This summer, the Milwaukee Art Museum transports visitors to nineteenth-century Paris with its feature exhibition, Posters of Paris: Toulouse-Lautrec and His Contemporaries. Opening June 1, the exhibition brings together the finest French examples from the golden age of the poster.

Advertising everything from theatre productions to the debaucherous cancan, bicycles to champagne, brightly hued, larger-than-life-size posters with bold typography and playful imagery punctuated the streets of turn-of-the-century Paris. Posters of Paris features more than one hundred of these posters (including a few designs that were originally censored) by artists hailed as masters of the medium: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Jules Chéret, Pierre Bonnard, and Alphonse Mucha, and others. These artists drew from an array of styles, from Byzantine and Rococo to Realist and Art Nouveau.

“These works celebrated the dawn of new entertainment, new products, and new technology,” said Mary Weaver Chapin, exhibition curator. “The posters were audacious, colorful, bawdy, and sometimes even profane. Art critics praised the artistic posters for bringing joy and color to daily life and for giving Paris a free ‘museum for the masses,’ ‘an open-air exhibition’ that changed daily as new posters were pasted up,” said Chapin. “Some critics went further, describing the posters as superior to the paintings found in exhibitions.”

Posters were the popular tools for advertising and communication at the time, similar to today’s social media. The arrival of a new poster was newsworthy and could draw a crowd. In some cases, police intervention was required. Billposting itself turned competitive and evolved into public theater, adding to the spectacle one encountered on the streets.

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