Brescia, Lombardy, March 1927. Four Italian friends, Aymo Maggi, Franco Mazzotti, Renzo Castagneto and Giovanni Canestrini, organize a motor race on open roads: 1,600 kilometers between Brescia and Rome, round trip. They call it the Mille Miglia, the thousand miles, after the distance in Roman miles. Seventy-seven cars take the start. No safety service, country roads cutting through Italian villages at full speed. The winner, Ferdinando Minoia on an OM 665 SS, completes the route in nineteen hours and fourteen minutes. The Mille Miglia instantly becomes one of the most prestigious motor races in the world, and its annual poster, commissioned to various Italian illustrators between 1927 and 1957, sets the image of mechanical speed for three decades.

That race illustrates a feature of the great motor and bicycle competitions of the twentieth century: every edition comes with an official poster, often signed by a recognized illustrator, commissioned by the race organizer to announce the event and then sold as a souvenir. The result, over four decades, is a corpus of several thousand sports posters, the best of which have reached the status of artworks in their own right.

The car-race poster, Italian and French schools

The Italian school of the car-race poster organizes itself around a few names. Marcello Dudovich, already famous for his commercial posters (Borsalino, Strega), signs several car-race posters for Bianchi between 1924 and 1935. Achille Beltrame, illustrator of the magazine La Domenica del Corriere, delivers Mille Miglia posters between 1929 and 1939. Marcello Nizzoli, who will later become famous as an industrial designer for Olivetti, signs the 1932 Mille Miglia poster: a red Alfa Romeo speeding through Tuscan hills, crushed perspective, purple sky.

The French school is just as strong. Géo Ham (Georges Hamel), an illustrator born in 1900, signs the official posters of the Automobile Club de France Grand Prix between 1925 and 1948, and those of the 24 Hours of Le Mans from 1923. His style blends Art Deco and technical precision: the cars are drawn with a mechanical accuracy rare for the period, set inside tense compositions, colored skies, motion suggested by speed lines. Ham also works for the drivers: he draws the stylized portraits of Tazio Nuvolari, Achille Varzi, Louis Chiron, which decorate the official programs.

The Tour de France poster

The Tour de France, created in 1903 by Henri Desgrange and his newspaper L'Auto, takes a while to develop a real poster strategy. In the early decades, the race is mostly announced through the paper's pages. It is in the interwar period that the poster takes its place. The Parisian firm Marcel Bich, founded in 1925, and later the advertising arm of the daily L'Équipe (which succeeds L'Auto in 1946) commission illustrations from artists like Bernard Mas, Raoul Auger, Marcel Jeanjean.

The recurring motif of the Tour poster: a cyclist in full effort, seen in profile or three-quarter, strained and tense, in a French landscape. The Pyrenees, the Alps, Mont Ventoux, the northern cobbles become typical settings. Colors are bright: yellow leader's jersey, intense blue sky, green or gray mountain. Typography sits at the top or the bottom, never the center. And the title, Tour de France followed by the year, is hand-drawn, embedded in the composition.

Cassandre and travel by car

The car poster also moves beyond the strict frame of competition. Cassandre, already famous for the 1927 Nord Express, delivers in 1932 a poster for the International Sleeping-Car Company that shows a road racing toward a horizon of mountains. In 1936, he signs for the brand Triplex (windshield glass) a composition that becomes a classic: a stylized electric lamp lights a danger sign, perspective of a nocturnal road, red sky. The car is not shown, but it is everywhere implied. It is Art Deco graphic design at its peak of economy.

Roger Soubie, a very prolific illustrator, alternates between film posters and car posters. He signs between 1928 and 1952 several dozen compositions for car brands (Citroën, Peugeot, Hotchkiss) and for races (Monte Carlo Rally, Circuit de la Sarthe). His palette is more contrasted than Géo Ham's, his compositions more narrative. He does not stop at the isolated car: he stages the driver, the mechanic, the crowd of spectators, the general atmosphere of a race day.

"A car poster," Géo Ham wrote in 1936, "is not the car. It is the sensation of driving it."

On the wall today

Vintage car-race and bicycle posters have rebuilt a stable audience since the early 2000s. Several causes. The revival of the retro culture around the antique car (the historic Mille Miglia, organized since 1977, draws collectors from around the world every year). The culture of road and urban cycling that has developed since the 2010s. The graphic quality of these posters, which makes them desirable even without a particular interest in mechanics.

Suggested format: 50 by 70 centimeters for most compositions, 70 by 100 for the great race scenes (Mille Miglia, Monaco Grand Prix, Tour de France). Natural oak frame for cycling (the wood evokes the artisanal character of 1950s bikes), matte black frame for cars (the black disciplines the saturated palette of Géo Ham compositions). Avoid the gilt frame, which overloads images that are already dense.

Ideal location: an enthusiast's office (car posters work well in a study without falling into a virile cliché), a garage turned into a workshop, a sporty reading corner. For cycling, the entry hall of a country house or the landing of an apartment fits perfectly. The composition takes on a nostalgic dimension without becoming kitsch.

Four starting points

  • A Mille Miglia poster, Italian school of the 1930s: car in motion, purple or gold sky, crushed perspective. For an office or a vintage living room.
  • A Géo Ham 24 Hours of Le Mans poster (1923-1948): mechanical precision, Art Deco palette. For a living room or a wide landing.
  • A 1930s-1950s Tour de France poster: cyclist in effort, French landscape, yellow jersey. For a kitchen, a reading corner or a garage-workshop.
  • A Monte Carlo Rally poster from the 1950s: the elegance of period cars, a winter palette, snow and coast. For an entry or an apartment landing.

At Montmartre Poster, the sports collection brings together posters in that great graphic tradition, printed on 275 gsm art paper. The cycling collection explores more specifically forty years of bicycle imagery, from the Tour de France to the Giro d'Italia, with the great Belgian and French spring classics in between.