A m cassandre biography of martin tn

In , a Parisian hurrying by the poster-appliqud walls and hoardings of his city might have had his eye drawn to a large horizontal poster. Given its strongly allegorical tone, the poster might have been taken as an exhortation by one of the revolutionary organizations of the time urging the French proletariat to fell a symbolic class foe.

The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition history— from our founding in to the present—is available online.

For just below the Herculean woodsman, the angular, decorative lettering informed the viewing public that the blow to be struck was a no-nonsense advertisement for Au Bucheron The Woodcutter , a prominent Parisian furniture store. Forthrightlyeven clumsilylettered at the lower left of the poster was the name of Adolphe Mouron Cassandre, a young artist-designer making his first appearance among a select and aesthetically tired community of poster designers.

If the poster itself did not proclaim social revolution, its year-old designer, with this initial commercial foray, was about to revolutionize the entire conception and style of poster design, and in turn institute fundamental changes in the realm of visual communication. In the ensuing years A. In the totality of his professional career, Cassandre worked only a relatively short time as a poster and graphic designer.

But in that rich period he produced a body of work that remains unmatched for its unique beauty and impact. In the classic French tradition, Cassandre was the nom de plume he took instead of his original name, Adolphe Jean Marie Mouron. He was born of French parents who resided in Kharkov, a famed Ukrainian city. In , when only 14 years old, he had the exceptional blessings of his parents to become a painter and was sent to Paris to study at the stiffly academic cole Des Beaux Arts.

His post-cole education included a period of study with Lucien Simon at the Acadmie Julian, followed by a period of compulsory military service. A puritan in our midst, a worshipper of all things beautiful. The leap from the Bucheron poster in to the succeeding one for Pi Volo aperitif embraced a quantum jump. This poster, with its fusion of bird, glass, light and dark forms and its art deco lettering, demonstrates that Cassandre had assimilated the revolutionary ideas of shape and interpenetration of form developed in the cubist and abstract paintings of Gris, Braque, and Picasso.

Images so seemingly literal and so directly rendered took on a new dimension.