"The end of the century saw the advent of mass advertising. Chromolithography as an artistic medium provided possibilities for mass communication that printers and artists were quick to take advantage of. Perhaps the most crucial development for advertising in the twentieth century was the realization that the successful advertisement sold an idea or lifestyle rather than a product -- and sex sold products better than anything else. Just as the promise of sex could fill the theatres of Paris, so sex could sell anything from cigarettes and cars to painting and poetry. The erotic content in Art Nouveau advertising ranged from the subtle to the explicit. Designers did not just aim to sell the promise of sexual fulfillment to a male audience, but also, and extremely significantly, they were selling the idea of a sophisticated, decorative and glamorous identity to women -- increasingly the dominant consumers. As it was women who often held the domestic purse strings, it was they who came to be associated with shopping.The theme of objects fulfilling a sexual need was not a new one, although it found particular resonance in the fin de siècle. In Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's novel Venus in Furs, Severin describes his lust for an inanimate sculpture of Venus: 'I love her madly, passionately with a feverish intensity, as one can only love a woman who responds to one with a petrified smile... Often at night I pay a visit to my cold, cruel beloved; clasping her knees, I press my face against her cold pedestal and worship her'. The de Goncourt brothers wrote of the erotic fascination of their Rococo objects, developing an overtly sexual and torturous relationship with them: Jules recorded his dreams of 'raping a delicate young woman who resembled one of his rococo porcelain figurines. Edmond wrote of caressing his Clodion statuette as if her stomach and neck had the touch of real skin'. The fetishistic concentration on the erotic potential of the object is implicit in much Art Nouveau.Many Art Nouveau poster designers used a veiled but highly charged eroticism and none more successfully than Alphonse Mucha, who created images of woman that epitomized the sophisticated and decorative Art Nouveau woman. His posters commodifed women, making them the ultimate symbol of the modern consumer world. His strategy of combining women with products sold a lifestyle dream, just as lifestyle became an issue for a growing metropolitan middle class with a disposable income. Many designers used women to sell products. Gallen-Kallela's poster Bil-bol takes the eroticism of Art Nouveau advertising one step further. This advertisement for a car dealer makes the promise of sexual fulfillment explicit: in an adaptation of a traditional Finnish folk story, a naked woman is violently snatched and restrained. Sex is forcibly imposed in the Kallela poster, whereas Leo Putz's woman in Moderne Galerie seems to offer sex in a playful and surprisingly modern way. The idiom of Putz's woman is that of the Bond girl. Putz in fact produced explicit erotic material, as did a number of prominent Art Nouveau graphic artists such as Fritz Erier and Aubrey Beardsley. The fundamental subversiveness of eroticism, its disregard for conventional morality or social structures, was recognized as a destabilizing factor across the ideological spectrum. Both socialist International Modernism and conservative historicism ignored the exploration of sexuality, deliberately pushing it to the periphery of art and design debates. Functionality and technological progression came to signify modernity, dominating the new century's design agenda, while the unadulterated use of historical styles once more signalled stability. However, although absent from the male-dominated sphere of Bauhaus or Le Corbusian functionalism, the erotic could not entirely be eradicated. Its reappearance in Surrealism and Art Deco demonstrates the power of the erotic to explore, simultaneously, the body and mind." Source
