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| Photo courtesy of Karen Etingin |
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| Photo by Katia Grubisic |
Flashes of a can-can dancer's thigh adorn your coaster; you might know Toulouse-Lautrec via these glimpses between sips of beer. Or perhaps Carlo Biscaretti's anisette-pushing monkey hangs over your bar fridge, next to a beloved neon Budweiser sign.
These might seem like cheap replicas, but poster art has never been as rarefied as your regular gallery fare. Long since in the public domain, the ephemera of a whole era now appears on everything from purses to placemats.
This summer, however, Toulouse-Lautrec, Biscaretti and dozens of their contemporaries are getting back some of their original oomph. A new gallery dedicated to the art of posters, L'Affichiste, has opened in Montréal's antiques district.
The gallery is the pet project of long-time affiche aficionada, Karen Etingin. After collecting privately for the past twenty years, Etingin is taking her obsession public. This light-filled, white-walled space sprawled on the second floor of a 1894 former bank building is the only gallery of its kind in Montréal. L'Affichiste boasts enormous colour prints advertising everything from hydrotherapy and silver polish to cigarettes and liqueurs. The collection moves from the visual eloquence of the Belle Époque through Art Deco's blockier colours and distinctive lines.
Etingin herself was first drawn by the romance and elegance of Art Nouveau: "I imagined myself in a horse-drawn carriage down the Champs-Elysées. The compulsion grew." And the rest, as they say, is history?specifically, history from roughly 1880 to 1940, tracing the evolution of economics, etiquette, censorship, politics and art.
"Each of the posters has a story," Etingin enthuses, "of either of the time or of the product, or of the artist." One poster depicts the mid-century European subculture of travelling fairs; another is the work of a retired officer in the French navy who decided to start painting after forty years of military service; yet another is an old candy wrapper, its gold-leaf intricacies and cameo-smooth model so striking that the actual chocolate must have seemed beside the point.
Posters are one of the last remaining artefacts of advertising and marketing that
we have from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Etingin is struck by the visual impact of the posters, but also by the fragility of the medium: issued on sheets of newsprint, these posters were by their nature temporary and disposable, meant to be rained on, painted over and torn down. The best-preserved posters are often mounted on more durable linen. Etingin digs these up in Europe and New York, at auctions or through private dealers.
Like most diehard collectors, Etingin has a relationship with each and every piece, often referring to their subjects with friendly familiarity. "I really do fall in love with them," she confesses, her eyes gleaming.
Her fascination comes from the insights into trends and time periods offered by each piece, but also the examples they provide of the marketing techniques we now take for granted. Posters "are one of the last remaining artefacts of advertising and marketing that we have from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century," Etingin says.
She shows me the Austrian artist Julius Klinger's Tabu cigarette-paper ads. The clean, printed shapes in red, white and black represent one of the first instances of branding. Klinger eventually perished in a concentration camp. "He was completely forgotten," says Etingin. At L'Affichiste, expect some large-scale, full-colour remembrance.
Etingin hopes to someday make this a multi-use space (the gallery already sells restored and remade Art Deco furniture on consignment.) In the meantime, she is basking in the success of her first two vernissages, and planning the next event for September.
As for the big empty spaces on the walls at home? "That gives me an excuse to buy more!" Etingin says. Once a collector, always a collector.
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Katia Grubisic is a writer, editor and translator whose work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Grain Magazine, Books in Canada, and The Fiddlehead, among others, and in a chapbook with Delirium Press. She is on the editorial board of The New Quarterly.
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Galerie L'Affichiste
417, des Seigneurs (corner Notre-Dame)
Tel: (514) 831-5121
Open every day, 10h to 16h, or by appointment
Contact
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or visit www.laffichiste.com |
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