Advertising and Brands

No open-access works for Advertising and Brands are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.

About Advertising and Brands

Commercial imagery has moved in both directions: artists borrow the look of advertising, and advertisers hire artists. In the 1890s the colour lithograph poster turned Paris streets into a parade of brands, with Jules Chéret and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec selling cabarets, bicycles and drinks. Twentieth-century designers made the trademark a discipline of its own: Paul Rand's striped IBM logo is still in use, and Bernard Villemot's sunlit posters for Orangina reduced a product to a burst of colour.

Painters took up packaging early. Stuart Davis built Lucky Strike (1921) from a cigarette wrapper, and Pop Art made branded goods the whole picture, as in Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans (1962), which line up like a supermarket shelf. Barbara Kruger later adopted the red bars and bold type of magazine layouts to aim slogans back at shoppers. Look for lettering, product shots and the grid of the printed page.

The makers