The Poster as Art; Jules Cheret and the Struggle for the Equality of the Arts in Late Nineteenth-Century France

1) Posters, often unlettered and printed on high-quality paper, were sold by a number of Paris print dealers. The best known of these, Sagot's Librairie de nouveautes et librairie artistique (established in 1881), began selling posters in 1886. Sagot's 1891 catalog offered 2,233 posters. For more on the subject, see Phillip Dennis Cate and Sinclair Hamilton Hitchings, The Color Revolution: Color Lithography in France 1890-1900 (Santa Barbara: Peregrine Smith, 1978), 12. For an account of poster prices at the time, see Jane Abdy, Cheret to Cappiello (London: Studio Vista, 1969), 25-26. Two periodicals were founded to cater to collectors and enthusiasts: Les Maitres de l'Affiche, begun in 1896, and L'Estampe et l'Affiche, which commenced publication a year later. 2) Robert Koch, "The Poster Movement and 'Art Nouveau,'" Gazette des BeauxArts 50 (1957): 285. A stronger case can be made for the view that the vogue for posters was the major factor in the print renaissance of the 1890s. The revival fostered by Cadard in the 1860s and early 1870s waned after his death in 1875. Despite some notable individual achievements and various collective efforts in the 1880s (see Cate and Hitchings, The Color Revolution, 13-14), the revitalization of the print dates from the early 1890s. The rising popularity of poster collecting, discussed below, was the prelude to the vogue for the print. The attention given the poster in the 1880s by collectors and critics did much to stimulate artists' enthusiasm for lithography, in particular, color lithography. That this At the end of the nineteenth century in France, the poster enjoyed high-art status. 1 The process by which it rose from mere commercial device to fine-art print did not, as has been claimed, revolve around the sudden vogue for prints that occurred in the early 1890s; 2 its rise through the hierarchy of media was a long, complicated process dating from the 1830s. The crucial phase began in the third quarter of the century with a two-pronged attack on the centuries-old academic principle of a qualitative hierarchy of the arts. At the top were the fine arts: painting, sculpture, and architecture. The decorative or applied arts, such as furniture design, were below them, and the popular arts caricature and the various arts for mass consumption were at the bottom. On the one hand, Realists and their naturalist heirs advocated an end to all attempts to rank the arts. On the other, decorative-art reformers sought to elevate those arts to the level of painting and sculpture. The poster became involved in these related but very different crusades and thus shared in their eventual victory over academic dogma as the result of the exceptional poster work of one man: Jules Cheret (1836-1932). Cheret enjoyed a good entrance: economic and artistic conditions in Second Empire France (1852-1870) favored a talented, ambitious poster designer. By the late 1850s, when Cheret's career began, the lithographic poster was established as the main promotional device for the rapidly expanding French economy. Moreover, the illustrated poster had a legitimate, if modest, place in the arts. It was first associated with graphic art during the 1830s as a result of the vogue for illustrated books. Both frontispieces and text illustrations, enlarged and sometimes elaborated, were placed in shop windows to promote the sale of these books. Tony Johannot's frontispiece for the 1844 edition of Goethe's Werther (figure 1), for example, was the basis for his more complete poster image (figure 2). As is typical of such work, this poster is unsigned. Signatures first appeared regularly on posters promoting the new illustrated almanacs of the 1840s. 3 The designers of these posters, Cham (figure 3) and Charles Vernier chief among them, were the popular and respected caricaturists whose works appeared in these periodicals. Evidence of the status that the