Affichiste French for Poster Designer

Affichiste is the name (literally ‘poster designer’) taken by the French artists and photographers Raymond Hains (1926-) and Jacques de la Villeglé (1926-), who met in 1949 and created a technique to create collages from pieces of torn-down posters during the early 1950s. These works, which they displayed for the first time in 1957, were called affiches lacérées (torn posters).

To produce precise images and effects, Villeglé manipulated the posters. Still, Hains left them more or less as he found them to illustrate the advertising world’s aesthetic bankruptcy. In the 1950s, other artists, particularly the Italian Mimmo Rotella and the German Wolf Vostell, adopted a similar technique.

Prints and Posters

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