The Era of Joy. Advertising Poster of the 1860s-1890s as a Continuation of the Laughter Culture of the European Middle Ages

Abstract

This article aims to study the influence of urban advertising on the formation of urban society’s positive mood in France at the turn of the 20th century. The focus is on the heyday period of circulation graphics, which was the result, firstly, of the improvement of printing techniques by the middle of the 19th century and the appearance of lithography, which made it possible to repeatedly replicate advertising samples. Secondly, it was the result of the intensive increase in trade, industrial production and the number of product consumers, for whose attention manufacturers competed. In addition, by the 1890s, a generation of advertising masters had formed, in particular, the poster masters who skillfully used the features of the new creative form and attracted the attention of art critics. This refers to the era of Jules Cheret, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Eugene Grasset, Adolphe Villette, Alphonse Mucha and others. An important aspect of this study is the research of the connection between the advertising poster of the Art Nouveau era and the laughter culture, which, according to M.Bakhtin, made a key contribution to the formation of the modern society’s thinking, as well as the concepts of the grotesque and the comic in the interpretation of the Russian writer and philosopher and Charles Baudelaire, a French poet and publicist. Consideration of poster communication from the standpoint of Bakhtin's theory is an original method. The artistic basis of this study is the poster heritage of artist Jules Cheret, the leading master of European printed advertising graphics of the second half of the 19th century. The concept approbation is carried out on the material of La Plume literary magazine, namely, issue No.110 of December 1893, which was entirely devoted to the art of the advertising poster. This article discusses six critical essays on Jules Cheret’s creative work. Their authors are E.Mendron, K.Huysmans, F.Champsaur, Roger Marx, Ivanhoe Rambosson, Raoul Serta. All translations of text fragments are made by the author of this article.