BEHOLD THE ARTY POSTER

Absolutely everybody suffers from the magic lamp syndrome. You find an apparently worthless piece of junk in the street or attic that turns out to harbor a genie who grants your fondest wishes. The artistic equivalent of the magic lamp is the objet trouve . People who make art transform the found object aesthetically. For everyday folks the lamp is some apparently ordinary thing which they alone, the discerning scavenger, recognize as a treasure.

The whole syndrome is probably a metaphor of redemption, but whatever it is, certain classes of object seem to promise it more than others and one class of object seems to be its very embodiment.

Consider The Poster.

What percentage of the the arty, intellectual, cultural, nostalgic, pack-rat set have collected, will collect or do collect posters? Half is certainly close. Three-quarters does not seem excessive. To say that every last one of these souls somewhere harbors posters proudly framed or rolled in attics feels closer to the veritable truth.

Does not the peripatetic aunt squirrel away travel posters, the theatrical father amass des affiches du theatre and the cousin tortured with social conscience display his mental wounds in supergraphic sheets from Cuba?

Indubitably.

Can one doubt that the punkers pad is papered with Prince or the designers digs with masters from Poland? None can.

The poster is the poor man’s masterpiece, a defiant signal to the yuppies that you don’t have to have money to have the good life, only an eye. To the art student worried about how to make a living, a beautifully designed poster holds out hope that he might be a mild commercial sell-out and still maintain integrity.

And how did the poster become such a beloved icon of vernacular culture? Because once upon a time it all came true. Flimsy sheets of printed paper intended to be glued upon kiosks and dissolved by rain or spilled escargot juice were designed by a great artist and joined the short list of masterworks of Western culture. No matter how monetarily valuable, the limited editions or surviving street sheets became the images belong to everybody. They are the democratic fulfillment of the magic lamp syndrome.

The story is so familiar that when the County Museum of Art announced an exhibition titled “Toulouse-Lautrec and his Contemporaries: Posters of the Belle Epoque” (through June 16) at least one critic got very drowsy. Oh it will all be too familiar. The stuff is over-reproduced. La Goulue turns up on coffee mugs for pity sake. Even lesser-known artists Like Eugene Grasset, Livemont Privat and Paul Berthon produced posters whose images are more memorable than their names.

So much for jaded anticipation. The real thing, which consists of about 104 works from the collection of Dr. and Mrs. Kurt Wagner, combines swooning connoisseurs pleasure with kick-in-the-pants visual impact that makes the show more sheer visual fun than a good Can-Can.

It’s hard to decide which is more pleasurable, the posters’ cherished familiarity, their astonishing freshness or the fictionalized world they evoke.

By all reports the demimonde inhabited by Lautrec, the fallen-away aristocrat, was a sleazy realm awash in booze, drugs, prostitution and general human corruption. An entertainer like Aristide Bruant was a corpulent egomaniacal bully who entertained Cafe-Concert audiences of slummers by insulting them with streams of rhymed Gallic invective.

In Lautrec’s posters he takes on heroic proportion, swathed in a black cloak and slouch hat. Their wonderful silhouettes lend the subject the dramatic elegance of the Japanese print. Later those selfsame forms helped teach generations of students still living that sheer abstract shape could have a life of its own. No wonder some of us carried little books of Lautrec poster reproductions around in our pockets as if they were holy writ. He drew with the wit and authority of a master Renaissance Mannerist while preparing us for non-objective painting.

The little man with the crippled legs seemed to have it all. Cynical as a concierge, he caricatured the pinched and twisted cuteness of Jane Avril, the puffy piquancy of May Milton and La Goulue’s raunchy sexiness and they apparently loved it. No wonder. The posters seep with an unsentimental compassion that gives everyone the maximum of French elan vitale.

Famous as Lautrec is, at least one of his former student admirers is never satisfied that he’s given enough credit. (Upon learning he was a hapless alcoholic, I once got thoroughly crocked on scotch hoping it would improve my drawing. It was the only time Lautrec didn’t help.)

After a couple of decades of sustaining Lautrec’s image with memory and scaled-down reproduction, it’s a refreshing shock to be reminded that the posters are (a) remarkably large, up to 4-by-5 feet, and (b) whisperingly subtle. Behind the bold Japanese-print solid shapes are perfume-light spattered washes of ocher, lavender and pink.

Lautrec planned these lithographic posters down to the last scintilla and although his handicap kept him from working directly on the stones he must have supervised his craftsmen like an anxious new mother. The prints lend great weight to the fading proposition that lithography is capable of carrying the spirit of original art into multiple reproduction. (A practice sometimes badly exploited in recent years.)

Lautrec is regarded as the pioneer innovator in the field and certainly deserves the credit of raising the poster form to high art. However, as a technician and a popularizer, he was preceded (as pointed out in smart, enthusiastic catalogue essays by curators Ebria Feinblatt and Bruce Davis) by Jules Cheret.

Really look at some 20 Cheret posters advertising everything from rice powder to smokes and you may notice that his drawing is scratchy and nervous and his composition as busy as a server in a fast-food joint. At the same time he has so much technical savvy and stylish panache, you hardly notice. The guy took academic and rococo styles and set them to popular themes. He took Tiepolo’s levitated figures and Boucher’s sex kittens and combined them into an image of the coquette that lived on into “Gigi” and the never-dumb brunette still waving from a current airlines TV spot.

The influence of this “minor” art has been extraordinary in the hands of artists major and modest. A work like Pierre Bonnard’s “France-Champagne” hints at our wry silliness in the ‘20s. Isn’t John Held Jr. lurking somewhere in that girl? Lautrec set off an “arty” graphics revival in the ‘50s.

Of course, images like Theophile-Alexandre Steinlen’s “ Tournee du Chat Noir “ stand alone as classics of popular art but it is testament to their lasting entertainment value that they keep popping up in new guises.

Where would the San Francisco Neo Art Nouveau poster revival of the ‘60s have been without Alphonse Mucha? His narcissistic, stained glass elegance not only furnished the style, a work like “Zodiac” reminds us that ours was not the first epoch to produce a rash of popular mystical cults.

It’s perfectly possible that the blond boulevardier sidling up to the elegant lady in black in Lautrec’s “Divan Japonais” is saying, “Eh, mademoiselle, and what is your sign?