Poster Art Raffle to Benefit the Aid Foundation of the 7th Field Artillery Regiment, 1915

According to Karl Lagerfeld (1933–2019), who was a passionate collector of early examples of poster art, Emil Pirchan (1884–1957) was among those artists who, in the short period between 1900 and the outbreak of World War I, managed to give German “advertising” a “unique face”; one that differed significantly from the “frivolous noble kitsch” produced in France. Pirchan created his first poster in 1904 while still in Vienna, but did not reach his full potential for designing emphatic pictorial messages until his time in Munich from 1908. His designs were often carried by a surface treatment reminiscent of paper cuts and by luminous colors. We can assume that Pirchan used pasted colorful pieces of paper for this design, something that was still a rarity in the 1910s.

IR, 2021