Adolphe Mouron was born in Ukraine in 1901, but the politicla situation at the time moved his family to migrate to Paris. Ironically for one of the most celebrated designers of all times, Adolphe had decided to become a painter upon graduating from high school. He only turned to the art of poster, under the name Cassandre, in the hopes that it would make him self-supportive enough to soon drop it and dedicate himself to painting.

Instead, poster design started exerting an irresistible fascination on him: he saw it as an art that "gave the painter a golden opportunity to communicate with the large public". His words herald the role he would eventually assume, that of a translator of the fine arts into design. At25 he wrote with great lucidity that "the poster is not meant to be a unique specimen conceived to satisfy a single art lover, but a mass-produced object that must have a commercial function. Designing a poster means solving a technical and commercial problem... in a language that can be understood by the common man." Because of this need for clarity, and because he wanted very large posters but had to face the risk of them being distorted by the enlargement process, Cassandre turned to architecture and geometry as means to design them.

The poster on the right, done for the newspaper L'Intransigeant in 1925, is one of his best-known works exemplifying his geometrical tendencies. The flatness of the colours, very clear shapes, perspective lines, restrained palette and striking uppercase typography are all characteristic Cassandre elements. The composition is based on three circles -- the eye, ear and mouth. This poster's message is strengthened by conceptual wit. The telegraph lines connected straight to the ear of the figure are a straightforward way of conveying the newspaper's unbiased efficiency. The paper's slogan, "Le plus fort tirage de journaux du soir" (The best-selling evening paper") is cropped to "Le plus fort" ("the Strongest"), and even its name is cut off as if it was impossible for anyone not to instantly recognize it. Braque, Picasso and the collage medium cna all be said to have influenced this work.


The mood of the industial age can be felt in this very unusual approach to a poster. After creating a poster about trains without trains, Cassandre frames the very wheels of that train in a monumental close-up. L.M.S. Bestway (1929) again depends on the circle for its compositonal control; the wheels are drawn abstractly with a speed effect that was quite new at the time. The typography is no less unusual: it is created solely thanks to a fine outline flight. The picture is very minimal, and nearly overwhelming.

Nord Express is different in that the composition is for once triangular,t he circles reduced to ellipses because of the perspective. The abstracted shape of the train is presented in a fish-eye view as it speeds towards a vanishing point situated in a dramatic spot: the lower right corner of the picture. Notice the telegraphic lines that are exact reproductions of what we saw in L'Intransigeant. Cassandre puridied his motifs to the extent of reducing them to icons.

Poster design at the time usually left the lettering for last, placing it at random on the illustration or squeezing it in a convenient corner. Cassandre radically changed that approach: "the design should be based on the text and not inversely". In Cassandre's work it is the text that sets the creation process in motion. An example is the famed Pivolo poster on the right: in French the product name, Pivolo, sounds like "Pie vole haut" ("magpie fly high"), and from this pun the image of the magpie was born. The type used is Bifur, designed by cassandre himself (more on that later). This was the first time he used letters for their visual impact, as a way of echoing the illustration, rather than for their semantic values or architectural qualities. By treating them as surfaces, gradating them from black to dark blue and filling them with shdes of grey, he transformed them into active plastic elements. Thus he turned the text into a rhythmical interplay of lines, surfaces and connecting spaces, as well as achieving an unexpected synthesis of upper and lowercase.

Cassandre would often resort to the kind of pun that created Pivolo's magpie, but the wittiest and most lauded of these examples is what he came up with for Dubonnet. The entire message of the campaign is conveyed by a simple play on the type, highlighting parts of the word in a progression leading to the brand name, while the image illustrates what the copy says. The first vignette reads DUBO, which read like "Du beau" ("something beautiful"). A man gazing at a glass of wine, highlighted only in the face and the arm carrying the glass, confirms that this is the way we are meant to read the text. In the second vignette, we read DUBON ("something good"), and our character is now tasting the drink, the colour reaching down to his stomach. Finally the full brand name, DUBONNET is revealed as the now-complete man helps himself to a second serving.

For his typography, Cassandre used almost nothing but sanserif capitals, which owing to their simplicity were particularly well-suited to the modular construction method he favoured (he clearly aspired to be an architect as well as a painter). Another advantage they presented was that they could be deformed and remain legible. Cassandre was unfailingly loyal to the uppercase because he considered the lowercase to be a manual distortion of the monumental letter. He wanted the primitive letter, a product of T-square and compass, the only letter to be truly monumental, because he hoped to restore the large-scale monumental painting of the finest periods of art history. Such was his state of mind about type when he started designing fonts himself in 1927.

He first invented the Bifur font used in the poster for Pivolo. Bifur was intended to surprise; its letters were to impress themselves on the viewer's mind because they don't have the appearance of conventional letter forms. Cassandre created the font by simplifying the architecture of the alphabet: he stressed its geometric qualities, eliminated all horizontal lines that could be removed and filled in the spaces with grey. He stripped the letterforms down to their essence while keeping them instantly legible. Once again, in his words, Bifur was "meant to answer a specific need, not to be decorative. It is naked among letters". With it he was trying to revive the word's original power as an image.

A few years later, Cassandre took a new direction in the search for the calligraphic values of the written letter. This is particularly reflected in his study for Peignot (left), intended to be an all-purpose typeface with upper and lowercase (which are really small caps). Bifur had been a commercial failure, but Cassandre remained convinced that the only way to restore the dignity of the written word was to return to the Roman alphabet and remove the "decorations" that had accumulated on letterforms. Peignot was not born as a decorative variant on a theme: it was the creation of a new theme that would be the point of departure for decorative experiments. Cassandre thought of it as a new step in the natural evolution of the letter. He believed that lowercase letters came into existence because they were easier to write, but that now, in the printing era, there was no reason why typographers could not return to the noble classical shapes of the alphabet and discard the archaic lowercase. The problem raised by this choice would have been that of legibility: a text in capitals is less legible than a text in lowercase. This is caused by the fact an uppercase word tends to assume a monotonous rectangular appearance with no familiar distinguishing feature to assist the eye, so that the eye grasps only its outline and can't break it down into letters. To solve this, the Peignot small caps preserve ascenders and descenders, which are aids to rapid reading. The only letter to keep its lowercase form was the d. Cassandre conceded to this because he realized that we cannot change our reading habits. All the other letters are capitals, some of which are atrophied (B, L, F), turned into lances (H, K) or dropped from the baseline (P, Q, Y).

However, Peignot failed to take certain factors into consideration: writing is related to drawing, and so like any art it involves mass psychology. Aesthetics and psychology are delicate subjects and cannot be approached with scientific methods. So Peignot was again a commercialfailure.

In 1937, after an extended stay in the United states, he turned to his original vocation again: painting. This practice would influence all his late posters and types. In 1958 Olivetti commissioned him several typefaces for typewriters. He then developed a style of letter in which the hand, influenced by painting, is now freed from the geometrical constraints of his pre-war work, and seems to flow with a rhythm inspired by the Roman proportions. The bold vertical strokes are balanced by ample curves, and there is an elegant slope to the letters -- yet they have also an incisive quality that recalls stone cutting. This font, used for the well-known Yves Saint-Laurent logo, was Cassandre's last typographic style.

A text of that period expresses his renewed view of letterforms and a new understanding of lowercase letters: "I now view the letter as being born of an expression of gesture, and its natural state is to be drawn rapidly. But it became with printing a sign slowly engraved in steel like the romans engraved on stone, and the temptation to imitate the Roman's monumental inscription, giving the page the severe orderly appearance of architecture, is great. It is a dangerous pitfall for it threatens to deprive the line of its essential movement, This is why we prefer Old Style characters -- they have succeeded in preserving the movement and rhythm of Roman and medieval cursives."

Cassandre occupies an important position in the history of graphic design, as a pioneer of poster communication, typographic treatment and the translation of complex visual subjects into symbolic form. The visual themes he tackled became part of the program at the Bauhaus school, among other things. He used the organic techniques of the fine arts and without losing their dynamism, tamed them into the controlled precision of the machine age. By showing the way to a new visual vocabulary more adapted to mass communication, he had a hand in widening the rift between fine arts and graphic design.

. Henri Mouron, Cassandre.

Academic notes and documents.

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Article ©, written by Joumana Medlej. Pictures from academic sources.