Art Nouveau (part 2)

 'At age eighteen ( Jules Chéret )  he went to London but could only find work making catalogue drawings of furniture, so he returned to Paris after six months.  Chéret was convinced that pictorial lithographic posters would replace the typographic letterpress posters that filled the urban environment, but he could not convince advertisers of this. At age twenty-two he produced a blue and brown poster for Offenbach’s operetta Orphée aux Enfers (Orpheus in Hades, imagle below) When further commissions were not forthcoming, he returned to London, where he soon mastered the more advanced English color lithography. A poster commission for a family of clowns he had befriended was the turning point, leading to label commissions from the philanthropist and perfume manufacturer Eugène Rimmel. '

 Art Nouveau graphic designs often utilized stylized abstract shapes, contoured lines, and flat space inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints. 

Artists in the West became aware of ukiyo-e prints to used for trade and communication between Eastern and Western nations increased during the last half of the 19th century.

One of the most innovative posters of this particular movement(Art Nouveau) was Toulouse-Lautrec's 1893 poster of the dancer Jane Avril. In this poster the lively atmosphere was captured by reducing imagery to simple flat shapes that convey an expression of the performance and environment. Although Toulouse-Lautrec only repoduced about three dozen posters, he was very influential in graphic design. His application of the ukiyo-e influenced graphic design toward more reductive imagery that signified, rather than dipicted, the subject. He also often joined lettering with his work by drawing the letters in the same technique as the elements of the picture. Below you can see his poster of the dancer Jane Avril.

Will Bradley was a self-taught American designer who also emerged as another Art Nouveau practitioner. His magazine covers, lettering styles and posters displayed a wide range of techniques and approaches. Bradley was inspired by European Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts movements. 
By the 1890's photoengraving was perfected. This allowed much better and precise works than hand engraving. Bradley's works were done using this 'new technology' at the time.

Cover for the magazine, 'Inland Printer', designed by Will Bradley

 For some reason, Art Nouveau rejected historicism and emphasized formal invention, so it became sort of like a transitional stage from Victorian design to the modern art movements of the early 20th Century. This transition like state is very evident in the work of the Belgian artist and designer Henry van de Velde. He changed from being a post-impressionist painter to furniture and graphic design in the 1890s. He used shapes and lines which was inspired by the natural world and then abstracted them to a point were they look 'pure',meaning that they look like abstract forms created by the designer rather than forms of nature. 
In his poster for Tropon food concentrate(1899), linear movements, organic shapes, and warm-hued colours combine into a nonobjective graphic expression. Although this poster has been interpreted as seperating egg yolks from egg whites, most viewers view it as pure form.

 Similarly exploring issues of form, architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh along with other fellow architects joined Margaret and France Macdonald in a revolutionary period of creativity beginning in the 1890s. This group combined rectangular structure with romantic and religious imagery in their unorthodox furniture, crafts and graphic designs. In a poster the group made for example, thereis obvious emphasis upon rising vertical composition.