“Invitation to the Lecture of Dr. W. E. Bredt at the Association of the Poster Lovers (Local Group Munich)”, May 1912

Between 1908 and 1918, during his years in Munich, the versatile artist Emil Pirchan (1884–1957) produced, by his own account, more than 1,500 works of commercial graphic design. These included around fifty posters, numerous logos, bookplates, advertising labels, packaging designs, technical illustrations for instruction manuals, calendar pages, invitation cards, book illustrations, endpaper designs, colouring books for children and playing cards. In 1913, he also founded a private school for graphic design in Munich. For this invitation to a lecture by the art historian Ernst Wilhelm Bredt (1869–1938), Pirchan devised a witty visual conceit: a young woman in a kimono examines a poster on the wall through a lorgnette, while the poster itself depicts a lady dressed in Biedermeier fashion engaged in the same act. Rather than introducing yet another female figure and creating an infinite mise en abyme, the poster within the poster displays the organiser’s emblem. The reference to Japan may be understood as a modernist appeal for formal reduction and visual clarity in the arts.