Les Vins de Bourgogne and Place de Vosges

Les Vins de Bourgogne

Les Vins de Bourgogne is an original vintage poster illustrated by Guy Arnoux advertising wines from France’s Burgundy region. The poster shows a 17th-century military captain reclining under a canopy of grapes, hinting that the wine has been aged to perfection. This beautiful piece was printed in the 1920′s using stone lithography.

If you visit Paris, make sure to go to Place des Vosges, a lovely park in the Marais which was built by Henry the 4th and inaugurated in 1612.  Place Des Vosges is a formal garden, it features plane trees planted in allees, and triangles of grass.  There is a perfect geometry to the place.  It is surrounded by well appointed  buildings, with shutters and  steeply pitched blue slate rooftops.

As is the case  in much of Paris, the bottom floor of many apartments is used for storefronts and restaurants.  You can have lunch at Ma Bourgogne, and watch the steady stream of people walk in and out of the gates of Place des Vosges. Visit their website to get a taste of this wonderful place.

This post was written by Karlie Drutz, Vintage European Posters special projects coordinator, and Elizabeth Norris, owner of Vintage European Posters.

You can visit our showroom at 2201 Fourth Street in Berkeley on Tuesdays and by appointment.

Call us at 510 843 2201 to schedule an appointment.

Our next pop up open weekend is May 18-19 2013. You can see our collection at www.vepca.com

Fernet Branca is so Chouette!

The mystical Jagermeister logo

In the 1980s, Americans discovered Jagermeister.  Now Jager has been around for more than a century, but a lean, mean marketing machine of a man, Chuck Giometti, decided to put Jager in the hands of every college kid in the US, and with the use of Jager girls and chilling machines, he did it.

Where did we drink Jager? In New Orleans on the street, in New York at KGB, in San Francisco at Dr. Bombay’s, in  Oakland at the Omni, and at home, never far from the freezer.  You must drink it chilled.  Imagine my surprise when I visited Germany in 1993, very excited at the prospect of drinking Jager in the motherland and was met with sideways glances by my German friends.

In Germany, Jagermeister is considered the drink of old men,  and is used as a digestif.  So when I asked for Jagermeister, it was assumed that, well, I needed digestive aid.  I found this postcard when I returned from Europe and it really cheered me up.

“When my dealer is away, I drink Jagermeister”

About 10 years ago, folks began to approach us at shows and say “Fernet Branca?” At first I didn’t know what they were talking about.  We learn a lot from our clients, and thankfully, one explained to us that it was an Italian digestif.  Over time we learned that when people asked for Fernet Branca, it was safe to assume they were bartenders by trade – today’s mixologists.  Asking for Fernet Branca at a bar is code for “I am also a bartender.”

Fernet Branca logo from the label

Eventually, we met the man responsible for putting Jagermeister and later Fernet on the map. Mr. Giometti contacted us and asked us to help him assemble a collection of original Fernet Posters. And so we did.  Today, he promotes Absente from Micel Roux, Rhum Barbancourt, and Prichards Whiskey to name a few.

Original Fernet Branca Menthe Poster

Anyway,  here is our one and only Fernet Branca poster.  I LOVE this piece. It was printed in the 1960s and suggests how cool or “chouette” the liqueur was then.  The poster is an original, and we consider it to be in Fine (or A-) condition.  The image is a summer image, evoking memories of a long cool drink under an umbrella.  Oh happy place, I’m ready for summer already!

A Little Taste of Benedictine

Vintage advertising posters tell us what products were in demand in the past and how those ‘brands’ reached out to consumers.  In the Vintage European Posters Blog this month, we will take a look at some of the original vintage posters from our collection which advertise legendary liquor brands, how manufacturers explained their product in posters, and how the product  looks to today’s consumer.

Benedictine Liqueur*

Benedictine is an herbal liqueur, said to have medicinal properties.  The recipe was developed  in the  Benedictine Abbey in Normandy by a Monk, Don Bernardo Vincelli, and contains 27 herbs and spices. The primary herbs are Angelica, Hyssop and Lemon Balm, and the distilled liquor is aged 17 months before it goes to market.

The recipe is closely guarded – only 3 people at a time are privy to it, and the brand has been  imitated countless times, so much so that at the distillery there is a rogue’s gallery of counterfeits! Benedictine is an ingredient in the Singapore Sling, some drink it neat, but it is probably most famously enjoyed as a B & B – Benedictine and Brandy.

Anonymous, Benedictine, c. 1890

This poster was created in the 1890′s in France.  It measures 41.5 inches by 57.5 inches and has some light folds with professional water reversible restoration.  The Parisian printer Imprimeries Lemercier went to great lengths to capture the detail of this beautiful design.  The poster features the gothic architecture of the Norman Abbey and the sense of history associated with the brand. The crests across the top of the poster suggest nobility.   The piece also has a tax stamp, just below the B which shows that the poster was hung outdoors and a municipal display tax was paid.

In the Bay Area today, there are many great watering holes featuring mixologists who use Benedictine in their palette.  Visit Flora’s new bar “Fauna” in the Uptown District, or Bourbon and Branch in San Francisco for a taste of this legendary liquor.  Having a hard time finding Benedictine? Try a good bottle shop like Ledger’s Liquor on University Avenue in Berkeley, very close to our Berkeley Showroom.

You can see this poster, and the VEP Collection at St. Christopher Antique Show February 1-3 in San Jose.  The show is a benefit for the St. Christopher’s School in Willow Glen.

2278 Booksin Avenue, San Jose
Friday February 1, 11am-8pm
Saturday February 2, 11am-8pm
Sunday February 3,  10am-2pm

VEP’s booth at the St. Christopher Antique Show last year

*Image from Wikipedia

This post was written by Elizabeth Norris, Owner Vintage European Posters, and edited by Emily Jackson, UC Berkeley Art History Student and Gallery Assistant  www.vepca.com

Vintage European Posters was established in 1997. We are the West Coast’s Largest Dealer in Original Vintage Posters from France and the United States. See us online anytime at www.vepca.com and at our Berkeley Showroom OUTPOST 2201 Fourth Street, Tuesdays and Thursdays

Vintage Posters for the Arts and Crafts Home

Posters are bold and brash you say? Not the right art for the craftsman bungalows that proliferate here in the Bay Area, where we at Vintage European Posters are based? Well maybe that’s because what commonly come to mind when you think ‘vintage poster’ are the saturated images of art deco such as Cognac Briand below. You only have to dig a little bit to find vintage posters that fit the arts and crafts aesthetic.

Cognac Briand by Stephane

First look to British Posterists like The Beggarstaffs, Dudley Hardy,  and Louis J. Rhead.

Artists from left to right: The Beggarstaffs, Dudley Hardy, and Louis J. Rhead

And of course the tradition of British Rail Posters

Vintage British Railway Posters

All suit the Arts and Crafts home with their limited color palette, restrained ornamentation and neutral colors.  The work of American Posterists can also be appropriate, like that of  Ethel Reed, Will Carqueville, and  William H. Bradley. The American style tends to have more in common with the British style than with the French posters of that same time period.

Three beautiful American posters

Another surprise category which we have seen work very well in our clients’ bungalows is the American World War I ‘home front’ posters.  Not the bloody posters we sometime associate with the war

On Ne Passe Pas by Neumont

but the more beautiful posters associated with causes such as food conservation, the YMCA and YWCA, gardening, and The Red Cross.

World War I “Home Front” Posters

From the category of non vintage advertising posters, another great fit is the work of living poster artist David Lance Goines, a Berkeley local.

Two posters by David Lance Goines

Goines uses a very limited color palette – neutral colors such as beiges, browns, blacks, and golds predominate.  Goines has many different clients who commission posters from him, and he draws from nature for many of his designs, whether the client’s product relates nature or not.

David Lance Goines, Sioux City Art Center

As William Morris, one of the grandfathers of the Arts and Crafts Movement, once said, “If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”* A motto to live by if ever there was one! One of the things we love most about our vintage posters is that they served a particularly unique function in history, and still remain remarkably beautiful today.

As we prepare for the Pasadena Heritage Society Craftsman Weekend, we are combing through our collection and trying to think like William Morris.  I hope you can join us at this beautifully curated show in October.

For more information on Arts and Crafts homes, check out our friend Arlene Baxter’s wonderful blog about green bungalow homes.

Sources
*”The Beauty of Life,” a lecture before the Birmingham Society of Arts and School of Design (19 February 1880), later published in Hopes and Fears for Art: Five Lectures Delivered in Birmingham, London, and Nottingham, 1878 – 1881 (1882).

This post was written by Elizabeth Norris, Owner Vintage European Posters and edited by Emily Jackson, UC Berkeley Art History Student and Gallery Assistant,  www.vepca.com

Vintage European Posters was established in 1997. We are the West Coast’s Largest Dealer in Original Vintage Posters from France and the United States. See us online anytime at www.vepca.com and at our Berkeley Showroom OUTPOST 2201 Fourth Street, Tuesdays and Thursdays

As well as at pop up open weekends (sign our mailing list to receive updates about pop-ups)

This fall we will exhibit at the Pasadena Heritage’s Craftsman Weekend October 20-21

The Fall Hillsborough Antiques Show November 2-4

Motocyclettes Monet et Goyon

Gerard, Monet & Goyon, 1926

In 1926, the poster artist O.K. Gerard designed this beautiful poster for Monet & Goyon Motocylettes. It was a momentous year for Monet & Goyon, only two years after one of the founding partners Andre Goyon died of pneumonia, and the year that the company sold the record amount of machines – over 10,000! Unfortunately, this peak in sales was followed only several months later by the death of Joseph Monet, the second partner, forever changing the face of the company. During the next thirty years the company continued to produce motorcycles, until 1959 when it was absorbed into Motostandard.

Relatively ittle is known about the artist himself, although we do know that he continued to work into the 1930’s, designing posters for companies like Boyriven, an automobile supplier. The difference in design between the art deco Monet & Goyon and the more tradition and detailed Boyriven is striking, considering the fact that Monet & Goyon was designed and printed a full seven years before Boyriven. The bright colors, bold shapes, and central silhouetted figure are very characteristic of the 1920’s and 30’s. Life was moving faster in the early 1900’s. Buses, automobiles, and motorcycles like the one in this poster were moving people quickly from here to there, and as a result advertisements had to use simple designs and bright, bold colors to catch the eye of the passerby. One can simply glance at this poster and know instantly what it is advertising, which was an essential feature of a successful poster design.

Gerard, Boyriven, 1933

In contrast to the Monet & Goyon, Gerard’s later poster for Boyriven reverts back to a more detailed design that focuses less on the brand, and more on the image itself. Why does this poster seem to fall outside the art deco tradition? Check out the white box just below “Société Anonyme” – it’s a calendar! Companies would often print posters that included a calendar, which encouraged individuals to hang their advertisement in their garage or office for an entire year, giving individuals plenty of time to visually explore the image. Too simple, and individuals were more likely to take it down and throw it away. Talk about long term advertising!

This post was written by Emily Jackson, UC Berkeley History Student and Gallery Assistant
Edited by Elizabeth Norris, Owner, Vintage European Posters www.vepca.com

Vintage European Posters was established in 1997.
We are the West Coast’s Largest Dealer in Original Vintage Posters from France and the United States.
See us online anytime at www.vepca.com and at our Berkeley Showroom
OUTPOST
2201 Fourth Street, Tuesdays and Thursdays

As well as at pop up open weekends (sign our mailing list to receive updates about pop-ups)

This fall we will exhibit at the Pasadena Heritage’s Craftsman Weekend October 20-21

The Fall Hillsborough Antiques Show November 2-4