Paris, rue Richer, 1869. Léon Sari, a former stage decorator, inaugurates a new entertainment hall with a never-before-seen format: a café-concert hall where one dines, drinks and watches the show from one's own table, with no forced intermission, no obligatory evening dress. Sari names his hall Folies Trévise after the neighboring street, then renames it Folies Bergère in 1872 after the nearby rue Bergère. The hall seats 1,700. To launch it, Sari commissions a poster from Jules Chéret, who has just come back from London with his color lithography technique. It is the first collaboration in a long series. Chéret will sign, between 1874 and 1900, more than a hundred posters for the Folies Bergère.

The café-concert is not a new genre in 1869. Since the 1840s, Paris has several hundred establishments where one can drink while listening to popular singers. The average café-concert is small, smoky, plain. The Folies Bergère break the mold: a big hall, sophisticated machinery, varied programming (song, operetta, ballet, circus acts, magic). Sari and his successor Édouard Marchand turn the establishment into the first great Parisian music-hall. And the poster becomes its main advertising medium.

Chéret, method and pas de deux

Jules Chéret applies to the Folies Bergère posters a method he had already worked out for earlier commissions. A single central figure, usually a dancer in motion, dressed in a colorful gown. A solid background in a saturated color (red, yellow, cobalt blue). A title hand-lettered, embedded in the movement of the composition. A secondary typography (date, place, program) at the bottom, in smaller letters. That grammar, which he had discovered on the lithographic stones of the Chaix workshop, becomes his signature.

His main model is Charlotte Wiehe, a Danish dancer at the Folies Bergère, whom Chéret sketches in pastel backstage between 1872 and 1885. Wiehe, present in almost every Chérette (Chéret's emblematic female figures), has become, through the poster, the Parisian face of the joyful elegance of the Belle Époque. Chéret draws her standing, mid-pirouette, never seated, never still. Movement is his signature: a Chéret poster immediately makes you want to move.

Graphic industrialization

To produce his posters, Chéret works at the Imprimerie Chaix, which he runs from 1881 to his retirement in 1925. The workshop employs a hundred lithographers, holds more than a hundred poster-sized stones, and prints each poster between 1,000 and 5,000 copies depending on the commission. The technique: Chéret draws directly on the stone with lithographic ink, working each color one after the other. Six colors on average per poster, sometimes eight. The result is flat, vibrant, legible from a distance.

The cost of a Chéret poster is modest for the commissioners: between 300 and 800 francs depending on the print run. For comparison, a day's wage for a Parisian worker in 1880 is about 5 francs. That economy allows cabarets, theaters and merchants to order posters in series. Avenue de l'Opéra, the Grands Boulevards, boulevard Sébastopol are covered with advertising hoardings where Chérets follow each other. Vincent van Gogh, who arrives in Paris in 1886, mentions them in letters to his brother Theo: he loves these posters "full of life" and buys several for his rue Lepic studio.

Beyond Chéret

The café-concert is not exclusively Chéret's territory. Other poster artists explore its codes. Adolphe Willette, more satirical, signs posters for the Chat Noir and the Moulin de la Galette. Lucien Métivet, a press illustrator, delivers posters for music-hall singers. And Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, from 1891, will transfigure the genre with about twenty posters that break with the Chéret lightness: darker palette, sharp point of view, radical economy of means. Lautrec has his own story, told elsewhere.

At the Folies Bergère themselves, the café-concert evolves. In 1886, Manet paints Un bar aux Folies Bergère, his last great canvas, exhibited at the Paris Salon a few months before his death. The painting shows a waitress behind a counter, with, in the mirror behind her, the reflection of the full house. It is the most famous image of what the Folies Bergère represented for late nineteenth-century Paris: a place where high society rubs shoulders with popular life, where popular song becomes art.

"A Chérette," Edmond de Goncourt wrote in his Journal in 1894, "is all of Paris inside a skirt."

Why the genre still holds

Café-concert posters have three qualities that make them lasting in decoration. First, the palette: the yellows, oranges, reds and cobalt blues remain vivid after more than a century, because the Chaix printing pigments were stable and Chéret avoided fragile colors. Then, movement: a Chéret poster gives immediate energy to the room it hangs in. Finally, the absence of an overly dated commercial message: the dancer, the singer, the show title do not point to an obsolete product. One can hang a Chérette today without feeling that one is displaying an antique advertisement.

Suggested format: 50 by 70 centimeters for an isolated Chérette, 70 by 100 for monumental compositions (Folies Bergère, Concert des Ambassadeurs). Natural oak frame to keep the warmth of the palette, or thin brass frame for a deliberate Belle Époque feel. Avoid the matte black frame, which dampens the yellows and the oranges, the master colors of Chéret's grammar.

Three starting points

  • A Folies Bergère poster signed Chéret: the big hall, the mixed program, the dancer in motion. For a Parisian living room or a dining room.
  • A Chéret poster for a more discreet café-concert (Concert des Ambassadeurs, Eldorado): a more intimate composition, a softer palette. For a bedroom or a reading corner.
  • An Adolphe Willette or Lucien Métivet poster, to open the eye to the graphic diversity of the café-concert beyond Chéret. For an office or a library.

At Montmartre Poster, the vintage collection brings together posters in the lineage of that tradition, printed on 275 gsm art paper. The language of the Parisian café-concert meets that of the music collection, which carries the music-hall legacy on toward jazz, French song and the great twentieth-century stages.