![]() ![]() Published in Lucien Lambeau, L’Hôtel de Ville de Paris (Paris: Librairie Renouard, H. 2, Salle de la Commission de voirie (Meeting Room of the Committee on Roads), view facing the east and south walls, ca. The decorative aesthetic generated by the poster could, therefore, be embraced and displayed in the Hôtel de Ville as a worthy example of the republic’s achievements and its potential.įig. ![]() Furthermore, the critical emphasis on the balance struck in Chéret’s work between modern stimulus and decorative harmony aligned it with the ideal of social solidarity. ![]() Fin-de-siècle design reformers, notably art critic and administrator Roger Marx (1859–1913), argued that Chéret’s work revealed the principles crucial to success in all decorative art, whether printed ephemera, site-specific decorations, or arts such as tapestry. These arts were considered crucial to democratize beauty and usher in a long-awaited modern French style, thus suggesting the way in which Chéret’s art might serve the greater good of society and the nation-in keeping with the edifying, didactic purpose of civic decoration. Though this commission has generally been viewed as a symptom of the Third Republic’s efforts to engage, in the name of democracy, with an “eclectic” range of art styles, I will demonstrate that there was a deeper logic to Chéret’s selection. The artist’s work won a place in the Hôtel de Ville not merely as an extension of the decorative program’s aesthetic range, but also for its synthesis of modern vitality with “decorative” harmony. 1, 2), situating his work alongside that of established artists like the much-revered Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–98). Yet, in 1895 Chéret was charged with the decoration of a room adjacent to the main ceremonial space (the Salle des fêtes) of Paris’s Hôtel de Ville (figs. Little in these accounts explains how the author of the French poster’s commercial success could become an appropriate candidate to decorate a civic building. Huysmans would go on to align this advice with a rejection of bourgeois society and its values, foregrounding and celebrating the erotic, pathological character of the “demented, nearly explosive joy” encapsulated in Chéret’s posters. Over a decade later, in response to the affichomanie (poster mania) inspired by Huysmans, the conservative Catholic critic Maurice Talmeyr (1840–1931) offered an alternative view of the poster as epitomizing rather than contesting a French bourgeois society that had embraced democracy and, especially, capitalism under the Third Republic: “the poster is the art, and almost the only art,” he declared, “of this age of fever and laughter, of struggle, of ruin, of electricity and oblivion.” advise those disgusted, like myself, by this insolent display of prints and canvases, to cleanse their eyes outside, through a prolonged stop in front of those palisades where Chéret’s astonishing fantasies burst forth, colored fantasies so energetically drawn and so vividly painted. In 1880, the writer Joris-Karl Huysmans ended his review of the annual Salon by suggesting that the commercial color posters of Jules Chéret (1836–1932)-the artist largely responsible for the success of this new form of commercial art in France -could serve as a cathartic and stimulating antidote to this presentation of “high” art: Brion’s previous publications include “Decorative or Didactic? Art à l’école and the Ambivalent Status of Aesthetics and Democracy in Belle Époque Primary Schools,” History of Education (2021) “Courbet's Bathers and ‘The Hottentot Venus’: Destabilizing Whiteness in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Nude,” Word & Image (2019) and “The Fin-de-Siècle Poster: Modern Stimulus in the French Interior,” in Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media (Bloomsbury, 2015). Her current book project focuses on Belle Époque art social (social art) initiatives to democratize art and provide an aesthetic education to the working classes in the context of collective spaces like the street, school, and museum. ![]() Her research examines the intersection of aesthetics and politics in key public art forms, whether decorative painting, posters, or public school imagery, of Belle Époque France. Katherine Brion is an assistant professor of art history at New College of Florida. ![]()
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