La 8e//e Epoque

If it was not the best of times, Parisians did not know it. Girls in lace frills climbed excitedly into the first asth matic automobiles. Bearded, droopy-eyed Edward VII took his cigar and his carnation to the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergere. Donning top hats, venturesome souls climbed nonchalantly into a balloon and blithely sipped champagne, up and up, to shiver in their stiff collars at the dizzy height of 10,000 ft.

This was the gaslight age, la belle epoque, an era doomed to end with the first shot fired at Sarajevo. The flamboyant demotic art of the poster captured this society in the first blush of its romance with technology and the full flush of its well-fed, self-confident romance with itself. Brimful of retrospection, a Paris exhibit covering the 1870-1914 flowering of poster art is making Frenchmen misty-eyed with nostalgia over the good, inexpensive, uncomplicated, sensuous old days.

In a way, poster artists were early admen. Toulouse-Lautrec glorified the bicycle as well as the poules of Montmartre. Lesser artists painted ads for big new department stores with "fixed prices indicated in plain figures" or automatic baby bottles, "the only one with a pump imitating the breast."

But poster art would not have made art history if it had not been for a rebellious group of impressionist painters who wanted to get more light and air into their work and to reach a larger public. With painters such as Manet, Bonnard, Villon, Toulouse-Lautrec, Steinlen and Forain doing the ad-cum-art work, the posters rapidly became collectors' items and more valuable than the products advertised.

At the height of the collecting boom, dealers advised clients to sell their Rembrandts and buy posters. Paris was so plastered with posters that the National Assembly felt forced to pass the famed "Defense d'afficher loi du 29 juillet 1881." But after World War I, posters fell off sadly in artistic repute and popularity. Nowadays the posters on the walls of Paris are scarcely more remarkable than the signs prohibiting them.

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