How the Wings Were Made
Stone, Screen, and Street
Every nation argued in ink. These are the arguments that became art — and each wing of this house was printed by a different hand, in a different shop, for a different wall. Three techniques carry almost everything gathered here: stone, screen, and stencil. All three were commercial trades long before anyone called them art.
Stone — hand-drawn lithography
Lithography works by chemistry, not the knife: the artist draws directly onto a slab of limestone with a greasy crayon or ink, the stone is etched and dampened, and grease-based ink clings only to the drawn lines while water repels it everywhere else. Jules Chéret trained as a lithographer in London, brought a fast color process back to Paris in the 1860s, and built the atelier that was later absorbed into Imprimerie Chaix — the printer whose name sits on most of the era’s great affiches. A color poster meant one stone per color, often four to six for an ambitious sheet, each drawn separately and locked into register with the others so the sheet printed clean, pass after pass. Toulouse-Lautrec drew his own posters straight onto the stone at his printer, Imprimerie Ancourt, spattering ink from a loaded brush — the crachis technique — for a grain no pen could match. The house’s French Wing runs on this stone-drawn, multi-pass color.
Screen — the WPA’s silkscreen poster
Silkscreen started as a sign-painter’s and textile trade: ink forced through a fine mesh stencil, one pull per color. The Federal Art Project’s poster division turned it into a fine-art print medium. Anthony Velonis, who built out the division’s silkscreen workshop in the late 1930s, is credited with pioneering the technique for poster work at national scale — a handful of screen pulls laying down flat, saturated fields of color, well suited to bold lettering and simplified imagery, and cheap enough for a government program to run off by the thousand. It is why the WPA Wing looks the way it does: hard-edged color blocks, no gradients, built for a bulletin board, not a salon wall.
Pochoir — the stencil-colored plate
Pochoir — French for “stencil” — hand-colored a printed outline one shade at a time. Lucien Vogel’s Gazette du Bon Ton (1912–1925) used it to keep illustrators like Georges Barbier and Georges Lepape’s fashion plates looking hand-painted rather than mechanically reproduced: a cutter prepared a separate stencil for every color in the plate, and colorists brushed gouache through each one in turn, sheet by sheet, building the image color by color, by hand. Because every edge came from a cut stencil rather than a photomechanical dot, the color sits flat and exact, with none of the halftone screen a printing press would leave behind. It is the technique behind this house’s pochoir fashion plates, filed under the French Wing alongside Chéret and Chaix.
| Technique | The look | Defining wing |
|---|---|---|
| Stone (lithography) | Hand-drawn line and crayon grain, warm layered color, multi-stone registration | The French Wing, 1891–1930 |
| Screen (silkscreen) | Flat, bold color fields, hard edges, minimal registration | The American Wing — WPA, 1935–1943 |
| Stencil (pochoir) | Exact, saturated color edges, no halftone dot, hand-brushed gouache | The French Wing’s fashion plates |
The street
None of this was made to last. A poster was rented wall space — wheatpasted onto building sides, transit kiosks, and in Paris onto the colonnes Morris, the cylindrical advertising columns that have stood on the city’s corners since 1868 — and it was papered over by the next campaign within days or weeks. Rain, sun, and the next bill-poster’s paste bucket were the ordinary fate of almost every sheet printed by these three trades. What survives today survives by accident: a printer’s own file copy, a handful set aside for an exhibition, a collector’s or a library’s decision to keep what everyone else let go. That is why every piece in this house carries its source and its accession — not as decoration, but because survival itself is part of the story we’re reproducing.
Read how this house sources and clears every piece it reproduces →