french poster art



MOTHU ET DORIA

Cult Art

Fine Art Giclée Print

Co-created and published by PINEAPPLE GALLERY

Original works: Theophile Alexandre Steinlen

(1859–1923). 

Framed in: Pink

Print Dimensions: 21cm x 27cm

Steinlen’s artistic focus in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was centered on leftist social commentary. However, as the devastation of World War I emerged across Europe, the urgency of the human effects of war moved to the forefront of his priorities.

Steinlen moved to Paris in 1881 at the age of 2 and settled in Montmartre, where in 1881 lifting of censorship in France and the passing of the Law on the Freedom of the Press, the production of politically focused artistic and literary ephemera flourished.

From journals, periodicals, and newspapers to party invitations and public posters, the visual and literary arts quickly flooded the city with social discourse.

Steinlen was a socialist and a relentless supporter of working-class rights. Through illustrating and printmaking, Steinlen aimed to communicate the chronicles of the working class as directly as possible.Since these widely circulated publications were part of a more democratic dissemination and reception of art, he viewed each of his works as a tool of resistance against oppression.

This approach put his art in the hands of the individuals and environs he was concerned with—both artistically and socially—challenged traditional artistic hierarchies, and empowered the working class.

Steinlen became best known for his lithographic posters from the 1890s. Local Montmartre café concerts such as the famous Le Chat Noir would host provocative performers whose songs would engage in working-class narratives. It was there that Steinlen met Aristide Bruant, a singer who would influence the artist’s work and politics, and serve as a frequent subject in his work which you can see highlighted in other CULT titles.

Singing in Argot, Bruant would meditate on the lives of local laborers while making fun of the bourgeois clientele in the audience. Parisians of all castes would be found together in these social spaces, and not only were they receptive to the scathing critiques about capitalism that Bruant expressed, they desired them and Theophile shared these ideologies. Steinlen’s concern with the working class and marginalized populations was a theme he carried through his entire career.

$50.00$120.00 inc.GST

"MOTHU ET DORIA"