When Tracy asked me if I wanted to help put on a 1920’s-themed cabaret benefit for the American Museum of Radio & Electricity, my immediate response was “heck stinking yes.”  Not just because I wish my entire life was just a long 1920’s themed cabaret benefit for various steam punk-adjacent causes–I was also intrigued by the idea of incorporating the amazing poster art of the Belle Epoque into Music for Modern’s publicity materials.  I’ve always loved Art Nouveau, specifically such artists as Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt.  In terms of my drawing and painting, I’ve been heavily influenced by the Expressionists and the Fauves.  In other words, I think that this era of art is THE BEST.  Just look at it:

Schiele’s figures have real weight and awkwardness, which makes the grace they attain seem painfully earned.  The mother figure here looks both real and carved out of marble at the same time.  The murky interior suggests cliffs and stones as well as soot and dust–it manages to be both abstract and tactile.

Klimt uses very flat planes, filling them with intricate patterns and bolts of color.  His work is reminiscent of Japanese prints.  This flattened, print-like affect makes his subjects seem all the more vivid, like a vase of orchids posed in front of floral wallpaper.  The wallpaper doesn’t become ugly, but the orchids do become more beautiful.

Kirchner’s figures are having some facial expressions, having some fashion, being somewhere cool, getting confused by hats.  What makes this painting cool is that it captures a very transitory moment–that of walking around at night looking at things, when way too  many things seem to be happening and the lighting keeps changing and horses look askew at you.  It’s difficult to suggest movement and transience in a static object, but Kirchner achieves it.

But I needed to make a poster, not depict the tension between the natural and artificial as society assimilated the effects of the Industrial Revolution.  So I started looking at the Belle Epoque advertising for events, spirits, products–anything I thought might be vaguely appropriate.

When most people think of cabaret posters, they of course think of Toulouse-Lautrec.  But there were a lot of other great artists working in the poster metier during this time.  Some of the most interesting posters were absinthe advertisements.  Here are a few of my favorites:

“You should drink our absinthe, because it might inspire old Pilgrims to chase you!”

“Instead of giving your cat coffee to drink as he peruses the morning paper, why not offer him absinthe?”

“Our absinthe is the perfect accessory for rapey dudes.”

Leonetto Cappiello is widely regarded as the father of modern advertising.  His lines are very clean; his images bright and distinctive.  When it came time to design the main Music for Moderns poster, I decided to base it on a famous Cappiello image–another advertisement for absinthe:

The thing I liked best about this image was the look of ecstasy on this woman’s face.  She’s fully clothed–even gloved–but she manages to look sexy, joyous, and vulnerable.  There’s something almost subversive about the look of unadulterated pleasure on her face.  This look spoke to our hopes for the event–we wanted to create something that felt dangerous yet prim, fun but buttoned-up.  After playing with the image for a bit, I came up with the below:

As you can see, I lifted Cappiello’s central image and color scheme whole hog.  In order to remove the original writing and get it to a higher resolution, I had to process the image multiple times in both Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.  The lines of the resulting image is somewhat simpler and less nuanced than the original, but Cappiello’s strong color palette still carries it.  The most difficult thing about making this poster was fitting all the necessary information onto it.  In order to do so, I ended up using 17 different fonts, in the hopes of differentiating each block of information from the next in an aesthetically pleasing manner.  I was also hoping to replicate the lettering of vaudeville posters like the below:

While this poster contains a huge amount of information, it manages to stay attractive and visually interesting through its lettering differentiations.  Each line is justified in order to achieve visual unity.  It may be a relic of a more literate time, but the effect is still appealing.

My next task was to create tickets.  In the process of searching for a ticket template, I came across some really cool luggage labels.  Here are a few of the best:

I was most intrigued by some of this set of Richter & Co. luggage labels.  My two favorite images ended up being these:

I settled upon adapting the Grand Hotel de Londres label.  Here is the final result:

On the back, I wanted to include some of the hilarious nightclub rules I had found when researching Prohibition nightlife.  Some clubs still use rules like this today.  Milk & Honey’s are especially representative:

No name-dropping, no star fucking.

1. No name-dropping, no star fucking.
2. No hooting, hollering, shouting or other loud behaviour.
3. No fighting, play fighting, no talking about fighting.
4. Gentlemen will remove their hats. Hooks are provided.
5. Gentlemen will not introduce themselves to ladies.
   Ladies, feel free to start a conversation or ask the bartender to introduce you. If a man you don’t know speaks to you, please lift your chin slightly and ignore him.
6. Do not linger outside the front door.
7. Do not bring anyone unless you would leave that person alone in your home. You are responsible for the behaviour of your guests.
8. Exit the bar briskly and silently. People are trying to sleep across the street. Please make all your travel plans and say all farewells before leaving the bar.

Here is what I settled upon.  The rules are taken from those for Club Gallant, a notorious New York club popular in 1925:

The rules, which you probably can’t read unless you are magic, are these:

1.  Do not get too friendly with the waiter.  His name is neither Charlie nor George.  Remember the old adage about familiarity breeding contempt.

2.  Do not ask to play the drums.  The drum heads are not as tough as many another head.  Besides, it has a tendency to disturb the rhythm.

3.  Make no requests of the leader of the orchestra for songs of the vintage 1890.  Crooning “Sweet Adeline” was all right for your granddad, but times, alas, have changed.

4.  Please do not offer to escort the cloakroom girl home.  Her husband, who is an ex-prizefighter, is there for that purpose.

The funny thing is, all of these rules, while tongue-in-cheek, are TOTALLY APPLICABLE to jerks of today.

My next task was creating hand bills.  Hand bills are fun to make because they are totally disposable–they cost little, and people don’t take them terribly seriously.  My first handbill was a just a play on the poster.  I needed to fit a ton of information into a tiny space, so I tried to come up with a concept to tie it together.  I liked the idea of the Music for Moderns muse drowning in a sea of words, but still smiling as she held her champagne high above the waves.  The execution, however, didn’t quite come out the way I wanted it to:

Warping the text into waves was harder than it looked, and finding words to fill every necessary space was challenging as well (I’m still not happy with that tiny “beer” hiding near the bottom of her dress.)  I had more fun with my next attempts.  I kept searching through archives of Belle Epoque advertisements, looking for images that were suggestive of refined debauchery.  To that end, I concentrated my searches on alcohol, cigarette, lingerie, and night club advertisements.  Finally,  I found this image:

What I liked about this image was its sense of insolent repose.  Sure, it glamorizes smoking, but it also glamorizes wearing purple dresses, living near the ocean, hanging out in pansy fields, and being hot.  If my hand bill actually tricks a bunch of youth into doing any of those activities, I can’t say I’ll be sorry.  (A promise I can make confidently, since I’m entirely sure that it won’t.  Besides, there are worse things to be than a propagandist for indolent lifestyles.)  Anyway, here it is:

I also enjoyed a series of advertisements for a dance troupe called Bon Ton Burlesque.  I couldn’t find out who had originally done the posters (which date back to the 1890s), but I thought that it was some of the best branding that I’d ever seen.  The design elements are kept consistent, and the images find a weird balance between salaciousness and whimsy:

It’s hard to see, but the dancer is leading around some of the same guys from the other posters: Monocle Dude, Eager Fatty, Muttonchops, Old Beardy, and John McCain.  There are so many reasons to love these posters–one, because they are like reading a comic about horrible old rich dudes really slowly; two, because they tell the truth.  Unlike a lot of modern advertisements for “sexy” products, these don’t pretend that consumers of these products are virile studs.  If you are a dude who is going out to see strippers all the time, you are probably a goofy dude of limited attractiveness.  The strippers in question will probably make total fools of you, and in your lust you will look stupid, and everybody will laugh.  Instead of trying to hide this grim reality, the Bon Ton ads make it a selling point.  The question they pose is, “Don’t you feel like going out and acting like an idiot and being humiliated by pretty girls?  Of course you do, you worthless sot.”  These images elevate the pathetic, helping it achieve a strange kind of transcendent beauty.  These posters are full of good humor and geniality.  Although they are over a hundred years old, they are more progressive in their politics than most sex worker/sex product advertisements today.  The dignity of the women in these posters is in no way damaged by their calling; on the contrary, it empowers them, allowing them to control the rich old white men who ostensibly control their entire society.  In short, why are these posters so Third Wave?  I don’t know.  They might be so good as to be Fourth Wave, in my opinion.

Here is my Bon Ton hand bill:

And herein ends my Music for Moderns graphic design post.  My main purpose in writing this post was to credit all of the amazing artists whose images I “borrowed.”  Although it was legal for me to use these images, since they are no longer covered by copyright, I feel that attribution is important.  I also just think that these artists are awesome, as well as much of the artistic output of the Belle Epoque in general.  I think that anybody who cares about graphic design should check out some of this work.  In the early days of advertising, care was taken to make even everyday objects, like luggage labels, as beautiful as possible.  Just because advertising is evil doesn’t mean it has to be ugly.  (I’m looking at you, Golden Arches.)