- About Bookbinding -

Pictorial Poster part 2

Anyone who has had the good fortune of late to spend even twenty four hours in Italy must have observed not a few Italian posters, chiefly railroad advertisements, having a quality of their own, a national note, perhaps best to be characterized as a broad richness of colour not unlike that to which we are accustomed in Roman scarfs and Bellagio rugs. In the brilliancy of some of these posters I have thought I detected the influence of the little group of Hispano-Roman painters; and I have noted also the decorative methods of the lithographic designers who have devised the showy but not inartistic covers for the sheet-music issued by the Milanese publisher, Signor Ricordi. M. Maindron, the first historian of the pictorial poster, has declared that Signor Simonetti, the water colorist, is to be credited with the elaborate posters announcing the Exposition of Turin some six or seven years ago. It may be doubted whether these Italian posters are really any more effective - even the best of them - than the best of the striking and brilliant paper covers with which Signor Ricordi adorns the music he publishes.

Fine as is not a little of the work of these Italians both in the pictorial poster and in the paper cover, it is on the whole not equal to that of the Frenchmen, M. Jules Cheret, M. Grasset, and M. Willette Of these, M. Cheret is the pioneer, and although I confess a great liking for the Byzantine compositions of M. Grasset, I cannot but think that M. Cheret is still to be hailed as the master of these two branches of the decorative art.

We are all profoundly grateful to M. Cheret that he has enlivened the dull gray walls of Paris by lightly draped and merrily dancing figures, giving a suggestion of life and warmth to the wintry streets of the French capital.

These aerial bodies, with their diaphanous drapery and their swift movement, suggest the figures frescoed on the walls of Pompeii; and M. Cheret is not without his share of the Latin ease and verve which forever fixed these Pompeian girls as a joy to the world. He has also the bold stroke of the Japanese artist, and he has, moreover, the Japanese faculty of suppressing needless details: for there is never any niggling, any finicky cross hatching, any uncertainty, in M. Cheret's work. He is an impressionist in one sense of the word, - an impressionist who has a masterly command of line and an absolute control of colour, and who uses these to make you perceive what has impressed him. The figure he sketches may be as saucy as you please, but there is no slouch about the composition.

To describe his work adequately we must, as M. Henry Lavedan suggested, borrow from this decorator certain of his own colors, a lemon yellow, and a geranium red, and a midnight blue; and even then we should lack the cunning of the artist so to juxtapose these as to reproduce his effects. Almost equally difficult is it to reproduce here what is most representative in M. Cheret's work; for above all else is he a colorist, and the attempt to translate his work into the monochrome of typography is little less than a betrayal. The compact and skilful composition can be shown, and the force of the drawings; but the effort to transfer the charm of the color is foredoomed to failure.

< Pictorial Poster part 1