Art: From the Kiosks

The high period of poster art was celebrated last week in Manhattan. Hanging on the Norlyst Gallery walls were some 37 of the bold-hued works which peeled off Parisian litho-stones in the ’80s and ’90s and plastered the boulevard kiosks of those gaudy decades.

That was a period when the top French painters recognized no distinction between commercial and “pure” art—and when many took advertising commissions. Inevitably dominating the show, as he did the posters of his time, was the work of stunted, aristocratic Henri-Marie-Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec Monfa, who put his hand to almost every variety of graphic art. But also shown were works by Lautrec’s finest contemporaries: Jean Louis Forain, Alexandre Théophile Steinlen, James Ensor, Jules Chéret, Albert Guillaume, F. A. Cazals (one poster showed Poet Paul Verlaine at an exhibition).

Most of the posters were theater, music-hall and circus advertisements. They formed a kind of profane Audubon collection of the night birds of Paris. A whole aviary was to be found in a unique four-paneled poster done by Choubrac for the Folies-Bergère, showing the scintillant plumage of the Folies, from the top hats in the lobby to the trapeze artists on the stage.

Collectors have long been interested in such huge, gay sheets. Good poster items currently bring as much as $200. The poster master, Toulouse-Lautrec, had no need of funds either from advertisers or collectors. His father was so well heeled that he could afford such eccentricities as an otter hunt, in Canadian costume, in the streets of Paris.