Thursday’s ad is for Hurra! Bier!, from 1937. From the late 1800s until the 1960s, poster art really came into its own, and in a lot of really cool posters, many of them for breweries, were produced. This was not part of the series of posters promoting beer by the German Brewers Association, the Swiss Brewery Association, and others, in the mid-20th century, but it seems to be in the same spirit of promoting beer generally. Many websites attribute it to French painter and lithographer Théodore Géricault, but he died in 1824, so it seems unlikely he created it nearly 100 years before the beer poster’s heyday, so it must have been someone else. The language appears to be German, so it likely wasn’t done in Géricault’s native country. It appears to have been made in Vienna, Austria by printmaker Paul Gerin, at least that appears on at least one copy of the print I found online. The small logo that’s visible above her left shoulder is for Gallery Otto, an Austrian art gallery that was founded in 1934, so the date at least makes sense. But there’s still no credible information about the artist who created the poster, which is a shame.
Because I couldn’t leave it there, I did finally discover that the original may have first appeared in the September 1937 issue of an Austrian magazine. The scan below is from that magazine, called simply “Wiener Magazine” (Viennese Magazine) which I found at ANNO – Newspapers Online, described as “Historic Austrian newspapers and magazines online.” It appears to have been on page 100, which seems to be the back page of the magazine. Sadly, there’s still no information about the artist, but there is some satisfaction in possibly having found the origin of the art.
