We see, around the time of the Art Nouveau period, artists and designers using images and words (in enticing fonts that accentuated the elegant swirls and slightly erotic feminine imagery that, say Jules Cheret, was famous for) in posters to advertise shows, conventions, plays, and cabaret. The more of an audience you can entice with words and images in a harmonious voice, the more money there is to be made.
Cheret's use of women as the primary figureswere the idealized beauty of that time period and embodied a feminist spirtit in that the women were "neither prude nor prostitute". This spoke to a wide audience, as did the his craft. Working from stone lithographs, Cheret utilized an astonishing range of crosshatching, stippling, watercolor washes, scratching and splattering, all to add texture and an energy movement that captured the vitality of the subject within.
Recent example? An article I read on cranbrookdesign.com, highlighting artist/designer Cleon Peterson and his recent advertising campaign for Saks Fifth Avenue. Cleon, an artist , graphic designer, and Senior Art Director with a for-profit design firm,Studio Number One,chose to use a Russian propaganda style in the marketing materials designed for Saks at an time when , Cleon says, "the economy and the country was in the shitter."
Collaborating with Shepard Fairey ( of the Obama campaign poster fame), both designers utilized a Russian propaganda-inspired theme. The suprematism/constuctivism/modernisitic feel of the design work lends itself to the posters of the era- specifically the early 1900's- when posters and art were pushing a military and communist idealism on the public. The picture planes are flat and one-dimensional with strong geometric and a a dynamic diagonal axis that kept individuality and humanism at a minimum while promoting political symbolism. The red, black and white colors in this marketing campaign echo the use of such in Communist posters and the iconic Russian flag of that time. Even the use of a lean, and expression-less woman photographed in black and white, gives the poster the continuity of a cold soldier-of-fashion/fortune message. Slogans on the posters and bags at Saks encourage, nay, DEMAND, you to "WANT IT", "BUY IT" AND "ARM YOURSELF", much as the poster of El Lissitsky" Beat The Whites with the Red Wedge" encouraged the "red" Bolsheviks to stand against the "white" Kerenski sympathizers.
At a time when the public is afraid to spend in a weakening economy, Fairey and Peterson treat the shopping public at large, not with begging and flattery, but a with a militant , impersonal, sans-serif Russian font: "DO THIS NOW, YOU CONSUMER SHEEP!!!!!". Well, maybe not...but, you can almost feel the pressure to spend before you are sent off to some unfashionable Serbia somewhere. ;)
Words, images, and even history, all at work to try and get us to march to a capitalist tune. Clever.
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