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1901-1968
Ukrainian-French (France, Paris)
Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron, also know as A. M. Cassandre, was a French graphic designer, typographer, poster designer, theatre designer, lithographer and painter from the interwar period. He was born in Kharkov in Ukraine at the beginning of the century, in 1901. His parents being of French origin, he comes to study in Paris where he will settle definitively in 1915 where he studied at the Académie Julian in Paris. He made his first advertising works in 1922 (margarine Sacac, pasta Garres) and then started to use Cassandre as his signature. His interest in the Bauhaus influenced the composition of his works: geometrical in order to produce a clear message. In 1925, his poster for the furniture shop "Le Bucheron" (1923) won the Grand Prix at the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts, Paris.
Influenced by cubism in his compositions, photography in his use of contre-plongée, cinema with the close-up, Cassandre simplified forms and emphasized perspectives. Following the Italian Futurists, he created a sense of speed and modernity visually, especially in his posters for trains and ocean liners. Typography played an important place in Cassandre's work and was an integral part of the composition.
In 1936, the MoMA in New York organized a retrospective of Cassandre's posters and he was also hired by Harper's Bazaar to design the covers of their magazine. In the 1940s, he increasingly abandoned advertising and devoted himself to painting and theatre sets.
Profile image courtesy of A.M. Cassandre.
