Fin de Siecle

   With images of crowded dance halls and smoky cabarets, this vibrant collection from the belle Époque explores the birth, development, and continued popularity of a graphic genre. 

   Thanks to innovations in color lithography, the streets of fin-de-siècle Paris were punctuated with brightly hued posters featuring bold typography and playful imagery. Advertising everything from tony theater productions to the licentious cancan, bicycles to cookies, these artistic posters covered the boulevards like "magical vegetation" and enlivened kiosks around town. Art critics of the day drew comparisons between the posters and the art being shown in galleries and at the Salon, and praised the posters on the street as offering free "museum for the masses." Affichomaniaques (poster maniacs) were known to tear down posters almost as soon as they were pasted up, and their zealousness incited the development of new markets for the poster as home décor and a collector's item. Posters that found their way into private homes eventually entered the collections of museums all of the  world. many artists furthered the affichomanie (poster craze) through their stylistic explorations and innovations , but one of the most famous was Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. This gorgeous book offers exquisite reproductions of more than one hundred posters by Toulouse-Lautrec and his contemporaries Pierre Bonnard, Jules Chéret, and Alphonse Mucha, among others. In addition, artists who's names are lesser known today contributed equally dazzling designs to this golden age of the French poster. 

  In her essay Posters of Paris: the Spectacle in the Street, Mary Weaver Chapin captures the voices of the artists, collectors and critics who fueled the poster craze of the 1890s. The result is a visual spectacle, a lively discourse on the value and purpose of art, and a celebration of a historically and creatively dynamic era.