CASSANDRE by Roland Mouron, Estate of A.M.CASSANDRE

In the shadow of the famous posters that earned him worldwide fame lies a pictorial body of work of unsuspected depth. A.M.CASSANDRE, giant of Art Deco, was always, first and foremost, a painter driven by a quest for artistic absolutes, whose graphic work was merely one of multiple expressions of a rigorous and coherent aesthetic vision.

 

The Man Behind the Poster: A Creator of Multiple Facets

 

Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron, known by the pseudonym A.M.CASSANDRE, is undeniably one of the greatest poster artists of the 20th century. His name remains associated with iconic creations such as posters for the ocean liner Normandie, the aperitif Dubonnet, and the railway line Étoile du Nord. These advertising works, characterized by their graphic power and refined composition, revolutionized the visual language of the interwar period and continue to influence contemporary design.

​

Born in Ukraine in 1901 and trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Cassandre was above all a complete artist who never limited himself to a single discipline. While his career as a poster artist overshadowed his other talents, his journey reveals a polymorphic creator: exceptional typographer (creator of the Bifur, Acier, and Peignot typefaces), theater decorator, furniture designer, and, above all, a demanding painter.

​

Painting as an Essential Laboratory

​

Cassandre's pictorial approach deserves particular attention as it constitutes not a mere diversion of a commercial artist, but the beating heart of his aesthetic research. His painting developed parallel to his graphic works, in a relationship of permanent mutual enrichment.

​

His pictorial work, less known to the general public, nonetheless reveals the same intellectual and formal rigor as his posters. Between geometric abstraction, symbolism, and surrealism, Cassandre develops on canvas a dense and coherent universe that dialogues with the major avant-garde currents of his time.

 

Although he achieved immense commercial success with his posters, Cassandre considered painting his refuge, his space of creative freedom. In the intimacy of the studio, far from advertising constraints, he could explore his formal and conceptual obsessions in their purest dimension.

​

An Aesthetic of Precision and Mystery

​

His painting, nourished by cubism, metaphysical art, and architectural composition, tirelessly explores the relationship between space, light, and idea. One finds the same quest for the exact form that characterizes his posters, but freed from commercial imperatives.

​

In his paintings, Cassandre deploys a visual language of great coherence. Simplified geometric volumes, architectural perspectives, and plays of shadow and light create enigmatic spaces sometimes evoking the atmospheres of Giorgio de Chirico. The chromatic palette, often restricted, accentuates the constructive power of his compositions.

​

As André Breton might have emphasized had he studied his pictorial work more closely: "Cassandre transforms geometry into visual poetry, mathematizing emotion without ever betraying it."

​

A Resistance to the Ephemeral

 

Far from being a simple decorative extension of his poster work, painting represents for Cassandre a true act of resistance against the ephemeral. While the poster is by nature destined for a temporary existence, the canvas aspires to permanence.

​

This tension between the immediate and the enduring runs through the artist's entire body of work. Even at the height of his advertising career, when commissions were flowing in and his reputation was international, Cassandre regularly retreated to his studio to paint, faithful to his deep conviction that art is not a mere commercial product but an inner necessity.

 

Jean Cocteau, who knew Cassandre well, might have said of him: "He accomplished this tour de force: making modernism commercial without ever compromising his artistic vision."

​

A Pictorial Body of Work to Rediscover

 

Cassandre's pictorial work remains largely unknown today and waiting to be rediscovered. Scattered in private collections, partially accessible through archives and fragments exhibited on the official website cassandre-france.com, it nevertheless testifies to the richness of a complete artistic journey.

​

This relative invisibility is partly explained by the immense success of his posters, which paradoxically eclipsed his other creations. The artist's suicide in 1968, while he was going through a period of doubt and financial difficulties, also abruptly interrupted a continuously evolving body of work.

​

Cassandre, Painter Who Conceptualized the Image

 

Cassandre was not simply a graphic designer who painted in his spare time, but a painter who conceptualized the image in all its dimensions. His approach reveals a rare coherence, transposing with great mastery the same aesthetic principles from poster to canvas, from décor to drawing.

​

This global thinking about form, rhythm, and space makes him a total creator, comparable in this respect to artists such as Le Corbusier or Fernand Léger, who also worked at the frontier between fine arts and applied arts.

Marcel Duchamp would not have disavowed this reflection on Cassandre: "He understood before many others that the boundaries between the arts were merely conventions to be overcome."

​

The Timeless Modernity of a Visionary Creator

 

While Cassandre is often associated with Art Deco aesthetics and the golden age of advertising posters of the 1920s-1930s, his pictorial work reveals a more universal and timeless dimension. His search for balance between expression and construction, between emotion and rigor, continues to resonate powerfully in our contemporary world.

​

As Roland Barthes wrote about creators of Cassandre's caliber: "The truly modern is not one who embraces his era, but one who, while understanding it deeply, manages to detach himself sufficiently from it to create forms that will survive it."

​

In rediscovering the pictorial work of A.M.CASSANDRE, we explore the richness of a coherent artistic thought, that of a creator for whom art, in all its forms, represented a permanent quest for the absolute.​​​​

​