Vintage Poster Archives
Cappiello Congres Etudiants 1907 | Bordeaux Poster
Cappiello Congres Etudiants 1907 | Bordeaux Poster
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A woman in a saffron-orange dress squeezes dark grapes into a wine glass; her partner throws one arm aloft and tilts back on a heel, mid-song. Grape clusters scatter across a deep teal sky. Behind the pair, a frieze of grinning suited men watches from the shadows. The violet-purple ground keeps everything flat and immediate, the composition pressing forward with the directness that defined Cappiello's mature style.
Leonetto Cappiello (1875–1942) designed this lithograph for the Fêtes du Congrès International des Étudiants, held in Bordeaux in September 1907, and it was printed by Imprimerie P. Vercasson of the rue de Lancry, Paris. By 1907 Cappiello had moved beyond the sinuous decorative language of his Art Nouveau contemporaries. Where Jules Chéret used swirling ornament, Cappiello used silhouette and gesture. The 1907 Bordeaux poster is among the event-commission works that sit alongside his better-known product campaigns for Maurin Quina and Bouillon Kub, and it is held in the Library of Congress collection, confirming attribution and date. Cappiello went on to produce over 1,700 commissioned posters before his death in Cannes in 1942, and is regarded as a founding figure of modern advertising graphic design.
The Bordeaux Congress commission allowed Cappiello to lean into the region's identity without constraint: wine, festivity, crowd energy, all rendered with his characteristically spare wit. The poster depicts a specific cultural moment, a jubilant student gathering in France's great wine capital, at the point when the city was becoming more confident of its international standing.
Reproduced from archival sources using the Giclée process on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper. The design is Cappiello's; the print is freshly produced, without optical brighteners, on a natural white substrate.
