CHARLES LOUPOT (1892-1962) & JEAN CARLU MONSAVON. 1936.

78 1/2x51 1/4 inches. Courbet, Paris.
Condition A-: tape on verso; minor tears in margins and creases in image. Paper.
Although both Loupot's and Carlu's name appear on this poster, Carlu clearly never touched this design. Loupot includes his friends name as a tribute, as the image is essentially a re-working of Carlu's 1925 poster for the same product (see Swann Modernist Poster Catlaogue 1859 lot 11 and cover). This exceptional poster has had the misfortune of being hard to reproduce and therefore in most documentation (including Zagrodzki's excellent monograph on Loupot) it appears strange and clumsy. This large format version of the image (the first to appear at auction!) proves that impression to be wrong. The title ("Monsavon is made from milk") is, albeit bizarrely, certainly provocatively, and perhaps inappropriately, illustrated by a woman, shrouded in soft lather, reaching out of the shower with a suggestive stream of milk flowing from her breast into a bar of soap. The background is a brilliant airbrush exercise, in vibrant blue, which subtly evokes the checkered décor of Carlu's earlier image. Unlike Carlu's original design, this poster is in the more fluid and sensitive style of the period which was quite different from the geometrically based image of the 1920s. Zagrodki no. 97A, p. 88.