91

Adolphe Mouron Cassandre

1901-1968

Café Chat Noir. Window card. 1932.

Condition A: slight darkening at bottom edge; punch holes at top, as issued for hanging; two Belgian ink stamps in bottom right.

Henri Mouron, the artist's son, in his monograph on his father's work, includes a black and white image of this work, describing it as a "gouache maquette poster for an unpublished project." It was unknown to have ever been printed. Yet, with this rare example, we now know that it was printed in a window card format. This is the only known extant copy.

One of Cassandre's graphic approaches to the art of the poster is referred to as the "Objective" mode - through which he "strove to express the object being advertised according to its 'laws of tension' in a plastic vocabulary that resembled the language of painting . . . In two [of Cassandre's] works of the objective mode, Chat Noir (1932) and Borwick's (1935), the formal poverty of the themes is offset by an artfully arranged still life" (Cassandre / Mouron p. 81-58).

Cassandre / Mouron 174 (maquette)
12½x9½ inches, 31¾x24¼ cm. Arcitaire, Liege.

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April 7, 2026 12:00 PM EDT
New York, NY, US

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