LiLu Look of the Day Brought to You From Milwaukee

by Lauren Setum, Allied Member ASID
Since I'm currently in the Milwaukee area gearing up for the Purple Stride walk tomorrow, I thought I'd feature a LiLu Look of the Day from outside of town. The Milwaukee Art Museum designed by Santiago Calatrava isn't far from where the walk will take place. The architecture is simply stunning...

Through September, the museum is featuring an exhibit entitled "Posters of Paris". A synopsis of the exhibit and a sneak peek at some of the posters is below...

"This summer, the Milwaukee Art Museum transports visitors to nineteenth-century Paris with its feature exhibition, Posters of Paris: Toulouse-Lautrec and His Contemporaries. Advertising everything from tony theatre productions to the licentious cancan, bicycles to cookies, brightly hued posters featuring bold typography and playful imagery punctuated the streets of turn-of-the-century Paris. By the 1890s, these artistic posters covered the boulevards like “magical vegetation”; they were seen throughout the city, posted on billboards, scaffolding, Morris columns, kiosks, urinals, in shop windows, and even pulled through the streets on mobile publicity carts.

Artist Jules Chéret was considered the “father of the poster” and a master colorist. His artistic designs inspired a generation of fine artists including Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Bonnard, and Alphonse Mucha, among others who worked in an array of styles, from Byzantine and Rococo to Realist and Art Nouveau. More than one hundred poster designs from these artists comprise the exhibition, including a few that didn’t make it past the censors of the day." mam.org/posters-of-paris