Paul Colin (1892 to 1986)
Paul Colin was one of the most important graphic designers of theater and music hall posters during the French Art Deco period. In just one night, in 1925, his poster for the Revue Negre made Josephine Baker, jazz and himself the craze of all Paris. Colin went on to design hundreds of posters, stage sets, costumes and cabaret decorations, easily keeping up with the furious pace of the roaring 20s! The piano was a decorative element which he was very fond of and it began appearing in stylized forms in some of his earliest posters. In assessing Colin’s piano posters, his first, and by far best was for Wiener et Doucet in 1925, a perfectly soft, geometrically balanced poster. In 1927 he took the piano to further cubist abstraction in an exquisite poster for Lisa Duncan, and then in 1929 he used this comfortable cubist approach again for Andre Renaud, a virtuoso who could play two pianos at the same time.
Information courtesy of Swann Galleries Inc. May 2003