Colour lithograph
166 x 124cm
1923
The poster that launched Loupot’s career, and established him as one of the leading lights of the new poster generation. One of two images produced for an automobile company, this version draws on the work of Paul Cézanne, whose paintings had inspired a generation of artists following an epochal retrospective exhibition in 1907. Where Cézanne would omit human presence, Loupot inserted a machine of luxury and elegance: the racing car. A version of the bucolic scène galante, in which men and women elegantly repose in nature, here the figures have been replaced with the symbol of the new, the automobile. The dreamlike scene also borrows from Expressionist aesthetics; the elegant car is not drawn with precision. Loupot instead evokes the myth of the automobile.
No other poster has since been able to so perfectly preserve the vigour of the inaugural dream connected to the advertisement of luxury items.