Collection: Les Affichistes

Les Affichistes designates the French poster designers who developed the modern advertising poster from the late nineteenth century through the interwar period, putting first Art Nouveau curvilinear design and then Art Deco geometry to work for the Paris commercial market. The lineage runs from the Belle Époque pioneers Jules Chéret (1836–1932), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901), and Leonetto Cappiello (1875–1942) to the interwar generation of A. M. Cassandre, Charles Loupot, Jean Carlu, and Paul Colin.

Cassandre, born Adolphe Mouron (1901–1968), set the international standard. His Au Bûcheron won first prize at the 1925 Paris Exposition; the railway posters Étoile du Nord (1927), Nord Express (1927), and L'Atlantique (1931) and the ocean liner poster Normandie (1935) became the period's defining travel images. The Dubo Dubon Dubonnet sequence of 1932 brought Cubist serial composition to advertising. He founded the Alliance Graphique studio with Maurice Moyrand and designed the typefaces Bifur (1929), Acier Noir (1936), and Peignot (1937) for the Deberny & Peignot foundry. Loupot produced the long-running St Raphaël and Bally campaigns, Carlu carried the idiom to wartime America with America's Answer: Production (1941), and Paul Colin established his reputation with the Revue Nègre poster for Josephine Baker in 1925. Stone lithography remained the dominant printing process throughout the period.