Beyond Toulouse-Lautrec?

You've heard of this guy, right? No doubt you will have seen many, many exhibition titles starting Toulouse-Lautrec and... In other words, he is quite literally the poster boy of Art Nouveau. If you want to understand what was happening in French graphic art in the last decades of the 19th century, then look no further. Or should you? I think you should. Clearly, the man was a genius and is still popular because he was the very best at what he did. However, if he epitomises the spirit of the era, he is far from alone in doing so. Thanks to the march of chromolithography and mass literacy, this was a golden age for commercial artists across Europe, with France at its stylistic heart. There are literally hundreds of superb but unknown artists from fin de siècle Paris whose work appeared on posters, postcards and other ephemeral items such as theatre programmes, as well as in the many satirical journals of the day. In this blog, I hope to reveal something of their work, and how it can give us some sense of the heady atmosphere of Paris circa 1900.

Now, being a collector at heart and longtime lover of late 19th and early 20th century graphic art, I naturally wanted to collect posters of the period, and whilst I do have a few, only having the resources of an ordinary mortal means this avenue is pretty much closed to me. Therefore I hit on the notion of collecting postcards to feed my passion. After all, collectors at the time went equally ape over these small rectangular pieces of cardboard as they did over their larger cousins. As well as being affordable, postcards offer the obvious advantage of taking up very little space, along with the pleasure of handling something over a century old. Posters tend to be created as propaganda, whether in order to sell a product to encourage the public to do something for the common good,  but postcards are more varied. Once they took hold in the public imagination, the range of subjects was endless, and the medium lent itself in particular to humorous digs at the great and good of the day. All that is before you attempt to decipher the message scrawled in haste on either the front or back of the card.

Looking into it, I discovered that the best postcards were what are called artist-signed, which helps to some extent when trying to locate good examples. I also found that, like posters, French postcards were, with some honourable exceptions, much more elegant and cool than their English counterparts. After all, Art Nouveau was a quintessentially French movement, although of course it found expression in many different forms throughout Europe. In terms of postcards specifically, there are some brilliant German examples, but since my grasp of the language is very limited and I can read French passably well, it seemed logical to stick to the one country. There are more than enough French artists to go round! So, here we go- the results of my ongoing collecting and research. Next time, an actual postcard!