Secret Basement Lab: Grotesque Design: Adrien Barrére's Poster Art for the Grand Guignol

Adrien Barrére

The Pigalle district of Paris, the area known today for its licentious tourist gawk-fodder, was once home to an institution that catered to the darker facets of human nature: Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, or "The Theatre of the Great Puppet". Founded in 1897 by French playwright Oscar Méténier, to present "naturalist" plays about the caste of French society shunned by the aristocracy and all but ignored in much of the art of the time: the prostitues, the Apaches and the poorer blue collar peoples seen as the distasteful side of Parisian life. The theater's direction soon turned, however, to splatter-driven voyeurism with over-the-top torture porn story lines when playwright Max Maurey took over directing duties in 1898.

A nightly show at the Grand-Guignol would consist of five or six short plays; short productions with wafer-thin plots to service the vicious butchery and ghoulish charlatanry that the audience craved. And they did indeed crave it. The theater remained open until 1962, when the doors closed due to steadily declining attendance; this is generally attributed to the intervening actual horrors of World War II.

Double poster display for Grand-Guignol shows Les Pervertis (The Perverted) and
Le Sorcier (The Sorcerer) by Adrien Barrére.

Adrien Barrére poster for La Marque De La Bête
(The Mark of the Beast), for Théâtre Du Grand-Guignol.

To say "something like that couldn't exist today" is a preposterous notion. In fact, the very avenue you had to stroll down to get to this blog, by which I mean the Internet, seems less the information-sharing, scientific research propagation database that Tim Berners-Lee envisioned, than an earth bed where malignant toadstoods like reddit and 4chan are cultivated.

Proselytizing my views on web culture aside, there's very little about the actual performances of the Grand-Guignol, or the sociology involved with its popularity with the public, that actually interest me. For a great article on the history of the actual theater and its productions, read here (NSFW).

Early Barrére poster for Pathé, depicting two of the
four Pathé Bros, who founded the French media
empire and were responsible for creating the newsreel
that prefaced most films in theaters between 1908 and the 1960s.

The only aspect of the whole affair that really strikes my fancy is the brilliantly bizarre poster art created for the various vignettes. Not the in-your-face gore depictions that look like they were scribbled in some adolescent's school notebook as inspiration for some dumb metal band, but the more artistically inspired pieces from the early 20th century; specifically the lithographs created by French poster artist extraordinaire Adrien Barrére (1874-1931).

While the more garish elements are still present in Barrére's work, there is a definite and obvious cinematic skill to his posters that draw viewers in. The cropping, composition, perspective and use of shadow and lighting make his pieces look more like scenes pulled from films than lurid titillation. Sadly I don't have much information on Adrien Barrére aside from the fact that he spent his whole life in Paris, studied medicine and law before deciding to pursue the life of a poster artist, and was ultimately the poster artist du jour, so the speak, for Pathé. The quality of his craftsmanship and brilliance, however, speaks for itself.