The illustrator most commonly known as A. M. Cassandre was born as Adolphe Mouron to
French parents living in Ukraine in 1901, and he spent his childhood years both there
and in France.
As a young man he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian.
And when he set up an artist's studio in Paris in 1922 he began using the the alias Cassandre
for the posters he started to produce.
And although he only created commercial work to augment the inadequate income he was making
from painting, it was the posters which rapidly came to dominate his output.
From the very outset his graphic work was remarkably distinctive. More than any of his
contemporaries Cassandre had absorbed and embraced the doctrines of early 20th century
European painting and its exploration of visual abstraction.
In particular he had been influenced by the work of the cubists Georges Braque and Juan
Gris, and there was also a significant measure of the early surrealist art of Giorgio de
Chirico.
In theory his radically geometric approach should have been a recipe for commercial disaster
in the graphic environment of the period, but it proved to be immensely popular with
Parisians and the urban sophisticated French, who enthusiastically embraced the modernity
of his images.
In 1924 he married the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, which elevated his social position
considerably and he promptly had a house designed and built in Versailles.
And with a contract to work with the prestigious print and publishing house Hachard et Cie
signed in the same year his career and future success looked guaranteed.
Although originally created in 1923 his poster for the Au Bucheron furniture store won first
prize at the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs.
This success and its subsequent exposure greatly enhanced his reputation and the commissions
for more came thick and fast.
All his designs were created with gouache paint and alongside the various brush applications
and stippled effects he was also one of the earliest to harness the potential of the mechanical
airbrush to create smooth and textured tonal transitions.
His original designs were then transferred to lithographic stones, and reproduced using
separate colour runs by print technicians working to Cassandre's precise direction.
In the latter part of the 1920s not only did his dynamic posters appear all across France,
but his reputation had also spread to other European countries, who were eager to be associated
with his distinctive dynamic aesthetic.
In 1930 Cassandre set up his own design and advertising studio Alliance Graphique in partnership
with his friend the businessman Andre Moyrand and fellow modernist poster artist Charles
Loupot.
The business was an instant success, with clients from France and further afield drawn
to their reputation for stylish campaigns.
In that year the company began a business relationship with the wine producers Nicolas,
for whom both Cassandre and Loupot created literature and publicity material.
And at the same time Cassandre also started to produce some of his most iconic and enduring
images for Dubonnet.
We can get a fascinating and unexpected insight into his preparatory work for this long running
campaign, with pencil drawings which reveal a totally geometric approach to image construction
from the very beginning of the piece.
And it's quite remarkable how expressive and engagingly humorous this level of abstraction
could be in his hands.
Although remarkably prolific with the posters and other advertising work which flooded into
Alliance Graphique, in 1933 he also found time to make his debut as a stage designer
and even to teach at a couple of Parisian art schools.
He also designed several enduring modernist typefaces between the late 1920s and mid 1930s.
Although Alliance Graphique had been a runaway success for Cassandre and his partners it
came to an abrupt end when Andre Moyrand died in a car accident in 1934.
With the real business brain of the three principles no longer at the helm Cassandre
and Loupot decided to go their separate ways, and the company ceased trading.
But Cassandre's reputation, and Loupot's for that matter, had grown to a point where neither
had to be concerned about a lack of commissions.
In 1936, he travelled to the USA to attend an exhibition of his work at New York's Museum
of Modern Art and he extended his visit to the city in the hope of entering into contracts
with American clients.
But he didn't enjoy the level of success he had expected, and many of those he approached
considered his style too extreme and non-representational for their customer's conservative tastes.
So with only a relatively small number of commissions in the pipeline he returned somewhat
disappointed to Paris.
Among his American successes was a series of cover illustrations for the magazine Harper's
Bazaar.
And by this point the more surrealist representational side of his creative impulse had become more
prevalent in his work, and many of the covers he created for the magazine demonstrated this
influence quite clearly.
But it wasn't a total or immediate transformation, and he had also been commissioned by the Container
Corporation of America to create a large amount of monochrome publicity work.
And this made much greater use of the more abstracted approach he had started his career
with.
Despite his failure to find equivalent success in the USA, in France and elsewhere in Europe
his popularity continued unabated.
The body of posters and other graphics he produced in the 1930s clearly demonstrated
the relentless creativity and aesthetic judgement that had defined his work from the very beginning,
and every image continued to explore the graphic potential of his subjects.
In 1939 he and his first wife divorced and following the outbreak of the Second World
War France fell to the invading German army only a year later.
During the war there was little to no demand for commercial work and he gravitated increasingly
towards creating stage sets and costume design for theatrical productions.
And this would prove to be a dominant aspect in his work for the rest of his career.
He also persisted in trying to achieve equivalent success with his art, but despite a 1942 exhibition
of his paintings, he attracted no more than moderate critical interest.
In his art and stage design, as well as the relatively small amount of poster work he
was now creating he increasingly explored the unsettling dreamlike qualities of surrealist
art and the impact of cubism so obvious in his early work had all but disappeared.
Following the war he married for the second time in 1947 and with poster work largely
abandoned he continued his involvement with international theatrical and operatic productions.
He also worked with several French fashion houses, designing a pack of decorative playing
cards and a range of silk scarves for Hermès, as well as creating the iconic Yves Saint
Laurent logo.
Cassandre spent six months in Italy in 1948, and did produce a couple of posters for a
publisher in Milan, but he had begun to turn irrevocably against the world of commercial
image making and his own part in its manipulation of the consumer.
Nevertheless, among the very few later examples of his poster work was this remarkably atmospheric
and aesthetically balanced poster extolling the beauty of Venice, created in 1951.
Cassandre divorced his second wife in 1954 and in the later 1950s although still immersed
primarily in the theatre he did continue to occasionally produce graphics including some
designs for classical music record covers, if only on an occasional basis.
But by this point he had begun to suffer periodic bouts of depression, and his creative output
was drastically reduced.
In 1960 he left Paris for the countryside with a rather vague plan to set up his own
art institute, but it came to nothing and he returned to Paris 2 years later.
His depression continued to become increasingly severe and he ultimately found himself largely
incapable of any kind if work.
In 1968 he committed suicide in Paris at the age of 67.
We can only speculate why he felt the need to end his life, and it's by no means certain
that it was necessarily connected to his inability to succeed as an artist.
Clinical depression needs no cause and It may well be he'd just had enough.
As I make this video it's just over half a century since his death and with the hindsight
that provides It's impossible to overstate the importance of Cassandre in the development
of 20th century illustration and poster design.
In a career which lasted for about 45 years he was relentlessly creative and innovative,
and his influence clearly continues to resonate in contemporary graphics.