Oct 02, 2003 - Sale 1978

Sale 1978 - Lot 4

Price Realized: $ 50,600
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 30,000 - $ 40,000
ADOLPHE MOURON CASSANDRE (1901-1968) AU BUCHERON. 1926.
59x161 inches. Hachard, Paris.
Condition A-: horizontal folds; creases and discoloration in margins; creases in image. 4 sheets unattached. Paper.
When Cassandre designed this poster for a Parisian furniture store in 1926, he was actually revisiting a project that had originally been published in 1923. That earlier work is generally credited as the then 22-year-old designer's first poster in his immediately recognizable, stylized form. Though separated by three years, the format and the content of the two posters are virtually identical. Each ingeniously utilizes the atypical elongated format, and each uses dynamically radiating lines to illustrate a lumberjack swinging his axe at a tree, which is beginning to fall. The similarities end there, and the intervening years show a dramatic and drastic evolution in Cassandre's style. The lumberjack and the tree have shed all of their realistic detail; the color scheme, originally evocative of a forest, has been replaced with abstract blue and black, and the layout and typography are much more innovative. This is an extremely rare poster; only a few copies are known to have survived. Cassandre actually created a third project for this company in 1934, which was reproduced in Le Spectacle est dans la Rue, that was never published. Suntory 3A, p. 33, Cassandre 19, p. 21.