www.citroën.cc

Related culture

As a result of driving and being interested in the wider related history of the design and development of this French automobile – I developed a side interest in various other French cultural icons.

The Folies Bergere print catalogue design

One of them specifically being the design and artwork of the  Folies Bergere catalogues and programmes of the early period from around late 1890’s till the 50’s. They produced catalogues for the annual shows and then also annual souvenir ’Reviews’. The souvenir reviews tend to have the more interesting content and elaborate cover designs, while the show programmes were more minimal but still very nicely designed. Their souvenir posters and postcards are also famous. Special promotional versions were produced when they toured some of their shows elsewhere overseas to places such as the UK, USA and cuba – even later on in the 50’s in Australia.

The Graphic design and presentation is quite fascinating – especially the designs of the covers including complex cutouts, embossing, transparent wraps, foils and stylish typography.
The strange elaborate and ‘exotic’ period costumes and tableaus shown in the content pages are also really quite amazing. Often they included odd hand colouring and printing techniques.
Over time I have collected a number of them with a particular interest in the 20’s – 30’s international art deco period that featured Josephine Baker. [Aside from this link to the Folies Bergere she was also a very interesting person.]

Here’s a few examples of the artwork and design…

Rare 1896 program – with a fantastic embossed card cover

This deco artwork styled program is from the late 30’s – post 1934 – this one is possibly 1935 . They ran with similar artwork for a number of years and this cover artwork was reused with slight variations till around 1940.