WEB POSTER EXHIBITION - Affiches de peintres printed by Mourlot in Paris

This web exhibition accompanies the current exhibition Affiches de peintres at the Dutch Poster Museum in Hoorn, The Netherlands, from 10 July till 9 October, 2005. The following text and the reproductions were kindly provided by Frans van Lier, curator of the exhibition.


1964, Kees van Dongen


1959, Joan Miro


1978, Marc Chagall

From 10 July till 9 October the Affichemuseum in Hoorn, Holland, will show some 130 French 'affiches de peintres': posters printed between 1950 and 1990 in lithography by the famous Paris printer Fernand Mourlot (1895-1988). All summer the Affichemuseum will host a feast of French painting with colourfull posters by all famous names of the Ecole de Paris: Picasso, Miró, Chagall, Matisse, Gris, Braque, Van Dongen, Poliakoff, Pougny, Marc, Delaunay, Léger and many others.

Imprimerie Mourlot in the Rue Chabrol, founded in 1852 by Jules Mourlot, was one of the many stoneprinters in Paris where artists as Lautrec, Chéret, Daumier, Bonnard, Steinlen and others had their lithos printed. Many of these pintshops collapsed during the 1929-crisis and second world war but not Mourlot.

After Jules three of his sons took over the printshop. One of them, Fernand Mourlot, ex-student of the Academy of Arts, knew many painters of the Ecole de Paris and raised their interest in his lithography-printing. In the second half of the 20th century hundreds and hundreds of lithos and posters were made, all hand-reproduced on stone and later on zinco by famous Mourlot craftsmen like Henri Deschamps or Charles Sorlier.

From the impressive collection of the Groningen publishers Caspar Wechgelaer and Els Verhoog - they own more than thousand of these lithographed 'affiches de peintres' (some also from the Arte printshop of Galerie Maeght) the exhibition in Hoorn is selected.

Some of the 'affiches lithographiées' are also on sale in the museum. (www.affichemuseum.nl)


1966, Pablo Picasso


1984, Fernand Leger


1961, Henri Matisse


home  previous exhibitions  page created on August 1, 2005 / this section is part of Rene Wanner's Poster Page /