Saturday’s ad is for Stella Artois, from 1979. 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 designed by Hipgnosis, the English art design group famous for their album cover designs, including ones for Pink Floyd, T. Rex, the Pretty Things, Black Sabbath, UFO, 10cc, Bad Company, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Scorpions, The Nice, Paul McCartney & Wings, the Alan Parsons Project, Genesis, Peter Gabriel, Electric Light Orchestra, Rainbow, Styx, and Al Stewart. This is part of a series of double-truck ads they did for the brewery. The text at the top, “Voici ce qui donne du relief à notre plat pays,” Google translates as “Here is what gives relief to our flat country.”
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