1900’s Poster Exhibition at the MNAC
We (Peter, my brother and I) have been today to visit an Exhibiton at the National Art Museum of Catalunya. It was a spectacular collection of the first modern posters. Two Catalan collectors from the beginning of the XX century amassed a great amount of beautiful Art Nouveau posters (most of them publicity posters). It’s a perishable art, since posters once the event or the season has passed they are simply discarded and not considered as works of art at the moment they were issued.
The images are stunning, there was even a small poster for a German hat factory! The Alphonse Mucha posters are the ones best known. Those wavy hair sensual women are hard to forget, but local artists like Ramon Casas also produced some beautiful work. We were stunned by the Casas poster for a Siphilis clinic, it’s the image of a skinny sick woman (a prostitute we assume… there you go, women are always the ones to get the blame)… it’s beautiful and sad at the same time. You can see it on the website of the link above, if you scroll down on the right hand side.
The posters of a tea called RAJAH, with an oriental dressed lady sipping away her steamy tea left me with the urge to get a taste of it, but unfortunately it’s long gone and I will never get a sip. Same thing usually happens with perfumes, those old ones with very evocative names… what did they smell off? A few years ago I bought myself a bottle of the re-issued Shocking perfume of Schiaparelli, the nostalgy of glamorous times and the connection of Schiaparelli with hats was just too much to resist. It smells exotic, but it’s a bit to heady for my taste… I believe it requires one to be dressed accordingly, not a perfume to be worn with a t-shirt.
Well that’s all for now. If you come to Barcelona, be sure to go to this exhibition. It will be open until the 30th of September 2007.