Jane Avril Jardin de Paris

Title

Jane Avril Jardin de Paris

Description

Original poster issued arround 1900 from the museum Stedelijk in Amsterdam, after Toulouse Lautrec.

ca. 1900

Artist

Stedelijk

Historical Description

Even in ancient times, merchants listed their goods on stone plaques to attract customers. Centuries later, posters took over this task. The precursors were thus stone tablets, on which the ancient Egyptians once carved messages. The Romans placed wooden boards with public announcements in busy squares. And in the Middle Ages there were placard-like notices in marketplaces or in front of churches. But the real birth of the poster came in the mid-15th century with the invention of letterpress printing by Johannes Gutenberg. In 1798, the musician and writer Alois Senefelder developed lithography. He was inspired to do so on a rainy day when he observed a leaf being traced on a limestone. In his process, a motif is drawn on a stone plate and transferred to paper by means of pressing force. From then on, Senefelder's invention enabled the mass reproduction of posters. Initially, this task was in the hands of printers and lithographers. But they were unable to meet the growing quality demands of customers for the motifs. However, they were not able to meet the growing quality demands of customers for the motifs. Artists were increasingly hired. The Frenchman Jules Chéret, who founded his own lithography workshop in 1866 and created around 1,200 posters in 40 years, is considered a pioneer of poster art. The population gave him the nickname "creator of a gallery of the street" for this. Chéret's compatriot Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who made poster history with his artworks for the famous Parisian vaudeville theater Moulin Rouge, became equally famous. Almost every evening, he captured the debauched nightlife around Montmartre in his drawings. In Germany, Art Nouveau motifs dominated at the turn of the century. The event poster for the play "Gismonda," featuring the then world-famous actress Sarah Bernhardt, was created by Alfons Mucha. Today, elaborately designed artist posters can be found at most in museums or theaters, because with the growing consumer mood since the 1920s, the range of brand-name articles and thus commercial posters advertising cigarettes, perfume or corsetry grew. Instead of lavish Art Nouveau ornaments, advertising now focused on functionality: product, name: done. In the course of the 20th century, the poster then changed again and again: the advertising of the time was strongly influenced by art movements and the spirit of the times. Sometimes reduced Bauhaus style, sometimes elegance à la Art Deco, sometimes with an American attitude to life with petticoats and Elvis quiff motifs in the 1950s, sometimes psychedelically adapted to the hippie era or provocative in the 1980s. But not only consumer goods were advertised, posters also always had political messages: The Nazis used them for propaganda purposes, as did the communist regime in the Eastern Bloc. The youth of the 1960s (and later generations) hung posters of the revolutionary Che Guevara on their walls; there were posters against nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War, environmental pollution and overpopulation. The increasing proliferation of mass media set the entire advertising market in motion, especially when television brought product advertising directly into the living room, but the poster, however, remained and will probably continue to exist for a long time.