Paris, November 1891. At the Moulin Rouge, opened two years earlier at the foot of Montmartre, the dancer La Goulue is the nightly draw. The cabaret's owner, Charles Zidler, commissions a new poster for the season from a thirty-six-year-old painter. The painter's name is Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. His poster, delivered in a few weeks, shows La Goulue mid-dance, skirt raised, face in three-quarter, in front of the flat black silhouette of Valentin le Désossé. The ground is mustard yellow. The typography hugs the bodies. The poster causes a scandal, then triumphs: printed in 3,000 copies, it is pasted all over Paris, sometimes twice on the same wall. Lautrec is 27 when he invents, in five weeks, what historians will later call the modern poster.

That Moulin Rouge poster is neither Lautrec's first (he had drawn one for the same venue a little earlier) nor his last (he will sign twenty-nine more before his death in 1901). But it is the one that fixes the grammar of the genre. Clean flats, thick contour line, typography embedded in the composition, vision from unexpected angles. The whole of European Art Nouveau graphic design springs from that break, accomplished in two decades, between 1880 and 1900, by a handful of Paris poster artists.

Jules Chéret, father of the modern poster

Before Lautrec, there is Jules Chéret. Born in 1836, dead in 1932 at 96, Chéret is today considered the actual founder of the modern poster. His career starts in 1858 with a stay in London, where he discovers color lithography refined by the English. He returns to Paris in 1866 and founds his own workshop, the Imprimerie Chaix. There he develops a six-color technique on poster-sized lithographic stones (1.20 by 0.80 meters), which allows fast and inexpensive production.

Chéret alone signs over 1,200 posters between 1866 and 1900. Cabarets (Folies Bergère, Olympia, Eldorado), consumer products (Saxoléine, Job, Saxoléhuile), theaters, concerts, exhibitions. His signature: the Chérette, a dancing female figure in colorful gowns, running through all his work. The Chérette is inspired by a single model, Charlotte Wiehe, a Danish dancer at the Folies Bergère, whom Chéret sketched in pastel. The Ministry of Public Instruction decorates him in 1890 with the Legion of Honor for "services rendered to mural art applied to industry." It is the first time a poster artist receives the distinction.

Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen and the Chat Noir

At the top of the Montmartre hill, the cabaret Le Chat Noir, opened by Rodolphe Salis in 1881, becomes the center of Parisian artistic life for two decades. Erik Satie plays piano there. Verlaine, Mallarmé, Maurice Rollinat recite their verses. Aristide Bruant sings. And the poster artist inseparable from the place is Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, a Swiss painter who reached Paris in 1881 at age 22, a friend of the Commune and a lover of cats.

Steinlen signs in 1896 the poster for the Chat Noir tour: a giant black cat, hieratic profile, red ground, typography in gilded letters. The poster becomes the lasting emblem of the cabaret and of the hill. It is today one of the most reproduced Belle Époque posters in the world. Steinlen also signs posters for Bruant, for the Tournée du Chat Noir that travels to the provinces, for commercial products (Quinquina Dubonnet, Sterilized Milk). His palette is darker than Chéret's, his subjects more socially engaged (he draws for the anarchist paper Le Mirliton and is active in Parisian satirical journalism).

Lautrec and the break of angles

Toulouse-Lautrec, as we said, does not invent the poster. He transfigures it. Three contributions are properly his. First, the Japonist eye: Lautrec is among the first Europeans to integrate into his compositions the principles of ukiyo-e prints, high-angle views, sharp foregrounds, accepted emptiness. Then, point of view: his posters often place the viewer in a high or low angle, as in the case of the Jane Avril poster (1893), where the singer is seen from below, almost full length. Finally, economy of means: three or four colors maximum, flats without modeling, typography reduced to the essential.

Lautrec produces, between 1891 and 1901, thirty posters in all. The period is brief, the body of work dense. His subjects are the Montmartre cabarets (Moulin Rouge, Divan Japonais), the singers (Jane Avril, Yvette Guilbert), the dancers (May Belfort, May Milton), an editor (the Confetti de Paris), a cyclist (the Chaîne Simpson). He dies in 1901 in Malromé, in Gironde, at 36, from syphilis and alcoholism. His posters are already collectors' items. The dealer Edmond Sagot in Paris resells copies to European and American collectors as early as the 1890s.

"A good poster," Lautrec wrote to his friend Maurice Joyant in 1894, "must impose itself at once, at ten paces, and hold the eye when one steps closer."

On the wall today

The posters of the Parisian Belle Époque have a rare quality of presence. They summon an atmosphere (cabaret, music-hall, fin de siècle), a warm palette (yellows, oranges, reds), a graphic design that stays legible at a distance. They work in very varied interiors: a classical living room with herringbone parquet, a Haussmannian apartment, a contemporary loft, a café-restaurant, the entry of a Parisian building. The recommended format is the 50 by 70 or the 70 by 100. The oak frame warms the palette, matte black disciplines it.

Avoid: accumulation. A Lautrec or a Chéret stands on its own. Putting three posters of that period side by side, even in a perfect grid, visually saturates the room. The rule that holds: one central piece (Moulin Rouge, Chat Noir, Folies Bergère) in a large format, and around it calmer works, botanical plates, photographs, Bauhaus geometries, which let the main piece breathe.

Three starting points

  • A Toulouse-Lautrec poster (Moulin Rouge, Jane Avril, Divan Japonais) in a 50 by 70 or 70 by 100 format. For a living room or a Haussmannian apartment entry.
  • Steinlen's Chat Noir, the emblematic poster of the Montmartre hill. For a kitchen, a reading corner or a child's bedroom in love with cats.
  • A Chérette by Jules Chéret, more joyful and more colorful, in the lineage of the Folies Bergère. For a light living room, dominated by cream or off-white.

At Montmartre Poster, the vintage collection gathers a selection of posters in the lineage of that great Belle Époque tradition, printed on 275 gsm art paper. The spirit of fin-de-siècle Paris, of the Montmartre cabarets and the Boulevard theaters, still circulates on the walls of contemporary apartments, more than a century after Lautrec's death.