Tuesday’s ad is for Stella Artois, from probably the 1950s or early 60s. From the late 1800s until the 1980s, poster art really came into its own, and in Europe a lot of really cool posters, many of them for breweries, were produced. I’ve been posting vintage European posters all last year and will continue to do so in 2020. This poster was created for Brouwerij Artois, which began brewing their popular Stella Artois in 1926. A brewery existed on the same site in Leuven, Belgium, since at least 1366, and in 1708, Sebastiaen Artois became the brewmaster for what was then known as the Den Hoorn brewery. Nine years later, in 1717, he bought the brewery and renamed it the Artois brewery. In 1988, they were a founding member of Interbrew, which went on to gobble up other breweries and today is known as Anheuser-Busch InBev. This ad looks remarkably like ones created for Ginder-Ale which I featured last month, and in fact Artois acquired Ginder-Ale in the early 1970s. This poster was created by Hungarian-born Belgian poster artist Charles Rohonyi, who did in fact create the Atomium poster for Ginder-Ale. The text, “HET bier,” translates as “the beer!”
