Vintage Poster Archives
Cocaine 1925 | René Gaillard French Theatre Poster
Cocaine 1925 | René Gaillard French Theatre Poster
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A winged green gargoyle-demon crouches between the dome of Sacré-Coeur and the red windmill sails of the Moulin Rouge, its hollow eyes trained on the street below. In the foreground, an emaciated woman in a floor-length scarlet dress sways, barely upright, surrounded by a cast of grotesque figures, a leering clown-musician, a lurking pair, a gnome-like figure at her side. At mid-right, actor Mars Biso is spotlit in a circular portrait vignette. The title COCAÏNE cuts across the composition in large irregular white letters on a diagonal black band. Three colours, black, cadmium red, and sickly green, carry the entire visual argument.
Designed by René Gaillard for Louis le Couriadec's five-act play La Splendide, the poster was produced in Paris around 1925 using stone lithography. Gaillard lived and worked in Montmartre, and the composition is rooted in the quarter's own topography: the Sacré-Coeur on the hill, the Moulin Rouge below, the alleyways between. Cocaine was legal in Paris at the time; Gaillard's gargoyle, borrowed from the city's Gothic stonework and set loose over the rooflines, makes clear that legality and benignity are not the same thing.
The design occupies a particular moment in French graphic art: the inter-war theatre poster at its most expressively charged, where cabaret illustration meets the unsettling grotesque and the diagonal compositional energy of the period's bolder work. As a document of 1920s Parisian cultural life, it reads as both advertisement and moral commentary.
Reproduced from archival sources using pigment-based inks on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper. A natural fit for collectors of French inter-war graphic design, students of Montmartre's cultural history, or anyone drawn to the visual language of the 1920s Parisian stage.
