Georges Gaudy
Happy Easter! Have a joyful day :)
- Zuzanna & The Team
This month we’re partnering with Europeana again to celebrate their fantastic new Art Nouveau season (21 February - 29 May). The season explores the depth and diversity of the influential art movement and features beautiful Art Nouveau jewellery, posters and much more. It is led by a major new exhibition that tells the story of Art Nouveau from its origins to its brilliant heyday, and features fifty artworks from more than twenty museums.
In today’s post, we explore Art Nouveau and advertising in the machine age, courtesy of the collection of the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.
Advertising at the turn of the 20th century reflected the public’s fascination with rapid technological progress and the machine age. Many posters portrayed the hustle and bustle of modern transport, featuring bicycles, cars, ships and aeroplanes, and the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya has an excellent collection of these works.
Artists like Georges Gaudy (1872-1940) subtly incorporated stylistic elements of Art Nouveau (known as modernisme in Catalonia) into their commercial work, using floral motifs, vivid typography and areas of pure colour, all of which are seen in this advertisement for Legia Cycles and Automobiles. Gaudy specialised in automobile and bicycle posters and in this poster he was able to combine these talents. The artistic influence of Japanese woodblock prints, ukiyo-e, was important in Art Nouveau and it is evident here in Gaudy’s bold outlines.
Images of leisure, sport and recreation were common on posters of the era, which depicted sporting clubs, motor races and regattas. These images were often highly aspirational, reflecting the fashion, wealth and social status of the growing bourgeoisie. In the Legia Cycles poster, we’re encouraged to admire the woman’s dress, beauty and poise as she leans on her elegant bicycle. As she gazes at a passing automobile, an implicit contrast is made between the two modes of transport and the old and the new.
We need your help - we need $20,000 to create the new version of DailyArt for Android devices.
. Thank you!