The Art Attic #5: Vintage Advertising

Chat Noir by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

When I look at my artistic influences, one thing is very clear: I love vintage commercial art. Old ads for chocolate or tobacco, flights to Morocco or a train to Paris. These ads are bold and colorful. They have a sense of daring adventure about them as if with one ticket or one dinner date, you could be swept up in an unforgettable whirlwind of fantasy. 

Some people would say that commercial art is crass or banal. It isn't trying to break rules or push boundaries. It isn't striving for immortality. It only wants to be remembered long enough for you to consider the product. It creates in you a want, a cavity that must be filled. 

The cynical part of my brain would certainly not look to modern advertising, a photography-heavy* industry, as my artistic inspiration, but ads from the 1960s and before, specifically those from the Art Nouveau and Art Deco periods, make my heart stir. I wrote once about how a glass doorknob or a fish-shaped downspout makes me feel seen as a human being across time and space. The same goes for these colorful, intricate ads. 

In the documentary Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010), one of the street artists talks about graffiti as a means of taking art to people where they are instead of insisting people come inside to something curated and planned. That's how I feel about good advertising. It's a pop of art in an unexpected place: a subway station, a doctor's office, a bleak highway. And who doesn't want our souls spoken to in those dull places?

One more thing that I admire in these ads that I see mirrored in my own work: hand-lettering. I don't use digital methods for my lettering. I don't like that bouncy cursive script everyone uses. I prefer to make my letters fit the mood of the work, and if they are a bit uneven or the three Es are sisters not triplets, who cares? That's part of how you know a human was involved.

* I'm not saying photography isn't artistic. It certainly is. Strangely though, most ad photography doesn't inspire me artistically. There's one huge exception, but that will be for another issue.