An Examination of Views on the Work of Cassandre - Essay Example

 The Blending of Art and Mass Culture: An Examination of Views on the Work of AM Cassandre When Adolph Jean-Marie Mouron first started his art career, he wanted to be a painter. However, he found that he needed an alternative form of income to support his painting, and so he turned to poster art – and this dichotomy between that which was art and that which brought profit, which dominated the criticism of art in the early 1900’s, was the inspiration behind his seminal work that would change the art of poster-making as well as the entire philosophy of advertising (Medlej, Drucker, Bogart). He found that posters gave him a “golden opportunity to communicate with the large public” (Medlej). Through such campaigns as that for Au Bercheron (Halter), Cassandre began to take the commercial medium of advertising and make it into an art form unto itself. While he asserted that “the poster is…a mass-produced object that must have a commercial function” (Medlej), Cassandre found that he could use images, colors, and text in a sort of artistic fusion to grab the attention of the viewer. Making posters as large as 13’ x 15’, Cassandre learned how lucrative art could be (Owen). As Neil Harris observed, “business [could] be…as stimulating a patron of the arts as prelates, cardinals, and popes were who represented the church in the fifteenth century.” Cassandre’s approach was not without its detractors. There were those who wondered if his style would make its way from France into American advertising – specifically, whether the American advertising designers would be willing to set aside their more conservative and monotonous design styles for something that seemed to swing closer to the world of art than the world of business. Those who hoped that American advertisers would change their designs were those who saw how Cassandre’s posters used geometry to grab the attention of the viewer; they realized the potential of “attention value.” While advertising only attracts those whose “circumstances permit the possibility of action,” Cassandre sought to make sure that the most focused attention would be on his posters (Parker). This focus would come with the elimination of distractions, so that the central message of the advertisement would be clear to the viewer (Parker). Cassandre established a handful of principles in his poster design. As mentioned above, Cassandre aimed for very large posters, and had a revolutionary attitude toward text. While other poster-makers attempted to squeeze the text in around designs, or wherever it would fit, Cassandre found the text to be the central part of the poster, particularly in advertisements. He claimed that “design should be based on the text and not inversely” (Medlej). His emphasis on the artistic value of text led him to experiment widely in sans serif fonts (Megaw, Hatchings), even to invent the Peignot-font, which he believed to be a “purer form of the alphabet” as far as it expressed the “essential character of Roman letters” (Tam). His goal was to make Peignot one of the established text-faces, but this did not come about during his lifetime (Tam). Cassandre’s emphasis on text even went to the use of alliterative slogans to increase the allure to the viewer (Hambourg). Another one of his principles centerd around the use of geometry and architecture to design his posters. Enlarging a poster to the sizes that Cassandre wanted in the 1920’s risked severe distortion of the original image, and so lines were used that would be difficult to distort. This use of line and form in a more figurative way was one of the basic influences in the later works of Max Lingner and Salvador Dali, who took the distortion of line and form to new frontiers (Held). Cassandre’s notions of poster-making had a significant effect on a variety of art forms throughout the rest of the twentieth century. His ideas concerning the use of line and color to increase audience attention became one of the founding tenets of the Bauhaus school. Over time, elements of Bauhaus style became the more sophisticated and rational phase of graphic design standards in Chicago (Lagana). Cassandre’s design methods spread not only to America, but elsewhere in Europe. Cassandre and his contemporaries, Colin and Carlin, joined to form the Alliance Graphique, which received high praise across the continent for its innovative methods of design (Prince). Gronowski, one of the pioneers of Polish poster art, closely followed Cassandre’s dictum that the poster artist should not assert his or her personality in the work, because the poster itself is a tool, and nothing more (Brown, Boczar). Yugoslavian poster art followed Cassandre’s idea that the text should be central to the poster; many posters from this country blend folk art designs with the message implicit in the propaganda wound about it in text form (Koscevic). Sven Brasch, one of the main leaders in poster design in Denmark, echoed Cassandre in a different way. Cassandre had taken the concept of transportation and glorified it through dramatic interworkings of line and color; similarly, Brasch excelled in taking the ideas central to his posters and giving them abstract expression in the pictures (Dailey). The effects of Cassandre’s work went outside the genre of poster design. British and French jewelers came up with designs that emulated the abstract principles of Cassandre’s work (Rudoe). Even retail displays in stores themselves began to show the intermingling of art and commerce, as the mannequins that were supposed to hold outfits began to take on an abstract significance of their own. What Gronberg refers to as the “cult of the poster” – the abstraction of the concrete – is expressed by these clothing dummies, who in the 1920’s, in France, changed in design. Gone were the faces, particularly on the female mannequins, and instead of flesh tones, these mannequins began to be gilded in silver and gold tones (Gronberg). Gronberg went on to assert that the removal of the individual face meant that business wanted there to be one uniform “modern urban gaze” that all citizens could be trained to emulate, and that this gaze could be made to accompany certain products, that would be made part of the package of attraction that customers would yearn to buy. The abstract idea of acceptability and desirability, in other words, was welded to the concrete form of clothing and other products that could bestow those abstract concepts on the purchaser (Gronberg). Ballet sets even started to show the same sorts of design in France as the posters of Cassandre (Veroli). Before the twentieth century, many saw a vast difference between art and commerce. Art was to be made for the sake of enjoyment, rather than for the sake of profit. One of the most fundamental changes in the twentieth century has been the primary place of motivation that profit has been given throughout society. One of the most visible ways this change has become manifest is in the ways that advertising has developed as a discipline, and used many of the principles of the visual arts to lure customers. Cassandre’s work in poster design was one of the key links in this chain of events. 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