Vintage Poster Archives
Elastic Sommier 1922 | Viano Advertising Poster
Elastic Sommier 1922 | Viano Advertising Poster
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A lime-green elephant, white-tusked and red-mouthed, rears above the Elastic all-steel bed-base on a flat black ground. Speed-lines radiate from the animal in every direction. In the left column, three words: Souple, Silencieux, Solide. The elephant is the fourth argument, and the loudest.
Designed by Viano, a French commercial illustrator documented working through the 1920s and 1930s, and lithographed in 1922 by Imprimerie Moullot of Marseille. The stone lithography press at Moullot was one of the foremost in the south of France, producing advertising posters for major brands across the region. The Elastic sommier, manufactured by Fabrication Rex, was an all-steel spring bed-base sold through local retailers, and this poster carries the instruction 'Exiger la marque Elastic fixee ici', demand the Elastic mark fixed here, a nod to the retail distribution model of the era.
The composition sits squarely in the Cappiello-school tradition that dominated French commercial art from around 1900 through the mid-1920s: a single, improbable figure rendered in flat saturated colour against a dark ground, designed to stop a pedestrian on a busy street. Viano's elephant has that quality. The Art Deco logotype cartouche in the upper right and the cursive script on the product itself mark the design as transitional, Cappiello's energy, shading toward the geometric clarity that would fully arrive with Cassandre's first poster in 1923.
A natural fit for anyone drawn to the history of French commercial art, or to the period when advertising illustration and fine-art printmaking shared the same lithography stones.
