(A BRIEF) HISTORY OF POSTERS

Posters have been a part of civilization since the 15th century, when artisans handmade and printed each and every sheet. Though a painstaking process, it eventually replaced the town crier and ushered in a new way of providing news, announcements, and other information to passers-by on the streets. However, it wasn't until the invention of the printing press and other techniques that posters became a popular, cost-efficient means of disseminating information to the public.

Lithography, the technique used to print posters, was invented by Alois Senefelder in 1798 in Austria, but it is Jules Cheret who merits the name "father of the poster". In the mid-1800's he developed a lithography technique that made rapid color printing in volume possible and he also played a major role in the transformation of the aesthetic nature of the poster giving it an identity and autonomy all its own. His colorful and well-loved posters transformed Paris into the "picture gallery of the street." As Charles Hiatt wrote in 1895:

"Paris, without its Chérets, would be without one of its most pronounced characteristics...Chéret’s posters greet one joyously as one passes every hoarding, smile at one from the walls of every cafe, arrest one before the windows of every kiosk."

Cheret's posters were so popular that it was nearly impossible to keep them up: they were often taken down as soon as they had been posted. His charming ladies became so well-known that the Parisians nicknamed them "Chérettes."

In Chéret's poster designs, illustrations carried the message; text was reduced to a minor explanatory role. He realized that product need not be the focus; a poster merely had to produce "a reaction of amusement, curiosity, excitement or some positive feeling which will help make the right points,'' as Harold Hutchinson writes in "The Poster: An Illustrated History From 1860'' (Viking). Hutchinson notes that by 1880 Cheret was so good at his craft that a Paris art critic wrote, ``there was a thousand times more talent in the smallest of Cheret's posters than in the majority of the pictures on the walls of the Paris Salon".

Soon every blank wall and space in Paris was covered with posters. In 1881, the government passed a law that created official posting places; this marked the veritable beginning of the poster industry. Each poster required a tax stamp indicating that a fee had been paid for the right to post it. The tax, based on square footage, led to the adoption of standard poster sizes.

In 1884, the first poster exhibition was held in Paris; two years later the first book on posters was written; and in 1890 Chéret was immortalized in the first one-man poster show. It celebrated the man whose legacy included not only the innovation that made mass postering possible, but also more than 1000 original designs.

The lithographic poster reached the height of its popularity during the last decade of the 19th century, the Belle Epoque. Well-known artists such as Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, and especially Toulouse-Lautrec all produced original works in poster form, thus transforming the poster into a new form of art. In 1891, Toulouse Lautrec’s created his first poster, Moulin Rouge. Partly inspired by Japanese woodblock prints, it was an immediate and huge success. The complete three-sheet version of this poster has sold for $220,000, the highest price ever paid for a fine art poster at auction.
In 1894 Alphonse Mucha, a Czech working in Paris, created a new style inspired by such diverse influences as the Pre-Raphaelites, the Arts and Crafts Movement, and Byzantine art. This ornate, feminine style was all curves, flowers and decorative lettering. The first masterpiece of what was called Art Nouveau design was Mucha's poster of Sarah Bernhardt, the American actress who had taken Paris by storm. This style dominated the Parisian scene for the next ten years and was the major international decorative art movement until World War I.