Vintage Poster Archives
J.B. Louvet Bicyclette 1922 | Mich Cycling Poster
J.B. Louvet Bicyclette 1922 | Mich Cycling Poster
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A caricature cyclist, cap pushed back over goggles and grinning broadly, pilots a green-framed bicycle balanced on the top rung of a yellow A-frame stepladder. The front wheel tilts skyward. Flat cobalt-blue fills the background. Red-orange slab-serif at the base declares LA BICYCLETTE J.B. LOUVET; the yellow italic slogan at the top right, Elle grimpe tout!, translates as 'It climbs everything.'
The design was produced around 1922 by Michel Liebeaux (1881–1923), who signed his work Mich. Born in Périgueux and trained in Nantes, Liebeaux became France's foremost cycling and automobile poster artist in the early decades of the twentieth century, illustrating for the sports daily L'Auto and producing advertising work for Citroën, Hutchinson tyres, and multiple cycle manufacturers. The Louvet commission coincided with the brand's competitive peak: J.B. Louvet, founded in 1903 in Puteaux, fielded Henri and Francis Pélissier in 1921 and remained a leading race team through the 1930s. The poster was lithographed by the Paris printer Firlett Wall.
The composition is built on a single absurdist visual claim: the bicycle climbs everything, including a ladder. The humour is in the specificity, the grin, the goggles pushed up on the cap, the exact yellow of the rungs. Mich's graphic instinct sits at the cusp of Art Nouveau caricature and the flatter, bolder vocabulary that Art Deco was then establishing in French advertising.
Reproduced from archival source material on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper. A natural reference point for anyone collecting French sporting graphic design or the poster art of the early 1920s.
