Nuyens’s Menthe 1922

Leonetto Cappiello created this advertisement for Nuyens’s Menthe, using lithography, a printmaking technique that perfectly suited the explosion of commercial culture in late 19th-century France. Lithography allows for bold, flat areas of color, evident here in the woman’s vibrant orange dress and the blocky blue lettering. The process begins with an image drawn on a flat stone or metal plate with a greasy crayon. This surface is then treated so that ink adheres only to the drawn areas, which are then transferred to paper. It's a relatively quick process, ideal for mass production. The poster’s aesthetic impact resides in this tension between hand-drawn image, and machine made print. Cappiello’s design, bold and eye-catching, would have been plastered across city streets, competing for attention with other advertisements. The medium is the message: lithography democratized art, bringing it into everyday life as a tool of commerce.