At present, Alphonse Mucha’s posters with languid ladies, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s expressive posters, and René Magritte’s posters are not represented in museums. But for the artist’s contemporaries, these works were part of everyday life. In fact, these works were created as advertisements and then changed the way we think about commercial art. Why did they become commercial artists? What was she popular about at the time and how were her advertisements created? We will tell you in this article.

Alphonse Mucha was an unknown artist who came to Paris from the Czech countryside. In the early 1890s he was an unknown artist who came to Paris from Bohemia and lived in Paris. To survive, he illustrated books and magazines and created advertisements, posters, food restaurant calendars with invitations and business cards.

Then, on Christmas Eve 1894, everything changed. The artistic director and actress of the Paris Renaissance Theater, Sarah Bernhardt (Fr. Sarah Bernhardt), asked to call the print shop where the artist worked.

The next premiere of Gismonda took place last month and it was decided to continue after the holidays. We needed to draw the playbill but unfortunately everyone in the print shop was already enjoying their Christmas weekend. Only Mukha was in the office and took on the urgent order. The poster made by the young artist appeared on the streets of Paris for the first time on January 1, 1895 and immediately created a sensation.

On that day, Alphonse Mucha, as they say, “woke up famous. In the capital of the artist’s art admired not only the inhabitants of the capital, but also Sarah Bernhardt herself in the future, she will trust the production of posters for their performances exclusively Alphonse.

In the artist’s studio there were other commercial proposals: the largest European brands wanted to advertise “in the style of the Fly”. The artist tirelessly created posters for JOB cigarette paper, Ruinart champagne, Lefvre-Utile cookies and Nestl baby food. He also designed posters for Mot Chandon beer, Trappestin brandy and many others.

Alphonse Mucha painted many monumental paintings during his lifetime, but he is remembered specifically as a talented advertising artist and ambassador of the Art Deco style. Count Henri Marie Raymond Comte de Toulouse-Lautrec (Fr. Henri Marie Raymond Comte de Toulouse-Lautrec Monfa) could have been an ordinary member of the aristocracy and spent his life at balls, hunting and dinner parties, but nature made a joke of him: at age 12 the boy stopped growing,
At 17, he began studying art and then went to Paris and became the center of the bustling art life of the 1880s.

Visiting Paris, Henri and his friends Emile Bernard and Vincent Van Gogh visited many entertainment venues like the Moulin Rouge cabaret, thanks to which the artist’s advertising talent was discovered. When the Moulin Rouge opened in 1889, its owner commissioned Toulouse-Lautrec to create his first advertising poster. On one winter night, three thousand copies of the poster were hung all over Paris and a crowd of visitors gathered in the cabaret.

He was left enthralled and was invited to all his events to have a “forever” free seat behind him. With this reservation, Henri was actively used and even became a regular at the establishment. During his life, Toulouse-Lautrec made about 30 advertising posters for various cabarets and cafe clubs. He portrayed popular entertainers such as the dancers La Goulue and Jeanne Avril, the clowness Cha-UKao, and the singers Aristide Louis Armand Bruand.

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s current posters are a work of art rather than advertisements and are among the most famous works of the Art Nouveau era. While he called himself “magical realism,” René Magritte (French: Ren Franois Ghislain Magritte) only fully devoted himself to art in 1926 after signing a contract with a Brussels art gallery.

In this case, he was an advertising artist in a paper factory, and even at his first group exhibition René showed not canvases or graphics with paintings in hand but advertising posters.
From the early 1920s Magritte met an extravagant couple through mutual acquaintances the designer Honorine Deschryjver and the journalist Paul Gustave van Hekke, owner of the fashion house Couture Norine. The creators of the brand were very original and worked with advertising artists such as Frits Van den Berghe (Dutch), Lon de Smet (Fr. Lon de Smet) and René Magritte.

Rene was an infrequent collaborator of Couture Norin and made some interesting advertising posters and drawings for the brand. Also, the acquaintance with van Hekke was a landmark for the painter: through the collaboration, Paul-Gustave drew attention to Magritte’s paintings and became his regular client. Salvador Dali’s (Spanish: Salvador Del) unusual activity in advertising and design began in 1936, when the artist moved from Spain to his homeland.

Salvador was not only an earner, but also a way to give vent to his bubbling creative energy, so the painter treated them as reverently as the paintings. Because the owners of Bonwit Teller department store decided that Dalí’s window display looks too strange, they made significant changes to his creation. For example, the artist became so angry that he grabbed the bathtub displayed in the window and jumped out the window with it.

Surrealist projects have not always been so successful: what was the advertising in which Salvador appeared! There were rumors about this: the painter demanded from customers 10,000 dollars for a minute shooting, but the money paid off.

These included ads for the Veterano brand, the Alka-Seltzer medicine and the Lanvin candy bar; in the latter painting, the artist vigorously twitches his mustache. The painting also designed logos, the most famous of which was the Chupa Chups candy logo (it still appears on candy wrappers) and brand advertisements in glossy magazines.

Dali’s predilection for commerce was condemned by other artists, and the leader of the movement, Andr Breton, even wrote the offensive anagram “Avida Dollars,” which in Latin means “greedy for a dollar,” from the artist’s name. But Salvador did not notice it: he continued to create ads, earning and burning through unimaginable amounts of money. In 1965, Breton, sarcastically disposed to his moniker, painted the painting “Apotheosis of the Dollar.” This artist became one of the most famous surrealists in history.

He was an idol of Andy Warhol. The legendary story of how, in the late 1940s, a young Warhol came to conquer New York and worked as an illustrator for Glamour magazine. Eddie executed his work with incredible talent, and it was from that moment that his puzzling career as a commercial artist began. Over the next decade, Warhol would study advertising and put his knowledge into practice,
Prior to his success, Glamour collaborated with other Cond Nast publications and other prominent clients.

Warhol was recognized as the father of pop art from his first attempts to combine commercial and fine art: no one before Andy could capture on canvas such familiar things as cans of soup, bottles of drinks, or fruit. His own artist was also a product of skillful personal brand organization-just like the celebrities he portrayed.

As a business, Warhol wrote Art as a Business. His work deftly reveals the workings of mass culture. When he was at the height of his fame, just two years before his death, the artist used the advertising campaigns of famous brands in his Ads Portfolio series. Today, Campbell’s cans of sax, Marilyn Monroe’s repeated images and the banana on the album cover of The Velvet Underground are familiar works of art to us. But they were once a revolutionary product of the synthesis of painting and advertising thanks to one genius, Andy Warhol.