knowledge and not the superficial “air of the amateur” acquired by “philistines” through the use of manuals and dictionaries.22 “Grand collectors of days past,” Nogressau pronounced, had become rare.23 He estimated that there were no more than a dozen true collectors in France at the time of his writing.24 Nogressau derisively contrasted the knowledgeable collector of the ancien régime with contemporary members of the crowd — shop assistants, bank clerks, and grocers, who consider themselves enlightened for buying some expensive bibelots or engravings.25 The latter type of collector he described as a “ ‘neo-­Patron’ [who] even establishes his hallways as a painting gallery!”26 but does not engage in forming a true collection, defined as “an ensemble, which has to represent choice pieces, successive époques and characteristic types of the same art.”27 Nogressau tied the phenomenon of amateurs who are pseudo-­collectors to the influence of the consumer economy of luxury, which produced what he described as unchecked appetites, paucity of knowledge, and fragmented purchases: “One wants to touch everything, taste everything, have everything.”28 Vanity incites one to “search for rarity,” for the “unique piece,” paying an extravagant sum for a single print of a rare state, which would be “sufficient to reunite honorable exemplars 266  ·  C o l l e c t i n g a n d I c o n o p h i l i a

of engravings of an entire époque.”29 By contrast, “true iconophiles” (iconophiles véritables), those who have a passion for and in-­depth knowledge of the print or the poster, are rare.30 A class hierarchy of superior and inferior collectors was not a new phenomenon. As Pamela Warner notes, in the eighteenth century, contempt for the widening circles of art collectors was prevalent. These new collectors were considered mere amants, lovers of artworks, and were called “amateurs,” in contrast with the elitist collector, the aristocratic man described as a “connoisseur.” By the century’s end, the amateur had challenged this hierarchy, claiming that his own knowledge, gained through empirical methods (including firsthand examination, the study of provenance and textual documentation), allowed him to make informed critical judgments about art. By contrast, he claimed, the elitist connoisseur’s noble upbringing, inherent taste, refinement, and culture, resulted not in accurate instinctive judgments but rather in “blindness” brought about by “learned prejudice.”31 By the end of the nineteenth century, the situation had become more complex. On the one hand, a clear distinction was in place between the collecting of print media, accorded a lower status, and the high status of collecting painting and sculpture; on the other hand, some experts, like Nogressau, also appreciated the “true iconophiles,” who developed an expertise in print media and did not necessarily collect very expensive or rare art pieces.32 Within the broad category of those who collected print media, Nogressau further distinguished between the “amateur,” “iconophile,” and “collector” on the one hand, and the more valued category of “sincere amateur,” “true collector,” and “true iconophile” (the knowledgeable and dedicated print-­media collector) on the other. Nogressau clarified that the category of print collectors ranged from those who collect only very expensive prints to those whose passion was as enormous as their budget was limited. The latter, he wrote, could afford to buy only torn illustrations from almanacs, moist, stained, punctured scraps, for ten, twenty, thirty-­five, and fifty centimes.33 Uzanne used the term “neo-­iconophile” to distinguish the frivolous collector of posters from the more serious one. For the neo-­iconophile, collecting posters was said to be like “intellectual vagabondage,” an amusement of “our light nature.”34 Thanks to “the ardent conviction of neo-­iconophiles,” he wrote, “the mania of the poster has grown to a sufficiently vast scale,” to the point where, as Uzanne notes, the journal he himself published (Le Livre Moderne) devoted attention to posters and encouraged the movement.35 Nogressau lamented the change in the ways collectors made their acquisitions, contending that dialogue, exchange, and sociability had become the casualties of consumer culture’s new retailing environments and practices. By the early 1890s, The Iconophile’s Collecting  ‡ 267

the small boutiques of print dealers, which had previously functioned as vibrant meeting places where print collectors exchanged knowledge, shared information, and sometimes held long conversations, gave way to very large stores (magasins).36 In the latter, collectors merely made their purchases without talking to anyone but the salesman: “Even when a fellow iconophile [confrère en iconophilie] whom one knows enters, the collectors just exchange a hello and continue to do their transaction with the salesman.”37 Despite Nogressau’s bleak view, certain islands of exchange among iconophiles continued to exist. Most notable was the gallery of Edmond Sagot, who had started out as a bibliophile and gone on to become the first and preeminent poster dealer.38 Uzanne, the dedicated bibliophile, publisher, and author who wrote about posters and poster collecting (among other topics), described Sa­ got’s gallery on the left bank as the place “frequented since a long time ago by the iconophiles who have fallen in love with modern prints.”39 Sagot was “a restless and active little man of a forceful intelligence and a rare certainty of taste”— as well as a passion for the poster.40 He succeeded in attracting to his gallery all the artists working in lithography and all the “curious amateurs of the capital,” thus virtually monopolizing the poster market and the collectors of posters.41 André Mellerio reported that Sagot “placed himself routinely in the avant-­garde” and was “always avid about things that are modern,” showing interest in every new effort.42 Many iconophiles were primarily interested in collecting posters. Beraldi proclaimed in 1886 (just a few years before poster collecting became widely spread) that “the collector of posters is a new variety.”43 Some poster collectors were former print collectors; some collected both prints and posters, while others collected exclusively posters; and some also collected various forms of everyday prints. As Beraldi noted, “Today it is the poster . . . that brings enjoyment to the print collector.”44 Poster collecting gained enormous momentum in the last decade of the nineteenth century.45 Uzanne reported that the collectors of artistic posters increased at an incredible rate: in France, where poster collecting began, they numbered only about ten before 1870, increasing to about fifty between 1881 and 1891, and reaching two hundred at the time of his writing, in 1891.46 After 1891, in the decade that marked the height of poster collecting, with the likes of Toulouse-­Lautrec and Pierre Bonnard designing posters, the numbers of collectors grew even more. One French writer reported in 1897 that by then there were in Paris about one thousand collectors (amateurs) of the artistic poster (affiches artistiques). But, above all, as he acknowledged, it was the English and Americans who collect the French artistic poster.47 An American poster period268  ·  C o l l e c t i n g a n d I c o n o p h i l i a

ical claimed in February 1896 that there were over six thousand poster collectors in the United States, and one thousand in Canada.48 These staggering numbers suggest that the American periodical included in its count of “collectors” even those who collected just a handful of posters, whereas in France the title implied possession of a substantial collection of posters, and moreover, one that included the most important poster artists.49 That the numbers of poster collectors increased in France during the 1890s can be inferred from the establishment, during those years, of specialized journals dedicated to the poster (or the poster and print) as well as from the fact that literary and cultural journals published information for poster collectors. The French journal La Critique, for example, published a column titled “Bulletin des iconophiles,” which included reproductions of posters, discussions, and news about books and catalogs on posters — all of interest primarily to poster collectors.50 The column was later retitled “Iconophilie” (Iconophilia) and signed by “L’Iconophile.”51 The journal also announced the formation of the “Société des iconophiles,” led by the critic Émile Straus, whose two articles on posters appeared in La Critique.52 It defined the society’s goal as supporting “the development of the arts by the purchase of prints of all kinds.”53 Like many other journals that published articles on posters, it included lists of posters available for purchase directly from the journal.

“Astonishing Archives” Most nineteenth-­century collectors appreciated the illustrated poster both for its contemporary aesthetics and for its iconography. Yet critics and collectors repeatedly articulated a further rationale for collecting posters — namely, that posters embodied the day-­to-­day history of modernity. Gustave Fustier, Beraldi, Ernest Maindron, Roger Marx, Uzanne, and Maurice Talmeyr in France; W. S. Rogers, Charles Hiatt, and Joseph Thacher Clarke in England; and Hans Sachs in Germany — all discussed the value of posters for future historians.54 Fustier’s 1884 article on poster collecting stated: “Posters tell you the history of a country, its political life, its mournings and its celebrations, its customs and its public manners!”55 A year later, Beraldi similarly asserted: “Posters are a microcosm of our society: touching on everything, they will give precious information on our habits, our customs, our costumes, our food, our readings, our maladies, above all our pleasures.”56 A few years later, Beraldi notes that although the print’s place may seem secondary when compared with the “grand manifestations of art, paintings, statues, monuments,”57 the print possesses an advantage — it has proven to be The Iconophile’s Collecting  ‡ 269

durable.58 In the end it is “the printed piece of paper that lasts. . . . In the course of the years, what remains for us of the society in which we live? Prints.”59 And it is this that justifies the iconophilic passion.60 For the iconophile, the print was no longer solely art; it was historical evidence. Poster collectors and critics were convinced that the poster, more than any other medium, books included, captured the everyday aspects of the present and would thus enlighten future historians about the earlier time in which the poster was made. Uzanne claimed that the poster “is more suggestive than the most analytic of books; it carries within it that je ne sais quoi that is in the ambient air of the time that created it.”61 Expanding on Beraldi, Uzanne’s 1891 article elaborated on the importance of collecting posters as a means of preserving a history of everyday life for the benefit of “future generations”: “Because our posters are like the mirrors of our customs, passions, the state of our mind, infatuations, gullibility, our costumes, of what we read, and our pleasures, and thanks to these, one will later on be able to better inventory and reconstitute our political habits, our licentiousness and our charlatanism.”62 Similarly, the British poster collector Joseph Thacher Clarke wrote in 1894 that the poster’s value to historians derived in part from its potential to reveal the preferences of the common person: To those who study the tendencies of our modern modes of artistic expression it has for some years been evident that in no other branch of design do the most characteristic features of everyday life find clearer and more drastic utterance than in the art of pictorial and mural advertisements. As the literary history of the nineteenth century may be best traced in the files of daily newspapers preserved in our great libraries, so may the most unaffected and typical artistic predilections of the Man in the Street be best appreciated by a review of these striking works of line and colour, providing us with an unconscious and unimpeachable witness to the present status of our civilization.63 Like other collectors, Clarke believed that posters “are actual records of the daily life and interests of the age. From these documents the future historian may derive the fullest information concerning our food (physical and intellectual), our clothing, our diseases, and our remedies therefore — in short, concerning our vocations, our amusements and our morals. What would not the archaeologist be willing to give for a set of such documents, relating, let us say, to the Pericleian Athens or to Augustan Rome?”64 Likewise, W. S. Rogers, a British designer, collector, and author, wrote in 1901 that posters were “truthful records, for future reference, of what we eat, drink, and take by the way of medicines — of how we clothe ourselves — of our morals, our manners, and our amusements.”65 270  ·  C o l l e c t i n g a n d I c o n o p h i l i a

Hiatt elaborated further on this oft-­repeated idea. In his 1900 article “The Poster as a Mirror of Life,” he noted that “not a little of the social history of England from the days of the Stuarts onwards is to be found in the advertising columns of the newspapers” because they reflect the “passing fashions of the time” and “the subjects which occupy the minds of men.” He concluded that the more developed forms of advertising of his own time, especially pictorial placards, would eventually be much more important “to the social historian of the future.”66 Hiatt found posters to be of value to the historian because of their wide scope, the fact that they are “capable of embracing every conceivable thing, of proclaiming every variety of enterprise. Under these circumstances the picture poster becomes valuable as a mirror of life.”67 Hiatt evaluated different categories of posters in terms of their value as historical documents. Posters of the stage and its performers were particularly effective in mirroring the history of the stage. Posters of the music halls, such as those featuring Yvette Guilbert, were valuable because they expressed the performer’s “fascinating personality.68 By contrast, posters of sports were not as effective in mirroring their time because they did not portray all sports. Whereas the American Edward Penfield and other American designers represented golf in posters, as in Penfield’s 1898 poster for Harper’s April issue, other sports, such as football and cricket, “despite their enormous popularity,” produced “absolutely no posters of interest” (Fig. 8.1).69 Likewise, boating was not represented in posters in England. Hiatt also recognized the relative nature of the value of posters for the historian, noting that “posters which reflect the common life of the common people” were “of the highest interest.”70 He thus praised Toulouse-­Lautrec’s posters, which he astutely judged to be “of infinitely greater importance than the idealized decorations of Mucha or the frivolous excursions of Chéret.”71 The claim that collectors played a crucial role in preserving the ephemeral poster for future historians was widely accepted by poster collectors and critics during the late nineteenth century. The iconophile considered his collecting not merely a personal activity but also a social responsibility toward the future. The postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha has observed that an archive is “haunted by the thought and shape of the future — how will the past come to be read?”72 Numerous late nineteenth-­century critics and collectors of posters believed in the primary importance of such a future-­oriented outlook. For Uzanne, poster collecting by the true iconophile was rescuing the poster from extinction and creating “astonishing archives”: “The collectors of posters, aside from the infinite joys . . . do a useful work and contribute to the growth of the riches of the national art, because the astonishing archives that they form rescue from assured The Iconophile’s Collecting  ‡ 271

8.1 Edward Penfield, Harper’s April ’98, 1898. J. Ottmann Lithograph Co., New York. 152 × 116 cm. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

destruction the often incomparable works, created for an ephemeral destiny, but which, because of their artistic expression, are worthy of being conserved equally to certain frescos of earlier centuries.”73

Posters’ Iconography of Modern Life Poster collectors embraced posters for the innovation in both their visual language and subject matter.74 Progressive critics recognized posters as an alternative to academic painting and praised their iconography of modernity. J.-­K. Huysmans, in his Salon reviews of 1879 and 1880, asserted the superiority of Chéret’s posters over most academic paintings; Gustave Geffroy wrote enthusiastically in 1888 about posters as an art form available to everyone on the street, as opposed to the formal exhibitions in the Salon;75 and Félix Fénéon regarded posters as democratic and antiestablishment art, and advocated collecting posters by peeling them off the walls.76 Posters featured accessible images that did not adhere to the tradition of high art and contemporary academic painting.77 They invented a seductive imagery of modern life. The large scale of posters, in contrast to small press illustrations, 272  ·  C o l l e c t i n g a n d I c o n o p h i l i a

8.2 (left) Viktor Oliva, Zlatá Praha, 1900. Otto, Prague. 80 × 39 cm. 8.3 (right) Jules Chéret, La Diaphane, Poudre de Riz Sarah Bernhardt, 1890. Chaix, Paris. 127 × 90 cm.

evoked associations with painting. Posters, compared with other art forms of the time, represented modernity differently, in part by placing consumption at the center. They represented and shaped views of contemporary life as intricately involved with consumption.78 They portrayed consumer activities as associated with various pleasures, from popular entertainments such as café concerts, theaters, and circuses to cultural products such as newspapers, books, and journals, as in the Czech artist Viktor Oliva’s 1900 poster designed for the cultural journal Zlatá Praha (Golden Prague) (Fig. 8.2). Posters established a new iconography for a wide range of consumer goods, from lamp oil, shoe polish, and biscuits to soap and cosmetics. In an early version of celebrity endorsement, they featured the actress Sarah Bernhardt promoting a facial powder, as in Chéret’s 1890s poster La Diaphane (Fig. 8.3).79 They promoted, for example, the latest invention of fire-­ resistant aluminum pots, as in Francisco Tamagno’s 1903 Aluminite (Fig. 8.4). Posters advertised the railway lines, often by cooperating with the resort towns to which they led, turning landscape painting into tourist imagery, as in Ferdinand The Iconophile’s Collecting  ‡ 273

8.4 (left) Francisco Tamagno, Aluminite, 1903. B. Sirven, Toulouse. 132.1 × 96.5 cm. 8.5 (right) Ferdinand Lunel, Chemins de fer de l’ouest, Étretat, à 4 heures de Paris, 1896. Lunel, Paris. 118 × 80 cm.

Lunel’s Étretat, chemins de fer, 1896 (Fig. 8.5). They served the new vast retailing establishments, the department stores, depicting their ready-­to-­wear fashions for men, women, and children, as seen in two posters for the department store Aux Buttes Chaumont by Chéret, one promoting women’s and girls’ fashion, the other men’s and boys’ fashions (Figs. 8.6 and 8.7).80 Although some of the posters, such as those that promoted the circus and café concert, represented topics that also appeared in contemporary art, posters depicted many topics that were absent not only from academic painting but also from avant-­garde art of the time. For example, posters presented consumer products that were based on new technologies such as the telephone, typewriter, sewing machine, bicycle, and automobile. It is hard to imagine a contemporaneous painting depicting a woman listening to a theater or opera performance over the telephone, as in Chéret’s Théâtrophone 1890 (Fig. 8.8). The poster depicts one of the early uses envisioned for this new communication technology. Nor is one likely to find a painting including the recently invented telephone along with a prominently displayed telephone number, as featured in an 1897 poster by the Belgian Théo van Rysselberghe for an art gallery in Brussels (Fig. 2.11); a middle-­class woman seated at a sewing machine, as in Henri Thiriet’s Machines 274  ·  C o l l e c t i n g a n d I c o n o p h i l i a

8.6 (left) Jules Chéret, Aux Buttes Chaumont, robes, manteaux, modes, 1882. Chaix, Paris. 176.5 × 122 cm. 8.7 (right) Jules Chéret, Aux Buttes Chaumont, manufacture d’habillements pour hommes & enfants, 1880–81. J. Chéret, 18 rue Brunel, Paris. 126 × 91 cm.

à coudre françaises Peugeot, c. 1890 (Fig. 8.9); or a typewriter and typist, as in Eugène Vavasseur’s 1904 poster Hammond (Fig. 8.27). During the late nineteenth century, some saw in contemporary posters the most striking expressions of modernity. Marius Vachon discussed this idea in his 1894 monograph “The Arts and the Paper Industries in France, 1871–1894.” He argued that posters fulfilled the naturalist vision developed by Gustave Courbet in the early 1860s. Vachon cites from an 1862 letter by the literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-­Beuve to a Saint-­Simonian author, Charles Duveyrier: The other day I chatted with Courbet. This vigorous and solid painter has more ideas, and it seems to me that he has a great one. It is to inaugurate a monumental painting that fits with the new society. . . . Courbet has the idea of painting vast iron train stations, which are the new churches for painting; of covering these vast subjects, sometimes thousands of them, with the views of the big cities that one travels through; the picturesque, moral, industrial, metallurgical subjects; in a word, the saints and miracles of the new society.81 When Courbet expressed these ideas, in the early 1860s, the Impressionists were still several years away from tackling some of these very topics in their paintings. The Iconophile’s Collecting  ‡ 275

8.8 (left) Jules Chéret, Théâtrophone, 1890. Chaix, Paris. 122 × 84.5 cm. 8.9 (right) Henri Thiriet, Machines à coudre françaises Peugeot, c. 1890. G. De Mailherbe, Paris. 40.6 × 69.2 cm.

In 1894, when Vachon wrote about the poster, Impressionist paintings of urban subjects were mostly a thing of the past and only a few of the Post-­Impressionists, notably Georges Seurat, depicted urban subjects in the early 1890s. Thus, for Vachon in 1894, posters fulfilled the naturalism that “Courbet envisioned” and for which “he was the energetic and convinced apostle.”82 Vachon admitted that posters were not quite as “grandiose” as the monumental painting that Courbet had called for, but concluded that the poster “is a new art” that gives the street a “vivid character” and expressed the hope that it “may rapidly advance” to realize Courbet’s grandiose conception: a monumental and popular painting, which is in harmony with the new society.”83 If posters depicted “the saints and miracles of the new society” and if, as their nineteenth-­century collectors were convinced, posters depicted everyday life in a way that made them indispensable for historians of the future, what kind of history was the iconophile preserving? To begin with, it was a history based primarily on the artistic poster rather than the earlier crude commercial poster. Both kinds of posters promoted brands, goods, entertainments, and services, yet contemporaries perceived them as distinct genres, and indeed, they displayed sig276  ·  C o l l e c t i n g a n d I c o n o p h i l i a

8.10 Écume de France, 1860. Van Geleyn, Paris. 70 × 88 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

nificant differences. Compare, for example, the anonymous 1860 poster Écume de France, printed by the Parisian printer Van Geleyn, with artistic posters of the 1890s (Fig. 8.10). The black-­and-­white lithograph Écume advertises a brand of pipes. The small dainty pipe smoked by the younger man, an artisan (on the right), stands for “today” (aujourd’ hui) and is contrasted with the large ornate pipe smoked by the older man, representing the old days (autrefois). Neither man is depicted as possessing a particular distinction, nor even as deriving any particular pleasure from smoking — two elements that, as we will see, become central in the later artistic poster. While cigarette paper was not a more elevated product than pipes, the contrast in the way in which it is presented in the 1896 color lithographic poster by the twenty-­four-­year-­old Jane Atché is notable (Fig. 8.11). Advertising the cigarette paper JOB, the poster depicts a smoker who is a highly fashionable upper-­middle-­class woman. Her distinguished appearance, aesthetic dress, and manner of smoking all convey a touch of the “new woman.” Even though smoking among middle-­class women was still controversial and indeed demonized in caricatures, the poster shows the woman retaining her social distinction, and The Iconophile’s Collecting  ‡ 277

8.11 (above, left) Jane Atché, Papier à cigarettes JOB, 1896. Cassan Fils, Toulouse-Paris. 150 × 120 cm. 8.12 (above, right) Alphonse Mucha, JOB, c. 1896. Champenois, Paris. 66.7 × 46.4 cm. 8.13 (right) Fritz Rehm, Der Kenner, Cigaretten Laferme, Dresden ( The Connoisseur, Laferme Cigarettes), 1897. Grimme & Hempel, Leipzig. 88 × 58 cm.

eliminates any implication of a deliberate act of defiance of gender restrictions on her part: Atché’s smoking woman is both respectable and casually self-­absorbed. By contrast, Alphonse Mucha’s well-­known poster JOB (made around the same time)84 highlights the pleasure of his female smoker, sexualizing her in ways that exceeded middle-­class propriety (Fig. 8.12). Distinction is the prominent trait of the middle-­class man shown smoking a cigarette in the 1897 poster designed by 278  ·  C o l l e c t i n g a n d I c o n o p h i l i a

8.14 Jules Chéret, En versant 3 francs au G[ran]d Crédit parisien, on a de suite une voiture d’enfant, 1877. J. Chéret, 18 rue Brunel, Paris. 90 × 124 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

the German artist Fritz Rehm, Der Kenner, Cigaretten Laferme, Dresden (The Connoisseur, Laferme Cigarettes, Dresden) (Fig. 8.13). As in Atché’s poster, the smoker is given the air of a connoisseur, with Rehm’s poster explicitly including this description as a caption within the image. The 1890s artistic posters of the male and female cigarette smokers, unlike the 1860 Écume, suggest refined taste and a sense of pleasure. No less importantly, they replaced the realistic and monochromatic depiction of the earlier commercial poster with a stylized, decorative, or, as in Rehm’s case, modernist aesthetic, and striking, often brilliant colors. In the 1870s, before the artistic poster, the crude commercial poster began to convey the message that the advertised product itself would confer middle-­class status upon its consumers. This implication is prominent in an early poster by Chéret, who by the 1880s had transformed the commercial poster into the artistic poster. His 1877 poster En versant 3 francs au G[ran]d Crédit parisien promoted buying a stroller on credit by showing before and after images of a family (Fig. 8.14). On the left, the beleaguered middle-­class couple looks miserable. They can hardly enjoy their walk since the mother caries an infant in her arms while the father drags along a resisting toddler. The same parents, seen on the right, are completely transformed, ambling happily with their two children neatly tucked The Iconophile’s Collecting  ‡ 279

8.15 Grands magasins du Bon Génie, saison d’été, vente à crédit, c. 1891. Emile Lévy, Paris. 130 × 94 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

into one stroller. The text explains the affordability of this transformation: a mere few francs paid in installments and reaching a total of twelve francs will buy the stroller. The emphasis on buying on credit shows that the poster appealed to members of the working classes while employing an imagery that is unmistakably middle class. This was an oft-­repeated strategy. The artistic poster rarely depicted members of the working class as consumers. Whereas some early posters, such as the stroller advertisement, still represented the dejected condition that precedes the credit purchase, later posters focused solely on the transformed consumer, newly initiated into the middle class. By 1890, both artistic and commercial posters typically featured middle-­class consumers, even if the poster was aimed at getting members of the lower middle classes and the working classes to buy on credit. For example, an anonymous c. 1891 commercial poster, Grands magasins du Bon Génie, saison d’été: Vente à crédit (Fig. 8.15), advertised a department store selling clothing on credit by depicting a well-­dressed middle-­class family strolling leisurely through a park, even while the potential clientele for such a credit purchases was by definition less affluent than the depicted family. The image of the consumer in 1890s posters thus became almost exclusively that of members of the middle class. When members of the working class were represented in the artistic poster it was usually not as potential consumers of products and entertainments for their 280  ·  C o l l e c t i n g a n d I c o n o p h i l i a

8.16 (left) Ouverture à L’Harmonie, g[ran]de brasserie rhénane . . . 1872. Van Geleyn, Paris. 103 × 77 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France. 8.17 (right) Lucien Lefevre, Café Malt, le meilleur, 1892. Chaix, Paris. 123.2 × 87.6 cm.

own pleasure or status but rather as working men and women, dressed in the attire of their professions. For example, the anonymous 1872 poster printed by the Parisian imprimerie of Van Geleyn, Ouverture à l’Harmonie, g[ran]de brasserie rhénane, which promotes a new brasserie, shows a waitress at work (Fig. 8.16), and Lucien Lefevre’s 1892 Café Malt shows a cook preparing (rather than drinking) coffee (Fig. 8.17). The women’s working-­class status is marked in these posters by their uniforms and their activity. Such working-­class figures are depicted (sometimes implicitly) as serving the middle class, whether in public places of entertainment or inside the home, as servants, cooks, and so on. A wide range of posters depicted middle-­class women, often with their children, as model consumers. As mentioned earlier, middle-­class women appeared with their offspring in posters promoting department stores. They also appeared in posters selling certain “domestic” products like milk or chocolate, as in Eugène Grasset’s Masson, chocolat mexicain, 1897, depicting a mother and daughter in Art Nouveau fashion (Fig. 8.18), and in posters representing various mainstreamed versions of the new woman as consumers — female figures enjoying their leisure time and engaging in sports, as in Abel Faivre’s Chamonix from 1905 The Iconophile’s Collecting  ‡ 281

(Fig. 8.19).85 Cycling women appeared in numerous posters advertising bicycles in different countries, as in the English poster by G. Moore, The James, depicting a young woman enjoying a ride in the park (Fig. 8.20). A congregation of young men and women with their bicycles in the background alludes to the possibilities of unchaperoned socializing provided by bike riding. The American poster Ride a Stearns and Be Content, 1896, by Edward Penfield (Fig. 8.21) depicts a young woman in the relatively comfortable riding fashion outfit associated with the new woman — a simple undecorated hat and blouse and a divided skirt (culottes), which looks like a skirt (but skirts of this short length were not worn at the time), so it was actually the culottes convenient for riding a bike such as are also visible in Misti’s Rouxel & Dubois (8.28). However, the posture of the woman in Ride a Stearns, with her feet far away from the pedals, is an improbable one for actual cycling. As these examples show, such posters rehabilitated the denigrated image of la femme nouvelle (the new woman) that had reigned in caricatures, transforming it into an acceptable, even glorified figure of a modern woman.86 Alongside these posters, which targeted young modern women as potential bicycle consumers, another type of bicycle poster seductively appealed to a masculine gaze with an evocative fantasy female figure. For example, the 1899 French poster Cycles Gladia­tor, by an artist known only by his initials, L. W., uses an enticing female nude who defies gravity as she flies through space, her long hair undulating, with her wing-­powered bicycle (Fig. 8.22). Overall, middle-­class men were represented less often than women in posters. They appeared typically in posters promoting products regarded as masculine, including certain forms of entertainment, male confection clothing (as in Chéret’s Aux Buttes Chaumont), bicycles, automobiles, shoes, alcoholic beverages, cigars, or cigarettes (Figs. 8.13 and 8.7). For example, the 1895 poster La Goutte d’or, by the Frenchman Charles Sénard, depicts an upper-­middle-­class man with an unusually long mustache, whose impeccable formal evening attire suggests the high quality of the promoted liquor (Fig. 8.23). An anonymous 1890 poster, Hultskamp’s Old Schiedam, printed by the major Parisian print establishment Camis for an English-­speaking public, promotes a Dutch brand of gin by portraying a content, pot-­bellied, middle-­aged, middle-­class male consumer of the drink (Fig. 8.24). The professional man, as represented for example in the Belgian artist Adolphe-­Crespin’s poster Paul Hankar architecte, 1894 (Fig. 8.25), was a rare subject. Men and women of diverse ethnic backgrounds typically appeared in posters in their work outfits, while at the same time symbolizing the product. For example, the anonymous 1892 La Négrita rhum poster features a dark-­skinned native 282  ·  C o l l e c t i n g a n d I c o n o p h i l i a

8.18 (left) Eugène Grasset, Masson, chocolat mexicain, 1897. G. de Malherbe, Paris. 64 × 46.4 cm. 8.19 (right) Abel Faivre, Sports d’hiver, Chamonix, 1905. J. Barreau, Paris. 105.5 × 75 cm.

8.20 (left) G. Moore, The James, 1890s. 153 × 100 cm. 8.21 (right) Edward Penfield, Ride a Stearns and Be Content, 1896. J. Ottman Lithograph Co., New York. 152 × 116 cm. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

8.22 L. W., Cycles Gladiator, c. 1895. G. Massias, Paris. 98.4 × 134.5 cm.

8.23 (left) Charles Sénard, La Goutte d’or, 1895. Fournier, Lyon. 99.8 × 197.1 cm. 8.24 (right) Hulstkamp’s Old Schiedam, the Finest Gin Ever Imported, 1890. Affiches Camis, Paris. 136 × 102 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

8.25 Adolphe Crespin, Paul Hankar architecte, 1894. Ad. Mertens, Brussels. 54.2 × 40 cm.

Jamaican woman presented as an exotic waitress who serves the rum, while also personifying it and evoking its “authenticity” (Fig. 8.26).87 On several occasions, posters portrayed men or women of different ethnicities as spectators rather than spectacle. In these posters the “other” or foreigner is a potential consumer, yet he or she is represented primarily as admiring Western products. Representatives of less-­developed countries are shown watching a technological product, such as a bicycle or typewriter, with awe, as an industrial miracle with global appeal.88 This is visible in Eugène Vavasseur’s 1904 poster promoting Hammond, an innovative American-­made typewriter whose more than one hundred typefaces enable typing in many different languages (Fig. 8.27).89 It shows an ethnically diverse all-­ male audience, including among others Turkish, Arab, and Indian men, whose bulging eyes suggest their amazement at the performance of the typewriter. Another example is the 1890s poster Rouxel & Dubois by Misti (Ferdinand Mifliez) (Fig. 8.28). It shows the admiration of an international all-­female audience for the bicycle and its owner/rider, a young woman dressed in the convenient bicycle fashion of the new woman. A Japanese and an Arab woman kneeling in the foreground are incredulous, and the stunned African child carried on his mother’s back looks on with wide eyes. Women from around the globe are shown paying homage to the Western bicycle and its model consumer, the Western new woman. Recognizable through her association with the bicycle and her rational The Iconophile’s Collecting  ‡ 285

8.26 (left) La Négrita rhum, 1892. Camis, Paris. 237 × 160 cm. 8.27 (right) Eugène Vavasseur, “Hammond” Machine à écriture visible, 1904. Arts Industriels, Paris. 81.3 × 38.7 cm.

costume, both of which were still controversial in Europe and America during the 1890s, the new woman in her reconfigured poster image becomes a model for Western progress.90 As this brief discussion shows, the history preserved by the collector of posters was indeed, as he himself believed, a history of various activities of daily life. But it also embodied ideologies of class, race, and gender. It was a history that visually established and reinforced class hierarchies and gender specificities, but promoted class and gender mobility based on acquiring the advertised consumer products. It was also a history based primarily on depictions of middle-­class men, women, and children of industrialized Western nations alongside the promoted products as the pinnacle of prestige. In valuing the late nineteenth-­century artistic poster over the earlier vulgar advertising poster, the iconophile’s collecting for the historian of the future privileged a visual culture that aestheticized the commercial. He favored the artistic poster that replaced realism with modernist aesthetics and crude commercialism with artistic depiction. Nonetheless, in applying his collector’s passion to posters, which were after all a product of consumer culture, rather than to painting or other rare artistic objects, the iconophile was distinct from the elitist collector.91 286  ·  C o l l e c t i n g a n d I c o n o p h i l i a

8.28 Misti (Ferdinand Mifliez), Rouxel & Dubois, c. 1890–1900. G. Bataille, Paris. 93.9 × 130.5 cm.

Ernest Maindron: Arch-­Iconophile, Archivist, Collector Among the iconophiles were several leading collectors who assembled vast poster collections in an effort to fulfill the highest iconophilic mission. Chief among them was Ernest Maindron (1838–1908), who was one of the most important collectors of posters in the nineteenth century. He was an “expert highly knowledgeable iconophile,” according to Émile Straus, the cultural critic of La Critique, himself a self-­described iconophile.92 Beraldi defined Maindron as a “passionate collector of posters.”93 Today, however, Maindron is primarily referred to as the first historian of the poster (his first article on the poster was published in 1884; his first volume, Les affiches illustrées, in 1886; and the second in 1896).94 Yet his identity, as I shall argue, was in the first place that of an iconophilic collector. Furthermore, his writing, as well as his curating of a major poster exhibition at the 1889 Exposition universelle, was based exclusively on his own collection. H. B. Jean Coudray wrote a profile of Maindron, published in Les Hommes d’Aujourd’ hui in 1887, in which he estimated that Maindron’s collection consisted of fifteen thousand posters.95 Maindron continued to collect vigorously after that date, and his collection grew substantially during the 1890s. He was the secretary-­archivist of the French Académie de sciences, and his extensive activity as collector was a labor of love executed with the professionalism of a curator/ The Iconophile’s Collecting  ‡ 287

archivist. A true iconophile, he was interested not only in posters but also in other everyday prints, such as illustrated programs for theaters and café concerts, menus, and invitation cards, about which he authored a book.96 To further understand the characteristics of a leading iconophile such as Maindron it is useful to analyze his visual portrayal in Les Hommes d’Aujourd’ hui. Chéret, commissioned by the journal to do a portrait of Maindron in the satiric style that characterized its covers, chose not to follow any existing model for portraying collectors, but instead invented a completely new iconography (Fig. 8.29). He did not represent Maindron in the dignified act of looking closely at an artwork, as Daumier had done, for instance, in his painting The Print Collectors of c. 1860–63 (Fig. 2.7). Furthermore, Chéret ignored an explicit suggestion by the journal to represent him with a magnifying glass.97 Like the monocle or hand-­held glasses, a magnifying glass was among the standard insignia of the serious viewer of art, the connoisseur/collector. Thus, for example, Frédéric-­Auguste Cazals’s 1894 poster promoting an exhibition at the Salon des Cent, the gallery of the journal La Plume, depicts two figures looking at posters (Fig. 2.25), one of whom, the Symbolist poet Jean Moréas, is aided by a monocle, and the other, the poet Paul Verlaine, wears spectacles. Since Maindron was Chéret’s own most dedicated collector (he assembled and cataloged a complete collection of Chéret posters),98 clearly the satiric sketch did not convey a lack of appreciation. Rather it showed a deep familiarity with Maindron’s endeavor. Therefore, I propose that Chéret avoided any trace of the established iconography of the collector because he understood that an arch-­iconophile of Maindron’s stature was an entirely different type from the traditional print collector represented by Daumier. Chéret depicts Maindron with a bohemian streak, his dark hair long and wavy. A touch of red between his shirt collar and portfolio hints at his Legion of Honor cross, awarded for his achievements as the archivist of the Académie. His top hat indicates his gentleman’s status, yet his energetic, purposeful walk shows his passion and drive as a collector. Maindron is shown in transit, transporting many posters, almost too numerous to carry. With a bursting portfolio under each arm, he is straining to hold on to three more large rolls. The sketch suggests that he is on a constant chase to collect large quantities of posters. Chéret further highlights Maindron’s mobility with the prominent black ink scribbling shaded in pink under the feet.99 The true and most dedicated iconophile who collected posters on such a grand scale could not be represented in the lofty aesthetic examination of a single artwork. Like the posters themselves, he too had to be out on the street rather than 288  ·  C o l l e c t i n g a n d I c o n o p h i l i a

8.29 Jules Chéret, Ernest Maindron, cover illustration, Les Hommes d’Aujourd’hui 6, no. 299 [1887]. 20.32 × 15.24 cm. Author’s collection.

8.30 Honoré Daumier, The Connoisseur, 1860–65. Pen and ink, 43.8 × 35.5 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929, 29.100.200. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

in the privacy of an interior. Represented in mid-­action, pursuing the accumulation of his vast archive, the eminent iconophile was captured in the mundane act of transporting works. In this respect, his depiction is almost diametrically opposed to Daumier’s The Connoisseur, 1860–65, whose subject is seated leisurely in the privacy of his own interior (Fig. 8.30). Reclining in a comfortable armchair, a portfolio of prints at his feet, surrounded by walls filled with framed artworks, Daumier’s connoisseur is shown in solitary contemplation of a tabletop replica of the Venus de Milo, who represented antiquity rather than contemporaneity. By contrast, the iconophile is active rather than reflective. Dressed in street attire, he is mobile rather than still, walking in a public space rather than sheltered in a private one. And he is interested in the contemporary poster rather than an ancient masterpiece. To be a leading iconophile meant always being on the move and engaging intensely with contemporary life — looking at everyday prints and posters circulating in public spaces, including the streets, galleries, studios, and print shops. It required collecting posters in large quantities without compromising on quality. Thus, instead of showing Maindron in the act of contemplation, Chéret depicts him in the act of accumulation. Of course, readers of Les Hommes d’Aujourd’ hui would have interpreted the satiric sketch through the respectful description high290  ·  C o l l e c t i n g a n d I c o n o p h i l i a

lighting Maindron’s extraordinary dedication to collecting posters: “Thus, with praiseworthy stubbornness, with the precision and the knowledge of a botan­ist, wherever his fancy takes him, ready for any adventure, M. Maindron ceaselessly and thanklessly chases the piece he is missing, and the one that is missing is always that to which he attaches most value. The day he finds it and puts it in his collection is a great day for him.”100 As for Maindron’s own views about collectors of the poster and print media, we know from his writing that he regarded them as “quite respectable people” with a “sweet and innocent mania,”101 or, as he describes it elsewhere, a “sweet folie.”102 Yet his more elaborate description of poster collectors evokes the archivist: he writes that they conserve numerous “important documents” that otherwise would be “lost to history,” and that, distinguished by “perseverance,” they take great care in gathering the posters and “piously” classifying them, “each [collector] in the specialty that is dear to him, constituting the most precious elements, the most indisputable and necessary for the knowledge of art.”103 Maindron’s identity as an archivist was also mentioned in the Hommes d’Aujourd’ hui profile, which notes his long affiliation with the Académie des sciences. Referring to Maindron’s own collection of posters and print media, the journal defines him as a “senior collector,” (collectionneur émérite) describing his thousands of methodically classified items in terms that once again evoke the idea of the archive: “Here are more than thirty years in which with a particular flair he has laboriously united thousands of documents, mostly concerning our era, that will later on make historiographers happy.”104 Writing on Maindron in 1889, Beraldi reports with admiration on Maindron’s extensive collection and details his elaborate classification system, from which we learn that Maindron clearly used his professional knowledge as an archivist in his iconophilic pursuit. The many thousands of posters were cataloged into some four hundred dossiers. Beraldi’s discussion of the classification mentions its diverse categories.105 Many posters were classified according to subjects, others by nation, and some by artist. For example, posters categorized by subjects were classified according to types of establishments, and within each type, according to particular establishments. For example: Concerts: Alcazar, Harmonie, XIXe siècle Ambassadeurs, Horloge, Folies-­Bergère, etc; librairie (the book shop) included subcategories of book subjects such as religious works, classics, education, science, art, travel, and history. Anticlerical posters constituted a category unto itself. Beraldi also notes a category titled “for memory,” which refers to political posters and other non-­illustrated posters since 1848, which filled fifty portfolios.106 There were two hundred dossiers of political caricature and a collection of posters of the The Iconophile’s Collecting  ‡ 291

siege of the Commune in 1871.107 Known as “a fanatic of Daumier,” Maindron had accumulated “a full collection” of the artist’s work and constituted Daumier as a separate category comprising three thousand pieces.108 Other dossiers were devoted to work by Gavarni, Cham, Gill, Grevin, and Willette. True to the iconophile’s interest in the everyday print, additional categories in Maindron’s collection included print items other than posters: cards, programs, and menus. Maindron classified foreign posters by nation: Italian, Spanish, German, English, and American. His classification according to artists included many of the early nineteenth-­century artists who made illustrated posters promoting books, and only a handful of contemporary poster artists: Léon Choubrac, Alfred Choubrac, and Chéret. Maindron no doubt added more artists to this category after 1889 (the date Beraldi published his account of the Maindron collection), since many poster artists, including Toulouse-­Lautrec, Bonnard, Mucha, Beards­ ley, and the Beggarstaffs only began to make posters in the early 1890s. Today, Maindron is known for his books and articles on the illustrated artistic poster of the late nineteenth century, yet his vast poster collection included not only illustrated posters but also earlier political typographic posters.109 Maindron had amassed a large collection of typographic posters of the Commune, displayed in Paris and the provinces from September 4, 1870, through the end of  May 1871. These constituted political communications, proclamations, announcements, and opinions, by the Communards, the National Guard, and committees. Commune posters were usually addressed to the “citizens,” “the inhabitants of  Paris,” or the like. One poster, for example, was addressed thus: Au Peuple de Paris, À la Garde Nationale, CITOYENS. (To the people of Paris, to the National Guard, CITIZENS). Another addressed itself to Le Peuple de Paris Aux Soldats de Versailles, FRÈRES! (The People of Paris, To the Soldiers of Versailles, BROTHERS!) These and many other posters appeared in a volume titled Les murailles politiques françaises depuis le 4 Septembre 1870, published in the early 1870s by Armand Le Chevalier.110 The publisher did not divulge the name of the “ardent collector” who, as he testified in a brief preface, had assembled this complete and 292  ·  C o l l e c t i n g a n d I c o n o p h i l i a

“precious collection” beginning in the time of the events themselves.111 Hence Maindron has not usually been associated with this book, nor with a significant collection of political posters. Presumably, Maindron chose to remain anonymous around 1873, the original date of publication of Chevalier’s volume on the Commune posters, because of the proximity to the controversial political event. The Commune, formed in response to the French government’s capitulation to the invading Germans, was viewed as a revolutionary government by the Left and the working class that constituted the Communards, but was deemed an unruly insurrection by the Right. It ended with the army killing some twenty thousand Communards and the government exiling or jailing many thousands. Amnesty was granted in 1880. Only with some historical distance did Maindron acknowledge his role in Chevalier’s book. Since the author of the 1887 profile of Maindron mentions this volume, Maindron apparently revealed to him that he was the anonymous collector of the Commune posters. A few years later, Maindron included the Murailles politiques in a list of books authored by him.112 That Maindron began to assemble the collection of Commune posters during the very months in which the items were pasted on public walls fits his pro-­Commune political leanings and demonstrates that his interest in these typographic posters was motivated by his recognition of their extraordinary value as historical documents. His act of collecting these political posters in real time amounted to a salvaging of ephemeral political communication, of history in the making — a history written anonymously, from the bottom up. As the publisher writes in a brief introductory note: “The posters are the history written for everyone, day by day, in the streets, on the walls. They are the most truthful expression, vivid in details.”113 Most of the political posters in Maindron’s book captured communications between the Communards and their supporters, including calls to action, proclamations, and explanations of particular political positions. They were a mass medium of the time and played an active part in the historical events. The same belief in political posters as shreds of history had motivated an earlier collection of political posters published in book form, Les murailles révolutionnaires, which included posters, decrees, and bulletins from February 1848 (initially published in Paris in the early 1850s).114 In his 1852 preface to the volume on the 1848 posters, Alfred Delvau referred to them as “a collective oeuvre, whose author is Mr. Everyone.” The posters were a living history, he wrote, the most “truthful, original and eloquent . . . the most animated pano­ rama of the days that were so diverse and so moving, which we all witnessed and in which we all were actors.”115 This publication most likely inspired Maindron’s own effort some twenty years later. The Iconophile’s Collecting  ‡ 293

Maindron was the new type of collector, who participated in Republican democratic values of knowledge, education, and science. The literary scholar Dominique Pety identifies this type of collector in her analysis of the representation of the collector in French literature from the 1840s to the end of the century. She pinpoints a transition from the mid-­century ironic and parodic representations of the collector as an eccentric and monomaniac type who leads a cloistered life, to two distinct types in the late nineteenth century: the aristocratic collector, focused on the artistic values of his collection and its strictly private function, and the “new type” of bourgeois collector associated with Republican values.116 Maindron clearly fit the latter profile. A tireless active agent in the collection and preservation of prints that had a function in the everyday, he was at once a leading collector and a historian of the poster movement, fulfilling the multiple roles of curator/archivist/scholar in a period that preceded the collection and the exhibition of posters by museums. Maindron’s collection (along with that of another collector, Constant Dessoliers) was so extensive that Roger Marx asserted in 1889 that the true museum of the poster resided only in the portfolios of these two collectors.117 Maindron not only collected posters and everyday prints but also labored actively to make his collection and knowledge public. To this end, he created a collection/archive on the scale of a significant museum; wrote two volumes and some articles on the history of the poster; cataloged Chéret’s enormous production of posters; prepared his own collection of Commune posters for publication; and organized, in 1889, the first major exhibition of posters, a historical exhibition at the centennial Exposition universelle titled Histoire résumée de l’affiche française, which was based on his own collection.118 His entire work on posters as a historian, curator, and (anonymous) editor could not have been accomplished without his own collection, but his importance as an iconophile exceeded his activity of collecting: Maindron was a knowledgeable critic and scholar who worked tirelessly to make the prints and his knowledge of them accessible to other collectors and to the public.

Collecting as Salvaging an Archaeology of Modernity During the 1850s and 1860s, the idea of the historical value of everyday images depicted in the print media gained popularity among progressive men of letters. Charles Baudelaire understood the cultural importance of print-­media images representing contemporary life. This, I propose, led him to choose Constantin Guys, an illustrator for the London Illustrated News, as “The Painter of Modern 294  ·  C o l l e c t i n g a n d I c o n o p h i l i a

Life.”119 Baudelaire’s choice of Guys implied not that he valued Guys —“a minor artist”— over the premier avant-­garde painter of the time, Édouard Manet, but rather that he understood the significance of a cultural turn toward the widely circulating images outside the realm of high art.120 Although Guys’s illustrations depicted “nothing but the familiar and the charming,” Baudelaire, who also saw fashion plates as having “a double-­natured charm, one both artistic and historical,”121 asserted that they were of interest for “serious historians.”122 In his appreciation of print-­media images for their “representation of the present” and for their historical value for the future, Baudelaire was a precursor of the late nineteenth-­century iconophile. The idea that historians would write history based on an analysis of everyday images was further developed in the following decades in the writing of critics and scholars. Beraldi made the most forceful argument to this effect in 1889. He discussed the new kind of writing of history that originated with the French Revolution as requiring the consideration of print media graphics such as posters, menus (a popular genre among late nineteenth-­century artists), and other everyday prints: “For those who reproach us about including them [menus], we insist on pieces of that genre, we cite the words of M. Thiers, who said in a preface to his Révolution française: ‘I inaugurate a new mode of writing history, I do not hesitate to give the prices of bread, of soap of candles.’ And we say the same: ‘We have today a new mode of considering the print: we do not hesitate to catalog posters, menus, and programs.’ ”123 Tom Stammers has demonstrated that in the mid nineteenth century close connections emerged in France “between the collector’s passion and the historian’s craft,” leading to a “convergence between cultural history and collecting practice.”124 Although Stammers does not specifically discuss prints or posters, his insights about the politics of collecting are equally applicable to the collection of these items. He proposes that “the acquisition and scrutiny of objects displaced or produced by the French Revolution encouraged new forms of historical writing, and new possibilities for the historical imagination.”125 As Stammers notes, the postrevolutionary practices of collecting the debris unleashed by the revolution onto the streets participated in fostering historical writing that “reflected a growing conviction in the explanatory potential of material culture,”126 writing in which the historian was “cast as an urban archaeologist, diligently piecing together the spirit of the past from the fragments and scraps that survived in the present.”127 Stammers also notes that Alfred de Liesville (whose collection of ephemera is now housed in the Musée Carnavalet in Paris) may have rejoiced prematurely when he wrote, in the 1870s, that “the inner wall of scholarship, The Iconophile’s Collecting  ‡ 295

defended with jealous regularity by its followers, has been breached like everything else by the revolutions.”128 Liesville believed that “a whole new ‘archaeology’ was being born, one that would treat the ‘newspapers, memoirs, songs, images, caricatures, coins’ of the modern world as seriously as it studied the fragments and vestiges of antiquity.”129 Beraldi, Maindron, and Marx, who were among the leading iconophiles writing on prints and posters and were themselves collectors of posters and prints, were committed to this postrevolutionary ideology of democratization. Several other collectors amassed large-­scale poster collections, suggesting that they too shared this ideology. Among them was Constant Dessoliers, who was employed at Didot.130 As Fustier testified, Dessoliers was “a delicate spirit and scholar,” who did not rest content with his collection of numerous engravings and formed a collection of posters. A “collaborator” of major print establishments for over five decades, he was able to obtain the posters of this “new art at their source.”131 Dessoliers had methodically collected posters for thirty years, amassing some ten thousand posters by 1884. His collection was classified into three categories: literary posters (promoting books), theatrical posters, and commercial posters. As Fustier wrote in 1884, it was “a truly unique collection, which “grew day by day and was the envy of our Bibliothèque nationale and the Musée Carnavalet.”132 Another large-­scale poster collector was the architect Lépine, who had begun collecting posters in his student days at the École des beaux-­arts.133 He collected posters of all kinds, including political, literary, and commercial posters, all arranged in chronological order.134 Lépine’s collection was particularly rich in posters and documents from the 1848 revolution.135 Fustier estimated that Lépine’s collection reached about fifteen thousand by 1884. By 1898, when it was sold, Lépine’s collection numbered sixty thousand posters.136 Another major collector discussed by Fustier was Georges Pochet-­Deroches, who had amassed an enormous collection of posters that was particularly strong in political posters from the 1848 revolution and served as the basis for the publication of these posters in the volume Murailles révolutionnaires.137 Pochet-­Deroches’s collection was dispersed by the time Fustier wrote his article, but he must have continued to collect illustrated posters after the sale of his earlier collection, since in 1901 he donated several hundred illustrated posters to the Musée des arts décoratifs.138 It is striking that Maindron, Lépine, and Pochet-­Deroches all collected political posters early on, and later collected the illustrated commercial posters once these had emerged. These major collectors, the arch-­iconophiles, were all male. Their representations, however, cast them as distinct from all other print collectors, male or fe296  ·  C o l l e c t i n g a n d I c o n o p h i l i a

8.31 Pierre Vidal, M. Beraldi père, iconophile, in Henry Nogressau, “Physiologie de l’Iconophile,” L’Art et l’Idée, March 1892, 190. National Gallery of Art Rare Books Library, Washington, D.C. Courtesy National Gallery of Art.

male. Male print collectors appeared only rarely in the new poster iconography of the 1890s as, in Frédéric-­Auguste Cazals’s 7me exposition du Salon des Cent (Fig. 2.25). On the other hand, numerous posters depicted fashionable urban women in the midst of an aesthetic gaze that consecrated the print as art while elevating their own cultural status (discussion and illustrations in chap. 2). Both the men and the women were also images to be looked at in the posters. Thus, the poster iconography was not characterized by the kind of simple male-­female dichotomy that tends to gloss over complexities. The arch-­iconophile did not appear in the poster medium at all, but only in sketchs or caricatures accompanying an article about him. For example, Pierre Vidal’s sketch of Henri Beraldi was included in Nogressau’s article on the iconophile and shows Beraldi, like Maindron in Chéret’s earlier sketch, striding with a roll of prints or posters tucked under his arm (Fig. 8.31). The iconophile was most accurately captured in written texts, primarily his own. Beraldi’s twelve-­volume oeuvre and Maindron’s two volumes of the history of the poster were monuments to their own extensive knowledge, which was inseparable from their practices as collectors. The Iconophile’s Collecting  ‡ 297

To sum up, the arch-­iconophile was an actor on a scale different from that of all other print collectors (of either gender) in terms of the scope of his collecting, his practices, and his ambition. His goal of accumulating vast archives of everyday print media set him apart from mere appreciators of the aesthetics of prints. Furthermore, he was a leading actor in his own time by virtue of forming a huge collection, writing about it, curating exhibitions, publishing, and in some cases donating his collection to a museum. He was dedicated to being an actor on the stage of history, reaching beyond his own time. In some ways, Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (a large collection of quotes from printed sources, and Bernjamin’s own reflections on daily life in nineteenth-­century Paris) exemplify a twentieth-­century version of the iconophile’s commitment.139 Arcades was a form of writing history that relied on the personal “collection” of shreds of the past — in Benjamin’s case, selected excerpts from books and articles in the press, published in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Among these, Benjamin included a quotation from Delvau’s preface to the 1848 poster compilation Murailles révolutionnaires, which expressed Benjamin’s own attempt to produce a collective work whose “author is Monsieur Everyone.”140 Hannah Arendt, who notes that “collecting was Benjamin’s central passion,” draws a connection between his collecting of books and his collecting of quotations.141 Benjamin was a bibliophile, a passionate collector who was always on the lookout, searching, carefully selecting, acquiring, preserving, storing, and communing with his chosen volumes.142 His collecting practice merged the tactile, the aesthetic, the literary, and the historical. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin put his chosen citations on display as a collector and curator would, showing carefully selected objects. Vanessa Schwartz aptly describes this as his “show and tell” method, in which “history is written as an argument advanced by montage and juxtaposition rather than as a systematic presentation of evidence in support of a clearly stated thesis.”143 Understanding Benjamin’s mode of textual juxtapositions as related to collection and display, as proposed here, also opens up the possibility of seeing it in the context of the patchwork aesthetic that characterized poster display in the nineteenth century. Critics often recognized the element of chance in the combinations of poster displays on walls and hoardings as a defining characteristic of the poster in the modern urban scene — fragmentary, ephemeral, always changing, and self-­renewing.144 Benjamin’s discontinuous strategies and his recontextuali­ zation of textual fragments are descendents not only of cinematic montage and Cubist and Dadaist collage, but also of the urban hoardings. In the more distant 298  ·  C o l l e c t i n g a n d I c o n o p h i l i a

view of history, Benjamin’s method is also a descendant of the postrevolutionary legacy of collecting and writing a history of the everyday. The late nineteenth-­century arch-­iconophiles Maindron and Beraldi, and many other collectors and critics, advocated the collecting of posters as a means of salvaging them for the future history of their own present. They observed their own time from the vantage point of the future precisely because they were fully cognizant of the significance of the ephemeral present. In Mikhail Bakhtin’s words, which echo Baudelaire’s ideas in “The Painter of Modern Life”: “To reinterpret reality on the level of the contemporary present now meant not only to degrade, but to raise reality into a new and heroic sphere.”145 To apply Bakhtin’s words, iconophiles saw their present not only as “an incomplete continuation of the past, but as something like a new and heroic beginning.”146

The Iconophile’s Legacy The iconophile developed with the birth of modern visual culture. Schooled on high art, he fell in love with the poster when it was a new kind of print made as advertising and displayed in everyday urban contexts. He trod the fault line between the expert appreciation, collection, and preservation of art objects, traditionally reserved for high art, and an emerging popular mass culture. The iconophile’s passion developed at a time when individual artists and designers made posters independently (collaborating with printers), before the advent of teamwork in full-­service graphic design and advertising firms. He collected when some of the poster artists, like Bonnard and Toulouse-­Lautrec, were involved in the avant-­garde art movements in Paris of the 1890s, and used the poster as a site for their experimentations.147 In some ways he was an early manifestation of the collector of contemporary art and a pioneer of the collection of everyday media for archives. He prefigured the practice of contemporary art collecting insofar as the posters he sought out for his collection were contemporaneous, and moreover, represented a new phenomenon that stretched the limits of what had previously been thought of as art. Collecting contemporary posters required foresight, devotion, and constant involvement in the latest developments. The iconophile exerted great efforts to acquire his objects of desire. Like many contemporary art collectors, he did not merely go to dealers “to secure a coveted” poster,148 but habitually visited artists’ studios and print shops. If he was not of great financial means, he viewed the dealer as “a last resource,”149 preferring to attain his posters “first hand.”150 This challenge tested his resources and aroused “his sporting instincts.”151 The Iconophile’s Collecting  ‡ 299

Since the iconophile collected posters that were displayed in open public urban spaces rather than singular artworks shown only in studios, galleries, or museums, he devised numerous ways of going directly to the source, such as approaching the theater box office, addressing a letter to the theatrical manager, pleading for a copy of particular posters, and if all else failed, luring a subordinate at the theater to produce the desired poster and rewarding him for his effort.152 Late in the century, he was well aware that, unlike in earlier times, the printer and bill-­sticker were typically no longer able to provide him with a poster; the former could not keep posters on his premises once they had been printed, and the latter had to account for every copy of a poster that had not been posted.153 Decades later, rumors still circulated of the times before poster dealers began to flourish in Paris in the mid 1880s, when “ardent pioneers” of poster collecting were led by their passion into nighttime “excursions to the hoardings . . . armed with wet sponges” with which to detach “their coveted picture-­bills.”154 This illegal mode of poster collecting, which might have landed these early poster collectors in prison, was seen by later collectors as a testament to their enthusiasm.155 The term “iconophile” disappeared from contemporary language, yet the iconophile’s vision of vast archives of ephemeral everyday images materialized in twentieth-­and twenty-­first-­century institutions. For example, the Musée de la publicitée in Paris, which opened in 1978, was actually based on the late nineteenth-­century vision of Roger Marx, the leading poster and print critic, who held a state position in overseeing museums. Marx began campaigning for the state to establish a museum of the modern poster in 1899.156 Iconophiles played a key role in the eventual establishment of modern archives of graphic media and by extension of other ephemeral media. The iconophile’s philosophy that everyday printed ephemeral images were the stuff of history and must be preserved for future generations, as well as his own practices of accumulation, formed the foundation of numerous archives and collections. While the fate of Maindron’s enormous poster collection after his death in 1908 remains, sadly, unknown, we know that some iconophiles’ collections were dispersed at auction, and quite a few were donated to museums.157 The ideas and values of the iconophile’s practice of assembling archives of everyday images continued in various archives of posters and advertising. It also had a related life in nineteenth-­century photography and film archives.158 As Paula Amad shows, a film critic reviewing the Lumière brothers’ cinématographe shown in Paris in 1895 saw the medium as capturing ordinary people in their daily activities and stated that, by recording movement, “now life [could be] collected and reproduced.”159 The medium of film, when it was first experienced, 300  ·  C o l l e c t i n g a n d I c o n o p h i l i a

led to the claim that “celluloid not only constitutes an historical document, but a piece of history.”160 Amad’s analysis shows that between 1895 and 1929, Albert Kahn’s Archives de la planète in Paris “constructed a literal film archive devoted to recording the diversity of global daily life.”161 Like other histories of the archive of historical documents and photography, Amad’s groundbreaking history and theory of the film archive appears unaware of the notion of the archive of the poster and other mundane print media, as well as of the figure of the iconophile as discussed by late nineteenth-­century critics and collectors.162 Both the film and photographic archives amassed by Kahn and the ten thousand photographs produced by Eugène Atget were made explicitly for the purpose of producing an archive. By contrast, the iconophile’s archive of posters and other print media was assembled from daily life environments, whether peeled off the street walls and hoardings or culled from dealers and artists. Posters made for commercial advertising, political revolutions, and elections appealed to collectors in large part because they had circulated in the realm of everyday life. The iconophile’s vision of a mode of historical writing based on posters proved less influential than his philosophy regarding the historical significance of preserving everyday ephemeral images. Some twentieth-­century historians did attempt to write a history based on posters. For instance, Max Gallo’s The Poster in History aims “to show through posters the evolution of society, of customs, and of ideas, to see the historical events and ideologies come alive in posters.”163 Gallo notes that he presents the poster “as a mirror that both reflects and distorts,” but that the distortions themselves are the most revealing aspects of  human history. The insights of Roland Marchand, who studied American advertising in the twentieth century, demystify the claim, which persisted in twentieth-­century American advertising, that historians of the future would be able to reconstruct “a day by day picture” of their time through advertising.164 Marchand points out that advertising selects and distorts reality, mirroring “popular fantasies rather than social realities.”165 He observes that studying advertising for the purpose of writing history can nonetheless be useful insofar as advertising constitutes a frame of reference and “community of discourse” shared by an otherwise diverse audience; it shapes or reinforces popular attitudes and provides a reliable “diagnosis of the needs and desires of the expanding consumer society.”166 Thus, whereas the iconophile’s vision of vast poster collections did materialize, his vision for the writing of history did not. Nonetheless, the increasing use of images in contemporary studies echoes his philosophy. None of the nineteenth-­ century iconophiles attempted to write a history of their own period, nor could they have succeeded. The task belonged necessarily to the future. Ironically, the The Iconophile’s Collecting  ‡ 301

leading iconophiles of the nineteenth century all wrote primarily for other collectors. For this reason, their volumes were printed in limited editions. They were activist collectors committed to stimulating and supporting the activities of other collectors/iconophiles. Maindron’s two volumes on the history of the poster; Beraldi’s twelve-­volume Les graveurs du XIXe siècle, tellingly subtitled Guide de l’amateur d’estampes modernes (A guide for the collector of modern prints); Marx’s writing on Chéret and his prefaces to portfolios of prints and posters;167 Uzanne’s articles on posters and collecting; and Mellerio’s volume on color lithography168 — all addressed themselves primarily to colleagues (or potential ones), who, like them, pursued the work that would collectively salvage an ephemeral archaeology of modernity. In this latter task, they succeeded. Paradoxically, the path they blazed by their collecting, scholarship, and writing developed into an independent history of the poster. This supported collectors and also charted a path further developed by museum curators, but did not establish the kind of model for a history of the everyday based on ephemeral images that they had envisioned as the iconophile’s legacy.

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NOTES

Introduction Epigraphs: “Chacun a pu suivre la métamorphose. Le placard d’autrefois, sans séduction avec sa laide typographie, lente à déchiffrer, est devenu une véritable estampe dont la polychromie égaie l’oeil, dont le symbolisme se trouve d’emblée compris” — Roger Marx, preface, Les Maîtres de L’Affiche, 1896–1900, vol. 1, 1896, intro. Alain Weill, notes by Jack Rennert (Paris: Chêne, 1978), 11; Arthur Symons, Aubrey Beardsley (London: At the Sign of the Unicorn, 1898), 18–19. Translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 1. Colin Campbell, The Beggarstaff Posters: The Work of James Pryde and William Nicholson (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1990), 11–13. 2. M. Bauwens, T. Hayashi, La Forgue, Meier-­Graefe, and J. Pennell, Les affiches étrangères illustrées (Paris: G. Boudet, Librairie artistique, 1897). The book cover features posters by the British artists Dudley Hardy, A Gaiety Girl (Fig. 5.2); Aubrey Beardsley, Publisher. Children’s Book (Fig. 6.18); Maurice Greiffenhagen, Illustrated Pall Mall Budget; and the Beggarstaffs, A Trip to Chinatown; Belgian artists Armand Rassenfosse, Huile Russe; Emile Berchmans, Fine Art and General Insurance Company; and Auguste Donnay, Association belge de photographie, deuxième exposition internationale d’art photographique; a Japanese poster (unidentified); and American posters by Alice R Glenny, Women’s Edition (Buffalo) Courier, and Edward Penfield, Harper’s March. 3. Ernest Maindron, Les affiches illustrées, 1885–1895 (Paris: G. Boudet, 1896), 16. 4. Ibid., 15–16. 5. In the commercial listings of Didot-­Bottin, Annuaire du commerce, de l’ industrie, de la magistrature, et de l’administration (Paris, 1890), 760. 6. “Et n’est-­ce pas là, en effet, l’art naturel et logique d’une époque d’individualisme et d’égoïsme à l’outrance?” Maurice Talmeyr, “L’âge de l’affiche,” Revue des Deux Mondes 137 (per. 4), no. 9 (September 1, 1896): 206 and 209. On posters and globalization see Ruth E. Iskin, “ ‘Savages’ into Spectators/Consumers: Globalization in Advertising Posters, 1890s–1900s,” Nineteenth-­Century Contexts 29, nos. 2 and 3 (June 2007).

7. “Maintenant, on se couche le soir en sleeping-­car à Paris, et l’on prend son chocolat le lendemain matin à Marseille”: Talmeyr, “L’âge de l’affiche,” 207. Ibid., 208. 8. As Dawn Ades notes, the distinction between the poster and the art poster was based on the status of the designer, and often it was also related to promoting cultural rather than commercial interests, in “Function and Abstraction in Poster Design,” in Ades et al., The 20th-­Century Poster: Design of the Avant-­Garde (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center / New York: Abbeville Press, 1984), 27. 9. “Créateur d’une industrie d’art depuis 1866 par l’application de l’art à l’impression commerciale et industrielle.” Journal des Artistes (April 13, 1890), cited in “Chronologie,” in Réjane Bargiel and Ségolène Le Men, La Belle Époque de Jules Chéret: De l’affiche au décor (Paris: Les Arts décoratifs and Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2010), 125. 10. Edmond de Goncourt, “Je bois au premier peintre du mur parisien, à l’inventeur de l’art dans l’affiche.” Entry of April 16, 1890, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal, mémoires de la vie littéraire (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1989), 3:413. 11. On Grasset see Eugène Grasset, 1845–1917: L’art et l’ornament, ed. Catherine Lepdor (Milan: 5 Continents, 2011). On Mucha see Jiri Mucha, Alphonse Mucha, His Life and Art (London: Heinemann, 1966); Jack Rennert and Alain Weill, Alphonse Mucha: The Complete Posters and Panels (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984); Victor Arwas, Jana Brabcová-­ Orliková, and Anna Dvoárk, eds., Alphonse Mucha: The Spirit of Art Nouveau (Alexandria, Va.: Art Services International in association with Yale University Press, 1998). 12. Issues of class and gender in the iconography of the artistic poster and commercial poster are discussed in chaps. 2 and 8, respectively. 13. In some cases commercial posters did enter art and design museums through the donation of an advertising agency. For example, in 1973, Ogilvy, Benson & Mather Ltd. donated 189 commercial posters from the archive of the British advertising pioneer S. H. Benson to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. See Margaret Timmers, ed., The Power of the Poster (London: V&A Publications, 1998), 22. 14. The Beggarstaffs submitted two revised designs, but they too were rejected. Campbell, Beggarstaff Posters, 42. 15. On the differences in the discourses and practices of artists and critics versus advertisers in England see John Hewitt, “Designing the Poster in England, 1890–1914,” Early Popular Visual Culture 5, no. 1 (April 2007): 57–70. 16. Arthur Fish, “Another Word on the Poster,” Studio 5 (September 1895): 216. 17. Charles Hiatt, Picture Posters (East Ardsley, Wakefield, UK: EP Publishing, 1976 [1895]), 2. 18. Haldane Macfall (writing under the pen name Hal Dane), “The Art of the Past Year,” St Paul’s London, January 5, 1895, 12, cited in Campbell, Beggarstaff Posters, 34–35. 19. Gleeson White, Windsor Magazine, January 1895, cited ibid., 33. 20. Black and White, November 10, 1894, cited ibid., 34. 21. Joseph Pennell, “Angleterre,” in Les affiches étangères illustrées, by Bauwens, Hayashi, La Forgue, Meier-­Graefe, and Pennell, 29–76. 22. Ibid., 31. 304  ·  Notes to Introduction

23. Ibid. 24. Spielmann was an established art critic who wrote for Pall Mall Gazette (1883– 90), the Graphic, the London Illustrated News, and other periodicals. Editor of the Magazine of Art (1887–1904), he was also a founder of the journal Black and White and author of several volumes, including History of Punch (1895) and the first book on Millais (1898). See Julie F. Codell, “Marion Harry Spielmann and the Role of the Press in the Professionalization of Artists,” Research Society for Victorian Periodicals 22, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 7–15; Codell, “ ‘The Artist’s Cause at Heart’: Marion Harry Spielmann and the Late Victorian Art World,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 71 (1989): 139–63. 25. Marion Spielmann, “Posters and Poster-­Designing in England,” Scribner’s Magazine, July 1895, 35, 39. 26. Ibid., 35. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 47. 29. Ibid. 30. “How We Advertise Now,” Punch, December 3, 1887, 262–63. 31. Unnamed author, “The Palace of (Advertising) Art,” Punch, December 3, 1887, 263. 32. Punch, October 13, 1888, 170. 33. Eugène Viollet-­le-­Duc, “Requête adressée aux parisiens par un étranger,” Gazette des Beaux-­Arts (May 1859): 168. 34. “Ne vous sentez-­vous pas offusqués par ces grandes pancartes industrielles qui s’étalent au milieu de nos rues, s’imposent à nos regards et nous gâtent tant de belles vues de notre cité?” Charles Garnier, “Les affiches agaçantes,” Gazette des Beaux-­Arts (December 1871): 490. My thanks to Réjane Bargiel for bringing this article to my attention. 35. Ibid., 491. 36. Ibid., 492. 37. For brief comments on Rouchon and Van Geleyn see Ernest Maindron, “Les affiches illustrées” (1884): 419–33, and 536. And on Van Geleyn see Marius Vachon, Les arts et les industries du papier en France 1871–1894 (Paris: Librairies-­imprimeries Réunis, 1894), 193. For contemporary research on Rouchon see Rouchon, un pionnier de l’affiche illustrée: Collections de la Bibliothèque nationale, ed. Alain Weill and Réjane Bargiel-­ Harry (Paris: Musée de l’affiche et de la publicité, Éditions Henri Veyrier, 1983). 38. This statement is attested by some photographs, for example a photograph from around 1865 by Marville that shows an earlier poster by Rouchon pasted on the street. On Rouchon’s technique, see Rouchon, un pionnier de l’affiche illustrée, unnumbered pages [5 and 6]. 39. “Que cet affreux grand OEil de cyclope qui regarde impudemment.” Garnier, “Les affiches agaçantes,” 491. 40. Surprisingly, the groundbreaking research in the Rouchon catalog, Rouchon, un pionnier, does not mention Garnier’s article and thus does not identify the posters menNotes to Introduction  ‡ 305

tioned by Garnier. Garnier refers to several titles of posters that correspond to known posters by Rouchon: La Belle Jardinière, 270 × 220 cm, 1849; Au bon Diable, 217 × 152 cm, 1859, and À l’oeil, 125 × 96 cm, 1864. (See reproductions, ibid., 39, 105, 96). It is possible that La Belle Jardinière Garnier referred to was a later poster. 41. “Acte de vandalisme”: Garnier, “Les affiches agaçantes,” 493. 42. “Incendiaires, éclatants, criards”: Octave Uzanne, “Les collectionneurs d’affiches illustrées: Les contemporains, Jules Chéret” [part 2], Le Livre Moderne: Revue du Monde Littéraire et des Bibliophiles Contemporains (May 1891): 258. 43. Anon., “The Hoardings,” Poster 3, no. 17 (December 1899): 180. 44. For example, a major twentieth-­century collector of nineteenth-­century American posters, Leonard A. Lauder, explained that although many “quite ordinary posters” hawking circuses, theatrical productions, or patent medicines existed, he chose only posters that “elevated their subjects beyond the realm of mere commercial art,” even though they too promoted a variety of products such as bicycles and literary journals. See introduction in David W. Kiehl, American Art Posters of the 1890s (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987), 10. 45. For a late nineteenth-­century discussion of afficheurs see Gustave Fustier, “La littérature murale: Essai sur les affiches littéraires en France,” Le Livre, Revue du Monde Littéraire 5 (November 1884): 356. 46. Phillip Dennis Cate, “The 1880s: The Prelude,” in Cate and Sinclair Hamilton Hitchings, The Color Revolution (Santa Barbara, Calif., and Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1978), 10, 36. The carved message “Défense d’afficher: Loi du 29 juillet 1881” (It is forbidden to post: The law of July 29, 1881) is still visible on building walls. 47. Maindron, “Les affiches illustrées” (1884), 544. 48. Georges D’Avenel, “Le mécanisme de la vie moderne: La publicité,” Revue des Deux Mondes (January–February 1901): 631. Lionel Mogues discusses the huge numbers of posters, including elections posters, in “Le mur et l’affiche,” L’Evénement (September 22, 1889): [p. 2]. 49. For discussion of posters in studies of late nineteenth-­century advertising see Frank Presbrey, The History and Development of Advertising (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968 [1929]), 494–500; Marc Martin, Trois Siècles de Publicité en France (Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob, 1972), 107–10, and Martin, “L’affiche de publicité à Paris et en France à la fin du XIXe siècle,” in La terre et la cité: Mélanges offerts à Philippe Vigier, ed. Alain Faure, Alain Plessis, and Jean-­Claude Farcy (Paris: Créaphis, 1994), 373–86; Diana Hindley and Geoffrey Hindley, Advertising in Victorian England, 1837–1901 (London: Wayland Publishers, 1972), 68–79; T. R. Nevett, Advertising in Britain: A History (London: Heinemann, on behalf of the History of Advertising Trust, 1982), 92–99. 50. For a list of exhibitions see Roger Braun’s bibliography, published in Alexandre Henriot, Exposition d’affiches artistique françaises & étrangères, modernes & rétrospectives, exhibition catalog (Cirque de Reims, August–November 1896), repr. Union centrale des arts décoratifs (Paris, 1980), 198. Maindron also mentions exhibitions in Brussels and Amsterdam: Maindron, Les affiches illustrées (1896), 26. 306  ·  Notes to Introduction

51. Marsha Morton, Pratt and Its Gallery: The Arts and Crafts Years, exhibition catalog (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Pratt Institute: 1999), 36–37, 69. 52. Henriot, Exposition. On poster exhibitions in France see Alain Weill, L’affichomanie: Collectionneurs d’affiches — affiches de collection, 1880–1900, exhibition catalog (Paris: Musée de l’affiche, 1980); Karen L. Carter, “L’Age de l’Affiche: The Reception, Display, and Collection of Illustrated Posters in Fin-­de-­Siècle Paris” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2001), 306–7, 344–79. 53. Edward Bella, ed., A Collection of Posters: The Illustrated Catalogue of the First Exhibition (London: Royal Aquarium, 1894); Campbell, Beggarstaff Posters, 29–32; Timmers, Power of the Poster, 14–16. 54. “Art in Picture Posters: A Unique Exhibition in the Mercantile Library, American, French, and English Work,” New York Times, February 16, 1896. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. J. Foster-­Bowen, “On Poster Collecting,” Poster 3, no. 16 (November 1899): 116. 59. During the years of its publication, 1910–21, Das Plakat was the most important publication on posters and graphic design. However, these years are beyond the scope of the present study. 60  “Un art véritable, ” Talmeyr, “L’âge de l’affiche,” 203. 61. Gustave Pellet published the album Elles by Toulouse-­Lautrec. On Vollard’s publishing see Una Johnson, Ambroise Vollard, Éditeur: Prints, Books, Bronzes (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977). 62. The Sketch, November 7, 1894, cited by Timmers in Power of the Poster, 16. 63. This was reinforced by twentieth-­century surveys of the poster such as those by Alain Weill, the French curator and former director of the Musée de l’affiche, and the British art historian, journalist, and curator Bevis Hillier. Alain Weill, The Poster: A Worldwide Survey and History (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985); Bevis Hillier, Posters (London: Hamlyn, 1974 [1969]). 64. Ernest Maindron, Les affiches illustrées (Paris: H. Lunette 1886). The book was based in part on two articles he published two years earlier, “Les affiches illustrées,” Gazette des Beaux-­Arts, 2nd ser., vol. 30 (November 1884): 419–33, and (December 1884): 535–47. 65. Maindron, Les affiches illustrées (1896). 66. Maindron, ibid., 6–16. 67. Henri Beraldi, Les graveurs du XIXe siècle: Guide de l’amateur d’estampes modernes, 12 vols. (Paris: L. Conquet, 1885–92). Beraldi’s catalog of Chéret’s work appears in vol. 4 (1886) and vol. 10 (1890). 68. Pierre Bourdieu makes the distinction between “bourgeois art” and “industrial art” in “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed,” in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. and intro. by Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 50. Notes to Introduction  ‡ 307

69. A. Demeure de Beaumont, L’affiche illustrée, vol. 1, L’affiche belge (Toulouse: Chez l’auteur, 1897). 70. Arsène Alexandre, M. H. Speilmann, H. C. Bunner, and August Jaccaci, The Modern Poster (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1895). 71. Hiatt, Picture Posters. 72. W. S. Rogers, Book of the Poster (London: Greening, 1901). 73. Jean Louis Sponsel, Das Moderne Plakat (Dresden: G. Kühtmann, 1897); Bauwens et al., Les affiches étrangères illustrées. 74. For example, 1,025 copies were printed of Maindron’s Les affiches illustrées (1896). Of these, the first 25 were printed on Imperial Japon paper, and the rest on vellum paper. The limited edition practice extended to some exhibition and dealer catalogs. 75. Philip B. Meggs, History of Graphic Design (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1983); Richard Hollis, Graphic Design: A Concise History (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001 [1994]). 76. Recent surveys in the rapidly growing field of graphic design history include Roxane Jubert, Typography and Graphic Design: From Antiquity to the Present (Paris: Flammarion, 2006); Stephen J. Eskilson, Graphic Design: A New History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007); and Johanna Drucker and Emily McVarish, Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009). Meggs’s history has been updated in Meggs and Alston W. Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley & Sons, 2006). Noteworthy for their emphasis on historical perspectives are studies on graphic design that include the poster, by Paul Jobling and David Crowley, Graphic Design: Reproduction and Representation since 1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), and Ellen Mazur Thomson, Origins of Graphic Design in America, 1870–1920 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997). 77. There are some notable exceptions. Among these are Susan Sontag’s extensive essay, “Posters: Advertisement, Art, Political Artifact, Commodity,” repr. in Looking Closer 3: Classic Writings on Graphic Design, ed. M. Bierut, J. Helfand, S. Heller, and R. Poynor (New York: Allworth Press, 1999, [1969]), 196–218 (originally published in 1970); the work of Jack Rennert, a collector, dealer, and historian of the poster, who published books on Cappiello and Mucha; and John Hewitt, an artist and illustrator, as well as a scholar of English posters. See Hewitt, “The Poster and the Poster in England in the 1890s,” Victorian Periodicals Review 35, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 37–62; and Hewitt, “Designing.” 78. Cate and Hitchings, Color Revolution. 79. Weill, L’affichomanie; Kiehl, American Art Posters; Margaret Timmers curated the exhibition and edited the catalog, The Power of the Poster; Richard Thomson, Phillip Dennis Cate, and Mary Weaver Chapin, Toulouse-­Lautrec and Montmartre (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2005); Bargiel and Le Men, La Belle Époque de Jules Chéret, includes essays on posters, mural paintings, and other decorative work, as well as a catalogue raisonné of Chéret’s posters. 80. Among notable exhibition catalogs dedicated to particular themes are Réjane 308  ·  Notes to Introduction

Bargiel and Ségolène Le Men, L’affiche de librairie au XIXe siècle (Paris: Ministère de la culture et de la communication, Éditions de la réunion des musées nationaux, 1987); Anne-­Claude Lelieur and Raymond Bachollet, Célébrités à l’affiche, Bibliothèque Forney, Paris (Paris: Conti, 1989); Raymond Bachollet et al., NégriPub: L’ image des noirs dans la publicité, intro. Kofi Yamagnane (Paris: Éditions Somogy, 1992) — this book was based on a 1987 exhibition at the Bibliothèque Forney, Paris; Jane Block, Homage to Brussels: The Art of Belgian Posters, 1895–1915, exhibition curated by Trudy V. Hansen (New Brunswick, N.J.: Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, 1992); Jean-­Michel Nectoux, Grégoire Tonnet, and Nicholas-­Henri Zmelty, La Plume, 1889– 1899, une revue “Pour l’art” (Paris: Institut national d’histoire de l’art, INHA, 2007), exhibition catalog, Galerie Colbert. Chapin’s introductory essay in the exhibition catalog Posters of Paris: Toulouse-­Lautrec and His Contemporaries (New York: Prestel, 2012) is notable for charting a concise history of late nineteenth-­century posters in Paris. 81. Numerous publications by Cate, some with other scholars, address the poster or the graphic arts, including Cate and Patricia Eckert Boyer, The Circle of Toulouse-­ Lautrec: An Exhibition of the Work of the Artist and His Close Associates, exhibition catalog (New Brunswick, N.J.: Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, 1985); Cate, ed., The Graphic Arts and French Society, 1871–1914 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, 1985); Patricia Eckert Boyer and Cate, L’Estampe Originale: Artistic Printmaking in France, 1893–1895, exhibition catalog (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam: Waanders, Zwolle, 1991); Cate, Gale B. Murray, and Richard Thomson, eds., Prints Abound: Paris in the 1890s (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, and London: Lund Humphries, 2000); Colta Ives, Helen Giambruni, and Sasha M. Newman, Pierre Bonnard: The Graphic Art, exhibition catalog (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, with Harry N. Abrams, 1989). 82. Thomson, Cate, and Chapin, Toulouse-­Lautrec and Montmartre. 83. Robert J. Goldwater, “L’Affiche Moderne, a Revival of Poster Art after 1880,” Gazette des Beaux-­Arts 22 (1942): 173–82; Robert L. Herbert, “Seurat and Jules Chéret,” Art Bulletin 40, no. 2 (June 1958): 156–58. 84. Bradford R. Collins, “Jules Chéret and the Nineteenth-­Century French Poster” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1980; Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI, 1988); Collins, “The Poster as Art: Jules Chéret and the Struggle for the Equality of the Arts in Late Nineteenth-­ Century France,” Design Issues 2, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 41–50; Marcus Verhagen, “The Poster in Fin-­de-­Siècle Paris: ‘That Mobile and Degenerate Art,’ ” in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Virginie Vignon, “Jules Chéret, créateur d’une industrie publicitaire (1866–1932)” (PhD diss., Université Paris-­X Nanterre, 2007). 85. Katherine M. Kuenzli, The Nabis and Intimate Modernism: Painting and the Decorative at the Fin-­de-­Siècle (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), chap. 1. 86. Ségolène Le Men, Seurat & Chéret: Le peintre, le cirque, et l’affiche (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2003); Carter, “L’Age de L’Affiche” (diss.), 2001; Carter, “L’Age de l’Affiche: Critics, Collectors, and Urban Contexts,” in Toulouse-­Lautrec and the French Imprint: Notes to Introduction  ‡ 309

Fin-­de-­Siècle Posters in Paris, Brussels, and Barcelona, ed. Phillip Dennis Cate, with essays by Carmen Vendelin and Sara Bujanda Bujanda (New Brunswick, N.J.: Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, 2005), 11–14; Karen L. Carter, “Unfit for Public Display: Female Sexuality and the Censorship of Fin-­de-­Siècle Publicity,” Early Popular Visual Culture 8, no. 2 (May 2010): 107–24; Carter, “The Spectatorship of the Affiche Illustrée and the Modern City of Paris, 1880–1900,” Journal of Design History 25, no. 1 (Spring 2012). 87. Mary Weaver Chapin, “Henri de Toulouse-­Lautrec and the Café-­Concert: Printmaking, Publicity, and Celebrity in Fin-­de-­Siècle Paris” (PhD diss., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI, 2002). Some of Chapin’s research appears in more concise form in the exhibition catalog by Thomson, Cate, and Chapin, Toulouse-­Lautrec and Montmartre. 88. Max Gallo, The Poster in History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001 [1972]); Miriam R. Levin, When the Eiffel Tower Was New: French Visions of Progress at the Centennial of the Revolution, intro. Gabriel P. Weisberg (South Hadley, Mass.: Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, 1989); Aaron J. Segal, “The Republic of Goods: Advertising and National Identity in France, 1875–1918” (PhD diss., UCLA; Ann Arbor: Mich.: UMI, 1995); H. Hazel Hahn, Scenes of Parisian Modernity: Culture and Consumption in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Palgrave, 2009), chap. 9. 89. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. and intro. by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 217–51; Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production; Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984); Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” and “Epic and Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981 [1934–35]), 259– 422, 3–40; Jacques Rancière, “Artistic Regimes and the Shortcomings of the Notion of Modernity,” in The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2006), 20–30; Rancière,“Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics,” in Communities of Sense, Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Beth Hinderliter, William Kaizen, Vered Maimon, Jaleh Mansoor, and Seth Moccormick (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009), 31–50. 90. Rancière, “Artistic Regimes.” 91. Stephen Bann, Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters, and Photographers in Nineteenth-­Century France (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), 15. 92. Ibid., 17. 93. Ibid., 40 and 30. 94. Benjamin, “Work of Art” (1969); Patricia Mainardi, “Copies, Variations, and Replicas: Nineteenth-­Century Studio Practice,” Visual Resources 15, no. 2 (1999): 123–47; Bann, Parallel Lines; Robert Verhoogt, Art in Reproduction: Nineteenth-­Century Prints after Lawrence Alma-­Tadema, Jozef Israëls, and Ary Scheffer, trans. Michèle Hendricks (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, 2007). 310  ·  Notes to Introduction

95. Most were slim catalogs with a brief preface and a listing of the posters included in the exhibition; some also included advertisements directed to collectors. The catalog of the most important international poster exhibition, held in Reims in 1896, had a substantial bibliography, compiled by the poster collector Roger Baun. Henriot, Exposition, 189–99. 96. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic,” in Field of Cultural Production, 254–66; Bourdieu, “Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception,” ibid., 216–37. This agrees with some points in Ariella Azoulay’s interpretation of Benjamin’s essay as “a preparation for mourning that precedes the loss because . . . the work of art possessing an aura, is produced during the course of that mourning itself”: see Azoulay, “[Death’s] Display Showcase: Walter Benjamin,” in Death’s Showcase: The Power of Image in Contemporary Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 10, 13. 97. Bourdieu, “Historical Genesis,” in Field of Cultural Production, 261. 98. Bourdieu, “The Market of Symbolic Goods,” ibid., 121. 99. On changing modes of perception see Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999). 100. Bourdieu, “The Aristocracy of Culture,” in Distinction, chap. 1. 101. Bann discusses this, Parallel Lines, 9. 102. Benjamin, “Work of Art” (1969), 219. 103. Ibid. 104. The most active association was the Verein der Plakatfreunde (Association of Friends of the Poster), founded by Hans Sachs in Berlin in 1905. 105. Roger Marx, Préface, Les Maîtres de l’Affiche, vol. 4 (1899), 16. Discussed in chap. 4. 106. Buhot’s proposal was published in the Journal des Arts, as Beraldi reported in Les graveurs, vol. 4 (1886), 28–29. It included detailed plans, suggesting that initially salles devoted to prints could be part of existing museums, and artists would offer their works, etc. He explained that notwithstanding the existence of the Cabinet des estampes at the Bibliothèque nationale, a print museum was needed in Paris because the former was not a museum. Buhot also proposed that prints by living artists should be included in the Musée du Luxembourg. 107. Marx, Maîtres, vol. 4 (1899), 16. For the most part, museums began collecting posters in the early twentieth century. The Victoria and Albert, for example, began collecting posters around 1910. Timmers, Power of the Poster, 13.

1. The Poster’s Place in Modernism Epigraphs: “Ce n’est plus de l’affiche, ce n’est pas encore complètement de l’estampe, oeuvre de saveur hybride participant des deux, ou plutôt si — c’est l’estampe en couleurs moderne”— André Mellerio, La lithographie originale en couleurs (Paris: Publication de l’Estampe et l’Affiche, 1898), 8; Charles Hiatt, Picture Posters (Wakefield, UK: EP Publishing, 1976) [1895]), 280; Arsène Alexandre, “French Posters and Book Covers,” Scribner’s Magazine, May 1895, 610–11. Notes to Chapter 1  ‡ 311

1. One of the notable exceptions is the recent study of Katherine M. Kuenzli, The Nabis and Intimate Modernism, chap. 1. 2. Nancy Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 1. Troy’s study, which focuses primarily on architecture and interior decoration, does not address posters. 3. Hiatt, Picture Posters, 1. 4. Ibid., 2. For comments on the poster as an art of commerce see Mary Weaver Chapin, “Posters of Paris: The Art of Spectacle in the Street,” in Chapin, Posters of Paris, 31–32. 5. Hiatt, Picture Posters, 2. 6. Letter, Bonnard to Claude Roger Marx, January 7, 1923, quoted in Antoine Terrasse, Pierre Bonnard (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), 23, and trans. Colta Ives, in Ives, Giambruni, and Newman, Pierre Bonnard, 10. See also Chapin’s discussion on issues of commerce concerning the poster in Posters of Paris, 31–32. 7. Sontag, “Posters,” 199. 8. Robert Koch, “The Poster Movement and ‘Art Nouveau,’ ” Gazette des Beaux-­Arts 50 (November 1957): 285–96; Meredith L. Clausen, “Architecture and the Poster: Toward a Redefinition of the Art Nouveau,” Gazette des Beaux-­Arts 106 (September 1985): 81–94. 9. On Bonnard’s graphic work see Gustave Coquiot, Bonnard (Paris: Éditions Bernheim-­Jeune, 1922); Claude Roger-­Marx, Bonnard: Lithographe (Monte Carlo: A. Sauret, 1952); Antoine Terrasse, Bonnard: Posters and Lithographs (London: Methuen, 1970); Colta Ives, The Great Wave: The Influence of Japanese Woodcuts on French Prints (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1974); Ursula Perucchi-­Petri, Die Nabis und Japan: Das Frühwerk von Bonnard, Vuillard und Denis (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1976); Helen Emery Giambruni, “Early Bonnard, 1885–1900” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley; Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI, 1983); Ives, Giambruni, and Newman, Pierre Bonnard; Francis Bouvet, Bonnard: The Complete Graphic Work, trans. Jane Brenton (New York: Rizzoli, 1981); Gloria Groom, Beyond the Easel: Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, and Roussel (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago / New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001); Claire Frèches-­Thory and Antoine Terrasse, The Nabis: Bonnard, Vuillard, and Their Circle (Paris: Flammarion, 2002); and Kuenzli, Nabis. On Toulouse-­Lautrec’s graphic work see Maurice Joyant, Henri de Toulouse-­Lautrec, 2 vols. (Paris: H. Floury, 1926–1927; repr. New York: Arno Press, 1968, 2 vols. in one); Jean Adhémar, Toulouse-­ Lautrec: His Complete Lithographs and Drypoints (London: Thames & Hudson, 1965); Ebria Feinblatt and Bruce Davis, Toulouse-­Lautrec and His Contemporaries: Posters of the Belle Époque from the Wagner Collection, exhibition catalog (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, 1985); Danièle Devynck, Henri de Toulouse-­Lautrec: Les affiches; Collection du Musée Toulouse-­Lautrec (Graulhet, France: Éditions Odyssée, 2001); Wolfgang Wittrock, Toulouse-­Lautrec: The Complete Prints, 2 vols., ed. and trans. Catherine E. Kuehn (New York: Sotheby’s Publications, 1985); Götz Adriani, Toulouse-­Lautrec: The Complete Graphic Works, a Catalogue Raisonné; The Gerstenberg 312  ·  Notes to Chapter 1

Collection (London: Royal Academy of the Arts, Thames & Hudson, 1988); Toulouse-­ Lautrec, les estampes et les affiches de la Bibliothèque nationale / Toulouse-­Lautrec, Prints and Posters from the Bibliothèque nationale (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale / Brisbane, Australia: Queensland Art Gallery, 1991); Chapin, “Henri de Toulouse-­Lautrec and the Café-­Concert.” 10. Goldwater, “L’Affiche Moderne,” 173–82; Herbert, “Seurat and Jules Chéret,” 156– 58; see also the extensive study by Ségolène Le Men, Seurat & Chéret. 11. Phillip Dennis Cate, in Cate and Hitchings, Color Revolution. See also Cate’s extensive work on French graphic arts of the late nineteenth century, for example in Cate and Boyer, Circle of Toulouse-­Lautrec; Cate, Graphic Arts and French Society; Cate, “L’Estampe Originale: An Overview of the Fin-­de-­Siècle Artistic Concerns,” in Boyer and Cate, “L’Estampe Originale,” 9–25; Cate, “Prints Abound: Paris in the 1890s,” in Cate, Murray, and Thomson, Prints Abound, 12–47. 12. Kuenzli, Nabis, 36 and 62. 13. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-­Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 6, no. 5 (Fall 1939): 34–49; Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). 14. Thomas Crow, “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts,” in Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996 [1983]), 3–37; Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, dist. Harry N. Abrams, 1990); Mary Gluck, Popular Bohemia, Modernism, and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-­Century Paris (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). 15. Cited in Joan Ungersma Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-­ de-­Siècle Paris (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), 261, citing from Félix Fénéon: Oeuvres plus que completes, 2 vols. (Geneva/Paris: Droz, 1970), 1:229–31. 16. Gustave Geffroy, “Jules Chéret,” La Justice (July 8, 1888), repr. in Geffroy, La vie artistique (Paris: E. Dentu, 1893), 2:149. 17. Ibid., 150. 18. Ibid. 19. Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete, 261, citing from Halperin, Fénéon: Oeuvres, 1:229–31. 20. Jules Chéret, Dudley Hardy, and Aubrey Beardsley, “The Art of the Hoarding,” New Review 11, no. 62 (July 1894): 53. 21. Ibid., 54. 22. Nonetheless, designers often complained about the conservatism of poster commissioners; see chap. 5. 23. Beardsley, in Chéret, Hardy, and Beardsley, “Art of the Hoarding,” 54. 24. Joseph Thacher Clarke, preface to A Collection of Posters: Illustrated Catalogue of the First Exhibition, ed. Edward Bella (London: Royal Aquarium, 1894–1895), 12. The exhibition, featuring two hundred works, included fourteen Lautrecs and forty-­eight Chérets. Notes to Chapter 1  ‡ 313

25. Cited in Rogers, Book of the Poster, 8. 26. Toulouse-­Lautrec, letter to Georges Montorgueil, no. 316, autumn 1893, and to Frantz Jourdain, no. 581 [summer 1899], in The Letters of Henri de Toulouse-­Lautrec, ed. Herbert D. Schimmel, intro. Gale B. Murray (Oxford University Press, 1991), 220, 357. 27. Letter to Henri Nocq [mid-­1896], no. 463, ibid., 295. 28. On Toulouse-­Lautrec’s use of posters of celebrities for his own promotion see Chapin, “Henri de Toulouse-­Lautrec and the Café-­Concert” (diss.), 2002. 29. Felix Fénéon, “Sur les murs,” Le Chat Noir 490, p. 1760, cited in Helen Emery Giambruni, “Early Bonnard, 1885–1900” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley; Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI, 1983), 85, n. 16, p. 304. 30. Pierre Bonnard, letter to his mother, May 21, 1891, cited in Terrasse, Bonnard: Posters and Lithographs, n.p. 31. Francis Jourdain, quoted in Roger-­Marx, Bonnard: Lithographe, 16, cited in Giambruni, “Early Bonnard,” 84. 32. Octave Mirbeau, preface to “The Sale of the Thadée Natanson Collection, 1908,” in Terrasse, Bonnard: Posters and Lithographs, n.p. 33. Thadée Natanson, in Un Henri de Toulouse-­Lautrec (Geneva: Pierre Cailler, 1951), trans. in Murray, Toulouse-­Lautrec: A Retrospective (New York: Hugh Lauter Levin Associates; distr. by Macmillan, 1992), 138. 34. Maindron, Les affiches illustrées (1896), 111. 35. Philip Huisman and M. G. Dortu, Lautrec by Lautrec, trans. and ed. Corinne Bellow (New York: Galahad Books, 1964), 91. 36. Chapin, in Thomson, Cate, and Chapin, Toulouse-­Lautrec and Montmartre, 53. For an analysis of the poster see ibid., and Richard Thomson, “The Imagery of  Toulouse-­ Lautrec’s Prints,” in Wittrock, Toulouse-­Lautrec, 18–21. 37. Chapin, in Thomson, Cate, and Chapin, Toulouse-­Lautrec and Montmartre, 51. 38. Ibid., 53. 39. On the cancan dance and its representation in popular culture and in Lautrec’s work see Gail B. Murray, “The Theme of the Naturalist Quadrille in the Art of Toulouse-­Lautrec: Its Origins, Meaning, Evolution, and Relationship to Later Realism,” Arts Magazine 55, no. 4 (December 1980). 40. Toulouse-­Lautrec, letter to his mother, no. 212, December 26, 1891, in Toulouse-­ Lautrec, Letters, 157. 41. Cited in Jiri Mucha, Alphonse Mucha, 132. On Mucha see Rennert and Weill, Alphonse Mucha; and Arwas, Brabcová-­Orliková, and Dvoárk, Alphonse Mucha. 42. Arwas, Brabcová-­Orliková, and Dvoárk, Alphonse Mucha. 43. Weill, Poster, 65. 44. Hillier, Posters, 30. 45. Hiatt, Picture Posters, 220. 46. Ibid., 214. 47. Ibid., 230. 48. Ibid., 366. 314  ·  Notes to Chapter 1

49. “Arcades Ambo: The Beggarstaff Brothers at Home,” Idler, January 1896, repr. in appendix C in Campbell, Beggarstaff Posters, 114, discussed in ibid., 29. 50. Ives, in Ives, Giambruni, and Newman, Pierre Bonnard, 95. 51. Coquiot, Bonnard, 12. 52. Giambruni, “Early Bonnard,” 137. 53. Arsène Alexandre, “French Posters and Book Covers,” Scribner’s Magazine, May 1895, 611. 54. Collectors and collecting of posters and prints are discussed in chaps. 2 and 8. 55. On the prices of Lautrec’s prints see Anthony Griffiths, “The Prints of  Toulouse-­ Lautrec,” in Wittrock, Toulouse-­Lautrec, 39–40. Prices for Lautrec’s posters varied, with some selling for just a few francs. In 1893 Lautrec informed Octave Maus that the selling price of the poster Divan japonais was ten francs (letter [February–March 1893] to Octave Maus, no. 282, ibid., 203). 56. Lautrec reports on his sales: for Étude de jeune fille, Hélène Vary, he received 200 francs beyond the dealer’s commission (letter to his mother, September 1891, no. 205, Toulouse-­Lautrec, Letters, 152); 600 francs for his painting of La Goulue, and 20 francs for his print of La Goulue and her sister (letter to Octave Maus, January 27, 1893, no. 270, ibid.,198). 57. André Mellerio, La lithographie originale en couleurs (Paris: L’Estampe et l’Affiche, 1898), discussed in chap. 3. 58. On lithography and photographically based printing and issues of authenticity and originality in France see Cate, “Prints Abound,” 14–19; in England see Meaghan Clarke, “Seeing in Black-­and-­White: Incidents in Print Culture,” Art History 35, no. 3 (June 2012). 59. Henri Beraldi, introduction to Exposition générale de la lithographie, École des beaux-­arts, exhibition catalog, April 26–May 24, 1891 (Paris: Typographie Georges Chamerot, 1891), ix. 60. Ibid., xii 61. Rogers, Book of the Poster, 32; Maximilian Schmid, “Ueber Deutsche Plakat-­ Kunst,” Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration 1 (1897–98): 61. 62. Ibid. 63. April 13, 1897, in Correspondance de Camille Pissarro, ed. Janine Bailly-­Herzberg (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1989), 4:346. 64. “Aucun qui n’en ait fait, n’en fasse ou n’en fera.” Mellerio, La lithographie, 6. 65. “Leur principal sinon unique mode d’expression.” Mellerio, La lithographie, 5. 66. Émile Zola, The Masterpiece, trans. Thomas Watson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), 80. 67. For an analysis of this issue in Bonnard see Kuenzli, Nabis, chap. 1. 68. Ives, in Ives, Giambruni, and Newman, Pierre Bonnard, 3. 69. Ibid., 7. 70. Ibid., 6. 71. The fact that Bonnard’s poster predated Lautrec’s first poster and influenced LauNotes to Chapter 1  ‡ 315

trec is reported by Natanson, in Un Henri de Toulouse-­Lautrec, extract trans. in Murray, Retrospective, 138–39. A Bonnard letter from 1923 confirms this: Ives, in Ives, Giambruni, and Newman, Pierre Bonnard, n. 6, p. 200. Bonnard’s first poster was initially commissioned in 1889, according to Charles Terrasse, the artist’s nephew, based on a letter by the artist to his mother, ibid., n. 1, p. 200. Bonnard’s France-­Champagne appeared on the streets of Paris in March 1891 as reported in Bonnard’s letters to his mother, March 13 and 19, 1891, cited in Perucchi-­Petri, Die Nabis, n. 127, p. 36; see Ives, in Ives, Giambruni, and Newman, Pierre Bonnard, n. 4, p. 200. On the evidence for the dates see Giambruni, “Early Bonnard,” n. 16, p. 303. 72. On Chéret’s claim that he studied drawing with Lecoq de Boisbaudran at the École nationale de dessin see Collins, “Poster as Art,” n. 5, p. 42. On Chéret’s early career see ibid. and Anne-­Marie Sauvage, “Les débuts de Jules Chéret jusqu’à 1881,” in Bargiel and Le Men, La Belle Époque de Jules Chéret, 35–49. 73. Hiatt, Picture Posters, 29. 74. Julia Frey, Toulouse-­Lautrec: A Life (New York: Viking, 1994), 354. 75. The figure of 1,430 posters is the most recent count, appearing in Bargiel and Le Men, La Belle Époque de Jules Chéret (a publication that is both an exhibition catalog and a catalogue raisonné); Bouvet, Bonnard. 76. Camille Mauclair, Jules Chéret (Paris: Maurice Le Garrec, 1930), 22. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid., 27–28. 79. “Tiepolo des carrefours, de Watteau des magasins de nouveautés.” Geffroy, “Jules Chéret,” 156. 80. Maurice Guillemot, “Jules Chéret,” Revue Illustrée, no. 4 (February 1, 1901). Rue de la Paix was the street where many of the elite fashion designers had their establishments. 81. Geffroy, “Jules Chéret,” 153. 82. On Chéret’s murals and other decorative works see Réjane Bargiel, “Jules Chéret décorateur,” in Bargiel and Le Men, La Belle Époque de Jules Chéret, 76–107. 83. Bonnard’s statement was made to André Suarès, cited in Terrasse, Pierre Bonnard, 44, trans. by Ives, in Ives, Giambruni, and Newman, Pierre Bonnard, 25. 84. Ives, Giambruni, and Newman, Pierre Bonnard, 3. 85. Gale B. Murray, Toulouse-­Lautrec: The Formative Years, 1878–1891 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 226. 86. Ibid., 219–24. 87. See, for example, Danièle Devynck, in Claire Frèches-­Thory, Anne Roquebert, and Richard Thomson, Toulouse-­Lautrec, South Bank Centre, exhibition catalog (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 57. On Lautrec’s use of Japanese stylistic characteristics see Devynck, Toulouse-­Lautrec: Les Affiches, 21–22. On the influence of Japanese art on the prints of Toulouse-­Lautrec, Bonnard, Vuillard, and others see Ives, Great Wave; Gabriel P. Weisberg et al., eds., Japonisme: Japanese Influence on French Art, 1854–1910 (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1975). 88. Phillip Dennis Cate, “Japanese Influence on French Prints, 1883–1910,” in Weis316  ·  Notes to Chapter 1

berg et al., Japonisme, n. 316, p. 64; Collins, “Jules Chéret,” n. 339, p. 214. Lautrec began collecting Japanese prints after seeing a large exhibition of Japanese art at the Georges Petit Galleries. Ives, Great Wave, 79. 89. Raymond Needham, “The Influence of Japanese Art on Poster Design,” Poster and Art Collector 6, no. 32 (March 1901): 103. 90. Ibid. 91. “Ce n’est plus de l’affiche, ce n’est pas encore complètement de l’estampe, oeuvre de saveur hybride participant des deux.” Mellerio, La lithographie, 8. 92. For the evidence on this see Charles Terrasse, Pierre Bonnard (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), 21–22; George Mauner, “The Nabis: Their History and Their Art, 1888–1896” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1967; New York: Garland, 1978), 222; Giambruni, “Early Bonnard,” n. 16, p. 303. 93. On the chérette see Verhagen, “Poster in Fin-­de-­Siècle Paris,” 103–29. 94.  Perucchi-­Petri, Die Nabis, 33. 95. Ibid., 82. 96. Jobling and Crowley, Graphic Design, 92. 97. Richard Thomson, Toulouse-­Lautrec (London: Book Club Associates, 1979), 17–18. 98. Laurence des Cars, in Nineteenth-­Century French Art: From Romanticism to Impressionism, ed. Henri Loyrette (Paris: Flammarion, 2007), 417. 99. Ibid. As the translator notes, Fénéon used the rare word émblématures (emblem repertory), which was translated as “iconic forms.” See ibid., n. 71, p. 442. Fénéon’s article “Les peintres graveurs (Manet, Lautrec, Redon)” appeared in L’En-­Dehors (April 22, 1893). 100. Anne-­Marie Sauvage, “Posters,” in Toulouse-­Lautrec, Les estampes et les affiches de la Bibliothèque nationale, 187. 101. “L’artiste conçoit simplement et nettement — bien en estampe. Il use du contraste de teintes plates, vigoureusement mises et colorées.” Mellerio, La lithographie, 7–8. 102. “Il ne semble point aussi à l’aise, dans un métier plus trituré et moins franc.” Ibid., 9. 103. “Il a puissamment contribué à créer la lithographie originale en couleurs aussi bien au point de vue de la conception que comme métier.” Ibid., 7. 104. For a comparative study of Lautrec and Chéret see Ruth E. Iskin, “The Janus-­ Faced Modernity of Toulouse-­Lautrec and Jules Chéret,” Visual Resources 29, no. 4 (December 2013): 276–306. doi: 10. 1080/01973762.2013.846780. 105. “C’est à coup sûr, une langue nouvelle qu’il parle, mais cette langue est ferme, claire et non sans harmonie, elle sera comprise. Toutes ses oeuvres ont une réelle importance.” Ernest Maindron, “L’affiche illustrée,” La Plume, no. 110 (November 15, 1893): 478. 106. Le Père Peinard, April 30, 1893, cited in Halperin, Fénéon: Oeuvres, trans. in Frèches-­Thory, Roquebert, and Thomson, Toulouse-­Lautrec, 378. 107. This is further discussed in Iskin, “Janus-­Faced Modernity.” Notes to Chapter 1  ‡ 317

108. On the Reine de joie poster see Gale B. Murray, “Toulouse-­Lautrec’s Illustrations for Victor Joze and Georges Clemenceau and Their Relationship to French Anti-­ Semitism of the 1890s,” in The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity, ed. Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb (London: Thames & Hudson, 1995); Ruth E. Iskin, “Identity and Interpretation: Receptions of Toulouse-­Lautrec’s Reine de joie Poster in the 1890s,” Nineteenth-­Century Art Worldwide 8, no. 1 (Spring 2009): n.p., http://www.19thc-­artworldwide.org/component/content/article/55-­spring09/spring09 article/63, repr. in Antisemitism and Assimilation: Jewish Dimensions in Modern Art, ed. Mathew Baigell, Rose-­Carol Washton Long, and Milly Heyd (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, with University Press of New England, 2010), 145–66. 109. Hiatt, Picture Posters, 61–62. 110. Ibid., 30, 33. 111. Ibid., 62. For a comparative analysis of Lautrec and Chéret see Iskin, “Janus-­Faced Modernity.” 112. Thadée Natanson, “Oeuvres de M. Toulouse-­Lautrec (1),” La Revue Blanche 4 (February 1893): 146. For an analysis of the review see Iskin, “Identity and Interpretation.” 113. Ibid. 114. Gustave Coquiot, Lautrec ou quinze ans de moeurs parisiennes, 1885–1900 (Paris: Ollendorff, 1921), 188–89, trans. in Murray, Retrospective, 137. 115. Clarke, in Bella, Collection of Posters, 9. 116. Ibid., 10. 117. Hiatt, Picture Posters, 76. 118. Campbell, Beggarstaff Posters, 17. Nicholson was Pryde’s brother-­in-­law, and while most critics during the 1890s referred to them as “the Beggarstaff Brothers,” the artists preferred “Beggarstaffs.” James Pryde, “Extract from an Autobiographical Essay by James Pryde,” appendix A, ibid., 110. 119. “Arcades Ambo,” Idler, 1896, appendix C in Campbell, Beggarstaff Posters, 114. 120. Hiatt, Picture Posters, 232. 121. Ibid. 122. Pryde, “Extract from an Autobiographical Essay,” appendix A, and “Arcades Ambo,” appendix C, both ibid., 110, 113. 123. Ibid., 17. 124. Ibid. 125. Pryde, cited ibid., 29. 126. Pryde, “Extract from an Autobiographical Essay,” ibid., 111. 127. Pryde, ibid. 128. On the dating of this poster see Campbell, Beggarstaff Posters, 106. 129. The typescript was found among Pryde’s papers when he died in 1941, but it is not known when he wrote it. The passages about the Beggarstaff collaboration are published in appendix A, ibid., 110–11. 130. Discussed in chap. 5. 131. “Arcades Ambo,” appendix C, Campbell, Beggarstaff Posters, 114–15. See Camp318  ·  Notes to Chapter 1

bell’s discussion on the Beggarstaffs’ relationships with advertisers and their strategies for obtaining commissions, ibid., 35–42. 132. Ibid., 115. 133. William Archer, The Theatrical “World” of 1896 (London: Walter Scott, 1897), cited ibid., 32. 134. W. S. Rogers, “Beardsley as a Poster Maker,” Poster 3, no. 18 (January 1900): 203. 135. Ibid. 136. Hiatt, Picture Posters, 220. 137. Ibid. 138. Spielmann, “Posters and Poster-­Designing,” 46. 139. Cate, in Cate, Murray, and Thomson, Prints Abound, 15. 140. Cassatt and Pissarro worked with color prints during the 1890s. Michel Melot, in The Impressionist Print, trans. Caroline Beamish (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 231–35. 141. Discussed in chap. 5. 142. Achille Ségard, Peintres d’aujourd’ hui. Les décorateurs Albert Besnard, Gaston La Touche, Jules Chéret, Paul Baudouin (Paris: Paul Ollendorff, 1914), 244. 143. Chéret used the Polichinelle figure also in posters in 1874, the year Manet made his Polichinelle lithograph, in Frascati, and Frascati bal masqué. See figs. 391 and 392 in Bargiel and Le Men, La Belle Époque de Jules Chéret. Cate notes that Manet’s painting Masked Ball at the Opera, painted at the end of 1873 and the beginning of 1874, includes a costumed Polichinelle and suggests that Chéret was familiar with Manet’s painting and responded to contemporary tendencies. Cate, “The French Poster, 1868–1900,” in Kiehl, American Art Posters, 60. 144. Marilyn R. Brown notes that despite the slight resemblance in facial features between MacMahon and Manet’s Polichinelle, as well as several other factors that hinted at the identification, the identity and meaning of Manet’s Polichinelle remained elusive. Brown, “Manet, Nodier, and Polichinelle,” Art Journal 45, no. 1 (Spring 1985). 145. MacMahon was chief of staff from 1873 to 1875 and the first president of the Third Republic from 1875 to 1879. 146. In 1923 Tabarant recorded the memoirs of Rançon, the assistant of the printer Lemercier, who printed Manet’s lithograph. According to Rançon, the police suspected that the figure was a caricature of MacMahon and did not allow the publication. Adolphe Tabarant, “Une histoire inconnue du ‘Polichinelle,’ ” Bulletin de la Vie Artistique (September 1, 1923): 368–69; see Brown, “Manet, Nodier, and Polichinelle,” 43 and n. 5, p. 47. Manet had designed a politically charged black-­and-­white lithograph of The Execution of Maximilian in 1869, the publication of which was prevented by authorities. Jay McKean Fisher, The Prints of Edouard Manet, exhibition catalog (Washington, D.C.: International Exhibitions Foundation, 1985–86), cat. entry no. 49, pp. 84–86; Juliet Wilson-­Bareau, ed., Manet by Himself: Correspondence and Conversation; Paintings, Pastels, Prints and Drawings (Boston: Bulfinch Press, Little Brown, 1991), 50–51. 147. Guérin bases the information on the distribution plan and print run on Rançon Notes to Chapter 1  ‡ 319

as interviewed by Tabarant, in Tabarant, “Une histoire inconnue du ‘Polichinelle,’” Bulletin de la Vie Artistique (September 1, 1923); Marcel Guérin, L’oeuvre gravé de Manet (Paris: Floury, 1944), cat. entry no. 79, n.p. 148. Ibid., 19. 149. R. M. Burch, Colour Printing and Colour Printers (Edinburgh: Paul Harris Publishing, 1983 [1910]), 234. 150. Discussed in chap. 6. 151. Benjamin, “Work of Art” (1969), 220. 152. Cited in Adriani, Toulouse-­Lautrec, cat. entry no. 3, p. 23. 153. For example, letters regarding his Bussod-­Valadon (successors of Goupil) print, La Goulue and Her Sister, and letter no. 246, to Émile Verhaeren [October 1892], in Toulouse-­Lautrec, Letters, 185. On the same print see letter to Roger Marx [October 14, 1892], no. 247, ibid., 185–86. Letters asking that upcoming posters be mentioned: Lautrec to Roger Marx [May 25, 1892], letter no. 223, ibid., 172; letter to Roger Marx, January 19, 1893, no. 264, informing him that Lautrec’s exhibition (at Bussod and Valadon) was about to open and that his poster Divan japonais would appear the following day, ibid., 195. On Lautrec’s prints and celebrity culture, blending art and publicity, see Chapin, “Henri de Toulouse-­Lautrec and the Café-­Concert,” chaps. 4 and 5, 124–95. 154. L’Escarmouche, for example, announced in 1893, “M. de Toulouse-­Lautrec, a frequent contributor to L’Escarmouche, is putting the last touches to a poster of the chansonnier Bruant that will attract great attention.” Cited in Adriani, Toulouse-­Lautrec, cat. entry no. 57, p. 94. 155. Richard Thomson, in Frèches-­Thory, Roquebert, and Thomson, Toulouse-­ Lautrec, 246. 156. One poster proof was of the second state, the other of the final state. Lautrec to Octave Maus, January 7, 1892, no. 214, Toulouse-­Lautrec, Letters, 167. 157. Les XX Brussels catalogue des dix expositions annuelles (Brussels, 1981), 300, discussed by Thomson, “Imagery,” in Wittrock, Toulouse-­Lautrec, 1:25. 158. Lautrec to Octave Maus, no. 213, Toulouse-­Lautrec, Letters, 158. 159. Archives Signac, cited by Anne Roquebert, in Frèches-­Thory, Roquebert, and Thomson, “Toulouse-­Lautrec and Artistic Life: Exhibitions 1883–1901,” in Toulouse-­ Lautrec, 39. 160. Ibid., 35–36. 161. On Pissarro’s print exhibition see Antonia Lant, “Purpose and Practice in French Avant-­Garde Print-­Making of the 1880s,” Oxford Art Journal 6, no. 1 (1982): 22. On the Impressionist print and issues of art and reproduction in the nineteenth century see Melot, Impressionist Print. 162. On rarification see Melot, ibid., 85–89. 163. For estimates of print runs see Adriani, Toulouse-­Lautrec. 164. Letter no. 246, to Verhaeren [October 1892], in Toulouse-­Lautrec, Letters, 185. 165. Nonetheless, sometimes the smaller editions of art prints could be larger than one hundred, and differences between them and the print run of posters varied. 320  ·  Notes to Chapter 1

166. A. Standish Hartrick, in Bella, Collection of Posters, 5–6. 167. Andrew McNamara and Toni Ross, “Medium Specificity and Discipline Crossovers in Modern Art: An Interview with Jacques Rancière,” originally published in Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 8, no. 1 (2007): 99–101, repr., QUT Digital Repository, http://eprints.qut.edu.au/ (accessed November 4, 2011); Rancière, “Artistic Regimes”; Rancière, “Contemporary Art.” 168. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski, “Visual Culture’s History, Twenty-­First Century Interdisciplinarity and Its Nineteenth-­Century Objects,” in The Nineteenth-­Century Visual Culture Reader, ed. Schwartz and Przyblyski (London: Routledge, 2004), 10. 169. J.-­K . Huysmans, “Le Salon de 1879,” in L’art moderne (Paris: Stock, 1903), 16. 170. Roger Marx, L’art social, intro. Anatole France (Paris: Bibliothèque-­Charpentier, E. Fasquelle éditeur, 1913). On Chéret’s posters and the hierarchy of the arts see Collins, “Poster as Art”; on social art, Catherine Méneux, “Social Art at the Turn of the Century,” in Arts & Societies, September 21, 2006, letter of seminar 12, Centre d’histoire de sciences po, http://www.artsetsocietes.org/a/a-­meneux.htmlm (accessed November 16, 2010). 171. “L’estime qu’on lui voue aujourd’hui s’explique encore par l’évolution des idées et par un tardif renoncement au préjugé des classifications arbitraires. Durant des années, l’entrave des hiérarchies a confisqué l’attention au profit des arts réputés ‘majeurs’; en dehors d’eux, il n’était point de salut; bien mieux, le caractère d’utilité semblait une cause de contemption, un signe de déchéance.” Marx, preface to Maîtres de l’Affiche, vol. 4, 1899, trans. adapted from Masters of the Poster, 1896–1900, intro. Alain Weill, notes by Jack Rennert, trans. Bernard Jacobson (New York: Images Graphiques, 1978), 15. The Maîtres de l’Affiche is the subject of chap. 4. 172. “Faisons table rase des partis pris qui obscurcissent le jugement; l’heure n’est plus aux dédains du silence. . . . L’affiche s’assimile à l’estampe par la technique et elle ne le cède en rien à la peinture, pour la richesse de l’effet.” Ibid., translation adapted. 173. Ibid., 36. 174. Ibid. 175. Ibid., 8. 176. Ibid., 39. 177. Ibid. 178. “Laissons de côté la question du grand art et du petit art; l’idéal n’est-­il pas cependant que l’art soit en tout, même dans les objets les plus usuels?” Beraldi, Les graveurs, vol. 4 (1886), 169–70. 179. John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (London: George Allen, 1896), 3:251. Ruskin refused to advertise the tea shop he established in one of London’s poor districts in order to supply neighborhood residents with pure tea in packets as small as they required. He did not even place a sign outside the shop. Ruskin discovered that “the poor only like to buy tea where it is brilliantly lighted and elegantly ticketed,” and asserted that he “resolutely refused to compete with Notes to Chapter 1  ‡ 321

my neighboring tradesmen.” Modern Advertising, a Monthly for Advertisers, supplement to Poster 4, no. 23 (June 1900): 4. 180. Charles Hiatt, “The Poster as a Mirror of Life,” Poster 4, no. 24 (July 1900): 177–78. 181. Brander Matthews, “The Pictorial Poster,” Century, September 1892, 748. 182. Ibid. 183. Ibid. 184. Collins draws a related distinction between the French attempts to “democratize” the fine arts and the efforts of those who sought to “aristocratize the applied arts,” suggesting that both endeavors “fueled the poster events of the 1880s and 1890s.” Collins, “Poster as Art,” 47. 185. Matthews, “Pictorial Poster,” 748. 186. Ibid. 187. Ibid., 749. 188. Ibid. 189. Goldwater, “L’Affiche Moderne,” 182. 190. Ibid., 174. 191. Ibid. 192. Herbert, “Seurat and Jules Chéret.” For more recent studies see Le Men, Seurat & Chéret; Howard G. Lay, “Pictorial Acrobatics,” in Montmartre and the Making of Mass Culture, ed. Gabriel P. Weisberg et al. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 145–79. 193. See chap. 3 for a discussion of pre-­Greenbergian ideas on medium-­specific traits of art lithography. 194. Greenberg, “Avant-­Garde and Kitsch.” 195. On American posters see Victor Margolin, American Poster Renaissance (Secaucus, N.J.: Castle Books, 1975); Kiehl, American Art Posters; Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Michele H. Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 196. Crow, “Modernism and Mass Culture,” 10 and viii. 197. Ibid., 3. The reference to “materials of low or mass culture” appears in various formulations throughout Crow’s essay. The designation of “materials” also appears in Clement Greenberg, “Collage,” in Art and Culture (Boston, 1961), 70, cited by Crow, “Modernism and Mass Culture,” 8. 198. Ibid. 35. 199. Varnedoe and Gopnik’s exhibition catalog High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture distinguishes between various genres of mass culture (newspapers, advertising, billboards, caricatures, comics, graffiti), devoting some discussion to their differences, but views the “interplay between modern art and popular culture” as fundamentally unidirectional, with avant-­garde painting and sculpture mining popular culture: High and Low, 19. Dawn Ades focuses on exploring the influences of avant-­ 322  ·  Notes to Chapter 1

garde art on the twentieth-­century poster but acknowledges the possibility of influences flowing in the other direction in certain cases. Ades, “Function and Abstraction,” 23–69. Norma Broude takes a different approach, analyzing a parallel between the surface effects of the technique of chromotypogravure in France of the mid-­1880s and the practice and goals of the Neo-­Impressionists, in “New Light on Seurat’s ‘Dot’: Its Relation to Photo-­Mechanical Color Printing in France in the 1880’s,” Art Bulletin 56, no. 4 (December 1974): 581–89. 200. Crow, “Modernism and Mass Culture,” 25–26. 201. Ibid., 35. 202. The canonization and marginalization of Lautrec and Chéret respectively are analyzed in Iskin, “Janus-­Faced Modernity.”

2. Toulouse-­Lautrec, Jane Avril Epigraph: “Or, presque immédiatement, le tableau, la statue, toutes choses à valeur d’exemplaire unique, par leur rareté, la matière, la difficulté d’établissement, deviennent des desiderata coûteux seulement accessibles à un nombre restreint. Que reste-­t-­il? L’estampe et l’estampe originale. Sa valeur d’art est un principe incontestable . . . et déjà de nombreux représentants de la classe moyenne qui consacrent des loisirs, une portion de leur intelligence et de leur argent à fureter, s’intéresser, acheter. Des couches profondes et qu’un rien étendrait au simple peuple s’ébullitionnent pour un art, non parfait sans doute, mais déjà plus affiné. On arrive à distinguer et abhorrer le chromo pour préférer l’estampe originale” — André Mellerio, La lithographie originale en couleurs (Paris: L’Estampe et l’Affiche, 1898), 37. An English translation by Margaret Needham of Mel­ lerio’s essay, “Original Color Lithography,” appears in Phillip Dennis Cate and Sinclair Hamilton Hitchings, The Color Revolution (Santa Barbara, Calif., and Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1978), 79–99. Citations from Mellerio’s essay are from this translation and, when noted, adapted from it. The present passage is adapted from “Original Color Lithography,” 96. 1. Mellerio, La lithographie, 37. The originally designed color print and the reproductive lithograph (“chromo”) used the same lithographic process, but whereas the former was an artwork specifically designed for the lithographic print medium, the latter was a reproduction of an existing artwork. Typically, the two kinds of print differed also in other respects, including the number of stones and thus colors used: the lithographic original art print tended to use just a few stones (three or four), thus retaining the quality of color transparency, while the reproductive lithograph tended to use many stones, and thus many colors, in order to approximate the coloration of the painting it reproduced. For more on original prints, their transformation, and nineteenth-­century markets see Verhoogt, Art in Reproduction. 2. See illustration in the Harvard Art Museums, http://www.harvardartmuseums .org/art/230041. Notes to Chapter 2  ‡ 323

3. See illustration in http://cartelfr.louvre.fr/cartelfr/visite?srv=car_not_frame&id Notice=19220. 4. On representations of women in posters see Verhagen, “Poster in Fin-­de-­Siècle Paris”; Jobling and Crowley, Graphic Design, 95–101; Chapin, “Henri de Toulouse-­ Lautrec and the Café-­Concert”; Ruth E. Iskin, “The Pan-­European Flâneuse in Fin-­de-­ Siècle Posters: Advertising Modern Women in the City,” Nineteenth-­Century Contexts 25, no. 4 (2003): 333–56; Chapin in Thomson, Cate, and Chapin, Toulouse-­Lautrec and Montmartre, 46–63, 137–43; Karen L. Carter in Cate, Toulouse-­Lautrec and the French Imprint, 11–14; Ruth E. Iskin, “Popularizing New Women in Belle Époque Advertising Posters,” in A “Belle Époque”? Women and Feminism in French Society and Culture, 1890–1910, ed. Diana Holmes and Carrie Tarr (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2006); Iskin, “Material Women: The Department-­Store Fashion Poster in Paris, 1880–1900,” in Material Women, 1750–1950: Consuming Desires and Collecting Practices, ed. Maureen Gaugeen and Beth Tobin (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009), 33–54; Hahn, Scenes of Parisian Modernity, 192–98. 5. On l’Estampe Originale see Donna Stein and Donald H. Karshan, “L’Estampe Originale”: A Catalogue Raisonné, in conjunction with an exhibition at the New York Cultural Center, in association with Fairleigh Dickinson University (New York: Museum of Graphic Arts, 1970); Jacquelynn Baas, “The Origins of l’Estampe Originale,” Bulletin of the University of Michigan Museum of Art and Archaeology 5, no. 1 (1982); Boyer and Cate, “L’Estampe Originale.” 6. Cate, “L’Estampe Originale: An Overview,” in Boyer and Cate, “L’Estampe Originale,” 9–25. 7. Douglas W. Druick, “Toulouse-­Lautrec: Notes on an Exhibition,” Print Collector’s Newsletter 17, no. 2 (May–June 1986): 45–46; Stein and Karshan, “L’Estampe Originale,” 10. 8. A letter by Toulouse-­Lautrec to Roger Marx mentions Lautrec’s coming over to discuss the cover with Marx, no. 279 (February 22, 1893), and another letter states that Marx is bringing with him the “proposed cover design,” no. 280 (probably February 23, 1893): Toulouse-­Lautrec, Letters, 202. 9. Claire Frèches-­Thory, in Frèches-­Thory, Roquebert, and Thomson, Toulouse-­ Lautrec, entry no. 120, p. 386. 10. Cate, in Boyer and Cate, “L’Estampe Originale,” 9 and 24. 11. Frey, Toulouse-­Lautrec: A Life, 349 and 324. 12. Chapin, in Thomson, Cate, and Chapin, Toulouse-­Lautrec and Montmartre, 139; Chapin, “Henri de Toulouse-­Lautrec and the Café-­Concert,” 137–41. Chapin, “Henri de Toulouse-­Lautrec and the Café-­Concert.” 13. Nancy Ireson, in Ireson, ed., Toulouse-­Lautrec and Jane Avril: Beyond the Moulin Rouge, exhibition catalog (London: Courtauld Gallery, 2011), cat. entry no. 11, p. 84. 14. “Nous donnait l’idée d’une Jane Avril connaisseuse en belle estampes, examinant de près, avec le clignement d’yeux amateur, l’épreuve que vient de tirer le bon vieil imprimeur tournant et virant le levier en forme de croix de sa bonne vieille presse.” Arsène Alexandre, “Celle qui danse,” supplement to L’Art Français, July 29, 1893, repr., and 324  ·  Notes to Chapter 2

translated, “She Who Dances,” by Nancy Ireson with Janet Ireson and Marie-­A mélie Tharaud, appendix, in Ireson, Toulouse-­Lautrec and Jane Avril, 131. Most quotes are from this translation, and when indicated, as in this case, are adapted from it. A translation of most of this article also appears in Murray, Retrospective, 160–63. 15. Chapin and Ireson use the term. Chapin in Thomson, Cate, and Chapin, Toulouse-­ Lautrec and Montmartre, 139; Ireson in Toulouse-­Lautrec and Jane Avril, 84 (quoting Alexandre). Claire Frèches-­Thory (in Frèches-­Thory, Roquebert, and Thomson, Toulouse-­ Lautrec, 386) describes Lautrec’s representation of Avril as embodying “good taste” and “refinement and distinction” but stops short of referring to Avril as a connoisseur. 16. Michel Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” in Untying the Text: A Post-­ Structuralist Reader, ed. and intro. Robert Yong, trans. Ian McLeod (London: Routledge, 1981), 52. 17. Cate, in “L’Estampe Originale: An Overview,” 9. 18. Arthur Symons, “Toulouse-­Lautrec and the Moulin-­Rouge” (1926), repr. and trans. in Murray, Retrospective, 152. 19. Jose Shercliff, Jane Avril of the Moulin Rouge (Philadelphia: Macrae Smith, 1954), 101. 20. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the cancan dance, unlike the chorus-­line dancing popularized in later movies, was a segment in which the female dancer improvised alone at the conclusion of a longer sequence of the quadrille na­ turaliste, which was performed by male and female dancing partners. See Catherine Pedley-­Hindson, “Jane Avril and the Entertainment Lithograph: The Female Celebrity and fin-­de-­siècle; Questions of Corporality and Performance,” Theatre Research International 30, no. 2 (2005): 114; see also Catherine Hindson, Female Performance Practice on the Fin-­de-­Siècle Popular Stages of London and Paris: Experiment and Advertisement (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), chaps. 4 and 5; Murray, “Theme of the Naturalist Quadrille”; Richard Thomson, “Dance Halls,” in Thomson, Cate, and Chapin, Toulouse-­Lautrec and Montmartre, 109–14. 21. “Imprévu toujours éblouissant, cette grâce subite et bondissante de la danse perpétuellement improvisatrice. Comme Mélinite, la danse a ses caprices et ses mystères soudains; seulement, dans ses effets, la femme est infiniment plus gracieuse que la poudre.” Alexandre, “Celle qui dance,” 130–31, my translation. Ireson suggests that Avril’s nickname, Mélinite, may also have been linked to the Salpêtrière hospital, which had previously been an arsenal. Avril was a patient there during her youth and witnessed the performances of hysterical attacks by inmates who, as she well realized, actually performed for the benefit of an audience. Ireson, “Dancing in the Asile: Jane Avril and Chorea,” in Ireson, Toulouse-­Lautrec and Jane Avril, 51. 22. Arthur Symons, “Dancers and Dancing,” in Colour Studies in Paris (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1918), 108. 23. Alexandre, “Celle qui danse,” trans. in Ireson, Toulouse-­Lautrec and Jane Avril, appendix, 132. 24. Ibid. Notes to Chapter 2  ‡ 325

25. François Caradec, Jane Avril au Moulin Rouge avec Toulouse-­Lautrec (Paris: Fayard, 2001), 73–74. 26. Shercliff, Jane Avril, 101. 27. “Avait ainsi attrapée et fixée comme un papillon éclatant”: Alexandre, “Celle qui danse,” trans. in Ireson, Toulouse-­Lautrec and Jane Avril, appendix, 130. 28. “Ce n’est point le chahut que cette danse solitaire, festonnant parmi les lourds quadrilles, réglés comme des impromptus de la Comédie-­Française, ou parmi les automatiques et monotones tournoiements des polkas et des valses. Ce n’est point le chahut que cette gentille improvisation, parfaitement insolente au fond, mais se faisant pardonner, et même encourager, son impertinence à force de finesse et de souplesse inventive.” Ibid., 131–32. 29. “Connaissant son public, n’ignore pas qu’il ne danse pas dans une forêt vierge. La forêt parisienne a des hôtes qui préfèrent des danses moins troublantes et moins venimeuses. Aussi notre ‘serpent qui danse’ a-­t-­il des frétillements plus vifs, qui ne cachent pas moins de philosophie, mais la déguisent sous la gaîté du rythme, sous l’ironie des pirouettes.” Alexandre, ibid., 132. 30. Jane Avril, Mes mémoires, ed. Claudine Brécourt-­Villars and Jean-­Paul Morel (Paris: Phébus, 2005 [1933]), 49. 31. Ibid., 55. 32. Shercliff, Jane Avril, 85; Caradec, Jane Avril, 42. 33. Shercliff, Jane Avril, 80. 34. Avril, Mes mémoires, 61. 35. Lautrec’s L’Estampe Originale cover was published on March 30, 1893; the poster for Avril was deposited in the dépôt légale on May 8, 1893. See Adriani, Toulouse-­Lautrec, 32, 40. The poster first appeared on the Paris streets in early June, as attested by Lautrec’s letters to critics urging them to write about it (letter no. 297 to Roger Marx, [June 2, 1893], and letter no. 298 to André Marty [June 2, 1893], in Toulouse-­Lautrec, Letters, 211). 36. Frey, Toulouse-­Lautrec: A Life, 325. 37. Estimated at one thousand to three thousand. Adriani, Toulouse-­Lautrec, 40. 38. The letter from Jane Avril and Églantine was sent from London on January 19, 1896 (Musée d’Albi), specifying the text for the poster and the order of the dancers (which Lautrec altered). Adriani, Toulouse-­Lautrec, 212. 39. Ibid., 411. 40. Lautrec represented Fuller and Guilbert in his lithographs, but none of these were posters, nor were they commissioned by the performers. 41. “Une part d’instinct et une égale part de volonté entrainent dans l’art de Mélinite, et c’est comme cela, je suppose, que cet art s’est rencontré avec celui de Lautrec qui est aussi très spontané dans son exécution, mais très volontaire dans sa conception.” Alexandre, “Celle qui danse,” trans. adapted from Ireson, Toulouse-­Lautrec and Jane Avril, appendix, 132. 42. “À eux deux, le peintre et le modèle, ils ont réalisé une véritable oeuvre de ce temps, 326  ·  Notes to Chapter 2

l’une par l’action, l’autre par la représentation.” Alexandre, “Celle qui danse,” trans. adapted from ibid. 43. Symons, From Toulouse-­Lautrec to Rodin; with Some Personal Impressions (London: John Lane, 1929), 8, cited in Frey, Toulouse-­Lautrec: A Life, 273. 44. Shercliff, Jane Avril, 2. 45. “Faite pour être maniée et contemplée de près, elle comporte légitimement une recherche et un affinement plus grands.” Mellerio, La lithographie, 33–34, trans. adapted from “Original Color Lithography,” in Cate and Hitchings, Color Revolution, 94. 46. See illustration on the website of the Art Institute of Chicago, http://www.artic .edu/aic/collections/artwork/14591. 47. Beraldi, Les graveurs, vol. 9 (1889), 111. 48. Marx’s collection was dispersed after his death in 1914. See Loys Delteil, Catalogue des estampes modernes composant la collection Roger Marx . . . [Vente (Art). April 27–May 2, 1914. Paris] (Paris: L. Delteil, 1914). 49. Melot, Impressionist Print, 8–11 and 274–75. 50. Henri Bouchot, La lithographie (Paris: Ancienne Maison Quantin, Librairies-­ imprimeries Réunis, 1895), 208–11. 51. William M. Ivins Jr., “Of French Prints since 1800,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 36, no. 3 (March 1941): 60. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 62. Degas had only a small group of admirers who collected his prints in his lifetime. Ibid., 63. 54. Ibid., 60. 55. Bouchot, La lithographie, 208–9. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 209–10. 58. Ibid., 210. 59. Melot, Impressionist Print, 275. 60. Ibid. 61. On the contested status of the color print see Cate and Hitchings, Color Revolution, 1–2. 62. Lunois was included in L’Estampe Originale and was also credited with introducing Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard to lithography. On Lunois see André Édouard, Alexandre Lunois, peintre, graveur et lithographe (Paris: H. Floury, 1914); and Phillip Dennis Cate’s biographical sketch in Cate and Hitchings, Color Revolution, 127. 63. Uzanne, “Les collectionneurs d’affiches: Les contemporaines, Jules Chéret” [part 2], 266. 64. Ibid., 266–67. 65. “Il se plaça résolument à l’avant-­garde et y demeura depuis. Toujours avide de modernités, il s’intéresse à chaque effort nouveau.” Mellerio, La lithographie, 23, trans. adapted from “Original Color Lithography,” 89. Notes to Chapter 2  ‡ 327

66. Poster sizes are listed in Maindron, Les affiches illustrées (1896), 7. Trans. in Jack Rennert, Posters of the Belle Époque: The “Wine Spectator” Collection (New York: Wine Spectator Press, 1990), [8–9]. The smallest sizes were: ¼ colombier, 41 × 30 cm; ½ colombier, 60 × 41 cm. The largest sizes were the double colombier, 122 × 82 cm; double grand aigle, 140 × 110 cm; quadruple colombier, 164 × 122 cm; quadruple grand aigle, 220 × 140 cm. 67. Martha Ward, “Impressionist Installations and Private Exhibitions,” Art Bulletin 73, no. 4 (December 1991): 618. 68. Émile Zola, Au bonheur des dames (Paris: Charpentier, 1883). 69. The print scholar and curator Peter Parshall notes the ubiquity of the motif of women “represented as connoisseurs evaluating the proverbial belle épreuve,” suggesting that this shows that women “were indeed regular purchasers of prints.” Although Parshall does not discuss specific posters, he mentions that “many posters showing interested clientele [were] published by Parisian lithography studios.” Parshall, The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900, exhibition catalog (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2009), 19, 23. While such depictions are not documentary evidence, their appearance in images that functioned as advertisements does suggest that the advertisers were attempting to include women in their target audience. 70. This is clearly the case, for example, in late nineteenth-­century department store posters. See Iskin, “Material Women.” 71. Hahn, Scenes of Parisian Modernity, 144. 72. Block, Homage to Brussels, 108. 73. On the artistic poster in Belgium see ibid., 1–20. Van Rysselberghe made several other posters featuring female art collectors for la Libre Aesthétique, an art association based in Brussels that held annual exhibitions from 1894 to 1914 (continuing the exhibitions of avant-­garde art by Les XX, which dissolved in 1893). 74. Ian Millman, Georges de Feure, 1868–1943 (Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, 1993), 71. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid. 77. On print collecting and privacy see Parshall, Darker Side of Light, esp. 1 and 14–15. 78. For more on the representation of women as passive objects reduced to a sexual allure for an active male gaze see Laura Mulvey’s seminal article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (Screen 16, no. 3 [Autumn 1975]: 6–18), which was originally developed to account for patterns in Hollywood films but became influential in art history. 79. Puvis was one of the honorary chairmen of the organizing committee for the exhibition, although he was not known for printmaking. The lithograph was made by Achille Sirouy and closely supervised by Puvis. See Douglas Druick, in Louise d’Argencourt, Marie-­Christine Boucher, and Jacques Foucart, Puvis de Chavannes, 1824–1898, exhibition catalog (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1977), 224. 80. Puvis acknowledged that he borrowed the Industry figure from his city hall decoration. Letter to an unnamed recipient, August (1895), cited and trans. in Aimée Brown 328  ·  Notes to Chapter 2

Price, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), 2:364–65. 81. The woman representing lithography was based on Puvis’s allegorical figure of  Industry, c. 1893–94 on the ceiling of the Hôtel de Ville, Paris. Douglas Druick, cat. entry no. 206 in d’Argencourt, Boucher, and Foucart, Puvis de Chavannes, 224. Brown Price discusses the poster in Brown Price, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, 1:148–49; 2:364–65. 82. Sponsel, Das Moderne Plakat, 106. 83. For an iconographic analysis of the poster see Ségolène Le Men, “L’affiche et le livre illustré,” in Bargiel and Le Men, L’affiche de librairie au XIXe siècle, 5. 84. On Charlet’s lithographic work see Bann, Parallel Lines, 43–87. 85. Iskin, “Pan-­European Flâneuse,” 339. 86. Shercliff, Jane Avril, 160. 87. Ibid. 88. Iskin, “Pan-­European Flâneuse,” 339. 89. On the new woman in posters see Jobling and Crowley, Graphic Design, 95–101; Iskin, “Popularising New Women.” 90. Theodore Reff identifies these objects in “The Pictures within Degas’s Pictures,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 1 (1968): 132–33. 91. Louisine W. Havemeyer, Sixteen to Sixty: Memoirs of a Collector, ed. Susan Alyson Stein, intro. Gary Tinterow (New York: Ursus Press, 1993 [1961]), 252–53. 92. Ibid., 252. 93. The men are identified by Jean-­Sutherland Boggs, Portraits by Degas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), n. 42, p. 94. Reff notes that in the 1881 painting of the two collectors, Degas was influenced by Daumier’s oil painting The Collectors, 1860–63 (Museum Bijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam). Reff, “ ‘Three Great Draftsmen’: Ingres, Delacroix, and Daumier,” in The Private Collection of Edgar Degas, ed. Ann Dumas, Colta Ives, Susan Alyson Stein, and Gary Tinterow (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997), 169. 94. Ann Dumas, “Degas and his Collection” and “Degas and the Collecting Milieu,” ibid., 57–66; 130–31. 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid., 58. 97. Anthea Callen observes that Degas did not represent Cassatt as an artist, as he did his male colleagues. Callen, Spectacular Body: Science, Method, and Meaning in the Work of Degas (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 168–75. 98. Frederick Sweet, Miss Mary Cassatt, Impressionist from Pennsylvania (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966), 50. 99. There was also an exceptional contemporary depiction of a female connoisseur, in a painting by the Italian Telemacho Signorini, A Visit to the Studio, c. 1860, featuring an elegant woman gloved and wearing a head covering, who has come to visit the artist’s studio and is examining a hand-­held print, standing before an open portfolio in which is visible a black-­and-­white print. I thank Norma Broude for bringing this painting to Notes to Chapter 2  ‡ 329

my attention. Broude notes that although Degas knew Signorini around this time, the painting did not appear to stimulate him to depict the female print collector. On the relationship between Degas and Signorini see Broude, The Macchiaioli: Italian Painters of the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), 136–37, 139. 100. Andrew McClellan, “Watteau’s Dealer: Gersaint and the Marketing of Art in Eighteenth-­Century Paris,” Art Bulletin 78, no. 3 (September 1996): 439. 101. Ibid., 440 and n. 8, 440. 102. Ibid., 440. 103. Ibid. 104. Ibid., n. 8, 440. The contrast between the appearance of the female collector in the visual representation and her absence from written sources is analogous to the gap between the representation of women collectors in late nineteenth-­century posters but not in critics’ writing. On Verrue’s collecting see Cynthia Lawrence and Magdalena Kasman, “Jeanne-­Baptiste D’Albert de Luynes, Comtesse de Verrue (1670–1735), an Art Collector in Eighteenth-­Century Paris,” in Women and Art in Early Modern Europe: Patrons, Collectors, and Connoisseurs, ed. Cynthia Lawrence (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1997), 207–26; Rochelle Ziskin, Sheltering Art: Collecting and Social Identity in Early Eighteenth-­Century Paris (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2012). 105. Helen Bieri Thomson notes that women appeared in a majority of the Salon des Cent posters, as allegories and muses of the arts and as the “beautiful cultivated Parisienne enjoying a new independence,” a figure to whom the posters pay homage. Bieri Thomson, “De l’iconographie des affiches du Salon des Cent,” in Les affiches du Salon des Cent, ed. Bieri Thomson, exhibition catalog (Gingins, Switzerland: Fondation Neumann, 2000), 19. 106. Patricia Ecker Boyer, “Le role de La Plume et de son Salon des Cent dans la défense de l’avant-­garde,” in Bieri Thomson, Les affiches du Salon des Cent, 8–17. 107. Alexandre, “French Posters,” 614. 108. Léon Deschamps announced in February 1894 in La Plume that he planned for monthly posters promoting the exhibitions at the Salon des Cent to make up a collectors album. Therefore the size of the Salon des Cent posters was close to the half colombier, i.e., 40 × 61 cm. Nicholas-­Henri Zmelty, “Le Salon des Cent,” in Nectoux, Tonnet, and Zmelty, La Plume, 1889–1899, 38; Jocelyne Van Deputte, Le Salon des Cent: Affiches d’artistes (Paris: Éditions des musées de la Ville de Paris, 1994). 109. Zmelty, “Le Salon des Cent,” 45. 110. Ward’s analysis demonstrates the significance of semiprivate spaces in comparison to the huge public Salon and the “quasi-­aristocratic, quasi-­grand magasin” gallery such as the vast space of the Georges Petit gallery, which exhibited gold-­framed artworks on walls covered by sumptuous red fabric in a gallery furnished with heavy drapery, settees, and plants. Ward, “Impressionist Installations,” 621. 111. On the preference of Pissarro and the Neo-­Impressionists for simple white frames 330  ·  Notes to Chapter 2

and their repudiation of signs of luxury in the exhibition of their works during the 1880s see Ward, ibid. 112. See Ward, ibid., for illustrations of the spaces of such galleries. 113. Bourdieu, Distinction, 30. 114. Ibid., 31. 115. Bourdieu, “Market of Symbolic Goods,” 121. 116. Melot, Impressionist Print, 8. 117. See, for example, comments by Mellerio, in La lithographie, 35–36. 118. Adriani, Toulouse-­Lautrec, 11. Sagot’s 1891 catalog listed Pierre Bonnard’s France-­ Champagne at three francs, and most of Chéret’s works ranged between one and twenty-­ five francs. Poster prices went up by the mid-­1890s. Charles Hiatt notes the steady rise in the price of Chéret’s posters listed in the Sagot catalog, recommending in 1895 that “the collector of modest means” buy Chéret’s more recent posters, which he described as “the best that he has accomplished.” Hiatt, Picture Posters, 362. 119. Roger Marx, Preface to L’Estampe et l’Affiche, appendix 1, trans. in Stein and Karshan, “L’Estampe Originale,” 15–16. 120. Mellerio, La lithographie, 37, trans. from “Original Color Lithography,” 96. 121. “Que reste-­t-­il? L’estampe, et l’estampe originale. Sa valeur d’art est un principe incontestable. L’abondance des tirages, la modicité de prix, la mettent à la portée de la masse.” Ibid., 37, trans. adapted from “Original Color Lithograpy,” 96. 122. Mellerio, “Original Color Lithography,” 95. 123. “Grands collectionneurs,” ibid., 37. 124. “Et l’on ne saurait nier qu’à côté des grands collectionneurs, amateurs parfois d’art mais souvent aussi simples disputeurs d’objets chers par vanité pure ou agio dissimulé.” Ibid., La lithographie, 37, trans. from “Original Color Lithography,” 96. 125. Ibid., 96. 126. Ibid. 127. Lisa Tiersten, Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in Fin-­de-­ Siècle France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Ruth E. Iskin, Modern Women and Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 128. For a woman to be a collector of “minor” arts was a long distance from Madame Bovary’s consumption of pulp fiction and the conflation of women with mass culture. On the latter see Andreas Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other,” in Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 44–62. 129. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal, July 1, 1892, 3:727. 130. Havemeyer, Sixteen to Sixty, 284. In terms of collecting, Cassatt had a lasting influence through her role as adviser to major collectors, including, most importantly, the Havemeyers. She took on this role because of her confidence that “all the pictures privately owned by rich Americans will eventually find their way into public collection and enrich the nation and the national taste.” Cassatt interview, Philadelphia Public Ledger, Notes to Chapter 2  ‡ 331

May 7, 1911, cited in Erica E. Hirshler, “Helping ‘Fine Things across the Atlantic’: Mary Cassatt and Art Collecting in the United States,” in Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman, ed. Judith A. Barter, exhibition catalog (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, and New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), 181. 131. Part of the Havemeyer collection, which was accumulated with Cassatt’s ongoing advice and became the most important American collection of Impressionist paintings, was bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On the Havemeyer collection see Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, Gary Tinterow, Susan Alyson Stein, et al., Splendid Legacy: The Havemeyer Collection (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, c. 1993). 132. “Connaisseuse en belles estampes.”Alexandre, “Celle qui danse,” 131, trans. adapted from Ireson, Toulouse-­Lautrec and Jane Avril, 131. 133. “Nombreaux représentants de la classe moyenne.” Mellerio, La lithographie, 37, trans. from “Original Color Lithography,” 96. 134.  Ernest Quentin-­Bauchart, Les femmes bibliophiles de France, XVIe, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, 2 vols. (Paris: D. Morgand; Lille: imprimerie de L. Danel, 1886); Gustave Pawlowski, “Madame de Pompadour, bibliophile et artiste,” Le Livre: Revue du Monde Littéraire, neuvième anné, Paris, 1888, 1–16. On women’s collecting in the eighteenth century see Lawrence, Women and Art in Early Modern Europe; Melissa Hyde and Jennifer Milam, eds., Art and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-­Century Europe (Bur­ lington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2003). 135. On the new woman in France see Debora Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-­de-­Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), chap. 4.

3. The Color Print Epigraph: “Alors, la lithographie originale en couleurs naissait, et simple feuille de papier auquel des moyens mécaniques procuraient le bénéfice de l’innombrabilité des exemplaires, elle atteignait une réelle valeur d’art. . . . Faut-­il la considérer simplement comme une incursion usurpatrice et diminuante dans le domaine de la peinture? Ou bien, au contraire, a-­t-­elle une essence intrinsèque, et son champ d’action particulier? Nous penchons résolument pour cette dernière affirmative” — André Mellerio, La Lithographie originale en couleurs. Translation adapted from “Original Color Lithography,” in Cate and Hitchings, Color Revolution, 80. 1. Cate, introduction to Cate and Hitchings, Color Revolution, 1. An 1899 amendment allowed for artworks made in the medium of color lithography to be exhibited in the Salon. Charles Maurin, “De la gravure en couleurs,” Journal des Artistes, no. 12 (March 20, 1898): 2273–74, cited and discussed by Cate in Cate and Hitchings, Color Revolution, 1, 34. 2. Douglas Druick and Peter Zeger, La pierre parle: Lithography in France, 1848–1900 (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1981), 65. 332  ·  Notes to Chapter 3

3. On media archaeology see Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, “Introduction: An Archaeology of Media Archaeology,” in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 4. “Si l’on peut dire que l’affiche est une estampe de vaste format, la lithographie originale en couleurs par son origine naissante reste encore rapprochée de sa grande soeur.” Mellerio, La lithographie, 33, trans. adapted from “Original Color Lithography,” 94. 5. Burch, Colour Printing, 174–219. 6. Ibid., 179–80. 7. Gustave von Groschwitz, “The Significance of XIX Century Color Lithography,” Gazette des Beaux-­Arts 44 (November 1954): 243. There were, however, certain differences between original prints made in lithography and chromolithographic reproduction, stemming from the fact (discussed below) that the latter used many more colors than the former. 8. Camille Pissarro, Letters to His Son Lucien, ed. John Rewald (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Peregrine Smith, 1981), 446. 9. Other publications followed. Le Paris Illustré (which began publication in 1883) published color illustrations, and Le Monde Illustré occasionally published color inserts. Burch, Colour Printing, 235–36. 10. Pierre-­Lin Renié, “The Image on the Wall: Prints as Decoration in Nineteenth-­ Century Interiors,” Nineteenth-­Century Art Worldwide 5, no. 2 (2006), http://www .19thc-­artworldwide.org/index.php/autumn06/156; Renié, Une image sur un mur: Images et décoration intérieure au 19e siècle (Bordeaux: Musée Goupil, 2005); Verhoogt, Art in Reproduction. 11. Verhoogt, Art in Reproduction, 63–131. For an explanation of the different techniques see Alfred Whitman, The Print Collector’s Handbook (London: George Bell & Sons, 1901), 18–88. 12. Rogers, Book of the Poster, 141. 13. Ibid., 142. 14. Charles Hiatt, “The Royal Academy and the Artistic Poster,” Poster 2, no.10 (April 1899): 151. 15. Ibid., 150. 16. Whitman, Print Collector’s Handbook, 134, 140. 17. Maurice Jonas, Notes of an Art Collector (London: Routledge, 1907), 32. 18. Ibid. 19. Kenworth Moffett, Meier-­Graefe as Art Critic (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1973), 13; Janne Gallen-­Kallela-­Sirén, “German Antisemitism and the Historiography of  Modern Art: The Case of Julius Meier-­Graefe, 1894–1905,” in Baigell, Washton Long, and Heyd, Antisemitism and Assimilation, 51–76. 20. Eberhard von Bodenhausen, in Moffett, Meier-­Graefe, 16–17; cited in Gallen-­ Kallela-­Sirén, “German Antisemitism,” 59–60. For a detailed account see Catherine Krahmer, “PAN and Toulouse-­Lautrec,” Print Quarterly 10, no. 4 (December 1993): 392–98. Notes to Chapter 3  ‡ 333

21. Gallen-­Kallela-­Sirén, “German Antisemitism,” 59. 22. As noted by the coeditor and cofounder of Pan, Eberhard von Bodenhausen, cited ibid., 59–60. 23. Ibid. 24. Cate, in Cate and Hitchings, Color Revolution, 13. See also Cate and Boyer, Circle of Toulouse-­Lautrec. 25. Poster and print collecting is discussed in chaps. 2 and 8. 26. André Maurel, “L’amateur d’affiches,” appeared in the column “Au jour le jour,” January 10, 1897. No title of the publication appears in the Chéret folder in the BnF, Fol, CN1 232 (C4910). 27. Cate, in Cate and Hitchings, Color Revolution, 20. 28. Johnson, Ambroise Vollard; Melot, Impressionist Print, 263–66. 29. Johnson, Ambroise Vollard, 19. 30. Melot, Impressionist Print, 263. On Vollard’s albums see Johnson, Ambroise Vollard, 19–21. The second Vollard album, L’album d’estampes originales de la Galerie Vollard, published in 1897, included thirty-­one artists and thirty-­two prints. Of these, thirty were lithographs and twenty-­four were in color. Ibid., 1:996, 263. 31. Ambroise Vollard, Souvenirs d’un marchand de tableaux (Paris: Albin Michel, 1948), 395. 32. Stein and Karshan, “L’Estampe Originale”; Cate, “L’Estampe Originale: An Overview”; and Patricia Eckert Boyer, “L’Estampe Originale and the Revival of Decorative Art and Craft in Late Nineteenth-­Century France,” in Boyer and Cate, “L’Estampe Originale,” 9–25 and 26–49. 33. Among the featured artists were Henri de Toulouse-­Lautrec, Pierre Bonnard, Alexandre Lunois, Édouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, Paul Gauguin, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Louis Anquetin, James McNeill Whistler, Eugène Grasset, Georges de Feure, Félix Bracquemond, Eugène Carrière, Henri-­Gabriel Ibels, Charles Maurin, Odilon Redon, Paul Ranson, Félicien Rops, Félix Vallotton, Ker Xavier Roussel, Auguste Renoir, Théo van Rysselberghe, Henri Fantin-­Latour, Walter Crane, Joseph Pennell, Camille Pissarro, Paul Signac, Adolphe Willette, Jules Chéret, and many others. 34. See Jacquelynn Baas, “The Origins of L’Estampe Originale,” Bulletin of the University of Michigan Museum of Art and Archaeology 5, no. 1 (1982): 13–22. 35. Beraldi, Les graveurs, vol. 9 (1889), 134; Cate, “L’Estampe Originale: An Overview,” 10–11. The third album was advertised in 1891 but has not been located. Ibid., 12. 36. Baas, “Origins of L’Estampe Originale,” 13. The 1888 portfolio included three etchings, one drypoint, two lithographs, and four woodcuts. Ibid., 16. 37. Roger Marx, “Peintres-­graveurs contemporains: L.-­A . Lepère,” Gazette des Beaux-­ Arts, année 50 (June 1908): 498. 38. Baas, “Origins of L’Estampe Originale,” 16. Of the intended edition of 150, 125 were for an album that was to be sold for one hundred francs, and 25 additional prints were to be sold individually for twenty francs. Ibid.; Cate, “L’Estampe Originale: An Overview,” 10–11. 334  ·  Notes to Chapter 3

39. Beraldi, Les graveurs, vol. 9 (1889), 134. 40. Baas, “Origins of L’Estampe Originale,” 17. 41. Cate, in “L’Estampe Originale: An Overview,” 11. 42. Beraldi, Les graveurs, vol. 9 (1889), 264. 43. Melot, Impressionist Print, 274. 44. “La vie, la couleur, la saveur, la liberté, l’individualité, le primesaut.” Beraldi, Les graveurs, vol. 9 (1889), 264. 45. Ibid., 269, 271. 46. On Roger Marx see Silverman, Art Nouveau, 135–36, 219–22; Catherine Méneux, ed., Roger Marx, un critique aux côtés de Gallé, Monet, Rodin, Gauguin . . . , exhibition catalog, Nancy, Musée des beaux-­arts, Musée de l’école de Nancy (Nancy: Ville de Nancy, Éditions Artlys, 2006); Méneux, ed., Regards de critique d’art: Autour de Roger Marx (1859–1913), preface Pierre Vaisse (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2009). 47. Marty purchased the right to use the title L’Estampe Originale from the original group. Baas, “Origins of L’Estampe Originale,” 17. 48. Marx’s preface to L’Estampe Originale of 1893 is printed in translation by Judith Colton, appendix 1, in Stein and Karshan, “L’Estampe Originale,” 15–16. Hereafter referred to as Marx, L’Estampe Originale, 1893. 49. Ibid., 16. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. Of the ninety-­five prints, sixty were lithographs, of which thirty-­three were in color; a third of the twenty-­six intaglio prints (etchings, drypoints, aquatints, and mezzotints) were in color; included were also seven woodcuts and one wood engraving. Ibid., 7. 52. Marx, L’Estampe Originale, 1893, 15–16. 53. Ibid., 15. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid.,16. 56. Mellerio, La lithographie, 2, trans. in “Original Color Lithography,” 79. 57. Cate, in Cate and Hitchings, Color Revolution, 73–74. 58. Ibid., 74. 59. Ibid. 60. See introduction and chaps. 1 and 4. 61. “Que si en présence du mouvement actuel ou [sic] nous demande quelle fut la ligne de démarcation qui franchie, fit pénétrer la chromolithographie dans le domaine de l’art original, — nous n’hésiterons pas à la proclamer dans l’effort de Chéret. Le rénovateur de l’affiche, ou plutôt son véritable créateur au point de vue moderne, a non seulement réalisé une œuvre personnelle, il a encore exercé une large et retentissante influence. . . .  L’estampe et ses recherches actives, désireuse de régénération, s’en est évidemment ressentie. L’affiche de Chéret lui ouvrait une voie neuve — elle s’y est engagée. . . .  Or, cette gravure moderne, sur quoi rompait-­elle avec la vieille et banale chromolithographie, à tel degré qu’il faut chercher aujourd’hui à la première un nom qui la distingue? Notes to Chapter 3  ‡ 335

Précisément en les points essentiels où se libérait et se créait l’oeuvre de Chéret.” Mel­ lerio, La lithographie, 3–4, trans. adapted from “Original Color Lithography,” 80. 62. “Ce n’est ni le fac-­simile ni le succédané de la peinture, c’est un autre procédé avec certains éléments en moins, mais d’autre part un charme propre, une équivalence d’art et l’avantage appréciable d’un tirage à exemplaires nombreux.” Mellerio, La lithographie, 34, trans. adapted from “Original Color Lithography,” 95. 63. Charles Maurin, “De la gravure en couleurs,” cited by Cate, in Cate and Hitchings, Color Revolution, 1. 64. Mellerio, La lithographie, 4, trans. adapted from “Original Color Lithography,” 80. 65. Ibid., 94. 66. Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” Forum Lectures, 1960 (n.p.). http:// www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/modernism.html (Washington, D.C.: Voice of America), 1960. All quotes are from this source. For a critique of Greenberg’s medium-­specificity as “ahistorical essentialism” see Diarmuid Costello, “On the Very Idea of a ‘Specific’ Medium: Michael Fried and Stanley Cavell on Painting and Photography as Arts,” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 2 (2008): 274–312. 67. Mellerio, La lithographie, 4-­5, trans. in “Original Color Lithogrpahy,” 80. 68. “A notre époque, en la lithographie, comme dans toute l’estampe en couleurs, il y a une bifurcation de tendances provenant de deux principes opposés.” Mellerio, La lithographie, 23, trans., in “Original Color Lithography,” 93. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid., 94. 71. “La lithographie en couleur est une estampe, donc les lois générales de celle-­ci doivent lui être appliquées. Quelles sont-­elles? Logiquement et nécessairement nous les trouvons dans l’essence même de l’estampe: simple feuille de papier, où par un tirage mécanique un dessin est reproduit à nombreuses fois. Le support n’est ni aussi solide et vigoureux que pour la peinture à l’huile, de même que le procédé n’en a pas les richesses abondantes et profondes. Il ne possède point non plus le grain et brillant du pastel, le pénétrant intégral et léger de l’aquarelle. Il ne saurait prétendre d’avantage aux imperceptibles finesses d’un dessin original. En effet le tirage mécanique, si parfait soit-­il, enlève les menues délicatesses, les accents de touche où le coup de doigt de l’artiste transmet directement sa sensation, en dehors de tout métier précis et sans être gêné par rien.” Mellerio, La lithographie, 32–33, trans. adapted from “Original Color Lithography,” 94. 72. “Les tirages successifs appesantissent les teintes qui ne se pénètrent pas intimement, se superposent plutôt en transparence. It est donc indiqué qu’on évite les mélanges excessifs aboutissant aux fadeurs prétentieuses du chromo. La polychromie moderne conserve avantage à s’en tenir aux teintes largement agencées, dans une simplicité de tons, visant plus à leur harmonie d’ensemble qu’à leur nuancements compliqués.” Mellerio, La lithographie, 32, trans. ibid., 94. 73. “Faite pour être maniée et contemplée de près elle comporte légitimement une recherche et un affinement plus grands.” Mellerio, La lithographie, 33–34, trans. adapted ibid. 336  ·  Notes to Chapter 3

74. Ibid. 75. “Le grain et le brillant du pastel, le pénétrant intégral et léger de l’aquarelle.” Mel­ lerio, La lithographie, 33, trans. adapted ibid. 76. Ibid. 77. To further create the illusion of a painting in the reproduction chromolithograph, Louis Prang’s lithographic reproductions in the United States were sometimes stretched on canvas and sold framed. Katharine Morrison McClinton, The Chromolithographs of Louis Prang (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1973); Maurice Rickards, The Encyclopedia of Ephemera, ed. Michael Twyman (London: British Library, 2000), 92–93. In Germany, the reproductive lithograph called an oleograph was thickly coated with oily varnish and imprinted using a patterned roller that gave the surface an embossed look reminiscent of the graininess of the canvas. Burch, Colour Printing, 212. 78. “Réels artistes.” Mellerio, La lithographie, 34, trans. in “Original Color Lithography,” 95. 79. Mellerio, in “Original Color Lithography,” 82. 80. Ibid., 95. 81. Ibid. 82. “Mais le droit à l’existence de l’estampe en couleur ressort de ce principe que nous considérons comme un axiome: tout mode de procéder où un artiste trouve à s’exprimer, est par là même légitime.” Mellerio, La lithographie, 5, trans. adapted from “Original Color Lithography,” 80–81. 83. Roger Marx, preface to vol. 4 (1899), Masters of the Poster, 1896–1900, intro. Alain Weill, notes Jack Rennert, trans. Bernard Jacobson (New York: Images Graphiques, 1978), 15. 84. Cate, in Cate and Hitchings, Color Revolution, 74. 85. Benjamin, “Work of Art” (1969), 218. Further discussed in the introduction and in chap. 4. 86. Bourdieu, “Market of Symbolic Goods,” 121.

4. Aura and Reproduction Epigraph: “Il fallait s’ingénier à remplacer commodément les originaux, donner une illusion de la grande pièce, en un mot trouver la Rue chez soi. . . . Les Maîtres de l’Affiche remplira le but rêvé par les collectionneurs”— Charles Saunier, “Les Maîtres de l’Affiche,” La Plume, no. 160 (December 15, 1895): 575. 1. Beraldi, Les graveurs, vol. 4 (1886), 203. 2. Maindron, Les affiches illustrées (1886). 3. Beraldi, Les graveurs, vol. 4 (1886), 203. 4. Roger Marx, prefaces, Masters of the Poster, 1896–1900, with intro. by Alain Weill and notes by Jack Rennert, eds. (New York: Images Graphiques, 1978), 6–7. Hereafter, Masters. Notes to Chapter 4  ‡ 337

5. “Renewal of Subscriptions,” in the November 1, 1897, repr. in Masters, 9. 6. Weill, introduction, in Masters, 4. 7. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (second version), in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008). 8. Stephen Bann, Parallel Lines, 30. 9. On the use of these terms in the late nineteenth century see chap. 1. 10. For Bourdieu’s discussion of the “field” see Field of Cultural Production. 11. Cate, in Cate and Hitchings, Color Revolution, 19–29. 12. Discussed in chap. 3. The journal L’Estampe Originale featured ninety-­five prints by seventy-­four artists and was disseminated in quarterly publications. Cate, ibid., 22. Stein and Karshan, “L’Estampe Originale.” 13. Johnson, Ambroise Vollard. Michel Melot notes that prints were the stimulus for the young Vollard’s vocation: Melot, Impressionist Print, 263. 14. Le centenaire de l’ imprimerie Chaix, 1845–1945 ([Saint-­Ouen]: Chaix, 1945), 132. 15. Ibid.; Alban Chaix, Historique de l’ imprimerie et de la librairie centrale des chemins de fer: Organisation industrielle et économique de cet établissement (Paris: Chaix, 1878). 16. Chaix, Historique, 84, 112. 17.  Didot-­Bottin, Annuaire du commerce, de l’ industrie, de la magistrature, et de l’administration (Paris, 1874), 1060. On Chéret’s early work see Sauvage, “Les débuts,” 35–49. 18. Cate, in Cate and Hitchings, Color Revolution, 10, 36. 19. Le centenaire, 96. Chéret confirmed this in his letter to Beraldi, clarifying that he retained the “artistic direction and complete execution” of the posters he signed. Cited by Sauvage, “Les débuts,” 48. 20. “A été la source de mille ennuis, de mille tracasseries, de mille difficultés!” Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal, 3:673, entry of March 2, 1892. 21. Le centenaire, 132. 22. Ibid. 23. Roger Marx, preface, vol. 1 (1896), Masters, 12. Rennert concludes that Marx’s role as the preface contributor likely did not include selecting posters. Rennert, “Notes,” ibid., 7–8. 24. “To Our Subscribers,” November 1, 1897, in Masters, 9. 25. Rennert discusses the imbalances of the selection, “Notes,” in Masters, 6–7. 26. Each monthly installment of four posters opened with a poster by Chéret, resulting in a total of sixty Chéret posters out of the overall 240. In addition, seven of the sixteen bonus prints were by Chéret. Rennert, “Notes,” in Masters, 6–7; Weill, introduction, ibid., 4. 27. Charles Hiatt, “Les Maîtres de l’Affiche — a Review,” Poster 1, no. 2 (July 1898): 79. 28. Maindron, “Les affiches illustrées” (1884), 544. 338  ·  Notes to Chapter 4

29. Ibid. 30. The catalogue raisonné is included in the exhibition catalog, La Belle Époque de Jules Chéret, ed. Bargiel and Le Men. For earlier catalogs of Chéret’s work see Beraldi, vol. 4 (1886), and vol. 10 (1890), 1–32 (following p. 292); Maindron, Les affiches illustrées (1896); Lucy Broido, The Posters of Jules Chéret: Catalogue Raisonné (New York: Dover Publications, [1980] 2nd rev. ed., 1992). 31. The Bibliothèque nationale de France, département des estampes et la photographie, has several volumes of press cuttings on Chéret, Coupures de presses Chéret données par René Bordeau, BnF Yb3–1650, vol. 1, 1885–1910; vol. 2, 1911–32; vol. 3, 1933–36; vol. 4, 1936–37; BnF Yb3–1657, vol. 1, 1884–90; vol. 2, 1890–91. For twentieth-­century studies see Mauclair, Jules Chéret; Collins, “Jules Chéret”; Collins, “Poster as Art”; Vignon, “Jules Chéret, créateur”; essays by Réjane Bargiel, Ségolène Le Men, Anne-­Marie Sauvage, and Noriko Yoshida, in La Belle Époque de Jules Chéret, ed. Bargiel and Le Men. 32. “Créateur d’une industrie d’art depuis 1866 par l’application de l’art à l’impression commerciale et industrielle.” Journal des Artistes (April 13, 1890), cited in “Chronologie,” in Bargiel and Le Men, La Belle Époque de Jules Chéret, 125. 33. Beraldi, Les graveurs, vol. 4 (1886), 174. 34. J.-­K . Huysmans, “Le Salon Officiel en 1880,” in L’art moderne (Paris: Stock, 1903), 184–85. 35. Huysmans, “Le Salon de 1879,” 9–95; Huysmans, “Le Salon Officiel en 1880,” 143– 85; Huysmans, “Chéret,” in Certains (Paris: Tresse & Stock, 1894 [1889]). 36. Réjane Bargiel, “Jules Chéret décorateur,” in Bargiel and Le Men, La Belle Époque de Jules Chéret, 77–107. 37. Unpublished letter by Ralph Brown, the inspecteur des beaux-­arts of the Ville de Paris to Jules Chéret, January 30, 1896, in the Special Collections of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. 38. Collins convincingly refutes Chéret’s claim that he studied under Lecoq de Boisbaudran at the École nationale de dessin. Collins, “Poster as Art,” n. 5, p. 42. 39. Discussed in chap. 3. Marx’s preface is reprinted in translation, by Judith Colton, appendix 1, in Stein and Karshan, “L’Estampe Originale.” 40. Lautrec’s featured posters were Divan japonais, La revue blanche, Jane Avril, La Goulue, and La Chaîne Simpson. 41. Letter no. 442 by Toulouse-­Lautrec to his mother (November–December 1895), in Toulouse-­Lautrec, Letters, 285. Translation is from Devynck, Toulouse-­Lautrec: Les Affiches, 18. 42. Talmeyr, “L’âge de l’affiche,” 203. 43. Ibid., 204. 44. Hiatt, “Les Maîtres de l’Affiche,” 79. 45. Rennert, “Notes,” in Masters, 8. 46. Beraldi, Les graveurs, vol. 10 (1890), “Les affiches de Chéret” (part 2), 1. 47. Ibid. Notes to Chapter 4  ‡ 339

48. Hiatt, Picture Posters, 366. 49. Charles T. J. Hiatt, “The Collecting of Posters, a New Field for Connoisseurs,” Studio 1, no. 2 (May 1893): 61. 50. Chéret, Hardy, and Beardsley, “Art of the Hoarding,” 47. 51. Hiatt, “Collecting of Posters,” 61–62. 52. Lewis F. Day, “English Poster Design,” Art Journal (April 1906): 106. 53. Émile Straus, “Psychie des affiches,” La Critique 1, no. 19 (December 5, 1895): 147. 54. “Trouver la Rue chez soi.” Charles Saunier, “Les Maîtres de l’Affiche,” La Plume, no. 160 (December 15, 1895): 575. 55. Ibid. 56. Marx, preface, Masters, vol. 4 (1899), 15. 57. Marx, preface, Masters, vol. 1 (1896), 11. 58. Marx, preface to Exposition Jules Chéret. Pastels, lithographies, dessins, affiches illustrées, exhibition catalog, Galleries du Théâtre d’application, December 1889–January 1890 (Paris: Chaix, 1889), trans. by Bernard Jacobson in Masters, 7. 59. Marx, preface, Masters, vol. 4 (1899), 15. 60. Marx, preface, Masters, vol. 5 (1900), 16. 61. Marx, preface, Masters, vol. 1 (1896), 11. 62. Mellerio, La lithographie, 89. 63. Uzanne, “Les collectionneurs d’affiches: Les contemporaines, Jules Chéret” [part 2], 266–67. 64. Bourdieu, “Market of Symbolic Goods,” 120–25. 65. “The Collector,” in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999) [H1a,2], 204. 66. November 1, 1897, repr. in Masters, 9. 67. Marx, preface, Masters, vol. 1 (1896), 11. 68. Marx, preface, Masters, vol. 4 (1899), 15. 69. Marx, preface, Masters, vol. 1 (1896), 12. 70. Marx, preface, Masters, vol. 5 (1900), 16. 71. Beraldi, Les graveurs, vol. 4 (1886), 102. 72. Ibid., vol. 11 (1891), 154. 73. Ibid., vol. 12 (1892), 127. 74. Ibid., vol. 5 (1886), 41. 75. Ibid., 42. 76. Marx, preface, Masters, vol. 1 (1896), 11. 77. Ibid. On the outdoor art exhibitions at Place Dauphine see Thomas Crow, chap. 3 in Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-­Century Paris (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 79–103. 78. Marx, preface, Masters, vol. 1 (1896), 11. 79. Ibid., 12. The Salon of the street is further discussed in chap. 5. 80. Marx, prefaces, Masters, vol. 4 (1899) and vol. 5 (1900). A precedent for Marx’s 340  ·  Notes to Chapter 4

campaign occurred in the 1880s when Félix Buhot, a painter, illustrator, and printmaker, campaigned in the Journal des Arts for the creation of museums for prints. Beraldi, Les graveurs, vol. 4 (1886), 28–29. 81. The museum opened in February 1978. Its name was later changed to Musée de la publicité. Until the museum’s establishment, its collection of posters was a department in the Bibliothèque des arts décoratifs. Réjane Bargiel-­Harry and Christophe Zagrodzki, Le livre de l’affiche / The Book of the Poster, exhibition catalog, Musée de la publicité, Paris, 1985 (Paris: Éditions Syros-­A lternatives, 1985), 22. Today it is a branch of the Musée des Arts décoratifs (les Arts décoratifs), housed in the Louvre’s Rohan and Marsan wings. 82. Marx, preface, Masters, vol. 4 (1899), 15–16. 83. The idea of the poster museum was debated in L’Estampe et l’Affiche. Marx’s 1899 preface to Les Maîtres de l’Affiche, in which he proposed the museum, was reprinted in L’Estampe et l’Affiche, and the journal responded with some questions and comments: see “Un musée de l’affiche,” L’Estampe et l’Affiche 2 (1898). The following year, the journal published numerous brief responses to the museum initiative: see “Murailles: Une enquête sur le Musée de l’affiche,” L’Estampe et l’Affiche 3 (1899). Marx’s preface to the final installment of Les Maîtres de l’Affiche, which responded to these commentaries (vol. 5, 1900), was titled “Le Musée de l’affiche, enquête,” in L’Estampe et l’Affiche 3 (1899). 84. Marx, preface, Masters, vol. 5 (1900), 16. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid. 89. Marx’s own collection was sold and dispersed after his death. See Delteil, Catalogue des estampes modernes composant la collection Roger Marx. The museum received the legacies of other collectors. See Weill, L’affichomanie, [1]. 90. Marx, preface, Masters, vol. 1 (1896), 12. 91. For the distinction between private collecting and museums’ collecting see Krzysztof Pomian, “Collections: Une typologie historique,” Romantisme 31, no. 112 (2001); and Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800, trans. Elizabeth Wiles-­ Portier (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). 92. Marx, preface, Masters, vol. 5 (1900), 17. 93. “Un musée de l’affiche,” L’Estampe et L’Affiche 2 (1898). The response of “La Revue” (pp. 263–64) was followed by Marx’s piece (pp. 264–65). 94. Marx, preface, Masters, vol. 5 (1900), 16. 95. Melot, Impressionist Print, 163. Melot discusses the 1862 etching by Millet that launched this mode of marketing of the modern print, ibid., 85–89; on Pissarro’s very limited run of proofs and on his treatment of each as an original see Antonia Lant, “Purpose and Practice,” 27. 96. Melot, Impressionist Print, 149–55. 97. See estimated print runs of Lautrec posters and prints in Adriani, Toulouse-­Lautrec. Notes to Chapter 4  ‡ 341

98. For example, Octave Maus mentions the high print run of Privat-­Livemont in “Privat Livemont,” Art et Décoration, Revue Mensuelle d’Art Moderne 7, no. 2 (February 1900): 61. For print runs of Chéret posters see Vignon, “Jules Chéret, créateur.” 99. Marx, preface, Masters, vol. 2 (1897), 12. 100. Beraldi, Les graveurs, vol. 4 (1886), 172. 101. Discussed in chap. 3. 102. Mellerio, La lithographie, 80. 103. Ibid., 93 104. Marx, preface, Masters, vol. 3 (1898), 14. Translation adapted from that by Bernard Jacobson. 105. Marx, preface, Masters, vol. 2 (1897), 12. 106. Bourdieu, Distinction, 29–30. 107. Ibid., 30. 108. Ibid., 31. 109. Ibid. 110. Ibid., 30. See also Bourdieu, “Historical Genesis,” 254–66, esp. 258–66. 111. Richard Thomson identifies the print within the painting as Lautrec’s lithograph of Lender. Thomson, “Imagery,” in Wittrock, Toulouse-­Lautrec, 1:13. 112. Benjamin, “Work of Art” (2008), 116. 113. Ibid. 114. Ibid. 115. Ibid. 116. Ibid., 119–20. 117. Ibid., 120. 118. Ibid. 119. Ibid. 120. Ibid. 121. Ibid. See Jonathan Crary’s exemplary analysis of changes in perception, in Suspensions of Perception. 122. Benjamin, “Work of Art” (2008), 120. 123. Ibid., 117. 124. Parshall, Darker Side of Light. 125. Talmeyr, “L’âge de l’affiche,” 215. Discussed in chap. 7. 126. Beraldi, Les graveurs, vol. 4 (1886), 102. 127. Toulouse-­Lautrec, for example, worked in Ivry with the potter Émile Müller on a small edition of a ceramic plaque depicting Yvette Guilbert, and made a stained-­glass design for Tiffany, commissioned by Samuel Bing. Douglas Druick, “Toulouse-­Lautrec,” 46. 128. Le Père Peinard, in Joan Ungersma Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete, 259, citing from Fénéon: Oeuvres, 1:226.

342  ·  Notes to Chapter 4

5. Art and Advertising in the Street Epigraph: Charles Hiatt, “A Note on the Beggarstaff Posters,” Poster 2, no. 8 (February 1899): 49. 1. “The Supplement to the Poster,” Poster 4, no. 24 (July 1900): 3. 2. Rogers, A Book of the Poster (London: Greening, 1901), 133. 3. Ibid., 10. On Rogers see [W. S. Rogers,] “Rogers on His Poster Work,” Poster 3, no. 16 (November 1899): 95–98. 4. Rogers, “The Modern Poster,” London Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 62 (January 1914), repr. in Affiche Anglais (n.p.), [2]. 5. Design practitioners in the nineteenth century employed these terms. See, for example, William Morris, “The Lesser Arts,” in Hopes and Fears for Art (New York: Longmans, Green, 1901), and Roger Marx, L’art social. Mentioning the debate about the “major” and “ ‘minor” arts, Beraldi referred to them as grand art and petit art in Les graveurs, vol. 4 (1886), 169. The term “commercial art” was used in the United States, for example by Will Bradley in “About Some Men, Some Posters, and Some Books,” Will Bradley, His Book 1 (May 1, 1896): n.p. For a discussion of the use of the term in the United States see Ellen Thomson, Origins, 61–63; Bogart, Artists. In Germany the term was Gebrauchgraphik (namely “functional graphics,” “graphics for use,” or “commercial graphic design”), and by 1927 it was still fairly new. See Jeremy Aynsley, Graphic Design in Germany, 1890–1945 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), chap. 1. For a discussion on definitions of graphic design and its parameters see also Jobling and Crowley, Graphic Design, 1–7. 6. As late as 1914, Rogers referred to “poster art” for lack of a better term, defining it as “the application of the art of the painter to the purposes of advertisement.” Rogers, “Modern Poster,” [5]. 7. On the origins of the term “graphic design” see Ellen Thomson, Origins, 61–63. 8. Meggs, History of Graphic Design. Among the design historians who have called for a more complex history of design are Clive Dilnot, “The State of Design History, Part I: Mapping the Field,” Design Issues 1, no. 1 (1984), and “The State of Design History, Part II: Problems and Possibilities,” Design Issues 1, no. 2 (1984); Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society since 1750 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005 [1986]); Cheryl Buckley, “Made in Patriarchy: Towards a Feminist Analysis of Women and Design,” Design Issues 3, no. 2 (Fall 1986); and Victor Margolin, “Design Issues and Design Studies,” Design Studies 13, no. 2 (1992). 9. Steven Heller, “Advertising: The Mother of Graphic Design,” in Graphic Design History, ed. Heller and Georgette Ballance (New York: Allworth Press, 2001 [1995]). 10. Hollis, Graphic Design; Jobling and Crowley, Graphic Design, chap. 3; Ellen Thomson, Origins; Jubert, Typography and Graphic Design; Eskilson, Graphic Design: A New History; Drucker and McVarish, Graphic Design History. The scholarship on

Notes to Chapter 5  ‡ 343

graphic design is currently in a state of tremendous growth. For an overview and analysis of issues in design and graphic design history see Dilnot, “State of Design”; Victor Margolin, “Narrative Problems of Graphic Design History,” in The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002 [1994]); John A. Walker, “Defining the Object of Study,” in Hazel Clark and David Brody, Design Studies: A Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2009 [1989]); Denise Whitehouse, “The State of Design History as a Discipline,” ibid., 54–63. 11. An exception is Karen L. Carter’s PhD dissertation, “L’Age de l’Affiche: The Reception, Display, and Collection of Illustrated Posters in Fin-­de-­Siècle Paris,” insofar as it discusses a wealth of late nineteenth-­century writings about French posters, including about posters in the urban context; but the dissertation does not address the poster specifically within the history of graphic design. Carter’s recent article “The Spectatorship of the Affiche Illustrée and the Modern City of Paris, 1880–1900,” contrasts the collective reading of political placards with the hurried individual viewing of later publicity posters in Paris and contextualizes the spectatorship of the latter within the conditions of display in post-­Haussmann Paris. See also comments by Andrea Korda on the gaze elicited by the few posters made by British artist Hubert Herkomer, which, inspired by academic art, required a knowledge of art history and time to unpack the iconography: “ ‘The Streets as Art Galleries’: Hubert Herkomer, William Powell Frith, and the Artistic Advertisement,” Nineteenth-­Century Art Worldwide 11, no. 1 (Spring 2012). 12. This focus heeds the call by design theorists for a history of graphic design that takes into account mediation and consumption in addition to production. See Walker’s “Design Production-­Consumption Model,” in Walker, with a contribution by Judy Att­ field, Design History and the History of Design (London: Pluto Press, 1989), and Grace Lees-­Maffei’s “The Production-­Consumption-­Mediation Paradigm,” Journal of Design History 22, no. 4 (2009): 351. On design journals see Ellen Thomson, “Early Graphic Design Periodicals in America,” Journal of Design History 7, no. 2 (1994); and Hewitt, “Poster and the Poster.” 13. On the evolution of graphic design from advertising see Heller, “Advertising.” 14. Jules Claretie, “Quelques opinions sur les affiches illustrées,” La Plume (November 15, 1893): 495, “musée d’images, son exposition . . . au plein vent.” 15. Vachon, Les arts et les industries du papier, 193. 16. “Le Salon du Pauvre,” Le Courrier Français 47 (November 23, 1890): 2. 17. Marx, preface, Masters, 11. 18. Ibid. 19. Cited by Bargiel in Bargiel and Le Men, La Belle Époque de Jules Chéret, n. 55, p. 107. The play Vive la liberté! Revue libre, rapide, incohérente et aristophanesque autant que possible en un acte et quatre tableaux dont un prologue en deux tableaux par M. Jules Lévy de MM. (Paris: Librairie Marpon et Flammarion, 1892), was performed on two nights in January 1891 at the Folies Bergère during the Incohérents ball. Apparently, Chéret provided the stage décor of posters for the performance: see La Belle Époque de Jules Chéret, 94. 344  ·  Notes to Chapter 5

20. “Faut-­il appeler les affiches ‘le musée de la rue’?” Beraldi, Les graveurs, vol. 10, “Les affiches de Jules Chéret (part 2, beginning after p. 292), 21. 21. Ibid. Discussed in chap. 8. 22. “The Streets as Art-­Galleries,” Magazine of Art 4 (May 1881). The anonymous article was likely authored by the British journalist George Augustus Sala, a point made by Andrea Korda, who refers to a letter by the artist Hubert Herkomer to George Augustus Sala, March 9, 1881 (MS Vault Sala 5, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, Conn.), in Korda, “ ‘Streets as Art Galleries.’ ” 23. Ibid. 24. Anon., “Dudley Hardy,” Poster 1, no. 4 (October 1898): 143. 25. Spielmann, “Poster and Poster-­Designing,” 35. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 46 and 42. He quoted the Belgian painter Jan van Beers who had exhibited his paintings in London and also made posters pasted on London walls. 28. For example, “The Hoardings,” Poster 3, no. 1 (December 1899): 180. 29. Charles Hiatt, “Posters and the Beauty of London,” Poster 3, no. 13 (August 1899): 290. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. Dawn Ades, in a comprehensive essay that focuses primarily on the twentieth century, notes, “A street aesthetic had begun to replace the ‘secular idealism’ of the earlier 19th century, magnetizing those who wanted art to remain in close contact with life.” Ades, “Function and Abstraction,” 28. Among others, she cites El Lissitzky, who describes Fernand Léger’s postwar, post-­Cubist painting: “The culture of painting no longer comes from the museum. It comes from the picture gallery of our modern streets — the riot of exaggeration of colors on the lithographic poster.” El Lissitzky, “Exhibitions in Berlin” (Veshch 3, Berlin, 1922), in Ades, 29. 35. Maximilian Schmid, “Ueber deutsche Plakat-­Kunst,” Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration 1 (1897–98): 58. 36. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 272. 37. Ibid., 277. 38. Linda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets, and Images in Nineteenth-­Century London (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 59, quoting from [Peter Cunningham,] Handbook of London as It Is [Murray’s Handbook of Modern London] (London: John Murray, 1863), xxx. 39. On the nineteenth-­century history of visual culture see Schwartz and Przyblyski, “Visual Culture’s History,” 3–14. 40. For a discussion of French commentators writing on the advertising poster’s aim to capture the gaze see Carter, “Spectatorship of the Affiche,” 16–22. On attention, distraction, and modernity see Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception, chap. 1. Notes to Chapter 5  ‡ 345

41. Georges Durosc, “Coins de Rouen, une affiche,” October 1890, in Jules Chéret, coupures de presse, BNF, bobine 357, 1890–91, département des estampes (Yb3–1650, 1, 2). 42. Italics in the original. Émile Straus, “Psychie,” 145. 43. Hiatt, “Some Decorative Posters by Charles I. Foulkes,” Poster 2, no. 10 (April 1899): 164. 44. D’Arnach, “Annonce-­réclame et publicité,” Revue Universelle des Inventions et des Sciences Pratiques, November 20, 1894, 433. 45. It should not be assumed that each of these categories necessarily had set rules. In many of them there were differences based on the period in which the posters were made, for example early posters from the 1870s versus later posters from the 1890s, or based on the poster artist who made them. 46. Hiatt, Picture Posters, 1. 47. Dudley Hardy, in Chéret, Hardy, and Beardsley, “Art of the Hoarding,” 51. 48. Ibid., 50. 49. As noted by Catherine Haill, who discusses the poster and its appearance in the photograph of the hoarding, in this poster Hardy’s decorative depiction of the hat ribbons evoke Chéret’s ebullient posters. Haill, “Pleasure and Leisure: Posters for Performance,” in Timmers, Power of the Poster, 40. On Bruant and Lautrec see Frey, Toulouse-­Lautrec: A Life, 40. 50. Hardy, in Chéret, Hardy, and Beardsley, “Art of the Hoarding,” 52. 51. Hardy, cited in Rogers, Book of the Poster, 8. 52. Jules Chéret, in Chéret, Hardy, and Beardsley “Art of the Hoarding,” 47. 53. Ibid., 50. 54. Ibid., 47. 55. Ibid. Chéret designed four decorative panels (panneaux décoratifs) intended for the home. Although they share some of his typical iconography and many of the characteristics of his eighteenth-­century inspired style, they also show an adaptation to the interior decoration of the home. Whereas Chéret’s typical woman sold various products and performances promoted in the posters, in the decorative panels she became an allegory of Music, Dance, Comedy, and Pantomime. These panels did not have any text, which in the posters identified the image with the promoted product or performance. On the panels see discussion in Le Men and Bargiel, “L’art de Jules Chéret, côté et côté salon,” in Bargiel and Le Men, La Belle Époque de Jules Chéret, 27. See illustrations of the four panels ibid., 28–31. 56. Rogers, Book of the Poster, 9, 130. 57. H[enry] C[uyler] Bunner, “American Posters, Past and Present,” Scribner’s Magazine, October 1895, 443. 58. Discussed in chap. 3. 59. Charles Hiatt, “A Note on the Beggarstaff Posters,” Poster 2, no. 8 (February 1899): 49. 60. Announced in Poster 1, no. 5 (November 1898): vi. On the journal the Poster see Hewitt, “Poster and the Poster.” 346  ·  Notes to Chapter 5

61. In taking the helm, Hiatt was most likely attempting to save the journal, but its demise soon followed nonetheless. 62. Hiatt, “Some Decorative Posters,” 162. 63. Hiatt, “Sarah Bernhardt, Mucha, and Some Posters,” Poster 2, no. 12 (June/July 1899): 240. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 66. G. de Saint-­Aubin, “Les Maîtres de l’Affiche en 1899,” Revue des Revues 32, no. 4 (February 15, 1900): 408. 67. Hiatt, “Note on the Beggarstaff Posters,” 49. 68. Hiatt, “Sarah Bernhardt,” 240. See discussion on the Beggarstaffs in chap. 1. 69. Ibid. 70. For an analysis of this poster see Campbell, Beggarstaff Posters, 17-­21. 71. Hiatt, “Note on the Beggarstaff Posters,” 50. 72. Hiatt, “Les Maîtres de l’Affiche,” 79. 73. Ibid. 74. Discussed in chap. 2. 75. Rogers, Book of the Poster, 129–36. 76. Ibid., 31–32. Rogers discusses this (and other issues addressed in the book) also in his later article, “Modern Poster.” 77. Marx, preface, Exposition Jules Chéret. (This brief quote from Marx’s preface was cited in Poster 2, no. 12 (June/July 1899): 232–33. 78. Cited in Poster 2, no. 12 (June/July 1899): 233. 79. Ernest Maindron, Les affiches illustrées (1896), 4. 80. Victor Champier, “L’exposition des affiches illustrées de M. Jules Chéret,” Revue des Arts Décoratifs, 10e année (1889–1890): 254–55. 81. Ibid., 256. 82. Ibid., 257. 83. Ibid. 84. Marx, preface to Les Maîtres de l’Affiche 1 (1896), intro. Alain Weill, notes Jack Rennert (Paris: Chêne, 1978), 11. 85. English translation by Bernard Jacobson, in Marx, preface, Masters, 1978, 11. 86. Champier, “L’exposition,” 256. 87. I have made the argument elsewhere that some late nineteenth-­century posters that represent women were designed to appeal to women consumers; see Iskin, “Pan-­ European Flâneuse; Iskin, “Popularizing New Women”; and Iskin, “Material Women.” 88. “Enfin, en devenant ‘affiche’ elle se modifie encore, hausse le ton, se met du rouge comme les acteurs pour être vue de loin, épice son langage, et fait vibrer sur les murailles, dans le tapage ahurissant des villes, au milieu des carrefours, ses boniments iconographiques, qui, s’adressant aux foules, doivent avant tout être nettement intelligibles, secouer les nerfs, et violenter le regard, avec les ressources très simples de lignes ou de couleurs.” Champier, “L’exposition,” 256. Notes to Chapter 5  ‡ 347

89. On the discussion of Gallic gaiety by both philosophers and mass-­media journalists during the late nineteenth century see Charles Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Epoque: Entertainment and Festivity in Turn-­of-­the Century France (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 39–50. 90. On the chérette see Verhagen, “Poster in Fin-­de-­Siècle Paris”; Carter, “L’Age de l’Affiche” (diss., 2001), 125–89. 91. Talmeyr, “l’âge de l’affiche.” 92. Ibid., 211. 93. Ibid., 212. 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid., 213. 96. Ibid. 97. Ibid. 98. Ibid. 99. Ibid. 100. Octave Uzanne, La nouvelle Bibliopolis, Voyage d’un novateur au pays des néo-­ icono-­bibliomanes (Paris: Henri Floury, 1897), 138. 101. Ibid., 139. 102. Day, “English Poster Design,” 106. 103. Ibid. 104. See chap. 8. 105. Spielmann, “Posters and Poster-­Designing,” 47. 106. Cited in Rogers, Book of the Poster, 8, 10. 107. Ibid., 9. 108. Ibid., 8. 109. Ibid., 130. 110. Ibid. 111. Ibid. 112. S. Manors, “Alick P. F. Ritchie, a Progressive and Popular Posterist,” Poster 3, no. 14 (September 1899): 28. 113. Charles Hiatt, “The Poster and the Pantomime,” Poster 5, no. 29 (December 1900): 116–17. 114. Bourdieu, Distinction, 32–34. 115. Karl Kloufe, “The Applied Arts and Advertising,” Poster 2, no. 12 (June–July 1899): 255. 116. Ibid. 117. Gustave Le Bon, La psychologie des foules (Paris: PUF, 2002) [1895], originally trans. and published in English in 1896 under the title The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. See Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-­ Century France (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981). 118. Champier, “L’exposition,” 254–55. 119. Straus, “Psychie,” 145. 348  ·  Notes to Chapter 5

120. “Véritables musées où la masse pensante, amoureuse d’art, trouve à satisfaire quelques-­uns de ses aspirations”: Maindron, Les affiches illustrées (1896), 2. 121. Marx, L’art social, 1913, 250; see also Marx, preface, vol. 1 (1896), in Masters 11. 122. Marx, preface, Maîtres, vol. 3 (1898), 14 in Masters. Translation adapted from the original French text: “aimée du peuple,” ibid., 14. 123. “Des amateurs par légion,” Marx, preface, Maîtres, vol. 1 (1896), 11. 124. Marx, preface, Masters, vol. 3 (1898), 14. 125. Bunner, “American Posters,” 442. 126. Ibid. 127. Ibid. 128. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography” [1931], in Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 519. As Paula Amad notes, Atget’s photographs “originally functioned as public records of topographical and architectural, not anthropological, traces.” Amad, Counter-­Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 150. 129. George William Joy, The Work of George W. Joy with an Autobiographical Sketch (London: Cassell, 1904), 61. The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1895 and in the Paris Salon in 1896, ibid., 110. 130. Ibid. 131. Ibid. 132. For an interpretation of this encounter see Kate Flint, “The ‘Hour of Pink Twilight’: Lesbian Poetics and Queer Encounters on the Fin-­de-­Siècle Street,” Victorian Studies 51, no. 4 (Summer 2009): 692. 133. Walter Dill Scott, The Psychology of Advertising: A Simple Exposition of the Principles of Psychology in Their Relation to Successful Advertising (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1913 [1908]), 219. 134. Ibid., 85. 135. Benjamin, “Work of Art” (2008), 120. 136. See discussion of the distinction between commercial and artistic posters in the introduction, and between the typographic versus the illustrated poster, in chap. 6. 137. Gustave Chéret had studied with Louis Robert Carrier-­Belleuse’s father, the sculptor and painter Albert-­Ernest Carrier-­Belleuse, and married his daughter, Marie Carrier-­Belleuse. Stanislas Lami, Dictionnaire des sculpteurs de l’ école française, au dix-­ neuvième siècle (Paris, 1914, repr. Kraus-­Thomson, Nendeln/Leichtenstein, 1970), 1:371. 138. Adolphe Tabarant reported this in Manet et ses oeuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 327; and Juliet Wilson-­Bareau identifies the particular poster in “Die verborgene Geschichte von Edouard Manets Reichshoffen,” in exhibition catalog Manet trifft Manet: Geteilt, wiedervereint, herausgegeben von Mariantonia Reinhard-­Felice im Auftrage des Bundesamt für Kultur, by Wilson-­Bareau and Malcolm Park (Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2005), 24–67, mentioned by Le Men in Bargiel and Le Men, La Belle Époque de Jules Notes to Chapter 5  ‡ 349

Chéret, n. 42, p. 49. Manet and Chéret are discussed in chap. 1. On Manet’s representation of advertising posters see Iskin, Modern Women, 133–40. 139. The first performance of La tzigane was at the Théâtre de la Renaissance on October 30, 1877. The poster was deposited in the dépôt légal on November 8, 1877. 140. For an insightful analysis of Steinlen’s illustration see Verhagen, “Poster in Fin-­ de-­Siècle Paris,” 111–13. 141. Miriam R. Levin, “Democratic Vistas — Democratic Media: Defining a Role of Printed Images in Industrializing France,” French Historical Studies 18, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 97–98. On Steinlen see Phillip Dennis Cate and Susan Gill, Théophile-­Alexandre Steinlen (Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith, 1982), on La rue see ibid., 118–20. 142. Maindron, Les affiches illustrées (1896), 10. 143. Hahn, Scenes of Parisian Modernity, 144. For England see Nevett, Advertising in Britain. 144. Hahn, Scenes of Parisian Modernity, 144. 145. On the 1881 law see Phillip Dennis Cate, in Cate and Hitchings, Color Revolution, 9–10. 146. For example, in 1906, a single construction wall generated about 100,000 francs per year; Hahn, Scenes of Parisian Modernity, 147. On advertising agencies, publics, and estimates of revenues from renting spaces see Segal, “Republic of Goods,” 77–145. 147. Elizabeth Robins Pennell, “London’s Underground Railways,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, January 1896, 278. 148. Ibid., 286. 149. Ibid., 287 150. See, for example, Henri-­Gustave Jossot, “L’affiche caricaturale,” L’Estampe et l’Affiche, no. 10 (December 15, 1897): 238, discussed in Nicholas-­Henri Zmelty, “L’affiche illustrée, miroir de la modernité esthétique et culturelle en France à la fin du XIXe siècle,” in Le salon de la rue: L’affiche illustrée 1880 à 1910, ed. Marie-­Jeanne Geyer and Thierry Laps (Strasbourg: Musée de Strasbourg, 2007); Chapin, Posters of Paris, 31–32. 151. T. Turner, “Autobiography of a Poster,” Poster 1, no. 2 (July 1898): 84. 152. Bourdieu, “Market of Symbolic Goods,” 125–31. Hewitt suggests the relevance of Bourdieu to the position of poster designers, in “Designing the Poster,” 60–61. 153. Bourdieu, “Market of Symbolic Goods,” 127. 154. Hiatt, “Note on the Beggarstaff Posters,” 50. 155. Discussed in chap. 1. See Pryde’s statement, appendix A, in Campbell, Beggarstaff Posters, 110–11. 156. Hiatt, “Note on the Beggarstaff Posters,” 50. 157. Howard Douglas, “An Interview with M[osnar] Yendis,” Poster 3, no. 14 (September 1899): 9. 158. Ibid. 159. S. Manors, “The Interview,” Poster 1, no. 1 (June 1898): 23. 160. Ibid. 161. Ibid., 23–24. 350  ·  Notes to Chapter 5

162. Frank Millward, “A Chat with Stewart Browne,” Poster 2, no. 10 (April 1899): 146–47. 163. [Rogers] “Rogers on his Poster Work,” 98. 164. Edgar Wenlock, “Concerning Advertisement of Steamship Services,” Poster 2, no. 11 (May 1899): 189. 165. Day, “English Poster Design,” 116. 166. Rogers, Book of the Poster, 133. 167. “Palette Scrapings,” Poster 3, no. 14 (September 1899): 42. 168. Ibid., 42. 169. “Curiosities of Theatrical Advertising,” Poster 4, no. 21 (April 1900): 54. 170. Ibid., 42. 171. On Bruant and Lautrec see Frey, Toulouse Lautrec: A Life, and Chapin, “Henri de Toulouse-­Lautrec and the Café-­Concert,” chap. 3. 172. Frantz Jourdain, “L’affiche moderne et Henri de Toulouse-­Lautrec,” La Plume (1893): 490, trans. in Mary Weaver Chapin, “The Chat Noir and the Cabarets,” in Thomson, Cate, and Chapin, Toulouse-­Lautrec and Montmartre, 93. 173. “The Hoardings,” Poster 3, no. 14 (September 1899): 35. 174. On this development in England see Hewitt, “Designing the Poster”; in the United States see Margolin, American Poster Renaissance, and Bogart, Artists. 175. The Advertiser’s Review was launched in April 1899, and numerous publications followed. Hewitt, “Poster and the Poster,” 46; Hindley and Hindley, Advertising in Victorian England. In France, La Publicité was launched in 1903 (it lasted till 1939), La Publicité Moderne was published 1905–9, and Atlas, 1908–26. In addition, the first manuals of advertising were published simultaneously. Martin, Trois siècles, 250. 176. On early advertising agencies see Hindley and Hindley, Advertising in Victorian England; Nevett, Advertising in Britain; Frank Presbrey, History and Development of Advertising; on the professionalization of advertising in France see Martin, Trois siècles, chap. 8. 177. Howard Leathlean, “The Archaeology of the Art Director? Some Examples of Art Direction in Mid-­Nineteenth-­Century British Publishing,” Journal of Design History 6, no. 4 (1993): 229. 178. “Practical Posters. A Chat with Mr. Maltwood,” Poster 4, no. 21 (April 1900): 68. 179. Ibid. 180. Hewitt, “Poster and the Poster,” 50. 181. “Practical Posters,” 64. 182. Ibid., 65–66. 183. Ibid., 63. 184. Ibid., 66. 185. Ibid. 186. Hewitt, “Designing the Poster,” 57. 187. E. De Crauzat, “Murailles,” L’Estampe et l’Affiche, 3e année, no. 2 (February 15, 1899): 12. Notes to Chapter 5  ‡ 351

188. On the evolution of advertising in France between 1900 and 1930 see Martin, Trois siècles, chaps. 6 and 8. Martin makes the point that after 1900 some of the most important advertisers in the food industry advertised both in posters and in the press, whereas advertisers of products such as cameras and sewing machines advertised only in the press, 116–17. 189. On the poster and billboard in the United States see Bogart, Artists, chap. 2.

6. Poster Design Epigraphs: “Comment forcer l’attention sur ce mot? La grosseur des caractères n’est pas un moyen suffisant ni sûr. Les lettres n’attirent pas. Il faut l’image pour retenir le regard au hasard accroché. De là l’affiche illustrée”— Lucien Muhlfeld, “L’affichage moderne,” in Paul Adam et al., Badauderies parisiennes. Les rassemblements. Physiologies de la rue (Paris: Floury, 1896), 70; “La réclame murale faite pour être vue, non lue” (emphasis in the original) — ibid. 1. André Maurel’s article “L’amateur d’affiches,” which appeared in a column “Au jour le jour,” was published January 10, 1897. The name of the publication is missing from the clipping of it that appears in a folder in the BnF Salle X, Foc, CN1 232 (C4910). 2. Martin, Trois siècles, 117. 3. On the interactions of word and image in art see, for example, Georges Roque, who has explored Magritte’s painting, his work in advertising, and the influence of his paintings on advertising, in several studies, including the 1983 exhibition he curated, Magritte et les publicitaires (Magritte and advertising); Roque, Ceci n’est pas un Magritte: Essai sur Magritte et la publicité (Paris: Flammarion, 1983); “The Advertising of Magritte / the Magritte of Advertising,” in Heller and Balance, Graphic Design History; “Magritte’s Words and Images,” Visible Language 23, no. 2 (May 1989). See also John C. Welchman, “After the Wagnerian Bouillabaisse: Critical Theory and the Dada and Surrealist Word-­Image,” in The Dada and Surrealist Word-­Image, ed. Judi Freeman, exhibition catalog, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989); Clara Orban, The Culture of Fragments: Words and Images in Futurism and Surrealism (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1997). 4. For example, Simon Morley’s survey study of word and image in art mentions posters only very briefly. Morley, Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003), 23. 5. Bradford R. Collins discusses strategies for image-­text harmony in “Jules Chéret and the Nineteenth-­Century French Poster,” 25–34, 101–5. The topic of text and image in British posters is briefly discussed in, L’affiche anglaise; les années 90, exhibition cata­ log, preface, Roland Barthes; intro. by Geneviève Picon (Paris: Bibliothèque des arts décoratifs, 1972), n.p. [30–33]. 6. David Scott’s semiotic analysis yields a wealth of insights, mostly about twentieth-­ century posters, in Poetics of the Poster: The Rhetoric of Image-­Text (Liverpool: Liverpool 352  ·  Notes to Chapter 6

University Press, 2010). The historically specific investigation employed here aims to integrate the issues of image and text relationship into an interdisciplinary history of the poster, within which the nineteenth-­century poster has an important role. See also Pierre Fresnault-­Deruelle, Les images prises au mot: Rhétoriques de l’ image fixe (Paris: Edilig, 1989). 7. Anne-­Marie Christin, “Lettering on Posters,” in Christin, A History of Writing: From Hieroglyph to Multimedia (Paris: Flammarion, 2002). See also Christin, “La lettre dans l’affiche française (1780–1900),” in Écritures, systèmes idéographiques et pratiques expressives, ed. Christin (Paris: Éditions le Sycamore, 1982). 8. Dennis Bryans, “The Double Invention of Printing,” Journal of Design History 13, no. 4 (2000): 288. 9. Ibid., 289. On the role of lithography in print history see Michael Twyman, Early Lithographed Books: A Study of the Design and Production of Improper Books in the Age of the Hand Press (London: Farrand Press, 1990); Twyman, Breaking the Mould: The First Hundred Years of Lithography; The Panizzi Lectures 2000 (London: British Library, 2001). 10. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 324–25. See also 358–59. 11. Ibid., 324–25. 12. Ibid. Bakhtin distinguishes between three categories — hybridization, the dialogized interrelation of languages, and pure dialogues — but clarifies that they are separable only in theory, whereas “in reality they are always inextricably woven together.” Ibid., 358. 13. For a different approach to the issue of dialogics of word and image in the poster see Roque’s discussion of twentieth-­century antiwar posters as dialogic in the sense that the text negates what the image affirms, in “Political Rhetoric in Visual Images,” in Dialogue and Rhetoric, ed. Edda Weigand (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008). On the relationship between illustrations and text in journals see Tom Gretton, “The Pragmatics of Page Design in Nineteenth-­Century General-­Interest Weekly Illustrated News Magazines in London and Paris,” Art History 33, no. 4 (September 2010). 14. Barthes, preface in L’affiche anglaise [1–2]. 15. Dudley Hardy in Chéret, Hardy, and Beardsley, “Art of the Hoarding,” 53. 16. Rogers, Book of the Poster, 32. 17. Ibid.,134. 18. Ibid., 134–35. 19. Quadrangle Club, Catalogue of an Exhibition of American, French, English, Dutch, and Japanese Posters from the Collection of Mr. Ned Arden Flood (Chicago, 1897), vi. 20. “Art and Advertising,” repr. in “The Hoardings,” Poster 3, no. 14 (September 1899): 35. 21. Jules Chéret, in Chéret, Hardy, and Beardsley, “Art of the Hoarding,” 49. 22. Ibid. 23. Maindron is cited in “Jules Chéret,” by Pierre ou Paul in Les Hommes d’Au­ jourd’ hui 6, no. 275 [1886]. [2]. Notes to Chapter 6  ‡ 353

24. Madaré worked for Chéret from 1872, and died in 1894. “Chronologie,” in Bargiel and Le Men, La Belle Époque de Jules Chéret, 123. 25. Chéret, Hardy, and Beardsley, “Art of the Hoarding,” 49. 26. William Morris, “A Note on his Aims in Founding Kelmscott Press,” in Modern Art, 1896, repr. in Alain Weill, Graphic Design: A History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Discoveries, 2004), 130. 27. Ibid.,131. 28. Ibid., 131–32. 29. Ibid., 130. 30. Lucien Muhlfeld, “L’affichage moderne,” in Badauderies parisiennes. Les rassemblements. Physiologies de la rue, ed. Paul Adam et al. (Paris: Floury, 1896), 70. 31. Straus, “Psychie,” 146. 32.  John Grand-­Carteret, Vieux papiers — vieilles images. Cartons d’un collectionneur (Paris: Le Vasseur, 1896), 430. 33. Alfred Franklin, La vie privée d’autrefois: Arts et métiers, modes, moeurs, usages des parisiens du XIIe au XIIIe siècle, vol. 1, L’annonce et la réclame, les cris de Paris (Paris: Éditions Plon, Nourrit et cie, 1887–1902), 107. 34. Ibid. 35. Christin, “Lettering on Posters,” 372. 36. Victor Fournel, C’est qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris (Paris: A. Delahays, 1858), 299. 37. Ibid., 294. 38. Ibid. 39. Maindron, “L’affiche illustrée,” La Plume, no. 110 (November 15, 1893): 476. On book posters see Collins, “Jules Chéret,” chap. 3; Bargiel and Le Men, L’affiche de librairie au XIXe siècle. 40. For a reading of the posters in Parry’s watercolor see Richard L. Stein, “1837: The Writing on the Walls,” Victorian Poetry 25, nos. 3–4 (Autumn–Winter 1987); Gerard Curtis, Visual Worlds: Art and the Material Book in Victorian England (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2002), 65–66; Sara Thornton, Advertising, Subjectivity and the Nineteenth-­ Century Novel: Dickens, Balzac and the Language of the Walls (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 21. 41. Émile Mermet, La publicité en France, guide manuel (Paris: Chaix, 1880). xxxiv. 42. Ibid. 43. Huysmans, “Chéret,” 51–52. 44. On book posters see Collins, “Jules Chéret,” 35–53, and chap. 3; Le Men, in Bargiel and Le Men, L’affiche de librairie. 45. Bargiel and Le Men, L’affiche de librairie, 16; Collins, “Jules Chéret,” 40. 46. Christin, “Lettering in Posters,” 373. 47. Collins, “Jules Chéret,” 40. 48. Ibid., 35, 53. 49. Le Men, in Bargiel and Le Men, L’affiche de librairie, 18. 50. Bargiel, ibid., 21. 354  ·  Notes to Chapter 6

51. Christin, “Lettering on Posters,” 373. 52. Le Men notes that certain book posters used various techniques to introduce some color, in Bargiel and Le Men, L’affiche de librairie, 14. Collins notes that, unlike their predecessors, book posters of the 1850s and 1860s were signed, suggesting that this contributed to the genre’s artistic status, although it was ultimately Chéret’s posters, begining in the 1870s, that were responsible for the artistic poster: Collins, “Jules Chéret,” 53. 53. For poster sizes in France see chap. 2. Poster sizes in England are discussed in Bi­ bliothèque des arts décoratifs, L’affiche anglaise, n.p. 54. Cat. entry no. 113 in Françoise Cachin and Charles S. Moffett, in collaboration with Michel Melot, Manet, 1832–1883, exhibition catalog, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum with Harry N. Abrams, 1983), 301. 55. The second printing of the book was also registered in 1868, but the date 1869 appears on the title pages: ibid., 29. For discussion and illustrations of the two posters see ibid., 299–301, and in Fisher, Prints of Edouard Manet, 88. 56. Hiatt, Picture Posters, 11. 57. Ibid., 183. 58. Spielmann, “Posters and Poster-­Designing,” 36. 59. This is Spielmann’s paraphrase of Walker, ibid. 60. Letter, September 14, 1871, in John George Marks, Life and Letters of Frederick Walker, A.R.A. (London: Macmillan, 1896), 232–33. 61. Today, none of the original posters survive, and the poster is known only through a later small-­scale wood engraving made by M. W. H. Hooper for the Magazine of Art. The small woodcut also appeared in Spielmann’s article and Hiatt’s book. 62. Pennell, “Angleterre,” 31. Spielmann, “Posters and Poster-­Designing,” 35–36; Hiatt, Picture Posters, 183. Catherine Peters, The King of the Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins (London: Secker & Warburg, 1991), 334. 63. Italics in the original; cited in Marks, Life and Letters, 232, citing from “The Street as Art-­Galleries,” in Magazine of Art, May 1881. 64. On Bubbles and other British paintings transformed into soap advertising see Laurel Bradley, “Millais’s Bubbles and the Problem of Artistic Advertising,” in Pre-­ Raphaelite Art in Its European Context, ed. Susan P. Casteras and Alicia Craig Faxon (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1995). On the use of academic paintings in British soap advertisements see also Andrea Korda, “ ‘Streets as Art Galleries.’ ” 65. “Thomas J. Barratt Dead: Chairman of the Firm of A. & F. Pears an Advertising Genius,” New York Times, April 27, 1914, 11. 66. Alison Smith in Jason Rosenfeld and Alison Smith, Millais, “Bubbles,” cat. entry no. 107, Tate Britain, exhibition catalog, September 26, 2007–January 13, 2008 (London: Tate Publishing, 2007), 184. 67. Charles Hiatt, Picture Posters, 195. 68. Charles Hiatt, “The Royal Academy and the Artistic Poster,” Poster 2, no. 10 (April 1899): 158. Notes to Chapter 6  ‡ 355

69. Cited in John Gullie Millais, Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1899), 2:186. 70. Ibid. 71. On marketing strategies, with a focus on the campaigns of Lever and Sunlight, see H. R. Edwards, Competition and Monopoly in the British Soap Industry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 29 and 147. 72. Korda, “ ‘Streets as Art Galleries.’ ” 73. Cited in Millais, Life and Letters, 2:186. 74. Pennell, “Angleterre,” 40. 75. Ibid. 76. Réjane Bargiel-­Harry, “Rouchon et la publicité sous la Second Empire,” in Weill and Bargiel-­Harry, Rouchon, un pionnier de l’affiche illustrée, [8]. Rouchon presided over his own print shop and on some occasions hired artists to design the posters. 77. A rare exception is Collins, who discusses Chéret’s unique manner of harmonizing image and text, in “Jules Chéret,” 101–5. The general scholarship on Chéret is extensive. See, for example, Mauclair, Jules Chéret; Collins, “Poster as Art”; Verhagen, “Poster in Fin-­de-­Siècle Paris” in Charney and Schwartz, Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life; Le Men, Seurat & Chéret; Vignon, “Jules Chéret, créateur”; essays by Bargiel, Le Men, Sauvage, and Yoshida, in Bargiel and Le Men, La Belle Époque de Jules Chéret. 78. On the group Les Incohérents see Phillip Dennis Cate, “The Spirit of Mont­ martre,” in The Spirit of Montmartre: Cabarets, Humor, and the Avant-­Garde, 1875–1905, ed. Cate and Mary Shaw (New Brunswick, N.J.: Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, 1996), 40–52. 79. Bargiel and Le Men date the two versions of the poster, L’ horloge, Champs Elysées, les Girard (with a green background) and Folies-­Bergère, les Girard (with a red background) based on when they were entered in the dépôt légale. Folies-­Bergère, les Girard, is dated between 1875 and February 1878, or January 1880 and July 1881, and L’ horloge, Champs Elysées, les Girard is dated April 17, 1877. See Bargiel and Le Men, La Belle Époque de Jules Chéret, no. 198, p. 160, and no. 106, p. 149. For an example of a very early poster see Lycéum, Little Faust, Written by H. Farnie, Musique de Hervé, of 1869, fig. 42, p. 141, in Bargiel and Le Men, La Belle Époque de Jules Chéret. 80. Robert L. Herbert discusses the influence of Chéret’s poster Les Girard on Seurat’s painting Chahut of 1889–90, noting that in both works the figures are hardly modeled, their flatness is complemented by linear motifs with an emphasis on the surface, the faces are caricatured, and the elongated arms and legs are raised high in the air. Herbert, “Seurat and Jules Chéret,” 157–58. 81. On iteration copy in press advertising see Presbrey, History and Development of Advertising, 93. 82. Henri Bouchot, the curator at the Cabinet des estampes of the Bibliothèque nationale (from 1898 to 1906), “Propos sur l’affiche,” Art et Décoration (April 1898): 117. 83. Weill, Graphic Design: A History, 26. 84. Meggs and Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 231. On the graphic arts in 356  ·  Notes to Chapter 6

Vienna at the turn of the century see Jane Kallir, Viennese Design and the Wiener Werkstätte, foreword by Carl E. Schorske, exhibition catalog (New York: Galerie St. Etienne, with George Braziller, 1986), chap. 5. 85. It was only in the 1910s that the futurists experimented with “words in freedom,” in which they innovated a dynamic typographic design free of the decorative regime. See, for example, F. T. Marinetti. Zang Tumb Tumb. Adrianopoli, Ottobre 1912: Parole in libertà (Milan: Edizioni futuriste de “Poesia,” 1914). 86. Jack Rennert, Cappiello: The Posters of Leonetto Cappiello (New York: Poster Art Library, Poster Please Inc., 2004), 66. 87. Interview conducted by Vendre magazine in 1934, cited by Rennert, Cappiello, ibid. 88. Eskilson, Graphic Design: A New History, 108, 111. For an illustration see Museum Wolkwang, Essen: http://collection-­online.museum-­folkwang.de/eMuseumPlus. 89. Meggs and Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 270. 90. Meggs recounts the story, ibid; Eskilson, Graphic Design: A New History, 109–10. 91. It is a good example of Victor Margolin’s idea that the designer’s creative process should incorporate responses by the consumers or users of design, in Margolin, ed., and introduction and closing essay, Design Discourse: History/Theory/Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 9. 92. Meggs and Purvis, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 270. 93. Ibid. 94. Drucker and McVarish, Graphic Design History, 159. 95. Aynsley, Graphic Design in Germany, 78. 96. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 358. 97. Ibid., 282. 98. Ibid. 99. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 173. 100. Ibid., 174. All further Benjamin quotations are from this page. 101. Max Pensky, “Geheimmittel: Advertising and Dialectical Images in Benjamin’s Arcades Project,” in Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, ed. Beatrice Hanssen (London: Continuum, 2006), 129. 102. Ibid.

7. The Rise of the Image Epigraphs: “L’image est souveraine. Elle exerce, partout où il y a des êtres humains, sa puissance tyrannique, son irrésistible séduction. Elle est l’agent le plus souple et le plus fécond qui soit de la vérité . . . ou du mensonge. Elle est devenue une des forces les plus redoutables de la civilisation” — Gabriel Mourey, “L’Art dans les livres illustrés,” La Revue et Revue des Revues 34 (September 1, 1900): 507; “Et, ce qui distingue encore ici l’affiche, c’est qu’elle ne me propose pas tout cela plus ou moins persuasivement, mais me l’impose. Je lis un livre si je le veux bien; je vais voir un tableau s’il me plait d’y aller; je n’achète pas Notes to Chapter 7  ‡ 357

mon journal malgré moi. Mais l’affiche? Je la vois, même si je ne veux pas la voir. . . . C’est cela que je suis obligé de respirer, et qu’on m’introduit de force dans le sang!” — Maurice Talmeyr, “L’Age de l’affiche,” Revue des Deux Mondes 137 (per. 4), no. 9 (September 1, 1896): 215. 1. D’Avenel, “Le mécanisme,” 658. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., 649. 4. W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Pictorial Turn” [1992], in Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Mitchell defines the pictorial turn as “a postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurality.” Ibid., 16. 5. Neil Harris, “Iconography and Intellectual History: The Halftone Effect,” in Harris, Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990 [1979]), 316. 6. Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-­de-­Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 3. See also Mary Weaver Chapin’s introduction to a recent exhibition, in which she refers to posters as spectacle: Posters of Paris, 12–13. 7. Schwartz and Przyblyski, “Visual Culture’s History,” 3. 8. Bann, Parallel Lines, 3. Bann, who focuses on the connections between lithography, photography, and painting in the nineteenth century, does not discuss posters. 9. Mary Weaver Chapin’s introduction to a recent exhibition is an exception insofar as it refers to posters as spectacle: Posters of Paris, 12–13. 10. Benjamin, “Work of Art” (1969). 11. Charney and Schwartz, Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, 1. 12. On the time lag see Roger Fidler, Mediamorphosis: Understanding New Media (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge Press, 1997). 13. Verhagen, “Poster in Fin-­de-­Siècle Paris,” 108. 14. Renié, Une image sur un mur; Renié, “The Image on the Wall: Prints as Decoration in Nineteenth-­Century Interiors,” Nineteenth-­Century Art Worldwide 5, no. 2 (2006); Verhoogt, Art in Reproduction. 15. On the illustrated press see Jobling and Crowley, Graphic Design, chap. 1. 16. Catalogue-­A lmanach du Musée Grevin, 1882, cited in Schwartz, “Cinematic Spectatorship before the Apparatus: The Public Taste for Reality in Fin-­de-­Siècle Paris,” in Charney and Schwartz, Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, 305. 17. Vachon, Les arts et les industries du papier, 157. 18. Wilhelm Bode, “Anforderungen an die Ausstattung einer illustrierten Kunszeit­ schrift,” Pan 1, no. 1 (1895): 33. 19. Arthur Symons, The Art of Aubrey Beardsley (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1918 [1898]), 15. 358  ·  Notes to Chapter 7

20. Champier, “L’exposition,” 256. 21. Ibid. 22. Vachon, Les arts, 182. 23. Huysmans, “Chéret,” 51–52. 24. D’Avenel, “Le mécanisme,” 652–55. 25. Hiatt, “Posters and the Beauty of London,” 290. 26. J. Foster-­Bowen, “Commercial Progress v. Amateur Aestheticism,” Poster 3, no. 15 (October 1899): 74. 27. Mermet, La publicité, 32. The advertising shown on these curtains was managed by the Administration d’affichage; ibid., 33. 28. Alexandre, “French Posters,” 603–14. 29. On the Incohérents see Cate, “Spirit of Montmartre,” and Daniel Grojnowski, “Hydropathes and Company,” in Cate and Shaw, Spirit of Montmartre, 1–94, 95–110. 30. Alexandre, “French Posters,” 604. 31. Ibid., 603 32. Ibid., 605. 33. Ibid., 604. 34. Ibid., 605–6. 35. Astley Williams, “English Magazine Covers: The Recollections of a Collector,” Poster 4, no. 23 (June 1900): 158. 36. Ibid., 159. 37. Ibid. 38. G. Howell-­Baker, “The Ideas of an Artist,” Poster 4, no. 23 (June 1900): 160. 39. Ibid. 40. On the increasing role of illustrations and the changing design of text and image in illustrated weeklies see Tom Gretton, “Pragmatics of Page Design,” 680–709. 41. Vachon, Les arts, 134. 42. Maurice Denis, Théories, 1890–1910 (Paris: L. Rourat et J. Watelin, 1920), 11. Trans. adapted from Frèches-­Thory and Terrasse, Nabis: Bonnard, Vuillard and Their Circle, 214. 43. “Horrible London: Or, the Pandemonium of Posters,” Punch, October 13, 1888, 170. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. “Picturesque London; or, Sky-­Signs of the Times,” Punch, September 6, 1890, 119. 47. Hugh MacLeay, “The Past and Future of the Poster,” Poster 4, no. 23 (June 1900): 137. 48. W. J. T. Mitchell, “What Is an Image?” New Literary History 15, no. 3, Image/ Imago/Imagination (Spring 1984): 504. 49. Late nineteenth-­century commentators expressed views that fit the patterns of iconophobia several decades before the invention of the term, in 1926. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., online version, September 2011. “Iconophile” and “iconophilia” (or iconophilism) were nineteenth-­century terms — see discussion in the next chapter. Notes to Chapter 7  ‡ 359

50. W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005); Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-­Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 51. Rosalind Krauss, “Welcome to the Cultural Revolution,” October 77 (1996): 96. 52. Gabriel Mourey, “L’art dans les livres illustrés,” La Revue et Revue des Revues 34 (September 1, 1900): 507. 53. Ibid. 54. “Par elle [l’image], une infinité de notions nouvelles ont pénétré l’entendement humain, une profusion presque excessive de perceptions inéprouvées a fait vibrer les sensibilités. En multipliant les occasions de penser et de sentir, elle a élargi le champ de l’activité intellectuelle, elle a développé et affiné la faculté de comprendre et d’éprouver toutes les manifestations du monde extérieur, si diverses, si contradictoires même soient-­ elles; elle a mis à la porte de tous des trésors inestimables qui n’avaient été, durant trop longtemps, que le privilège de quelques uns.” Ibid. 55. Levin, “Democratic Vistas,” 82–108, esp. 94–96; Robert Justin Goldstein, “Fighting French Censorship, 1815–1881,” French Review 71, no. 5 (1998): 786–96. Jobling and Crowley, Graphic Design, chap. 2. On censorship of caricatures see Robert Justin Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature in Nineteenth-­Century France (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1989), 41–75. On censorship of posters see Maurice Rickards, Banned Posters (London: Evelyn, Adams & Mackay, 1969); Carter, “Unfit for Public Display,” 107–24. 56. Journal Officiel de la République Française (June 8, 1880): 6212–13, cited in Levin, “Democratic Vistas,” 95. See Levin for a discussion of the legislative opponents to the freedom to print images and display them in public space. 57. Cited in Aaron J. Segal, “Commercial Immanence: The Poster and Urban Territory in Nineteenth-­Century France,” in Advertising and the European City: Historical Perspectives, ed. Clemens Wischermann and Elliott Shore (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000), 127. 58. Gabriel Désert, “Alphabétisation et scolarisation dans le Grand-­Ouest au 19e siècle,” in Making of Frenchmen: Current Directions in the History of Education in France, 1679–1979, Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques 7, nos. 2/3 (Summer–Fall 1980): 150, cited in Segal, “Republic of Goods,” 123. 59. Dr. Gillebert Dhelcourt, May 15, 1889, cited ibid., 289. 60. Levin, “Democratic Vistas,” 95. 61. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908), originally published in French, 1895. For more on Le Bon’s book see Barrows, Distorting Mirrors, and Segal, “Republic of Goods,” 357–63. 62. Le Bon, Crowd, 45–46. 63. Ibid., 52, 59, 64. Ibid., 74, 76. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., 69. 360  ·  Notes to Chapter 7

67.  Grand-­Carteret, Vieux papiers — vieilles images, 420; Straus, “Psychie.” 68. Fournel, in Ce qu’on voit, 263. 69. Muhlfeld, “L’affichage moderne,” 70. Emphasis in the original text. 70. Ibid. 71. D’Avenel, “Le mécanisme,” 649. 72. Straus, “Psychie,” 145. 73. Straus, “Des affiches,” La Critique 2, no. 36 (August 20, 1896): 124. 74. Fournel in Ce qu’on voit, 263. 75. Ibid., 261–68. 76. Ibid., 263. For Fournel’s discussion of the flâneur and the badaud see 261–68. 77. Ibid. 78. For an analysis of nineteenth-­century responses to the typographic poster and its literary representations see Thornton, Advertising, 32–62. 79. Estimate of edition and citation from La Vie Parisienne, July 10, 1892, in Adriani, Toulouse-­Lautrec, 23. 80. On the poster’s invasiveness see Carter, “L’Age de l’Affiche” (diss., 2001), 64–80. 81. Talmeyr, “L’âge de l’affiche,” 215. 82. Ibid., 209. 83. Ibid., 215. 84. Ibid., 214. 85. René Dubreuil, “Sur les ‘Femmes’ de Jules Chéret,” La Plume, no. 110 (November 15, 1893): 493.

8. The Iconophile’s Collecting Epigraphs: “ICONOCLASTE signifie briseur d’ images, BIBLIOPHILE veut dire amateur des livres; pourquoi donc ne pas faire le mot ICONOPHILE pour désigner un amateur d’ images? C’est-­à-­dire, celui qui réunit toute espèce d’objets ayant rapport aux arts graphiques et plastiques, sans se restreindre à aucune spécialité”— Jean Duchesne Aîné, Voyage d’un iconophile, revue des principaux cabinets d’estampes, bibliothèques et musées d’Allemagne, de Hollande et d’Angleterre (Paris: Heideloff et Campé, 1834), viii; “Mais vienne le temps, quelle revanche! Tout passe, casse, s’efface, disparait; et la feuille imprimé demeure. . . . Ceci justifie amplement ce qu’à première vue on pourrait trouver de forcé et d’artificiel dans la passion iconophile”—  Henri Beraldi, Les graveurs du XIXe siècle: Guide de l’amateur d’estampes modernes (Paris: Librairie L. Conquet, 1889–92), vol. 9 (1889), 256. 1. Duchesne Aîné, Voyage d’un iconophile, xv. He wrote the book based on his travel to the countries housing the most important collections of prints. On Duchesne Aîné see [Paulin Paris], Notice historique sur la vie et les ouvrages de M. J. Duchesne Aîné (Paris: Imprimerie Simon Raçon et compagnie, 1855). 2. Duchesne Aîné, Voyage d’un iconophile, vi. Notes to Chapter 8  ‡ 361

3. Ibid., v–vi. 4. Ibid., vii. 5. Ibid., viii. 6. Ibid., viii–ix. The definition of “iconophile” in Émile Littré’s dictionary, appearing several decades later, shows that by then the term had come to denote one who loves images and is an expert of prints. Émile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française contenant . . . la nomenclature . . . la grammaire . . . la signification des mots . . . la partie historique . . . l’ étymologie (Paris, Hachette, 1863–73). The Oxford English Dictionary defines the iconophile as “a connoisseur of pictures, engravings, book illustrations, and the like,” listing the earliest use of the term in English as 1881. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., online version, September 2011. On bibliophiles see Yann Sordet, L’amour des livres au siècle des lumières: Pierre Adamoli et ses collections (Paris: École des chartes, 2001); Willa Silverman, The New Bibliopolis: French Book Collectors and the Culture of Print, 1880–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). 7. Anon., “Poster-­Neurosis,” repr. from the Sunday Sun in Poster 5, no. 27 (October 1900): 65. 8. Ibid. In 1908 Roger Braun, a major French collector of posters, urged affichophiles (poster lovers) not to fear the sarcasms and mocking their collection may elicit. Roger Braun, Bibliographie et iconographie de l’affiche illustrée (Lille: Imprimerie Lefebvre-­ Ducrocq, 1908), 4. Reprinted in Weill, L’affichomanie, 4–18. 9. Beraldi, Les graveurs, vol. 4 (1886), 169. 10. Beraldi, “L’estampe en 1889,” in Les graveurs, vol. 9 (1889), 255. 11. Ibid., vol. 5 (1886), 183. 12. Ibid., vol. 9 (1889), 142. 13. Beraldi refers to these illustrators as “iconographs.” Ibid., vol. 12 (1892), 232–33. 14. Ibid., vol. 4 (1886), 169. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. The term “auratic” refers to Walter Benjamin’s ideas on the aura in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” [1936]. Discussed in the introduction and in chaps. 3 and 4. 18. Beraldi cataloged Chéret’s posters in Les graveurs, vol. 9 (1886) and continued in vol. 10 (1890). 19. Ibid., vol. 11 (1891), 249. 20. Ibid., 248. 21. Nogressau, “Invitation à la physiologie,” 181–91. For a list of publications for the print collector see ibid., 181–82. 22. Ibid., 183. 23. Ibid., 182. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 183. 26. Ibid. 362  ·  Notes to Chapter 8

27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Pamela J. Warner, “Connoisseur vs. Amateur: A Debate over Taste and Authority in Late Eighteenth-­Century Paris,” a paper given in a colloquium at the Istituto Svizzero in May 2008. My thanks to the author for providing a typescript copy. For the published version see Penser l’art dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle: Théorie, critique, philosophie, histoire, ed. Christian Michel and Carl Magnusson (Rome: Académie de France à Rome — Villa Médicis, 2013). For a notable analysis of changes in public views and among critics in eighteenth-­century France see Thomas E. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-­Century Paris (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985). 32. Nogressau, “Invitation à la physiologie,” 183. 33. Ibid., 190. 34. Uzanne, “Les collectionneurs d’affiches: Les contemporaines, Jules Chéret” [part 2], 255–67. 35. Uzanne, “Les collectionneurs d’affiches illustrées” [part 1] (April 1891), 195. 36. Nogressau was likely thinking of Goupil, the international firm with headquarters in Paris, or of the vast, elegant, Georges Petit Gallery. On the gallery spaces of art dealers in the 1880s see Martha Ward, “Impressionist Installations and Private Exhibitions,” Art Bulletin 73, no. 4 (December 1991): 599–622. 37. Nogressau, “Invitation à la physiologie,” 187. 38. Mellerio, La lithographie, trans. in “Original Color Lithography,” 89. 39. Uzanne, “Les collectionneurs d’affiches: Les contemporaines, Jules Chéret” [part 2], 266–67. 40. Ibid., 266. 41. Ibid. 42. Mellerio, La lithographie, 89. 43. Beraldi, Les graveurs, vol. 4 (1886), 168–78. 44. Ibid., 170. 45. For nineteenth-­century discussions on the collection of posters see Fustier, “La littérature murale”; Hiatt, “Collecting of Posters”; Uzanne, “Les collectionneurs d’affiches illustrées” [part 1] and “Les collectionneurs d’affiches: Les contemporaines, Jules Chéret” [part 2]; Rogers, Book of the Poster, 12–25. For contemporary scholarship on American poster collecting see Frederick R. Brandt, “Introduction: Posters, Patrons, and Publishers,” in Designed to Sell: Turn-­of-­the-­Century American Posters (Richmond: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 1994); and Neil Harris, “American Poster Collecting: A Fitful History,” American Art 12, no. 1 (Spring 1998). On poster collecting in France see Weill, L’affichomanie; Carter, “L’Age de l’Affiche” (diss., 2001), chap. 5; and Le Men and Bargiel, “L’art de Jules Chéret,” in Bargiel and Le Men, La Belle Époque de Jules Chéret, 20–24. 46. Uzanne, “Les collectionneurs” [part 1], 195. 47. Maurel, “L’amateur d’affiches.” Notes to Chapter 8  ‡ 363

48. Will Clemens in Poster 1, no. 2 (February 1896): 15, cited Brandt, “Introduction,” 11. 49. See Uzanne’s advice to collectors on which posters and poster artists should be included in poster collections, “Les collectionneurs d’affiches illustrées” [part 1], and “Les collectionneurs d’affiches: Les contemporaines, Jules Chéret” [part 2]. 50. The Bulletin des Iconophiles was announced in La Critique, no. 45 (January 5, 1897). 51. La Critique, 3rd year, no. 64 (October 20, 1897): 196. Conversely, “L’Iconoclaste” signed some of the 1890s reviews in La Critique. 52. Émile Straus, “Des affiches,” La Critique 2, no. 36 (August 20, 1896): 124–28; Straus, “Psychie.” 53. Straus, La Critique 2, no. 43 (December 5, 1896). 54. In 1914, the leading German poster collector Hans J. Sachs spoke about “cultural and art historians of the later centuries” who will investigate “culture and ‘unculture,’ aesthetic sentiment and artistic taste” by drawing on picture postcards, menus, and place cards no less “than on great works of painting and sculpture, architecture and the arts and crafts.” Sachs, Das Plakat, Mitteilungen des Vereins der Plakatfreunde, Berlin, 1914, cited in Aynsley, Graphic Design in Germany, 37. On Sachs’s activities as a poster collector see his own account in The World’s Largest Poster Collection, 1896–1938: How It Came About . . . and Disappeared from the Face of the Earth (New York: Hans Sachs, 1957). On Clarke see Timmers, in Power of the Poster, 14–16. 55. Fustier, “La littérature murale,” 337. Fustier focused primarily on the earlier “literary poster” that promoted books in the 1830s and ’40s, and on collectors of posters who began collecting in the 1850s. 56. “Les affiches sont un microcosme de notre société: touchant à tout, elles donneront des renseignements précieux sur nos habitudes, nos moeurs, nos costumes, notre nourriture, nos lectures, nos maladies, nos plaisirs surtout.” Beraldi, Les graveurs, vol. 4 (1886), 176. 57. Beraldi, “L’estampe en 1889,” in Les graveurs, vol. 9 (1889), 255. 58. Ibid., 256. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Uzanne, “Les collectionneurs d’affiches illustrées” [part 1], 196. 62. Ibid., 196. 63. In Bella, Collection of Posters, 7–8. 64. Ibid. 65. Rogers, Book of the Poster, 13. 66. Hiatt, “Posters as a Mirror of Life,” 177. 67. Ibid., 178. 68. Ibid., 179. 69. Ibid., 180. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid., 181. 364  ·  Notes to Chapter 8

72. Homi K. Bhabha, “Elusive Objects: Anish Kapoor’s Fissionary Art,” in Anish Kapoor, essays by Homi K. Bhabha, Jean de Loisy, Norman Rosenthal, exhibition catalog, Royal Academy of Arts (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2009), 34. 73. Ibid., 196. 74. The aesthetic language of posters is discussed in chap. 1. 75. See chap. 1. J.-­K . Huysmans, “Le Salon de 1879” and “Le Salon Officiel en 1880”; Huysmans, “Chéret”; Geffroy, “Jules Chéret,” repr. in La vie artistique, 149–50. 76. Félix Fénéon, Le Père Peinard, April 30, 1893, in Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete, 261, quoting from Fénéon: Oeuvres, ed. Halperin, 1:229–31. 77. A detailed analysis of the overall iconography of posters is outside the scope of this project. The iconography of print collectors depicted in posters is analyzed in chap. 2 of this book. For more on particular topics in the iconography of posters see Verhagen, “Poster in Fin-­de-­Siècle Paris”; Ruth E. Iskin, “Father Time, Speed, and the Temporality of Posters around 1900,” Kronoscope 3, no. 1 (2003); Iskin, “Pan-­European Flâneuse”; Iskin, “ ‘Savages’ into Spectators/Consumers”; Iskin, “Popularising New Women”; Iskin, “Material Women”; and Hahn, Scenes of Parisian Modernity, chap. 9. 78. Some paintings of the time represent consumer culture; see Iskin, Modern Women. Aaron J. Segal demonstrates that some posters transformed aristocratic, Catholic, and other symbols, in “Republic of Goods,” 418. 79. Celebrities appeared in quite a few nineteenth-­century posters. See Lelieur and Bachollet, Célébrités à l’affiche. 80. On the department store poster in Paris see Iskin, “Material Women.” 81. Vachon, Les arts et les industries du papier, 194–96. 82. Ibid., 195. 83. Ibid., 204. 84. Jane Atché, originally from Toulouse, worked in Paris, where one of her teachers was Mucha. The dating of her poster to 1896 is confirmed by its inclusion, in November of that year, in the international poster exhibition held in Reims. Mucha’s first poster for JOB was made at the end of 1896 or possibly in 1897. Claudine Dhotel-­Velliet, Jane Atché, 1872–1937 (Lille: Le Pont du Nord, 2009), 40–47. For a comparative analysis of Mucha’s and Atché’s posters see Dolores Mitchell, “The ‘New Woman’ as Prometheus: Women Artists Depict Women Smoking,” Women’s Art Journal 12, no. 1 (Spring– Summer 1991): 6. 85. Iskin, “Popularising New Women.” 86. Ibid. 87. Iskin, “ ‘Savages’ into Spectators/Consumers,” 130–32. On the representation of blacks in French posters see Bachollet et al., NégriPub. 88. Iskin, “ ‘Savages’ into Spectators/Consumers,” 132–45. 89. Ibid., 142–43. On the typewriter see Michael H. Adler, The Writing Machine (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1973), 184, 289. 90. Iskin, “ ‘Savages’ into Spectators/Consumers.” 91. On the elitist consumer/collector who attempts to stay aloof of the contamination Notes to Chapter 8  ‡ 365

of the marketplace see Rosalind H. Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-­Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), chap. 4. 92. Straus, “Psychie,” 147. 93. Beraldi, Les graveurs, vol. 4 (1886), 203. 94. Ernest Maindron, “Les affiches illustrées” (1884); Maindron, Les affiches illustrées (1886); Maindron, Les affiches illustrées (1896). 95. H. B. Jean Coudray, “Ernest Maindron,” Les Hommes d’Aujourd’ hui 6, no. 299 [1887], n.p. [2]. Beraldi had estimated two years earlier that Maindron possessed over ten thousand posters: Les graveurs, vol. 4 (1886), 203. 96. Maindron, Les programmes illustrées des théâtres et des cafés-­concerts, menus, cartes d’ invitations, petites estampes, etc., intro. Pierre Veber (Paris: P. Lamm, 1897). Maindron also authored several other books. 97. Coudray, “Ernest Maindron,” [3]. 98. The catalog of Chéret’s work appeared in Maindron’s 1896 volume, Les affiches illustrées. 99. The beginning of the scribbled line near Maindron’s right foot unobtrusively incorporates Chéret’s signature, hinting humorously that Chéret’s posters set Maindron in motion while Maindron’s writing established Chéret’s legacy. 100. “Donc avec une opiniâtreté digne d’éloges, avec la précision et la science du botaniste, le nez au vent, prêt à toutes les aventures, M. Maindron poursuit sans trève et sans merci la pièce qui lui manque, et celle qui lui manque est toujours celle à laquelle il attache le plus de valeur. Le jour où il la trouve et la pique dans son herbier, c’est fête en son logis.” Coudray, “Ernest Maindron,” [2]. 101. Maindron, “Les affiches illustrées” (1884), 419. 102. Maindron, Les affiches illustrées (1886), vii. 103. Maindron, “Les affiches illustrées” (1884), 419. 104. “Voici plus de trente ans qu’avec un flair particulier il y réunit laborieusement, surtout pour ce qui concerne notre époque, des milliers de documents qui feront plus tard la joie des historiographes.” Coudray, “Ernest Maindron,” [1]. 105. Beraldi, Les graveurs, vol. 9 (1889), 162–64. 106. Ibid., 164. 107. Ibid. 108. Ibid. Coudray, “Ernest Maindron,” [2]. Maindron was asked to be the secretary of the exhibition by the prestigious committee of Republicans (whose honorary president was Victor Hugo), which organized the 1878 Daumier exhibition at the Durand Ruel Galleries. Michel Melot, “Daumier and Art History: Aesthetic Judgement / Political Judgement,” trans. Neil McWilliam, Oxford Art Journal 11, no. 1 (1988): 4–5, and n. 13, p. 20. 109. Coudray, “Ernest Maindron,” [2]; Beraldi, Les graveurs, vol. 9 (1889), 162–64. 110. Les murailles politiques françaises depuis le 4 Septembre 1870 (Paris: Armand Le Chevalier, 1873). (Coudray erroneously dates the publication to 1874 in “Ernest Maindron,” [2]). 111. Preface by the publisher, Armand Le Chevalier, ibid., [1]. 366  ·  Notes to Chapter 8

112. The list appears in the front matter in Ernest Maindron, Marionnettes et guignols, les poupées agissantes et parlantes à travers les âges (Paris: F. Juven, 1900). 113. Preface by the publisher, Armand Le Chevalier, in Les murailles politiques, [1]. 114. Les murailles révolutionnaires: collection complète des professions de foi, affiches décrets, bulletins de la république, fac-­similé de signatures, intro. Alfred Delvau (Paris: J. Bry [aîné], 1852). Maindron was surely familiar with this publication, which was republished with additions in the late 1860s with the involvement of Le Chevalier, who wrote a long preface to the sixteenth edition published by E. Piccard in 1869 and who later published Maindron’s collection of Commune posters. 115. Ibid., 2. See Frank Gallo on the political posters of the 1789 French Revolution, Poster in History, 17–18. 116. Dominique Pety, “Le personnage du collectionneur au XIXe siècle: De l’excentrique à l’amateur distingué,” Romantisme 31, no. 112 (2001). 117. Cited in Beraldi, Les graveurs, vol. 10 (1890), 20. 118. Maindron, 1751–1889. Le Champ de Mars, avec la collaboration de M. Camille Viré (Paris et Lille : Imprimerie de L. Danel, 1889); Ségolène Le Men, “L’art de l’affiche à l’Exposition universelle de 1889,” Bulletin de la Bibliothèque Nationale (June 1991). 119. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1965). On Guys see Pierre Duflo, Constantin Guys, fou de dessin, grand reporter, 1802–1892 (Paris: Arnaud Seydoux, 1988). On the French illustrator in the late nineteenth century see Patricia Eckert Boyer, “The Artist as Illustrator in Fin-­de-­Siècle Paris,” in Cate, Graphic Arts and French Society. 120. Baudelaire, “Painter,” 1. 121. Ibid., 2. 122. Ibid., 40. 123. Beraldi, Les graveurs, vol. 9 (1889), 162. 124. Tom Stammers, “The Bric-­a-­Brac of the Old Regime: Collecting and Cultural History in Post-­Revolutionary France,” French History 22, no. 3 (2008): 295 and 309. 125. Ibid., 295. 126. Ibid., 303. 127. Ibid. 128. Ibid., 315, citing from A.-­R . de Liesville, Histoire numismatique de la Révolution de 1848. . . . (Paris: H. Champion, 1877), vii–viii. 129. Stammers, “Bric-­a-­Brac,” 315, citing from de Liesville, Histoire numismatique, vii–viii. 130. Weill, L’affichomanie, n.p. [3]. See also Carter’s discussion on French poster collectors, “L’Age de 1’Affiche” (diss., 2001), chap. 5. 131. Fustier, “La littérature murale,” 338–39. Four thousand of his posters dating 1835– 89 were dispersed in a sale in 1968. [Vente. art. 1968–10–17. Troyes]. Ancienne collection de Constant Dessoliers, 4000 affiches 1835–1889 (Troyes: Imprimerie Renaissance, 1968). 132. Fustier, “La littérature murale,” 339. Notes to Chapter 8  ‡ 367

133. Ibid., 348. 134. Ibid., 346. 135. Ibid. 136. [Vente. Art. 1898–03–31. Paris], Catalogue d’une importante et curieuse réunion d’environ 60,000 affiches relatives à l’histoire de Paris et des provinces . . . : collection de feu de M. Lépine, . . . (Montluçon: Grande imprimerie du centre, 1898). 137. Fustier, “La littérature murale,” 338. 138. Réjane Bargiel-­Harry and Christophe Zagrodzki, Le livre de l’affiche / Book of the Poster, 22. The Pochet-­Deroches collection given to the Musée des arts décoratifs consisted mainly of French posters, including most of the posters by Toulouse-­Lautrec, one hundred Chéret posters, and one hundred bookshop posters. It was one of the two largest bequests in the museum’s history (the other was by Roger Braun). 139. Benjamin, Arcades Project. 140. Alfred Delvau, ed., Les murailles révolutionnaires de 1848, 16th ed. (Paris, [1852]), 1, cited in Benjamin, Arcades Project, [G3a, 3], 179. 141. Hannah Arendt, in Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. and intro. Arendt, 39. 142. Irving Wohlfarth discusses Benjamin’s writing about the lowest-­class counterpart of the bourgeois collector — the chiffonnier (ragpicker), proposing that the materialist historian is embodied in the chiffonnier in Benjamin’s work. The ragpicker represents “a collector of the ‘refuse of history,’ ” who “would also be the incognito of an author who, in this instance, seeks to abandon the traditional prerogatives of authorship for a more marginal, anonymous and subterranean position from which, ideally, to let the historical materials speak for themselves.” Wohlfarth, “Et cetera? The Historian as Chiffonnier,” New German Critique, no. 39 (Fall 1986): 144. 143. Vanessa R. Schwartz, “Walter Benjamin for Historians,” American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (2001): 1698. http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/106.5 /ah0501001721.html. 144. Discussed in chap. 5. 145. Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” 40. 146. Ibid. 147. Discussed in chap. 1. 148. Rogers, Book of the Poster, 15. 149. Ibid. 150. Ibid. 151. Ibid. 152. Ibid., 17 153. Ibid., 18. 154. Ibid., 17. 155. Ibid. 156. Discussed in chap. 3. 157. The only information I have been able to track down on the fate of Maindron’s collection is a sale of his collection of works by Daumier some three years before Main368  ·  Notes to Chapter 8

dron’s death: Catalogue d’un intéressant oeuvre lithographié de Honoré Daumier formé par M. Ernest Maindron, ed. Maindron and Loys Delteil (Paris: Imprimerie Frazier-­ Soye, c. 1905). 158. On nineteenth-­century photography archives see Rosalind Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View,” Art Journal 42, no. 4 (Winter 1982); Molly Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992); Allan Sekula, “The Body of the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986); Sekula, “Reading the Archive: Photography between Labour and Capital” [1986], in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells (London: Routledge, 2003). 159. Cited in Amad, Counter-­Archive, 4. 160. Boleslas Matuszewski, “A New Source of History,” trans. Laura U. Marks and Diane Koszarski, Film History 7, no. 3 (1995): 322. Discussed by Amad, Counter-­Archive, 3–4, 184–87. In 1898, Matuszewski, a cameraman, called for the establishment of a film archive in Paris, which he described as “a collection of cinematographic documents” and “a Cinematographic Museum or Depository.” Ibid. 161. Amad, Counter-­Archive, 6. 162. The history of the archive in France is discussed by Amad, ibid., 144–48. Kahn’s archive contained still photography, stereoscopes, and film footage (including 183,000 meters of 35 mm black-­and-­white silent film, mostly unedited footage, and a small amount of color film), 72,000 color autochrome photographs, and 4,000 stereographic images. Ibid., 6–7. On the color photographs in the Kahn archive see David Okuefuna, The Dawn of the Color Photograph: Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008). 163. Gallo, Poster in History, 12. For an analysis of the nineteenth-­century European posters in historical context see Jobling and Crowley, Graphic Design, chap. 3. 164. Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, xv. 165. Ibid., xvii. For example, advertisers recognized that consumers would rather identify with a higher status than with accurate depictions of their own lives, leading most of them to situate their products in upscale settings; ibid., xvii. 166. Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, xx and xxii. 167. Discussed in chaps. 3 and 4. 168. Discussed in chap. 3.

Notes to Chapter 8  ‡ 369

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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INDEX

academic painting: for advertising, 224, 225, 226 accessibility, of posters and prints, 42, 50, 73, 118, 119, 137, 175, 250, 257, 258, 259, 272 advertisers, 10, 15, 65, 150, 178, 197, 198, 201, 352n188, 369n165; and Bubbles, 194, 225; clients, 196, 205, 206; designing for, 202– 8; poster commissioners, 22, 198, 202; and realistic posters, 7, 190, 204; target audience, 23, 201, 207, 214, 282, 328n69 advertising, 22, 66, 149, 178, 179, 194, 200, 203, 208, 216, 252; agencies, 205, 304n13; and artistic poster, 6, 7; directors, 205–6; French posters, 197–98; function of posters, 4, 39–40, 41, 54, 120, 167, 174, 190, 210; history, 1, 18, 219; posters, 106, 118, 119–20, 155; repetition in, 234; saturation, 226; targeted, 23, 98, 201, 282. See also image-centered culture advertising curtain (rideau-annonces), 250–51 advertising sites: 18, 250; outdoor display, 4, 18, 41, 176, 193, 201, 220, 250, 252, 253, 265; public conveyances and stations, 3, 63, 176, 193–94, 202, 226, 242, 250. See also hoardings; billboards aestheticizing the commercial, 6, 286 aesthetic(s), 53, 181, 265, 269, 288, 298; dress, 277; integration of function and, 174, 207; language and modernist, 2, 35, 39, 41, 49, 65, 72, 77, 279, 286; modernist in

the poster, 39, 40, 62, 99, 105–6, 235, 279, 286 (see also modeling, elimination of ); the poster and development of modernist, 51–71 Affiches étrangères illustrées, Les, 24 affichomanie (poster craze), 22, 264, 266, 267, 291 affichophile, 20, 262, 264, 362n8. See also iconophile affordability of posters, 49, 50 Alexandre, Arsène, 49, 84, 85–86, 90, 112, 121, 251, 252 Amad, Paula, 300–301, 349n128 amateurs. See collectors American posters, 146, 292 Ancourt’s printshop, 51, 83, 90, 92 appeal of poster, 175, 191 archivist, 262, 291. See also Maindron, Ernest Art and Decoration, 21 art field, 29, 142, 168, 203, 207 Art et l’Idée, L,’ 266 art market, 22, 23, 134, 142, 169 art and mass culture, 72, 75, 76 artistic posters, 6, 7, 250, 275; distinct from commercial poster, 13; England, 7, 9–10; English and American collectors, 268; influences on, 6 (see also prints: Japanese); in London, 176, 255; principle of, 223 Art Nouveau, 28, 29, 49, 73, 84, 148, 161, 239

Arts and Crafts movement, 74, 190, 191 artwork: original, 51, 141; as unique object, 29, 119, 168 Atché, Jane, 277, 365n84 Atget, Eugène, 177, 192, 301, 349n128; Rue de l’abbaye, 12 attention, poster’s attracting, 10, 41, 46, 61, 63, 65, 103, 118, 178, 179, 181, 183, 185, audiences, poster, 198–99, 214, 258 aura of artwork, 142; diminishing, 27, 28, 29, 141, 147 auratic artwork and print, 29, 32, 69, 142, 163, 168, 266 auratization, 28, 148, 159, 167, 266 Austen, Alice, 12–13 avant-garde, 51, 72, 76, 94 Avril, Jane, 22, 104, 31, 81, 82, 83–95, 120, 121 badaud, 260 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 26–27, 177, 211, 229, 241, 242, 299, 353n12 Bann, Stephen, 27, 147–48, 248, 358n8 Bargiel, Réjane, 25, 151, 220, 305n34, 308n79 Barthes, Roland, 212 Baudelaire, Charles, 135, 294–95, 299 Beardsley, Aubrey, 2, 42–43, 47–48, 54, 65–66, 76, 77, 192, 235–36, 253, 255, 292; painting versus the poster, 42; posters by, 41, 54, 65–66, 76, 235–36 Beggarstaff Brothers, 2, 7, 41, 48, 62, 63, 65, 76, 177, 183–84, 239, 304n14, 318n118, 129; style and technique, 62–65 Belgium, Belgian 2, 18, 24, 30, 81, 98, 99, 134, 146 Bella, Edward, 18 belle épreuve, 158, 328n69 Benjamin, Walter, 26, 27–29, 128, 138, 141– 42, 147, 148, 163, 168, 164, 165, 167, 178, 194, 242–43, 248, 298, 311n96, 368n142 Beraldi, Henri, 23–24, 50, 72, 73, 91, 134–35, 145, 161, 265, 266, 269, 296; on collecting, 155, 268; on collectors, 158; and history of prints, 23, 91, 297, 302, 311n106; on Maindron, 287, 291; on myth of “museum of 398  · Index

the street,” 175–76; on writing history, 296, 299 Bernhard, Lucian, 239–41 Bernhardt, Sarah, 22, 46, 183, 205, 273 bibliophiles, 122, 135, 155, 188, 250, 253, 265, 268, 298 Bibliothèque nationale, 94, 160, 263, 296, 311n106, 339n31 bicycle, 52, 82, 179, 274, 282, 285, 306n44 billboards, 4, 17, 174, 181, 208, 250, 322n199. See also hoardings bill posting, 2–4, 17, 201 bill sticker, 4, 17, 23, 253, 300 Bing, Siegfried, 120–21 Boilly, Léopold, 80 Bonnard, Pierre, 6, 25, 27, 39, 52, 53, 76, 128, 141, 292, 299; designing posters, 51, 268; L’Estampe et l’Affiche (poster), 128–30; France-Champagne, 43–44, 48–49, 51, 55–56, 57, 133, 316n71; influence of, 45, 56, 57, 315n71; posters by, 40, 41, 252 book posters, 220–22, 227, 354n44, 355n52, 364n55 Bottini, Georges Alfred, 101–2 Bouchot, Henri, 94, 236, 356n82 Bourdieu, Pierre, 26, 28–29, 112, 165, 167, 168–69, 190, 191, 203, 307n68; on aesthetic gaze, 117–18, 148, 162, 163, 164; on consecration, 28, 29, 117, 143, 148, 157 Bradley, Will H., 232, 343n5 brands, 224, 226, 229, 230, 234, 239–40, 276, 277, 282 Braun, Roger, 362n8, 368n138 Britain, British, 2, 54, 68, 130, 131, 134, 146, 173, 179, 205, 222, 224, 252; design discourse, 207; differences between advertisers and artists, 202–5; poster critics, 174, 176, 179, 182, 183, 185, 187, 189, 190, 223, 225, 249; and poster design, 182, 190, 224, 212; poster designers, 9, 18, 48, 65, 173, 179, 202, 212, 206, 226, 255 Bruant, Aristide, 22, 69, 89, 198, 199, 205, 260, 320n154 Brussels, 18, 27, 70, 98, 306, 328n73

Buhot, Félix, 30, 311n106, 341n80 Bunner, H. C., 182, 192 Burty, Philippe, 135, 136 Campbell, Colin, 62–63 cancan, 46, 85, 86, 89, 188, 325n20 Cappiello, Leonetto, 206, 238, 308n77 caricatures, 10, 11, 80, 117, 134, 165, 253–55, 265, 296, 297, 319n146, 356n80; of new woman, 165, 277, 282; political, 68, 265, 291 Carrier-Belleuse, Louis Robert, 194, 195, 196, 201 Carter, Karen L., 26 Cassatt, Mary, 109, 110, 121, 161, 319n40, 329n97, 331n130 catalogs, exhibition, 25, 28, 42–43, 311n95 Cate, Phillip Dennis, 25, 40, 66, 83, 131, 136–37, 141, 309n81, 319n143 Cazals, Frédéric-Auguste, 114, 288, 297 Chaix, imprimerie, 17, 52, 145–46, 148, 149–53, 154, 167, 214; heads of firm 149, 150, 151, 167. Champier, Victor, 152, 186–87, 191, 250 Chapin, Mary Weaver, 25, 26, 83, 325n15 Charlet, Nicholas, 103, 219 Chéret, Jules, 2, 24, 44, 49, 52–53, 56, 58, 261–62, 77, 94, 151, 156, 161, 175, 181 194, 230–31, 252, 272, 274, 292, 308n79, 319n143, 344n19; critics on, 2, 6, 52, 59– 62, 72, 151, 156, 187–88, 213, 242, 261, 272; and image and word, 228–30, 356n77; influence on color art print, 137; and letters, 214, 230–32, 234–35; lithographic posters of, 2, 29, 41, 218; and Manet, 66, 195–96; number of posters, 52, 316n75; own print shop and Chaix, 17, 52, 150, 213–14; portrait of Maindron, 288–90, 366n99; in poster history, 2, 6, 9, 17–18, 23, 49, 52–53, 57, 72, 75, 77, 137, 151; Théâtre de l’opéra . . . , 60; training, 51, 214, 339n38; and transforming commercial poster into artistic poster, 6, 52–53, 66, 151–52, 279; on viewing posters,

156; and wall decorations, 152. See also chérette; Maîtres de l’Affiche chérette, 25, 45, 56–57, 60, 62, 187, 230, 261 children, 191, 194, 235, 258, 260, 261, 274, 279, 281, 286 Choubrac, Léon and Alfred, 292 Christin, Anne-Marie, 210, 220 chromo, 79, 140, 323n1 chromolithographs, 119, 130, 139, 162, 337n77 cigarettes, 13, 204, 278, 279, 282; paper, 277 cinema. See film city views: affected by posters, 10–12, 11, 226, 254–55 Clarke, Joseph Thacher, 62, 269, 270 class, 256, 258; distinction, 22, 29, 163, 168, 189, 196, 197, 278; targeting, 201, See also middle class; working class classification, 108, 160, 264, 291–92; of posters, 72, 291, 296; system, 25, 291 collecting, 82, 102, 131, 157, 165, 167, 192; and archaeology of modernity, 294–99; by peeling off walls, 134, 272, 300, 301; posters, 22, 149, 151, 256, 263–302. See also museum collections: 157, 158; poster, 287, 296, 368n138 collectors, 163–64, 128, 130, 166, 167, 176, 299, 266–67, 294, 302; American, 120, 121, 268–69; English, 268; exchange among, 158, 267–68; new type, 94, 118, 294; practices of, 23, 34, 108, 111–12, 134, 167, 266, 297; of prints, 131, 158, 268, 296, 298; women, 79, 108, 112, 122. See also connoisseurs; middle class collectors, poster, 13, 15, 22–23, 28, 48, 49, 294; numbers of, 132, 268, 269; writing history of poster, 22–23, 276, 286. See also connoisseurs; iconophile; Maindron, Ernest Collins, Bradford R., 25, 220, 322n184 Collins, Wilkie, 22, 222, 224 color, 6, 10, 12, 50, 52, 53, 55, 58, 60, 65, 63, 65, 71, 99, 140, 141, 181, 184, 216, 218, 219, 259 Index  ‡ 399

color lithographic art prints, 2, 21, 72, 73, 93, 130, 131–32, 161; status, 82, 83, 95, 130, 131 color lithography, 2, 6, 21, 49–50, 72, 73, 75, 93, 120, 128, 130, 161, 220; and Lautrec, 59, 81; medium for original work, 82, 83, 119, 131–32, 137–39, 141–42; and posters, 2, 131, 122 commercial art, 174, 207–8, 306n44, 343n5 commercial posters, 9–12, 52, 53, 253–54, 279, 280, 301; distinct from artistic poster, 6–7, 13; England, 7, 9–10, 12, 13, 253, 255; United States, 12; vulgar, 9, 10, 158, 176, 225, 254, 286 commissioners of posters, 22, 42, 48, 52, 88– 89, 95, 113, 128, 132, 134, 178, 222, 313n22 commodification, 17, 176, 200, 254–55 communication, 159, 208, 211, 217, 220, 229, 239, 249, 274; with broad public, 43, 189; and images, 214, 256; political, 292, 293; visual, 35, 211–12, 259; word-based, 216 (see also typographic poster) connoisseurs, 22, 48, 90, 94, 111–12, 117, 118, 119, 121, 145, 267, 279; female, 31–32, 79– 84, 85–117, 118, 119, 120, 121–23, 328n69, 329n99, 330n104; gaze of, 109, 112, 117, 118, 129; male, 80, 81, 82, 83, 93, 109, 110–12, 114, 288, 290. See also Daumier, Honoré consecration of art, 27, 28, 29–30, 118, 143, 148, 160, 163 consumer(s), 6, 58, 82, 267, 273, 279–80, 282, 285; culture, 286, 365n78 ; depiction of pleasure of, 207, 273; economy, 266; female, 82, 91, 97, 187, 279–80, 281, 282; goods, 273; male, 98, 282; pleasures, 207, 273 consumption, 17, 273, 344n12 contemplation, 29, 91, 100, 114, 117, 165, 290 copies, 27, 29, 32, 137, 138, 139, 145, 161, 162, 168–69, 226, 260, 308 Coquiot, Gustave, 49, 61–62 Courbet, Gustave, 42, 121, 275–76 Courrier Français, Le, 175, 250 400  · Index

covers, 33, 68, 194, 224–25, 226, 265, 303n2; illustrated book and magazine, 2, 33, 74, 198, 208, 249, 251–53, 265, 303n2; of journals, 33, 198, 208, 252–53, 288 Crauzat, Ernest de, 208 credit, buying on, 279–80 Crespin, Adolphe, 282 critics and commentators, 7, 13, 15, 17, 21, 27, 28, 33, 59–60, 69–70, 72, 76, 127, 142–43, 173–74, 87, 104, 182, 190, 215, 243, 248, 256, 261, 268, 359n49; and Bonnard, 44; British, 7, 33, 10, 50, 62, 63–65, 174, 176, 182–85, 189, 205; and Chéret, 2, 6, 52, 151, 261–62; differences between British and French, 182–89; French, 33, 62, 179, 185– 89; German, 50; on images, 248, 249, 250, 256, 258; progressive, 119, 120, 142 Critique, La, 21, 156, 191, 259, 269, 287 Crow, Thomas, 76, 322n97 crowd, 117, 165, 187, 190, 191, 197, 200, 258, 259, 260, 261 266; culture, 13–22; high and low, 24, 25, 41, 50, 55, 68, 69, 70, 72, 75–76, 124, 139, 147, 198, 199, 265; of spectacle, 2, 17, 248. See also image-centered culture curators, 22–23, 25, 264 Czech posters, 146, 273 d’Alési, Hugo, 103–5 D’Avenel, Georges, 18, 247, 259 Daumier, Honoré, 50, 80, 81, 83, 90, 92, 94, 96, 106, 110, 117, 165, 288, 290, 292, 329n93, 366n108, 368n157; representation of male print collector, 81, 90, 95, 97, 107–8, 288, 290 Day, Lewis, F., 156, 189, 204, 207 dealers, 20, 21, 23, 95, 97, 120, 132, 266, 268, 299. See also Sagot, Edmond decorative arts, 30, 72, 73–74, 120, 135, 149, 157, 169, 170, 173, 174, 191 Degas, Edgar, 52, 53, 77, 94, 95, 106–9, 110, 327n53, 329n93, 329n97, 330n99 Delacroix, Eugène, 39, 94, 96, 220 Delvau, Alfred, 293, 298

democratization, 137, 191, 192, 272, 296; of art, viewing, and collecting, 31, 35, 72, 73, 118–19, 121, 122, 168, 322n184; of public space, 175, 200 Denis, Maurice, 133, 253, 334n33 department stores, 97, 120, 179, 218, 274, 280, 281, 328n70; posters for, 12, 179, 218, 274, 280, 281, 328n70 Deschamps, Léon, 112, 330n108 design, of color print original, 83, 90, 94, 119, 136, 135, 168, 182, 323n1 design, of poster, 43, 51, 173, 174, 181, 182, 188, 212, 239, 344nn11–12; and advertisers, 202–8; modernist, 2, 6, 7, 31, 35, 39, 40, 49, 51–66, 239 (see also aesthetic(s): modernist in the poster); and new speech type, 177, 189; original, 29; for the street, 178–89. See also image-centered culture; letters and lettering; image: relationship with word Dessoliers, Constant, 176, 294, 296 Devéria, Achille, 152, 219 dialogism, dialogic, 26, 33, 139, 169, 177, 208, 239, 240, 357n91; relationship of  image and word, 209–43. See also image: relationship with word Didot-Bottin annuaire, 150, 296, 303n5 discourses, 84, 117–23, 121, 162, 256; advertising, 149, 207, 301; design, 33, 174, 178, 207; modernist, 53, 54, 61, 71, 72, 77; written and visual 32, 82, 84, 121–23 display, 108, 114, 121, 163, 174, 250, 258, 298, 299; of posters, 12, 17, 23, 155, 156, 159, 176, 178, 179, 182–83, 185, 194, 195, 216, 220, 224, 300, 344n11; of prints, 79, 155, 257, 265. See also street Doucet, Jerôme, 46–47 Duchesne Aîné, Jean, 263–64, 361n1 effectiveness of posters on streets, 41, 47– 48, 54, 65, 71, 175, 178, 179, 181, 182, 183, 185, 186, 203, 205, 235 election posters, 17, 301 Englemann, Godefroy, 130

engravings, 98, 134, 266, 267, 296, 362n6; halftone, 130, 248 entertainment, promoted in posters, 47– 48, 65, 179, 181, 183–94, 196, 197, 198, 205. See also Moulin Rouge ephemerality: archaeology of modernity, 128, 142, 263–302, 294–99; posters,’ 5, 22, 41, 50, 118, 120, 160, 194, 293 Estampe et l’Affiche, L’, 21, 136, 159, 160, 208, 341n83; poster, 128 Estampe Originale, L’, 83, 94–95, 135, 136, 149, 331n51; earlier incarnation, 134, 334n35; Lautrec cover, 81, 84, 96, 98; prefaces to, 135, 153; subscribers, 119, 134 exhibitions, 7, 18–20, 28, 70, 102, 103, 106, 151, 213, 237, 306n50, 311n95, 365n84; catalogs, 43, 62, 322n199; display in, 19–20; posters promoting, 117, 120, 330n108; Reims, 18, 70, 311n95, 365n84; Salon, 117, 127, 151, 157, 159, 164, 165, 175, 272; Westminster Aquarium (London), 7, 8, 9, 18, 19, 20, 22, 43, 70, 71, 311n24. See also “Salon of the street” experimentation, poster as site of, 40, 55, 62, 208, 237, 299 Exposition universelle: Histoire résumée de l’affiche française, 157, 287, 294 eye, 12, 84, 204, 205; 219, 261; catching, 12, 179, 181, 182, 206, 221, 257; immediate impression, 179, 183, 191 facsimile. See copies Faivre, Abel, 281 fashions, 12, 85, 274, 277, 282, 285–86 Fau, Fernand, 114 Fénéon, Félix, 41, 42, 43, 59, 60, 88, 169, 272, 317n99 Feure, Georges, de, 99–100, 334n33 film, 2, 34, 128, 157, 178, 248–48, 301–2; archives, 300, 301, 369n160, 369n162. See also Benjamin, Walter Fischer, Otto, 105–6 flâneur, 66, 103, 104, 178, 260, 262 Fournel, Victor, 216, 259, 260 Index  ‡ 401

frames, 42, 43, 330n110 France, French, 2–4, 12, 17, 18, 21, 24, 26, 27, 30, 31, 68, 74, 81, 158, 175, 179, 182, 186, 189, 191, 194, 205, 215–16, 264, 295; advertising in, 201, 251; collecting posters in, 268–69; color print in, 128, 130, 131; images in print media, 253; mass culture, 249; poster designers, 179, 203, 212 Franklin, Alfred, 215 Frèches-Thory, Claire, 83, 325n15 freedom of the press law (France, 1881), 17, 150, 201, 306n46 Frey, Julia, 83 Furniss, Harry, 10–11 Fustier, Gustave, 269, 296, 364n55 galleries, 19, 28, 30, 41, 42, 79, 81, 92, 114, 117, 120, 330n110, 336n36; and modernity, 98–99; of posters and prints, 21, 28, 101. See also Sagot, Edmond; Salon des Cent Gallo, Max, 26, 301 Garnier, Charles, 11, 12, 305–6n40 Gauguin, Paul, 52, 53, 109, 334n33 Gavarni, Paul, 50, 110, 219, 292 gaze, the, 96, 100, 117, 129, 163, 197, 198, 215, 259; aesthetic, 26, 28, 29, 105, 107, 114, 117, 122, 148, 162, 163–66, 167–68, 297; collector’s and connoisseur’s, 117, 118, 129, 165, 166; contemplative, 102, 114, 117, 163, 165, 167, 178; distracted, 91, 166; of passersby, 46, 165, 166, 176, 179, 201 Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 11, 21 Geffroy, Gustave, 41–42, 52–53, 152, 272 gender(s), 93, 98, 105, 120, 121, 122, 128, 197, 199–200, 201, 256, 278, 286, 296; of collectors, 96, 120, 121; mixed, 34, 102, 197, 260 Germany, German, 2, 81, 131, 146, 197, 239, 292 Goldwater, Robert, 25, 40, 75 Goncourt, Edmond de, 6, 120, 151 Gottlob, Fernand, 106–7 Goulue, La, 46, 52, 85–86, 87, 88, 89, 234, 315n56 402  · Index

Grand-Carteret, John, 215, 259 graphic design, 1, 2, 6, 24–25, 72, 173, 174, 207, 220, 238, 299, 307n59; history, 24– 25, 40, 77, 174, 308n76; and the image, 210; and the street, 177 Grasset, Eugène, 2, 6, 7, 24, 62, 96, 208, 236, 252, 281 Greenberg, Clement, 24, 27, 75, 76, 138 Greiffenhagen, Maurice, 253, 303n2 Guilbert, Yvette, 88, 89, 205, 271, 326n40, 342n127 Guys, Constantin, 294–95 Hahn, J. Hazel, 26 Hardy, Dudley, 2, 43, 54, 176, 177, 179, 181, 185, 189–190, 206, 207, 212, 252, 255, 346n49 Harper’s Magazine, 271 Hassall, John, 203–4, 252, 253 Havemeyer, Louisine W., 108, 121, 331n130, 332n131 Henriot, Alexandre, 18 Herbert, Robert, 25, 40, 75, 356n80 Hewitt, John, 206, 207–8, 308n77, 350n152 Hiatt, Charles, 7, 72, 130–31, 155, 156, 179, 190, 250, 255, 269, 271–72; on Beardsley, 47–48, 65–66; on Beggarstaff Brothers, 62, 183–85; on Chéret, 61, 62, 151; and criteria for successful poster, 182–83; and posters as advertising, 39–40, 225; on posters in London, 176–77; Picture Posters, 24 hierarchy of the arts, 74, 120; struggle to eliminate, 72–73, 135, 157, 169, 186 historians, 26, 295, 301; of art, 25, 39; of design, 239, 343n8; and everyday images, 295; of future, 34, 262, 269, 270, 271, 276, 286, 295, 299, 301, 364n54; of posters, 3, 21, 103, 157, 213, 287, 294, 301; of prints, 145 (see also Beraldi, Henri); of visual culture, 148 history: cultural history, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 295; and ephemeral images, 300, 301; of everyday life, 270–71, 286; of poster,

22–25, 26, 145, 263, 264; writing, 295, 298, 301; written in the street, 293 hoardings, 17, 19, 41, 166, 176, 178, 181, 184– 85, 201, 205, 220, 224, 226, 250, 265, 298; London, 7, 10, 13, 47, 156, 176, 177, 205, 216, 222, 253, 255 Hommes d’Aujourd’ hui, Les, 287, 288, 290, 291 Huysmans, J.-K., 72, 77, 87, 151, 218, 250, 272 hybrid, hybridization, 22, 26, 31, 54, 55, 69, 169, 210, 211, 234, 241, 353n12 Ibels, Henri-Gabriel, 94, 334n33 icon, 56, 122, 219, 221, 241, 259, 264, 230. See also image iconography, modern, 52, 82, 272–86. See also connoisseurs iconophile, 22, 142, 256, 262, 263–302, 362n8; arch-, 34, 287–88, 296, 297, 298, 299; legacy, 299–302; neo-, 266, 267; 362n6; iconophilia, 22, 256 iconophobia, 22, 73, 247, 249, 256–59, 260, 359n49 image, 256, 257, 260, 261; accessible (see accessibility, of posters and prints); assault of, 262; bypassing reason, 252, 257; double language of letters and, 211, 229, 236, 241; in everyday life, 34, 234, 248, 264, 249–55, 256, 295, 300; fear of, 257–58; printed, 34, 35, 249, 250, 261, 264; relationship with word, 210, 211, 212, 220, 227–28, 230, 233, 234–35, 241, 242, 253, 353n7 image-centered culture, 243, 249, 256, 258, 260, 264; advertising, 22, 178, 209, 247; poster and poster design, 2, 22, 33, 178, 209, 215–27, 247, 249, 259, 260, 261 Impressionism, 42, 66, 70, 77, 97, 118, 121, 160, 275, 276, 332n131 innovation, poster, 2, 7, 26, 44, 54, 58, 60, 63, 64–65, 76–77, 207, 209–10, 221–22; Chéret, 52, 151, 228, 252; and color lithography, 50, 75

interiors, 22, 28, 91, 92, 97, 130, 193, 290; and display of posters, 101, 105, 129, 134, 156, 177 international scope of poster, 2, 4, 24, 30, 146, 211 Ireson, Nancy, 83, 325n15, 325n21 Ives, Colta, 51, 53 Japan, 18, 24. See also prints: Japanese Johannot, Tony, 219, 220, 228 Jossot, Henri-Gustave, 114, 215 Jourdain, Francis, 44, 45 Journal des Artistes, 83 Journal des Arts, 311n106, 341n81 journals, 132, 251, 252, 268–69 Joy, George William, 193–94 Kahn, Albert, 301, 369n162 Kahn, Gustave, 152 Kiehl, David W., 25 Krauss, Rosalind, 256 Kuenzli, Katherine M., 25, 40, 312n1 Le Bon, Gustave, 191, 258–59 Le Chevalier, Armand, 292, 293, 367nn113–14 Lefevre, Lucien, 281 Leibig Extract, 206 Leloir, Maurice, 91–93 Le Men, Ségolène, 25, 151, 220, 355n52 Lepère, Auguste, 134 Lépine (poster collector), 296, letters and lettering, 88, 101, 103, 107, 184, 185, 210, 212–13, 221, 237; harmoniza­tion with illustration, 214, 356n77; and images, 231; iteration copy, 233; letter design, 212, 214, 230; lettered, 253 256, 259; typographic, 212, 214 221, 253 Levin, Miriam R., 26, 200, 257, 258 Lévy, Jules, 251–52 Liesville, Alfred de, 295–96 lithography, 2, 29, 43, 72, 122, 131, 182, 253, 254, 333n7; as medium for original art, 50, 51, 119, 127, 137, 139, 141, 142, 161, 162, Index  ‡ 403

lithography (continued) 168, 323n1; as reproductive, 29, 50, 130, 136, 138, 168, 337n77. See also color lithography Livre Moderne, Le, 21, 267 London, 47, 54, 70, 89, 193, 201, 202, 205, 216, 222, 226, 248; and advertising, 206, 219; critics in, 176–77, 182, 253–55; posters in, 66, 71; streets, 178, 190 Lunel, Ferdinand, 273–74 Lunois, Alexandre, 94, 95, 96–97, 327n62 Madaré, Julian, 214 Maindron, Ernest, 3, 45, 59–60, 191, 269, 287–93, 296, 299, 308n74, 367n114; archivist, 287, 288, 291, 294; collector, 176, 287–88, 291–94, 296, 300, 368n157; and history of poster, 23, 145, 157, 215, 297, 302; portrayal by Chéret, 288–90, 366n99 Maîtres de l’Affiche, 105, 145–53, 151, 338n26, 166; auratizing, 154–62 Manet, Edouard, 42, 66, 68, 121, 196, 221– 22, 295, 319n143. See also Polichinelle “man on the street,” 40, 179, 189–92, 272 Marchand, Roland, 301 Margolin, Victor, 357n91 marketing, 97, 206, 341n95 Marty, André, 83, 96, 119, 134, 135, 149, 335n42, 335n47 Marx, Roger, 30, 72, 73, 82–83, 127, 128, 141, 157, 161, 168, 175, 269, 294, 296, 302; challenging hierarchy of the arts, 72–73, 120, 136–37, 157, 169; collector, 30, 93, 296, 341n89; and poster museum, 159–60, 300; prefaces by, 118–19, 134, 135–36, 153, 156–58, 159; support of modern print as art, 73, 127, 135, 157–58 masculine, masculinity, 33, 187, 258, 260, 261, 282 mass culture, 2, 18, 24, 27, 41, 76, 122, 249, 299, 322n197, 322n199, 331n128. See also culture: high and low masses, the, 29, 68, 69, 128, 141, 163, 167, 404  · Index

189, 190, 191, 192, 257, 259; in salon, 117, 165 mass media 117, 139, 141, 142, 147, 164, 165, 167, 249, 256, 264 Matthews, Brander, 72, 74 Maurin, Charles, 70, 137–38, 334n33 McClellan, Andrew, 111–12 media, print, 135, 142, 168, 211, 248, 251, 265, 267, 294, 298, 301; collecting, 267, 291; images, 249, 253, 256, 264, 294, 295 medium specificity, 32, 75, 136–43 Meier-Graefe, Julius, 131, 163 Mellerio, André, 49, 54, 59, 72, 90, 95, 119, 120–22, 128, 136, 157, 161, 168, 268, 302; and equality of the arts, 72, 136–37; and lithographic color posters and prints, 72, 127, 128, 135, 136–40. See also medium specificity Melot, Michel, 94, 118, 119, 135, 160–61, 338n13, 341n95 men, 80, 82, 98, 282, 285 Mermet, Émile, 216, 218, 219, 251 middle class, 6, 20, 46, 66, 97, 104, 118, 168, 189, 190, 198, 279; collecting art prints, 79, 109, 118, 165, 294; collecting posters, 31, 79, 118; upper, 96, 97, 117, 197, 198, 201, 277, 282. See also connoisseurs; iconophile Millais, John Everett: Bubbles, Pears’ Soap, 68–69, 194, 224–25, 226 Millet, Jean-François, 160, 341n95 minor arts, 27, 72, 73, 74, 120, 149, 170, 174, 331n128, 343n5 Mirbeau, Octave, 44 Mirliton, Le, 198, 201 Misti (Ferdinand Milifiez), 282, 285 Mitchell, W. J. T., 248, 256, 358n4 mobile poster displays, 179, 218, 250, 257 modeling, elimination of, 42, 45, 53, 56, 106, 190 modernism(s), 25, 26, 27, 40–64, 71; historical, 27, 31, 34, 71–77; twentieth-century American, 24, 27, 31, 71, 75; two modernist narratives, 24–27, 41, 71–77; and

public, 189, 190. See also design, of poster: modernist modernity, 98–99, 135, 248, 256, 269; posters as ephemeral archaeology of, 263–302; representation of, 41, 60, 66, 77, 272–86 monochromatic posters, 130, 133, 219, 220, 279 Montmartre, 87, 198, 199, 221, 252 Moréas, Jean, 87, 114, 288 Morris, William, 73, 74, 190, 191, 214 Morris columns, 41, 193, 250 Moser, Koloman, 236 Moulin Rouge, 2, 53, 56, 70, 87, 89, 261; poster, 45, 49, 51, 52 53 56, 70, 86, 233–34 Mourey, Gabriel, 256–57 Mucha, Alphonse, 2, 6, 43, 102, 183, 185, 205, 249, 265, 271, 278, 292; posters by, 46–47, 183, 220, 278, 365n84 Muhlfeld, Lucien, 215, 259 Murray, Gale B., 53 museum, 25, 28, 29, 95, 160, 298; collecting posters, 6, 23, 30, 131, 304n13, 311n107; of modern poster, 30, 159–60, 311n106, 341n83; of people and street, 33, 159, 175, 176, 191 Mystère de Paris (com. poster), 7 Nabis, the, 25, 40, 52 Natanson, Thadée, 51, 59, 61, 316n71 new media, 30, 128, 142 newspapers, 68, 69, 174, 179, 210, 233, 235, 248, 249, 271, 273, 296 new woman, 105–6, 122, 277, 281, 282, 285–86 New York, 72, 182, 193 Nogressau, Henry, 266, 267–68, 297, 363n36 Oliva, Viktor, 273 original: dichotomy of copy and, 148; multiple, 2, 136–38, 142, 169; singular, 138, 142 Oury, Léon Louis, 197

Pan (journal), 21, 105, 131, 249 Paris, 2, 11, 72, 182, 226–27, 253 Parrish, Maxfield, 75 Parry, Orlando, 216, 222 Parshall, Peter, 165, 328n69 passersby, 33, 46, 165, 166, 176, 179, 188, 196, 201, 216 Pears’ soap, 69, 194, 224, 226 Pellet, Gustave, 21, 307n61 Penfield, Edward, 271, 282 Pennell, Joseph, 9–10, 226, 334n33 photographs, posters represented in, 12–13, 19, 20, 69, 177, 179, 181, 192, 194, 199 photography, 27, 29, 128, 130, 141, 147, 148, 164, 168, 178, 248; archives, 300, 301, 369n162; non-auratic, 138, 142, 148, 167; and photogravure, 50 Pissarro, Camille, 50, 70, 75, 95, 109, 130, 161, 319n40 Plakat, Das (Berlin), 21, 307n59 Plume, La, 21, 112–14, 288, 262, 330n108. See also Salon des Cent Pochet-Deroches, Georges, 296, 368n138 Polichinelle, 66, 68, 319nn143–44 political posters, 17, 301, 201, 291–93, 296, 298, 301; commune, 292–93, 294, 367n114; pollution, 9, 10, 42, 155, 181, 185, 202 portfolios, 99, 117, 119, 132, 133, 134, 145, 155, 294, 307n61, 330n108, 334n38; in depictions, 79, 92, 93, 95, 97, 102, 106–8, 109, 128, 288, 290, 329; and L’Estampe Originale, 81, 83, 93, 94, 96, 119, 134, 135, 153, 334nn 35–36, 334n38; original prints for, 21, 94, 96, 132, 134, 135, 166, 169; posters promoting print portfolios, 99, 117, 133; print, 21, 31, 93, 94, 108, 117, 120, 132–34, 155, 165, 166, 169; Vollard’s, 21, 94, 132, 133, 149, 334n30 Poster, The (England), 13, 21, 173, 176, 182, 190, 204, 205, 206, 252, 255 Poster, The (U.S.), 21 Poster and Art Collector, 54, 182 Poster Lore (U.S.), 21 Index  ‡ 405

preservation, 155–56, 158, 159, 294 press, 272; advertising in, 98, 204, 208, 226, 233, 352n188 prices: of Maîtres de l’Affiche, 146–47; of posters, 118, 315n55, 331n118; of print portfolios, 119, 134, 334n38; of prints, 49, 73, 79, 118, 119, 121 print collectors, 93, 94, 96, 117–23, 165, 294; depiction of, 92–93, 96, 97, 98, 101, 102, 105, 107–8, 109, 119–20, 266, 297; female, 79–80, 81, 82–95, 96, 102, 120, 121, 296; male, 93, 296. See also connoisseurs; Daumier, Honoré printers, 12, 22, 23, 29, 50, 51, 52, 84, 132, 151, 153, 195, 199, 212, 222, 249, 300 printing: lithographic method of, 51, 210 print media graphics, 22, 49, 250, 265, 268, 288, 292, 295, 364n54 print runs, 23, 43, 68, 89, 137, 161, 319n147, 320n165, 326n37, 342n98; limited editions, 70, 133, 134, 142, 160–61, 168, 308n74 prints: avant-garde art, 95, 264; black-andwhite, 24, 66, 71, 98, 104, 107, 129, 130, 148, 266, 329; color fine art, 2, 21, 72, 73, 82, 83, 93, 95, 128, 130, 131–32, 161, 166; everyday, 264, 288; Japanese, 6, 20, 44, 53–54, 56–57, 109, 120–21, 131; ubiquity in daily life, 265 Privat-Livemont, Henri, 161 product, products, 82, 105, 179, 196, 274, 277, 285, 286, 352n88; identity, 205, 206, 226; name, 228, 238; promoted, 43, 58, 65, 201, 206, 209, 226, 231, 238, 260, 273, 279–81, 282, 286, 287, 306n44, 346n55. See also brands and brand names public, 114; communicating directly with broad, 50, 65–66, 117 publicité. See advertising Punch, 10, 253–54 Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre, 18, 102, 185, 328nn79–80, 329n81, 334n33 Raffet, Auguste, 219 railway stations, 219, 226 406  · Index

Rancière, Jacques, 26, 27, 31, 71, 72, 75 Rassenfosse, Armand, 2, 113, 114 realistic posters, 7, 13, 190, 204, 235, 279 reception, 26, 47, 149, 163, 165, 166, 167, 169, 174, 192, 239, 242–43, 256, 260. See also critics and commentators Rehm, Fritz, 279 reissued posters, 21, 30, 32, 105, 132, 148, 167, 185 Rennert, Jack, 238, 308n77, 338n23, 338n25 reproductions, 17, 27, 28, 29, 130, 141, 142, 148, 161, 167, 191, 269; chromolithographic, 127, 140 168; color, 68, 139, 148, 155; lithographic, 95, 139, 142, 224, 337n77; mass, 169, 249 repurposing of prints, 29, 148–49, 154, 155, 159, 160, 167 Revue, La, 341n93 Revue des Arts Décoratifs, 186 Revue Blanche, La, 51, 112, 339n240 Revue des Deux Mondes, 187, 260 Revue Illustrée, 46 Revue des Revues, 21 Robins-Pennell, Elizabeth, 201–2 Rogers, William S., 65, 130, 173, 181, 185, 190, 191–92, 204, 207, 213, 269, 270; and poster design, 24, 185, 212 Roller, Alfred, 236 Rouchon, Jean-Alexis, 12, 227, 228, 305n38, 305n40, 356n76 Royal Academy, 130, 173, 224, 349n129 Ruskin, John, 74, 321n179 Rysselberghe, Théo van, 97, 274, 328n73, 334n33 Sachplakat, 239–40, 241 Sachs, Hans, 21, 269, 331n104, 364n54 sandwich men, 179, 218, 250, 257 Sagot, Edmond, 19, 21, 95–97, 132, 157, 167, 268, 331n118; gallery, 101–2, 118, 268 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 275 Salon des Cent, 112–13, 114, 117, 288, 330n105, 330n108 “Salon of the street,” 175, 194, 199, 201

Saunier, Charles, 152, 156 scale, 155–56; of posters, 105, 130, 134–35, 145, 155, 166, 169, 216, 219, 222–23, 226, 227, 272; of prints, 28, 101, 155, 166 Schwartz, Vanessa R., 71, 248, 298 Scott, Walter Dill, 194 Scribner’s Magazine, 10, 21, 182, 189, 251 seduction of the poster, 6, 17, 187–88, 189, 216, 259, 260, 272 Ségard, Achille, 152 Sénard, Charles, 282 Senefelder, Alois, 130 Seurat, Georges, 75, 77, 276 sheet music, 33, 249, 251, 252 sizes, poster, 45, 96, 113, 155, 169, 200, 328n66, 330n108 soap, 9, 202, 224, 226, 273. See also brands; Pears’ soap “social art,” 72–73 Société belge des affichophiles (Antwerp), 20 solicitation, 17, 188, 259 Sontag, Susan, 40 space: civic, 10, 17, 255; flat or twodimensional, 6, 44, 55, 56; interior, 22, 91, 92, 101, 129, 156; and poster display, 4, 175, 201, 250; public, 10, 11, 12, 17, 18, 22, 91, 107, 112, 164, 175, 200, 201, 250, 290, 300; semiprivate, 330n110; urban, 17, 42, 54, 55, 65, 164, 199, 216, 218, 261, 264, 199 spectacle, 85, 105, 114, 122, 243, 249, 250; culture of, 17, 33, 34, 248; genealogy of, 2, 33, 34, 248; “under the influence of,” 34, 259–62; of poster on the street, 152, 176; and the street, 176, 178 speech type, 33, 177, 189 Spielmann, Marion Harry, 10, 66, 176, 189, 223, 224, 225, 226, 305n24, 355n59, 355n61 Sponsel, Jean Louis, 24, 103 sports, 122, 271, 281, 283 Steinlen, Théophile-Alexandre, 2, 161, 198, 199–200, 201, 205, 220, 252

Straus, Émile, 156, 191, 215, 259, 269, 287 street, the, 7, 17, 54, 63, 173–202, 207; and display of posters, 9–10, 12, 18, 22, 33, 41, 42–43, 50, 54, 55, 69, 113, 129, 158, 159, 175, 201, 208; London, 176; as spectacle, 176, 178; “speech type,” 33, 189; visual representations of posters on, 192–202. See also “Salon of the Street” Studio, 21 studios, 52, 85, 92, 195, 290, 299, 300, 328n69, 329n99 Symons, Arthur, 84–85, 249 Talmeyr, Maurice, 4–6, 21, 155, 187–88, 260–61, 269, 279 Tamagno, Francisco, 234, 273 taste, 12, 31 95, 100, 119, 125, 158, 192, 249, 261, 267, 268; of advertisers, 7, 203; avantgarde, 89, 93; of print collectors, 93, 95, 119, 122, 130, 158, 163; public 190, 203; uncultivated, 9, 10, 176; working and middle classes, 176, 189, 192, 249 technologies, new, 2, 25, 82, 119, 274 telephone, 82, 99, 274 terms for field in which poster participated, 173–74, 343n5 theatrical poster, 181, 190, 193, 204–6, 222, 296 Thiriet, Henri, 274 Thomson, Ellen Mazur, 308n76 Thomson, Richard, 25, 59, 342n111 Timmerman, Aegidus Willem, 163–64 Timmers, Margaret, 25 Toorop, Jan: The Print Amateur, 163, 166 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 6, 24, 25, 26, 27, 43, 51, 52, 53, 58–62, 70, 94, 98, 99, 131, 141, 161, 163, 198–99, 233, 292, 299, 320n154, 342n127; At the Moulin Rouge: La Goulue, 51, 52, 53, 61, 70; At the Moulin Rouge: La Goulue and Her Sister (art print), 49, 70; and Avril, 81–95, 326n35, 326n37; and Bonnard, 45, 51, 53; and Bruant, 205, 250, 260; and Chéret, 2; consulting Marx, 82–93; cover of L’Estampe Index  ‡ 407

Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de (continued) Originale, 80, 82–83; and critics, 59–60, 70, 271; depiction of female connoisseur, 82–95; designing posters, 51, 268; Divan japonais, 88; La Goulue, Moulin Rouge, 45–46; innovations of, 58, 60, 66, 76; Jane Avril, 89; posters, 13, 40, 41, 52, 59, 60, 66, 68, 252; prices, 118 Troy, Nancy, 39 typewriter, 82, 274, 275, 285 typographic poster, 193, 197, 216, 218, 228, 292–93; within illustrated poster, 234– 36; in Paris, 216, 218, 259, 260; “puffed” language in, 260 typography, 210, 214, 216, 218, 220, 223, 236, 357n85 United States, 2, 74 urban space, 17, 22, 42, 54, 55, 63–65, 164, 199, 216, 218, 261, 264, 276, 300; commodified, 10, 176, 200; display of posters in, 20, 201; environment, 165, 175, 182, 194, 218, 261 Uzanne, Octave, 95, 152, 157, 188–89, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 302; on collecting, 271–72 Vachon, Marius, 175, 249, 250, 253, 275, 276 Van Geleyn, 12, 241, 277, 281 Vavasseur, Eugène, 275 Verhagen, Marcus, 25, 249 Verhoogt, Robert, 27–28 Verlaine, Paul, 114, 288 Vidal, Pierre, 297 Vie Parisienne, La, 69, 260 viewers, 6, 43, 65, 105, 110, 179, 198, 201, 226, 261; gender of, 105, 187. See also passersby viewing conditions of posters, 156, 165, 166, 178, 181, 182, 186. See also pollution

408  · Index

vignette, 215, 216, 218, 228, 241, 252 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène, 11–12 visual culture, 1–2, 34, 35, 148, 123, 212, 248, 266, 286; and iconophile, 264, 299 Vollard, Ambrose, 21, 51, 94, 132–33, 134, 149, 334n30, 338n13. See also portfolios Vuillard, Édouard, 133, 327n62, 334n33 Walker, Frederick, 222–24, 355n61 walls (on the street), 4, 6, 11, 13, 17, 23, 46, 181, 188, 201, 205, 218, 220, 227, 250, 274, 298; advertising on, 4, 216–17; London, 41, 43, 190, 253; and passersby, 166; revenue-producing, 17, 201, 350n146; visual representations of posters on, 13, 20, 69, 192–93, 194–95, 196, 219, 253; Watteau, Antoine, 51, 111–12, 152 Weill, Alain, 25, 307n63 Willette, Adolphe, 96, 208, 252, 292, 334n33 Wolff, Albert, 249 women, 6, 33, 46, 52, 80, 81, 82, 100, 102, 104, 105, 188, 120, 122, 258, 281, 282, 285; collectors of “minor arts,” 120, 331n128; depiction in posters, 2, 7, 44, 56, 57–58, 102, 120, 330n105; fashionability, 91, 95, 99, 101, 102, 110, 113, 114; modern, 82, 102; posters addressed to, 187, 347n87; as spectacle, 105, 114. See also connoisseurs; consumers; new woman woodcuts, 214, 334n36, 335n51. See also prints: Japanese working class, 176, 190, 198, 199, 258, 280; areas, 46, 201; depictions, 109, 194, 196, 197, 181 Yendis, Mosnar (Sidney Ransom), 203 Zola, Émile, 50, 97