A.M.

Cassandre
The career of Adolphe
Jean-Marie Mouron,
better known as A.M.
Cassandre, coincided
with the transition, in
the 1920s and 1930s,
of French commercial
art from a strong
lithographic poster
tradition to a fuller
range of graphic
design. Of the work of
a trio of internationally
recognized Parisian
poster designers, the
others being Paul Colin
and
Jean Carlu, Cassandre's
is the most celebrated.
His posters carried
familiar French and
international brand
names and, in many
cases, established their
visual
identity and longstanding resonance.
Born in the Ukraine,
Mouron trained as a
painter at the Ecole des
Beaux Arts and the
Academie Julian in Paris
immediately after
World War I. On
designing his first
poster he adopted the
pseudonym
"Cassandre" possibly to distinguish
his identity as a
graphic artist
from his other longterm commitment as a
painter.
Among the first posters
Cassandre designed
were those for the
Parisian furniture store

Au Bucheron. When
they appeared on the
city's streets in 1923,
these striking designs
were some of the
earliest to interpret the
ideas of modern
painting and to
emphasize the
typographic
arrangement of words
as a key element in the
design.
Cassandre's career as a
graphic designer took
off at
a time when the Paris
art world was still
investigating
the compositional
discoveries of Cubism,
Futurism and
Purism, and he applied
many of the ideas of
Picasso,
Braque and L6ger to
his new medium. In all
these
artistic movements,
modern painters had
depicted still
lifes, portraits or street
scenes through the
breaking up of
conventional
perspective. What were
called "facetted"
forms were used to
merge objects in space.
The idea of
simultaneity, which
suggested that the eye
can register diverse
elements on a canvas
at one time, was an
important influence on
this generation of
poster

designers. Cassandre's
work was also in tune
with the
simplification of form
that characterized
much of the
design known as
moderne in the years
leading up to the
influential Exposition
Internationale des Arts
Decoratifs et lndustriels
Modernes held in Paris
in 1925. Cassandre's
compositions were
derived from a firm
geometrical base, more
familiar to architecture
than graphic design.
The Florent poster
shown here, for
example, is based on a
2:3 rectangle and the
diagonal line draws
attention to this
proportion. The
composition is softened
and enhanced by a
series of repeated
motifs, the curves of
the tin box and the
product's name.
Some of Cassandre's
most famous posters
he designed a total of
more than 200 - were
produced for
international railway
and shipping lines,
including Nord
Express, Etoile du Nord
(both 1927), Wagons
Lits Cook,
(1933) and Normandie
(1935). These designs
show his extreme
virtuosity in using
elegant symbols as a
form of visual

shorthand. These he
depicted in illusionistic
spaces with clever use
of shadow, intriguing
silhouettes or reversed
forms. Like many of his
contemporaries,
including the architect
Le Corbusier and the
painters Leger and
Ozenfant, Cassandre
stressed the beauty of
machines.
Echoing Le Corbusier's
functionalist
declaration that "the
house is a machine for
living in", Cassandre
wrote in
1929 of the poster as
the "machine i
annoncer" (a
machine for
announcing). By the
193os, together with
the precise depiction of
industrial forms, which
he
achieved by using an
airbrush, Cassandre
introduced neoclassical
heads or figures into
his designs a
reference to Surrealism
and its popularity
among contemporary
fashion photographers.
In 1927 Cassandre
founded an advertising
agency,
Alliance Graphique in
Paris, with Charles
Loupot and
Maurice Moyrand. At
the peak of his activity
he was also
commissioned by
Charles Peignot, of the
prestigious type
foundry and publisher

Deberny Peignot in
Paris, to design
typefaces. The results,
Bifur (1929), Acier Noir
(1937) and Peignot
(1937)~ indicate how
modern French
designers were
prepared to stress
elegance over
functionalism - by
contrast with, for
example, the
Bauhaus. Cassandre's
typefaces are
distinctive for their
stress on negative and
positive space. One of
the important sources
for their style was the
Carolingian lower-case
letterforms developed
during
the tenth century.
Many posters in
Cassandre's mature
style derive their
effectiveness from the
use of
the airbrush. In this
example, advertising
the Grand International
Lawn Tennis
Fortnight staged in
Paris in 1932, the
tennis ball and net are
created by masking the
surface and defined by
the
transition from dark to
light.
An acknowledgement
of Cassandre's
international
significance came in
1936, when the
Museum of Modern Art,
New York, installed a
solo exhibition, making
him one of the first

graphic designers to be
honoured in this way.
Following this, he spent
the winters of 1937 and
1938 in New York,
where he designed
covers for the
magazines Fortune and
Harper's Bazaar, as
well as
monthly press
advertisements for the
Container Corporation
of America and
advertisements for the
agencies Young and
Rubicam and N.W. Ayer
& Co. At what might
have been the apex of
his career,
Cassandre appeared
uncomfortable with the
division of labour in
New York publishing,
which was more
marked than in Europe.
He retreated to France
and concentrated on
stage design and
painting, more at ease
with the European
model of the
autonomous graphic
artist.