AM.CASSANDRE par Roland Mouron, Estate of A.M.CASSANDRE

"A Poster is to be viewed on the street. It should integrate architectural groups and enrichen the spreading facades. It should enliven not the individual advertisement board or building, but rather the huge blocks of stone and the vast area as a whole".

​

A.M.Cassandre, Translated by Kikuko Egashira

 

 

"A Poster unlike a painting, is not and is not meant to be, a work easily distinguished by its - manner - a unique specimen conceived to satisfy the demanding tastes of a single more or less enlightened art lover. It is meant to be a mass-produced object existing in thousands of copies like a fountain pen or automobile. Like them, it is designed to answer certain strictly material needs. It must have a commercial function. I need not emphasize that my principal and constant care is to renew myself ceaselessly. Plenty of very well-intentioned people ask me to do posters - in the style of "Au Bucheron" - as if I were free to continue turning out electrotype plates of a design once it had found favor with the public and become established ! Such repetitions are out of the question. Besides, they would amount to a kind of suicide for the artist. Each poster is a new experience, or rather a new battle to wage and win. Success does not come to the artist who tries to cajole the onlooker with soft words. It comes to the artist who sweeps down on the public like a hussar, or rather ( if I am allowed this image) who rapes it."

 

A.M.Cassandre, Translated by Michael Taylor

 

"All my life, I have been solicited by two innate tendencies; a need for formal perfection, which had led me to pursue the work of a craftsman who knows where his duties and limits lie, and a burning thirst for a lyrical expression that aspires to free itself from all constraints. Contradictory impulses - and difficult ones to reconcile in this day and age. For the lyrical work of a contemporary artist aware of his own tragic destiny necessarily contains his pain, his anguish, his despair. Whereas an artisan’s work, which expresses essentially the joy of its own accomplishment, can only contain a faith in life and durability, an unambiguously optimistic affirmation. But how is one to attain this joyful serenity when one’s heart is filled with grief? My instinctive restraint and perhaps also my fear of indulging, almost reprehensibly, in narcissism have always prevented me from voicing my own despair lyrically. And yet lyricism, it now seems to me, is the only honest one."

 

A.M.Cassandre, 1960 AMC Papers