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The Broders Sale
The legacy of Roger Broders’ poster work has made his name synonymous with French Art Deco
travel posters. His artistic career, as a whole, spans from the early 20th century, when he began contributing
fashion and travel illustrations to Parisian magazines, through the 1950s, when he was a painter and
book illustrator. But it was the advertising work he did between 1920 and 1933 for which he is best
remembered. During this period, in which the Art Deco movement flourished and began to spread its
influences across the artistic spectrum, he was designing posters.
This auction presents all of Roger Broders travel posters, including variants, some which are known
and several that are unknown. It also includes the posters he designed outside of the travel arena. The
auction is a landmark event in that never before has the body of work of a single artist been offered at
one time.
Broders’ career is inextricably linked with his principal client, the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée Railway
(PLM). Over the course of thirteen years he designed 65 posters for the company, advertising locales
along their routes from Paris, through the Southeast of France, to the Côte d’Azur.
During this same period, he was also commissioned to design posters for other railway lines including:
the Alsace and Lorraine Railway; Chemins de Fer de l’Etat; Indian State Railways; London, Midland
& Scottish Railway and the Montreux-Oberland Bernois Railway.
In total, he designed fewer than 100 posters, and with the exception of just 13 of them (for car companies,
real estate companies, banks, and lotteries), they were all travel oriented.
His first travel posters, from 1920, are stylistically similar to other travel posters from the period. Yet,
they already exhibit Broders’ ability effectively to demarcate depths-of-field, to play with light and
shadows and to highlight his command in utilizing colors in an effective and harmonious manner, talents
which he would develop more fully over the following years.
In 1925, his style changes and he begins using a more geometric, almost cubist approach. He employs
“large flat areas of bright colors [that are] reminiscent of Kandinsky, Severini, La Fresnay and
Delaunay . . . his color harmonies are very strong, bold but always evocative and close to the subject
matter” (Broders p. 11).
Whether this change was in any way a result of the 1925 Art Deco Exhibition in Paris is impossible to
say. However, the unique, captivating style that ensued certainly reflected the prevailing artistic sentiment
of the era. His images were so innervating that “his graphic style and clean lines,” have been cited as an
entire “renewal of the travel poster” genre (Broders p. 11).
Although widely recognized for his landscapes, Broders’ most sought-after posters are those depicting
people. His “most recognized creations stage elegant couples dressed in the latest fashion, drawn in a
style that could have led him to produce fashion art for magazines, such as ‘Vogue’ or ‘La Gazette du
Bon Ton’ . . . [these couples] promote the concept of luxury in fashion at each of [the] resorts”
(Perry / Broders p. 12).