Tuesday’s ad is for Stella Artois, from fairly recently, around 2000 I think, although it’s meant to look more vintage. 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 poster was created as part of a series by American artist and illustrator Robert E. McGinnis, who “is known for his illustrations of more than 1,200 paperback book covers, and over 40 movie posters, including Breakfast at Tiffany’s (his first film poster assignment), Barbarella, and several James Bond and Matt Helm films.” He’s a favorite of mine, especially for his Bond posters and his sixties pulp covers, and you can learn more about him at his official website and the American Art Archives. This one appears to not have been as popular as the rest, which I base on the fact that I could find only one example of it throughout the internet. The text, “Viva le Vie Légère,” Google translates as “Long live the light life.”
