The Poster Ad Effectiveness: Art Nouveau vs Sachplakat

Abstract

Poster design has evolved since the Industrial Revolution, and with the Art Nouveau Movement, it has evolved even more and inspired other art movements to fruition. Even though some, such as the Sachplakat style, was a direct rejection of the Art Nouveau style. Viewership of posters changed over time, and so did the style of posters that went along with it. This research paper attempts to show the success of the French Art Nouveau and Sachplakat posters in their respective art movements. However, due to the dated information of the businesses at the time, there were limitations to what could have been recorded before and after the public release of the poster advertisements. Therefore, little information on business fiscal reports could be found, as the posters in question date back to the late 1890s to early 1900s. Instead, the differences between each poster style will be compared in this research paper. The posters used to compare Art Nouveau and Sachplakat in this paper will be posters designed by Alphonse Mucha and Lucian Bernhard.

Art Nouveau came first before Sachplakat, which was the art movement that reacted against it. Art Nouveau was an extremely ornamental style of artwork, and poster viewership slowly changed over the exposure of posters during this time. Ads became illustrative during the Art Nouveau Movement, and the approach to viewing posters shifted from reading informative posters to poster gazing. In turn, the highly illustrated and detailed posters of the Art Nouveau Movement was rejected through the simplification of the Sachplakat poster style, which changed how businesses marketed their products through poster advertisements.

The Industrial Revolution was mechanical and lacked beauty from handcrafted goods. As a response to the factory reproductions from the industrial world, Art Nouveau (also known as New Art) emerged in Europe. Among the French Art Nouveau artists, designer Alphonse Mucha built his career through posters. His signature style featured elongated female figures with extremely decorative patterns, either through the female’s hair or the Byzantine-style embellishments. Mucha’s use of curvilinear lines was especially prominent in his female figures’ hair and floral details. The hand-drawn text used in the posters also has curvilinear elements to match the flowing rhythm of his posters. Mucha’s style is the “implicit promise of sexual availability that will be awarded to the male purchaser of a product,” and the organic forms, the curvilinear rhythm, and the sensual atmosphere that was evoked in Mucha’s work became synonymous with the Art Nouveau movement.

The purpose of posters is to persuade viewers and influence their behaviors by delivering a message. Change of poster viewership shifted from people reading posters to illustrated posters “from the collective audience to individual viewer”. Posters before the Art Nouveau Movement mostly had text rather than images. It was extensive to the point that common people reading posters posted in public was a form of social activity for the working class. A majority of the posters that were distributed at the time either had political or religious content, and most people would receive current event news by word of mouth, such as from town criers. These public forms of announcements influenced public opinion and helped establish social and political power. In fact, broadside postings were determined, approved, and controlled by the government. These wordy posters of town ordinances or notices are referred to as placards or broadsides, and they were either created through printing or by hand, “often appeared during periods of economic crisis or rebellion”. These broadsides were commercialized by the use of wooden type, as they were significantly cheaper than metal type. Over time, as the establishment of free compulsory education made reading more accessible to the common people, these placards declined as literacy rates rose among the population.

Eventually, these placards evolved; the purpose of public posters shifted from reading to viewing, in order to stand out from wordy posters, as “critics frequently used metaphors of hypnosis and unconscious suggestion to indicate how passersby still perceive posters in a glance and claimed that this printed material was physically ‘absorbed’ into the mind and body through an osmosis-like process”. The poster’s image was comprehended through a simple glace; therefore, this led designers to simplify their designs to easily catch the viewers’ attention. Bold designs through flat blocks of color (influenced by the Japonisme) became a characteristic of the Art Nouveau style. Due to the necessity for designers to catch attention in the streets, posters became “rowdy, uproarious, and loud”, which has associations to gaudiness. It can also be described that Art Nouveau posters’ persuasiveness and aggressiveness is shown through its use of color and its dynamic composition: “figures seem to lunge out of the composition into the space of the viewer”.

The style of Art Nouveau was eye-catching and effective in terms of advertising. Color and composition choice helped fulfill the promotional role Art Nouveau posters soon became known for, and these flamboyant posters’ image instilled in many viewers’ memories, as critics credited Art Nouveau posters that can arrest, stimulate, and shock viewers into a heightened, more focused mental state:

Jules Chéret was the first to use color lithography in posters, and this method became the standard during the Art Nouveau Movement. It became common to mass-produce illustrated posters with color lithography due to its accessibility and affordability, in comparison to original prints and illustrations. Chéret’s use of color lithography made way for Alphonse Mucha’s work, who epitomized the Art Nouveau movement, in terms of its cliché posters of languid women with long flowing hair enveloped in flowers, signaling both design awareness and a liberal attitude.

The term “Art Nouveau” was coined in 1895, when a man by the name of Siegfried Bing opened a shop in Paris called L’Art Nouveau that sold ornamental objects. The Art Nouveau Style assimilated styles from the past, such as Rococo, Baroque, and cultural styles from Islam, Japan, and folklore. In addition, metamorphosis became a common theme in Art Nouveau. Metamorphosis was present in Mucha’s work, as he uses plenty of organic patterns in his pieces. He also has curvilinear lines, flat two-dimensional forms, and is known for his use of female figures in his posters. Mucha’s first poster of the actress Sarah Bernhardt from 1894 highlights all of these characteristics, such as the narrow, elongation of the female figure, emphasized by the vertical orientation of the poster, the use of pastel colors, and the thoughtfulness of the subject matter. Mucha depicted Bernhardt’s successful career in this piece and gave her an image that denied the domestic and obedient attitude of women while her images worked to show woman’s elegance and an ideal of beauty. Mucha’s Art Nouveau aesthetic created a new level of dignity and seriousness to the art movement.

Many Art Nouveau posters used the female form to attract attention and sell commercial goods, and this type of marketing is especially targeted towards the male audiences. In Mucha’s example of the JOB Cigarette advertisement (1896) features a woman smoking. Smoking was considered an activity in association to men, to the point that smoking women were portrayed as “prostitute, bohemian, or lesbian,” and that posters with women with lit cigarettes must have been startling to the public (other JOB Cigarette paper company advertisements were also created by other designers, who also included women in their posters).

Mucha’s JOB poster was the most popular among the series. It features a “smoking woman, who has an orgasm with cigarette pleasure being inhaled into her body”. Smoking expresses different symbolisms, such as death, passing pleasures, or sexual allusions. In addition, the woman’s long curly hair elevates her sex appeal, its curliness implies the entrapment and deceitful of beauty towards the male viewers of the cigarette paper advertisement. Her nicotine-addicted provoking eyes look down on the male viewers, and the purple and gold color scheme (instead of primary colors) makes for a more exotic and mysterious aura. Due to the connotations associated with smoking, Mucha’s depiction of smoking women in his posters gave mixed messages to the viewers of his posters because most of Mucha’s women, like Sarah Bernhardt’s posters like Gismonda (1894), are “pure, sophisticated, creatures with elegant curves set against backgrounds inspired by Byzantine paintings”.

In addition to sexualized women, Mucha also drew more conservative female figures, such as mothers. He created an advertisement for Nestlé Foods to sell baby food in 1898. The female figure in this poster was more conservative, with a halo and pointers behind the mother’s head, and fewer embellishments in the poster overall, such as less bouncy and curly hair and fewer flowers. Overall, Mucha’s women show less potential obscenity, as they are languid, mysterious, religious, decadent, and heavily draped.

Mucha and other Art Nouveau designers aided to change social beliefs, particularly towards women. Like the controversy and initial confusion of the women on the JOB Cigarette Paper advertisement series, the commercialized and decorative Art Nouveau posters also helped break the taboo against women and drinking. Women figures on posters reflected increasing the rights of women, artists also depicted women’s subordinate roles metaphorically.

Art Nouveau posters slowly declined in popularity between 1905 and 1914 due to three reasons: a change in fashion (Art Nouveau started to look dated and more people started wanting less of the ornamental style), expanding business clients have different needs for advertisements outside of the entertainment industry, and war made designers focused on promoting patriotism and national causes. Thus, Sachplakat was created in response to the increasingly fast-paced and visually saturated environment of the modern city in the twentieth century. The minimized design elements and elimination of lengthy advertisement texts were common at the time. However, the type of environment-driven aesthetics became one of the first advertising appeals developed specifically for the fast-moving and visually-loud cityscape. Communicating to distracted individuals in this environment required new designs whose simplicity would stand out amidst such a visual cacophony of lights and sights.

Sachplakat (translated as “object poster” and also known as Plakistil), was a poster style in which did not fill the pages. Instead, it “restricted the image to the object being advertised, and the words to the brand name,” which is exactly how Lucian Bernhard’s first Sachplakat poster came to be. Due to the Art Nouveau style, persuasive simplicity was not yet common in advertising. So when Bernhard came out with the Priester Matches poster in 1905, he stood out from other designers. Not only did his piece not fill the page, but the negative space allowed the product in the display to pop out. This intentional choice to isolate the pairs of match sticks and the name of the brand simplifies and flattens the overall surface of the piece. Bernhard “moved graphic communications one step further in the simplification and reduction of neutralism into a visual language of shape and sign”. The flat surface was able to acknowledge the two-dimensional characteristics of the poster, which enhances the product. Sachplakat style of poster design is also less labor-intensive than the Art Nouveau illustration style because the background surface and the visual composition of the Object Poster does the work instead of the ornaments that the Art Nouveau style is known for.

Advertising during the 1880s up until the early 1910s had a prominent influence in the graphic design world. Art Nouveau style includes highly decorative embellishments in the poster and fills the page up with intricate Victorian style of decoration. Mucha’s dreamy and fantastical posters gave light to the devilish and deceiving women to the conservative and respectable women, which represents natural womanhood. As posters have the ability to be decorative and commercialized for business or consumer consumption, they are also capable of changing social norms due to its prominence and influence in the public sphere, as per the example of the liberation message of the female population in Mucha’s works. The Art Nouveau movement influenced society more so than the Sachplakat poster style, though the simplistic forms of Sachplakat stood out from the past and oversaturated Art Nouveau style. Regardless, both styles influenced modern advertising, as posters simply with the product still engage consumers to purchase them, so long as they are persuaded to do so if the posters catch their eye.