Vintage Poster Archives
Villemot Crosse & Blackwell 1981 | Vintage Advertising Poster
Villemot Crosse & Blackwell 1981 | Vintage Advertising Poster
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A woman faces downward, eyes half-lowered beneath broad black lash strokes, red lips pursed in quiet satisfaction. Her hair, or what serves as hair, is a single ripe tomato, a flat disc of cadmium red topped with a green calyx, set against a solid black ground. The Crosse & Blackwell label floats above her as a kind of thought-bubble, 'sauce tomate' inscribed beneath it in red brush script. In her outstretched hand, a yellow dish of pasta, with a miniature sauce tin nestled on top. Everything in the composition is two-dimensional, without shadow or modelling, each element reduced to its cleanest possible shape.
Bernard Villemot (1911–1989) designed this poster for the French market in 1981 as part of what Crosse & Blackwell internally called 'The Feminine Tomato' campaign. Villemot had studied under Paul Colin and spent four decades building a practice grounded in the belief that a poster should be treated as a painting: a single arresting image, complete in itself, requiring no explanatory text. By 1981 that philosophy had produced the world-recognised Orangina bottle-woman, the Bally shoe women, and the Perrier series. The Crosse & Blackwell commission belongs to the same late-career vein, where his flat graphic language and saturated palette were fully resolved. The campaign was credited with a 17 per cent increase in Crosse & Blackwell sales over the preceding year in the French market.
Reproduced from the 1981 design on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper, pigment-based archival inks, smooth matte finish, natural white tone. The deep black ground and the high-contrast red-and-white palette hold particularly well on matte stock.
Sits well with collectors of mid-century French commercial graphic design and alongside advertising prints from Cappiello, Savignac and Carlu.
