Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Some light tanning due to age. Year 1969. Hardcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> The streets of Paris in the closing years of the nineteenth century were compared to a museum in the open air. Magnificent brilliant posters added colour and gaiety to the grey facades of the buildings and the poster became for a brief moment a work of art. Today the posters of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec are universally famous yet he was only one of the many designers who were admired in the 1890s. Jane Abdy who is specially interested in the French art of the last century gives a lively account of these poster artists of the different styles in which they worked and of the per-sonalities who inspired them. Works of Mucha Grasset Steinlen and Lautrec are vividly described and illustrated as well as those of minor artists now mostly neglected or forgotten. But the pride of place is reserved for Jules Ch?ret the inventor of the coloured lithographic poster who for thirty years so delighted the French by his gay and sparkling works that he was the most popular artist of the day. The author shows by reference to contemporary sources how the poster was appreciate in its time by writers painters and public alike. She also contributes much in-formation on the activities of the poster enthusiasts whose collections are today the principal source for the study of this ephemeral art and indicates the rise in the market value of these works of art some of which now fetch four-figure prices. (SP)