Raymond Savignac

Witty poster artist

Raymond Savignac, graphic artist: born Paris 6 November 1907; married Marcelle Mercier; died Trouville-sur-Mer, France 28 October 2002.

The artist Raymond Savignac designed over 600 advertising posters and helped usher in a new age of optimism and consumerism in France after the end of the Second World War. His colourful and witty images for products such as Monsavon soap, Gitanes cigarettes, SNCF railways, Bic razors, Air France and Citroën cars came to embody the very idea of France to many foreigners.

Over a fruitful career lasting 50 years, Savignac was made an officer of the Légion d'honneur, exhibited his work around the world and designed the official poster for the World Cup held in France in 1998. An advocate of the "less is more" approach, Savignac said,

Reading a poster must be instantaneous. In a fraction of a second, the man in the street must be able to understand it. Poster art is the creation of a fleeting image which people will not forget.

Born in Paris in 1907 to parents who had left the Auvergne region to run a restaurant, Savignac toyed with the idea of becoming a professional cyclist but found the sport too physically demanding. Having left school at 15, he got a job drawing and colouring bus maps for the Compagnie des Transports Parisiens before joining Robert Lortac's animation studio to work on commercials for the cinema.

In 1933 Savignac showed up at the studio of the celebrated graphic artist Cassandre and managed to secure a commission for a booklet. Soon he became Cassandre's full-time apprentice. Savignac had designed his first poster, for Roquefort cheese, when he was drafted into the army at the outbreak of war in 1939. Cassandre went to America and when Savignac was demobilised in 1940 he returned to Paris where he worked for the advertiser Robert Guérin.

In 1948, Savignac teamed up with the graphic designer Bernard Villemot and created a distinctive campaign for Monsavon soap. The ironic and iconic poster depicting a pink-and-white cow and its udders dripping milk into a giant bar of soap instantly caught the public's imagination. "I was born at the age of 41, from the udder of the Monsavon cow," claimed Savignac.

Savignac was subsequently hired to help sell everything from Maggi soups to Vérigoud soft drinks and Dunlop tyres via Cinzano, shoe-polish and painkillers (his groundbreaking Vite Aspro poster simply showed city traffic driving through a man's head).

Savignac was equally at ease drawing film posters (La Guerre des boutons, 1962, and Alexandre le bienheureux, 1967, for the director Yves Robert; Lancelot du Lac, 1974, and L'Argent, 1983, for Robert Bresson), advertising forthcoming appearances by popular French comedians (Maurice Baquet, Raymond Devos) or promoting national newspapers (Le Figaro, Il Giorno). In 1969, Savignac designed the set and the costumes for a production of Molière's L'Avare at the Comédie-Française while his dynamic work full of visual puns also proved popular in Japan, the United States, Germany and Britain.

"A poster creates the illusion if not of happiness, then at least of comfort and ease," he told interviewers. "It is optimism at its most absurd: no more indigestion, no more unrequited love."

Savignac found his exalted position as a proper artist rather than simply a commercial designer "quite nonsensical". In 1979, he left Paris and settled in Normandy but continued to accept commissions until recently.

Always immacutely dressed, Savignac was a committed environmentalist; he also railed against modern-day advertising techniques and their over-reliance on photographs rather than the broad, brash strokes he had pioneered. In an interview with Le Monde newspaper in 1996, he called himself

an old brontosaurus who does a job that no longer exists for a species that's well on its way to extinction.

Pierre Perrone