A.M. Cassandre

Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron, better known by his pen name Cassandre, was born in 1901 in Kharkov, Ukraine, into a French family that had emigrated for the wine trade. The family returned to France after the Russian Revolution. At 18, Cassandre enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, then at the Academie Julian. He was earning a living from advertising drawing by 1923. His first printed poster, Au Bucheron for a Parisian department store, revealed him in one stroke: at 22, he invented a visual grammar that did not yet exist in France.

That grammar is Art Deco poster grammar: a strict geometric composition, flat strong colors, typography treated as a fully graphic element, and a subject often technological. Nord Express in 1927, Etoile du Nord in 1927, Statendam in 1928, the Dubonnet trio in 1932, and above all the Normandie ocean liner in 1935: each poster is a lesson in framing. The Normandie, seen head-on, its funnel a black triangle against the sky, has become the graphic symbol of French Art Deco.

In 1930, Cassandre founded the Alliance Graphique agency with Charles Loupot and Maurice Moyrand. The agency produced for Dubonnet, Triplex, Pathe and for the French national railways. In 1936, the Museum of Modern Art in New York dedicated a solo exhibition to him, which led Harper's Bazaar and art director Carmel Snow to commission a series of covers. He lived in New York between 1936 and 1939, drew for Vogue, Container Corporation of America, Ford. The war forced him back to France.

The postwar years were harder. The poster market collapsed, commissions dwindled. Cassandre concentrated on typography (Peignot for Deberny and Peignot in 1937, Touraine, Cassandre) and on stage design, notably for the Comedie-Francaise. In 1963, he drew the YSL monogram for Yves Saint Laurent, still in use today. He took his own life in Paris in 1968.

A Cassandre print carries on a wall the authority of modern French graphic design. The palette is dark, the contrast hard, the format vertical. It hangs alone, never in a gallery wall: the composition demands its own breathing room. A black or dark oak frame suits it better than light wood. It is a living-room piece, not a corridor piece.