Why Buy Lithograph Posters: Mourlot & Maeght Original Art
Why Buy Lithograph Posters:
Mourlot & Maeght, Original Art at an Affordable Price
Mourlot and Maeght printed both limited-edition lithographs and exhibition posters — and pulled them from the very same stones. Here is why the poster, not just the numbered edition, deserves a place in a serious collection of Picasso, Chagall, Braque, Miró and Matisse.
I.One Stone, Two Destinies
In the ateliers of Fernand Mourlot in Paris and Aimé Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, a single set of lithographic stones could carry two lives. An artist — Chagall, Miró, Braque, Léger, Matisse — would draw directly onto the limestone, and the printer would pull from it both a limited, numbered edition on fine wove paper, usually Arches or BFK Rives, intended for collectors and museums, and an exhibition poster, printed in a larger and more public run, intended to announce the show on the street. The drawing did not change between the two. The stones did not change. What changed was the paper, the run size, and — eventually — the price the market was willing to pay.
This was never a simple, single-step process. A colour lithograph required a separate stone for every colour in the composition — six, eight, sometimes more — each one drawn, registered and printed in exact alignment with the others, a single misalignment ruining the sheet. The same battery of stones, painstakingly prepared by the artist and printer together, produced both the numbered edition and the poster. This is the detail that gets lost in casual conversation about posters versus prints, and it is the detail that makes affiches by these artists one of the most quietly mispriced categories in twentieth-century collecting. A poster pulled from the same stones as a numbered lithograph is not a copy of the art. It is the art, printed in a different format, by the same hands, on the same press, in the same campaign of work.
— Jean Adhémar, Curator-in-Chief, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, in the preface to Chagall's Posters: A Catalogue Raisonné
II.The Catalogue Raisonné Makes the Case
Chagall's Posters: A Catalogue Raisonné, compiled by Charles Sorlier — Chagall's own lithographer at Mourlot since the artist's earliest graphic work — does not treat the poster as a marginal note in the painter's career. It dedicates an entire, separately catalogued section to the posters Chagall engraved with his own hand directly onto the stone, distinct from the posters Sorlier himself transposed from existing paintings and drawings, and again distinct from the posters made from Chagall's earlier work without his direct involvement.
That structure is the scholarly proof of what dealers have long known by feel: not all posters are equal, and the ones engraved by the artist's own hand on the lithographic stone sit in a different category entirely — closer to the limited-edition print than to ephemeral advertising.
III.The Mourlot Compendium
The scholarly record extends beyond Chagall alone. Fernand Mourlot's own bound compendium, Les affiches originales des maîtres de l'école de Paris — published with André Sauret in 1959 and reproducing the poster work of Braque, Chagall, Dufy, Léger, Matisse, Miró and Picasso across 102 original lithographs — was itself printed by lithography at the Mourlot workshop, on the same presses and using the same hand-pulled technique as the posters it documents. The compendium is not a photographic reproduction of posters. It is a lithographic object reproducing lithographic objects, made by the house that made the originals.
IV.The Signature That Closes the Gap
Not every poster carries the artist's signature — most affiches were printed unsigned, for the public street campaign they were made for. But among Mourlot and Maeght posters, a further, rarer category exists: a small number of impressions, pulled from the same run, that the artist signed by hand in pencil, in the margin. This was not standard practice; it was typically done for the dealer, the gallery, or a handful of patrons, and the signed group could be — and often was — smaller than the numbered edition printed on Arches or BFK Rives. A signed poster, in other words, is not a lesser, larger-run cousin of the limited edition. In some cases it is the rarer object.
The image is the same image. The press is the same press, run from the same stones. The paper differs — but where the artist's hand has signed both the poster and the numbered edition, it has touched both equally.
And yet the prices have not converged. A hand-signed Mourlot poster, printed from stones Chagall drew himself, can be acquired today for a fraction of what a numbered Arches-paper edition from the same image commands at auction. That gap is the opportunity.
The Arithmetic
A hand-signed Mourlot lithographic poster by Chagall — La Baie des Anges, Sorlier 9 / Mourlot 350, printed in 1962 from stones Chagall drew himself — is available today at $6,500.
The numbered, limited-edition lithograph pulled from the same stones, on Arches paper, has reached £30,000 at auction.
Same drawing. Same hand. Same stones. A different paper stock, and a different number of zeros.
V.The House Behind the Stone: Fernand Mourlot
The Mourlot name has been bound to the revival of lithography for more than a century and a half. From a printing house on the rue de Chabrol in Paris, Fernand Mourlot built a workshop that began in commercial work, theatre bills and cabaret posters, before a 1930 Delacroix exhibition poster proved that an exhibition announcement could be treated as a work of art in its own right rather than mere advertising.
What set Mourlot apart was his insistence on bringing painters into direct contact with the stone itself. Where lithography had long been the territory of illustrators, Mourlot invited artists to draw straight onto the limestone as though composing a painting — a practice that began with Vlaminck and Utrillo and, by 1937, had drawn in Matisse, Bonnard, Braque, Rouault and Miró through his collaboration with the publisher Tériade. The relationship reached its peak in 1945, when Picasso first walked into the studio and, over the next twenty-four years, produced close to four hundred lithographs on the rue de Chabrol presses. The workshop later crossed the Atlantic in 1967, when Fernand's son Jacques opened a Mourlot studio in New York, printing for Rauschenberg, Bacon, Lichtenstein, Calder, Kelly and Katz, and the family's tradition continues today through Galerie Mourlot and Eric Mourlot.
It is within this same workshop — under the hand of Charles Sorlier, Chagall's own lithographer at Mourlot from his earliest graphic work — that posters such as Paris, L'Opéra — Le Plafond de Chagall were pulled. This image is not a photographic copy of the Opéra ceiling fresco; it is an original lithograph, drawn and printed by Sorlier after Chagall's composition, on stones cut and run by the Mourlot workshop. La Baie des Anges and Vence, by contrast, were drawn directly onto the stone by Chagall's own hand — the highest category in Sorlier's catalogue raisonné. The Vence example illustrated below is rarer still: an unnumbered artist's proof pulled before the addition of the exhibition text, a state collectors and cataloguers distinguish explicitly from the standard, lettered edition. The Fantin-Latour and the French Costumes of the 18th Century poster below belong to a different, still entirely legitimate tradition: original lithographs hand-pulled by Mourlot's own master printers from existing compositions, in the workshop's long-standing practice of producing fine art posters for exhibitions and publications, rather than the artist's own hand on the stone.
VI.The Garden of Stone: Aimé Maeght
If Mourlot gave the lithograph its workshop, Aimé Maeght gave it a home and an audience. Maeght opened his first gallery in Cannes in 1936, then in Paris in 1946, and went on to exhibit the era's defining names — Braque, Matisse and Léger from France; Miró, Tàpies and Chillida from Spain; Chagall and Kandinsky among the Russian émigrés; Calder and Kelly from America; Giacometti from Switzerland — alongside artists from across Europe and Asia.
Maeght's enterprise began, much like Mourlot's, as a printing house, before evolving into one of the world's foremost publishers of prints and illustrated books — a tradition still carried on today by Jules Maeght at the Maeght print studio near Montparnasse, where lithography sits alongside etching, carborundum, drypoint, woodcut and aquatint. Editions are kept deliberately small, numbered and signed by the artist, and the Maeght house has published more than twelve thousand titles over its history, making it the most significant lithography and print publisher of the twentieth century.
Aimé Maeght's ambitions reached beyond the gallery wall. In 1964, at Saint-Paul-de-Vence, he founded the Fondation Marguerite et Aimé Maeght — the first private museum built in France for contemporary art, and the first conceived in direct collaboration with the artists themselves. Its sculpture gardens, populated by Miró, Giacometti, Calder, Braque, Chagall and Léger, still draw some two hundred thousand visitors a year, and the Foundation's holdings include fifty Giacometti sculptures, a hundred and fifty by Miró, and the largest painting Chagall ever made.
VII.Works From the Stone
The pieces below are original lithographs from the Mourlot workshop, currently available through Hedonism Gallery — some drawn directly onto the stone by the artist's own hand, others printed by Mourlot's master lithographers after the artist's composition or an existing work.
Chagall on the Stone
The Classical Printmaking Tradition at Mourlot
Alongside its work with the School of Paris, the Mourlot workshop maintained a long-standing practice of hand-pulling fine lithographs after earlier masters and historic source material — a separate but equally legitimate strand of its output, printed by the same master craftsmen on the same presses.
VIII.What the Market Is Pricing — and What It Isn't
The price of a print, in the end, reflects three things: who made it, how it was made, and how many exist. On the first two questions, a hand-signed Mourlot or Maeght poster from the artist's own stone answers identically to a numbered limited-edition lithograph. It is only on the third — the size of the run — that the two diverge, and that divergence is precisely what keeps poster prices a fraction of their numbered-edition counterparts, despite identical authorship and identical printing.
| Format | Stone | Paper | Indicative Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hand-signed Mourlot poster | Artist's own engraved stone | Poster stock | $6,500 |
| Numbered limited-edition lithograph | Same stone | Arches | £30,000 |
IX.The Conclusion
For a new collector building toward the first-name artists of the twentieth century — Chagall, Braque, Miró, Léger, Matisse — the hand-signed lithographic poster from Mourlot or Maeght is the most rational point of entry available. It carries the artist's own signature, it was pulled from the same stone the artist drew on, and it is documented in the same catalogues raisonnés that govern the numbered editions. What it does not carry is the price.
The stone does not know which paper it is printing on. The market, eventually, tends to remember that too.
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