Cassandre's posters helped art deco to "elbow its way in"

Continuing our Art Deco Centenary series we profile graphic designer and artist Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron, who under the pseudonym Cassandre created posters that thrust the style into everyday life.

From his striking, head-on poster of the SS Normandie to the iconic interlocking YSL logo for fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, Cassandre was instrumental in art deco's elevation of advertising and branding to a new art form.

Initially turning to poster design to avoid becoming another struggling young artist in Paris, he soon became enraptured by the role the format could play in the shaping of a new cityscape.

Cassandre was born in 1901 to French parents in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and spent his childhood moving between what was then the Russian Empire and France before his family settled in Paris in 1915 following the outbreak of the first world war.

Aged just 14, he briefly attended the staunchly classical Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris, before later moving to study in the studio of artist Lucien Simon and at the Académie Julian.

Cassandre's studies cemented his desire to be a painter, but having to now support himself financially, he looked to the world of commercial advertising in order to gain experience while also earning a regular income.

Given the distance between this world and that of fine art, he adopted the pseudonym Cassandre – occasionally combined with his surname, Mouron – in order to leave open the possibility of later becoming a painter under his birth name.

However, after his first major poster commission in 1923 for cabinet maker Au Bucheron, Cassandre would never really look back.

This poster depicted a great tree being felled by a muscular figure with an axe, framed by golden, stepped forms resembling sun rays in a drastically modern departure from the company's previous, more domestic brand image.

The design was exhibited at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris in 1925 – the event that introduced art deco to the world – where it was awarded the grand prix.

On the back of this newfound attention, Cassandre was able to co-found the design studio Alliance Graphique in 1926, and a prolific period of poster designs followed during the interwar period.

While broadly considered art deco in style, Cassandre was notable for his blending of influences from art nouveau, cubism and surrealism.

Among his best-known works are those associated with a new era of travel, including a cubism-inspired poster for the Nord Express in 1927, and the iconic design for the Ocean Liners SS L'Atlantique in 1931 and SS Normandie in 1935.

As his career grew, so did Cassandre's confidence in the poster as a new, modern form of artistic practice. He came to view the poster not just as a work in isolation, but as something that played a part in the shaping of the city, and should enrich it.

"A poster is made to be noticed by people who have not sought it out. It must elbow its way in," he wrote. "It should enliven not the individual advertisement board or building, but rather the huge blocks of stone and the vast area as a whole."

This was particularly evident in an idea he developed known as the serial poster – a storyboard-style series of images intended to be viewed in quick succession by hurried passers-by.

Cassandre's 1932 poster for drinks company Dubonnet – entitled "Dubo - Dubon - Dubonnet" – was the most famous example of this, depicting a cartoon silhouette and text which gradually gain colour and presence as the figure drinks the advertised aperitif.

Such was Cassandre's influence over the image of the cityscape that the Swiss writer Blaise Cendrars called him "the first director of the street".

It was through his early designs that Cassandre met Charles Peignot, a founder of the Deberny and Peignot Foundry, and in 1928 they would begin an almost decade-long collaboration to create some of art deco's most iconic fonts.

First was Bifur in 1928, a Bauhaus-inspired, all-capital font that reduced letters down to their most recognisable features and rendered the resulting voids in blocks of grey and thin lines, creating almost a motion-blurring effect.

"The eyes of readers have been accustomed for two centuries to high-contrast characters," Cassandre said. "Let's push to the extreme the idea that the eye only sees the solids and eliminate the serifs."

Bifur was followed by Acier Noir in 1935 – a slightly more legible version of Bifur – and in 1937 by Peignot, an elegant font which mixed upper and lower cases with elongated verticals and was featured at the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris.

From 1936 to 1940, following in the footsteps of fellow art deco icon Erté, Cassandre collaborated with Harpers Bazaar on a series of 38 covers.

In a stark contrast to the glamorous fashions depicted by Erté, Cassandre's covers were abstract and dark, an early example of the ideas of European surrealism coming into America.

American graphic designer Art Chantry described Cassandre's covers as being "part Dali, part Magritte and a little Max Ernst tossed in for shits and giggles".

"[He] depicted floating eyeballs over an outline of France to image Paris fashion on the brink of catastrophe. It's disturbing stuff – especially weird to see on the cover of a conservative fashion magazine," writes Chantry.

Following the second world war, during which Cassandre served in the French army, he continued his commercial work, including typefaces of Olivetti, and also returned to painting and theatre design, both of which he had dabbled with earlier in his career.

 

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One of his final typographic designs came in 1961, after being approached by Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé to design a new monogram for their fashion house, for which he made a single, elegant proposal still used by the brand.

In 1962 Cassandre was also awarded the Légion d'Honneur, but his commercial career would never return to the successes it had enjoyed prior to the second world war.

A revival of art deco was already appearing on the horizon, but Cassandre suffered increasingly with depression. He committed suicide in his studio on 17 June 1968, aged 67.

Cassandre had one son, Henri Mouron, with his first wife Madeleine Cauvet, who would later publish a biography, AM Cassandre in 1985. Today, much of his work has been published online by Cassandre's grandson, Roland Mouron.

The top illustration is by Vesa Sammalisto.

Art Deco Centenary

This article is part of Dezeen's Art Deco Centenary series, which explores art deco architecture and design 100 years on from the "arts décoratifs" exposition in Paris that later gave the style its name.

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