Français
Jules CHERRET
1882-1963
Charcoal.
Signed in pencil.
Size: 32x22cm.
Jean Jules Chéret, born in Paris on June 1, 1836, and died in Nice on September 23, 1932, is a French painter and lithographer, popular master of the art of the poster.
His joyful creations, his ease at tackling different techniques, naturally brought Jules Chéret to the art of the poster of which he was a pioneer. The hundreds of posters he produced are a rich collection, moving testimonials of the famous places of the time: Folies Bergère, Grévin museum, department stores, balls.
Admirer of Watteau, his motto seems to have been lightness and movement. The fetish character of her posters is a joyous, elegant woman who always seems to be moving. It is easily recognizable and is one of the characteristics of Cheret's style: it is the "Chérette". This representation of a woman whose size is strongly marked, who is always almost in a state of weightlessness and who reveals her charms in the extreme limits of the publicly acceptable - according to the social norms of the Belle Epoque - is a great advertising tool. It is found on countless posters at a time when the supply of consumer products is growing. By erotising it, hypersexualizing it, "without falling into the gritty [...] Chéret has crystallized a sum of fantasies in a figure perfectly in line with the appetites of male domination," in an ambient climate oscillating between celebration of "the Woman and misogyny: she embodies an object of desire, which is transmitted to the object to be sold. The work of Chéret has an influence on the painters of his time: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Georges Seurat, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard in France; Dudley Hardy in England; Henri Meunier and Privat Livemont in Belgium; Elmer Boyd Smith in the United States. Jules Chéret will also influence some creators of Art Nouveau, such as Alfons Mucha, in whom we find this taste for the sensual woman. Yet he is not a creator of Art Nouveau. Earlier, it is also distinguished by its style: Chéret highlights the color (we say that he creates his posters as fireworks), and by the fact that the line (the black ring) is absent from his compositions. Finally, the references to nature are here often secondary, and never show the stylized stem shapes typical of curvilinear Art Nouveau. Jules Chéret was one of these precursors of the poster before 1900, and managed to revolutionize the poster by creating his own style. (Source Wikipedia).
