Thirties Archives - Charles Loupot

Thirties

For a while, advertisers were reticent to commission posters by the artist, as the French public was yet to embrace him as the Swiss had. As a result, during the two years which followed his arrival in France, the artist worked more as an illustrator than poster designer.

Later, however, once fully embedded in the work of St. Raphaël, Loupot’s work is everywhere: occupying four thousand painted walls up to thirty metres square in size — not including the several thousand of posters on sheet metal which adorned the city of Paris.

St Raphael Quinquina

Colour lithograph

160 x 121cm

1938

Loupot had worked to modernise the brand image of the aperitif company St-Raphaël since 1936. By 1938, Loupot was redesigning the outdated typeface, and experimenting in graphic, cursive letters. The new lettering was not however ready at the time of this poster, and so Loupot’s recent design of the striding waiters was printed alongside the old lettering contained in a banner at the top of the poster.

L’Atlantique

First draft, poster paint on paper

105.5 x 65.5cm

1930

In 1930, the Compagnie Générale de Navigation Sud-Atlantique launched a new liner, the Atlantique, and ordered a poster for the occasion from Alliance Graphique, the collaborative enterprise of the two leading poster artists of the day, Loupot and A. M. Cassandre. Cassandre and Loupot worked on the project separately, each submitting their own design. Alliance Graphique was not an especially successful collaboration, as suggested by this method of creative competition between the two artists. Both artists depicted the bow of a ship, Loupot inserting a view of the Paris as if reflected on the ship. In the end, Cassandre’s draft was plumped for, submitted some time before Loupot’s design.

Coty

Colour lithograph

180 x 127cm

1938

One of Loupot’s most evocative pieces in which the face is obscured to such an extent that only the bright red lips are visible. The face appears to be clouded in a smoky haze, allowing the lips to loom out from the darkness. This effect was created through the careful use of a spray paint gun, with the result of a kind of graphic version of chiaroscuro, a painterly effect traditionally used for the maximum contrast of light and dark. The lettering of the brand ‘COTY’ appears to be rising from water, reflected back on the watery surface.

Cointreau Woman

Colour lithograph

160 x 120cm

1930

Pierrot, the character from pantomime andcommedia dell’arte, had long been associated with the liqueur brand Cointreau. In 1930, the company decided to update its image and abandon the by-now old fashioned character of Pierrot de Tamago, entrusting Loupot with the task of creating two new posters with a male and female Pierrot. In this poster the female Pierrot is transformed into the clearly defined shapes of Art Deco, the characteristic orange flavour of the drink worked into the figure, so that an orange peel forms its right side, eventually spraying out as if to suggest the powerful aroma of the liqueur. The clown’s nose clip refers back to the photographs of the famed mime artist Najac as Pierrot, who had worn it in a publicity shoot for the brand photographed by Félix Nadar.

GIC glaces crème Ch. Gervais

Colour lithograph

43 x 32cm

1930

A humorous and whimsical piece for an ice-cream company, this poster is in fact a skilled use of the lithographic medium through the splatter effect of the ink. Whilst it seems as if the artist had simply thrown ink onto the lithographic plate to mimic a dripping ice-cream melting onto the letters ‘GIC’, the effect was in fact produced through a series of plates layered on top of each other that required a painstaking level of concentration.

Ambre Solaire, pour brunir sans brûlures

Colour lithograph

200 x 130cm

1936

Following his success with the beauty company L’Oréal in the previous year, Loupot was commissioned to produce another poster by Eugène Schueller, this time for the Ambre Solairesun cream. The piece is bathed in a bronze light, and the figure bends her head upwards towards the rays. The inclusion of a nude for a commercial poster was a daring move for the time. There is a monumental sensuality to the statuesque form, played off against the curves of the bottle that sits next to her.

Twining

Colour lithograph

160 x 120cm

1930

Loupot produced this poster for the English tea company Twinings, using the red and gold of the brand’s colours as the central design motif. He had already played on the idea of steam for his design for Martin coffee, in which the white cup filled with black coffee gave off a single faint line of aromatic steam. Here, the play on the senses is pushed even further. The cup of tea sits at the bottom right of the letter ‘T’, the steam rising from the cup rising in front of the letter. The ‘T’ of Twinings and the tea itself thus appear to be intertwined in a game of homophones that works in both English and French.

St-Raphaël quinquina

Colour lithograph

120 x 160cm

1938

In 1936 Loupot had been commissioned by the aperitif company St-Raphaël to produce an updated image of the brand for the 1937 International Exhibition held in Paris. The following year, Loupot designed another variant of the design, this time showing the two servers swinging on chairs on a terrace. Clad in red and white, each waiter is a visual reminder of the products sold by the company, reasserted in the red and white bottles on the table. In order to produce the poster’s delicate modelling of colour, Loupot used an aerograph, an early form of airbrush. Through this technique, Loupot was able to both achieve the illusion of varied depth for the figural group, and also fill the background with a mysterious cloud of gradated colour. The seated figures, with their heavily delineated hands, are reminiscent of the hugely popular designs produced by Loupot’s rival A. M. Cassandre for the aperitif brand Dubonnet.

Dop lave et embellit les cheveux

Colour lithograph

200 x 130cm

1935

Eugène Schueller, the French pharmacist and entrepreneur behind L’Oréal, launched the first soap-free shampoo ‘Dopal’ exclusively to hairdressers in 1909. By 1934, a non-specialistversion with the abbreviated name ‘Dop’ was starting to be marketed to thegeneral public. Schueller approached Loupot with the commission to produce a poster for the product. Settling on a design, though, was no easy process for Loupot. Ever the perfectionist, he composed multiple drafts before choosing a final design. The profile of a simplified female face is shown silhouetted against a luminous background, allowing the glowing golden hair to take centre stage as the focus of the poster.

St-Raphaël quinquina

Colour lithograph

120 x 160cm

1938

Throughout the 1930s, a number of France’s leading alcohol brands, including Dubonnet, Byrrh, Cinzano, and Martini, commissioned fashionable poster artists in order to keep their brand image up to date. The aperitif brand St-Raphaël took the chance of the 1937 L’Exposition Internationale de Paris (International Exhibition held in Paris) to do similar. Max Augier, the creative director of the brand, commissioned Loupot in 1936 to produce a new design that would reflect the brand’s forward thinking creative policies. The design shows two waiters hurrying to deliver drinks, each with a bottle of liqueur on a tray. They run above the Champ de Mars, one of Paris’ most iconic spaces. There are evident nationalistic overtones, as common with much aperitif advertising of the time. The French flag is dotted through the poster, and the colours of the poster more generally form the Tricolour, with the dark blue of the right-hand side of the poster, and the white and red of the two waiters respectively. Most radically, Loupot and Augier decided not to advertise the brand in a pavilion inside the exhibition, as would be normal practice, but instead to pay for the posters to cover all the outside walls of the exhibition.

Monsavon c’est du lait

Colour lithograph

70 x 53cm

1936

Jean Carlu, a contemporary of Loupot, had designed a poster for the popular soap product in 1925. Very well received, it depicted a laughing boy holding a bar of soap with his arm outstretched. Carlu’s piece was highly stylised, using a triangular composition inspired by the motifs of the soap’s packaging. In 1936, Eugène Schueller commissioned Loupot to design a female counterpart, a deliberate choice considering Loupot’s notoriety in his use of evocative female forms. Loupot played off the composition established by Carlu by including the triangle shaped eye and mouth, but added a new sensuality to the piece. The model’s naked body is enveloped in a light modesty cloud of foam, advertising the efficacy of the product through a playful sexuality.