TM by Mark Sinclair

Author:Mark Sinclair [Sinclair, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Laurence King
Published: 2014-09-07T23:00:00+00:00

Vertical version of the poster featuring Monguzzi’s logo and the image of the glider photographed by Lartigue.

Since the museum’s expectations at coming up with a suitable launch poster through a competition failed (the head of the museum’s curators rejected all the proposals that showed a work of art, the director rejected all the proposals showing the building), Monguzzi was again asked to address the problem and provide a concept. ‘The conclusion at the meeting was that just two elements really needed to be on the poster – the logo and the date,’ he recalls. ‘The logo was already well known, it had been widely used and many articles were in the newspapers talking about this impending birth. In fact, the poster was only reiterating something already known – I was just astounded by the radicalism of the new brief.’

But after numerous attempts Monguzzi felt that a purely typographic approach could not properly evoke a birth. ‘Nothing was really starting, nothing was beginning, nothing was taking off,’ he says. ‘I walked over to my photography books, picked up a Jacques Henri Lartigue album, and slowly began to flip through the pages. [The early work of Lartigue was a perfect fit time-wise, and Lartigue was French]. When I finally came to the image of the glider I stopped. I knew this was the answer.’ Monguzzi had settled on Lartigue’s 1908 photograph My Brother, Zissou, Gets His Glider Airborne. It was the perfect take-off metaphor.

For the poster, Monguzzi incorporated the left half of the image only and completely cut off the bottom third. He needed to turn the image into a symbol. ‘When I got back to Paris with this proposal I knew that I had totally disobeyed the brief,’ he says. ‘But I was confident that they would understand – the image was not shown as a piece of art.’ After some deliberation, the museum approved the poster, but there remained a further hurdle.

Lartigue was 92 and the year before had donated his archive to the French state. The Lartigue Foundation had rules in place concerning the use of his work and, in particular, cropping images was not allowed. Monguzzi suggested showing the project to the Foundation anyway. ‘When they saw the posters, not only were the rights to use the image as I had planned allowed, but a vintage print of that shot was donated to the Musée d’Orsay photographic collection,’ Monguzzi recalls.

A few days after the museum received the approval, on 12 September 1986, Lartigue died. ‘The poster became a posthumous homage,’ says Monguzzi. ‘Three months later, after the museum’s opening, Florette Lartigue wrote a touching letter to Jacques Rigaud, the Musée d’Orsay’s president, saying how happy her husband would have been in seeing his glider flying all over the roofs of Paris.’

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