The Masters of Poster Art

For the first time, the Musée d’Orsay is devoting an exhibition to the spectacular development of the illustrated color poster at the end of the nineteenth century. Through a unique collection of works by the “Masters of the Poster,” the exhibition tells how this medium was elevated in importance to the same “rank” as mural painting, as art critic Roger Marx wrote. This journey into the golden age of the illustrated poster also focuses on the rise of consumption and mass culture of which it was both an instrument and a supreme representation. The streets teeming with energy and novelty of the Belle Époque found in posters one of the most vivid testimonies and together with drawings, art objects, photographs, paintings they evoke an ephemeral and effervescent world of a Paris that no longer exists.