‘Mona Lisa,’ ‘Venus de Milo’ and . . . Alka-Seltzer Commercials?

What is the powerful spell cast by advertising? Like a long-ago pop tune unexpectedly heard again on the car radio, nothing seems to make the synapses of memory fire faster.

This most mercantile, repetitive and 20th century form now has its own museum--in the same royal palace by the Seine that houses the “Mona Lisa” and “Venus de Milo.” In the Rohan wing of the Louvre, the very different works on display include posters for Paris all-girl revues, a TV commercial in the Thai language for Chiclets chewing gum, and posters for lipstick, men’s cologne and socks.

Is this art?

“It’s true that there is always a goal--selling a product--but art can be used to do it,” argued Benedicte Colpin, spokeswoman for the Museum of Advertising, which opened in November. “Some of the great artists of our times, great producers and photographers, have worked in advertising.”

True, from Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec to Andy Warhol, any line that once existed between high culture and over-the-counter culture has probably been blurred forever. But does that mean aesthetic merit and an effective sales campaign infallibly go together? Was there necessarily artistic content in the classic Alka-Seltzer spot about the spicy meatball, or claims by countless detergents to wash whiter?

“Not really,” Colpin said. “But there is also sociological value. Advertising is a mirror of its time.”

Four years in the making, the museum on the Rue du Rivoli claims to be the first in the world devoted exclusively to advertising, or la publicite. The kernel of the collection is 30,000 posters, gathered by Georges Ponchet and Roger Braun, that once were the heart of a now-defunct museum here. About 15,000 television and radio spots and ads from printed media also have been loaded into databanks for visitors.

This is “the art of the ephemeral,” museum curator Rejane Bargiel explains on the museum’s bilingual Web site, https://www.museedelapub.org. “All that counts, at the end of the day, are that it allows us to savor these little masterpieces of creativity and humor in 30 seconds, in three words and a visual, in a few musical notes strung together.”

One recent morning, young visitors were intensely hunched over the museum’s 12 computer terminals, using their mouse to plow through the archives for their favorite commercials. In an adjacent room, a large monitor played videotapes of a weekly French TV show on advertising, which included vintage Madison Avenue products such as the fast-talking businessman who ships his parcels by Federal Express or a 1950s French-language spot for Colgate toothpaste (“white teeth, fresh breath”).

Another 80,000 videocassettes of donated material, some of French and foreign commercials dating back to the 1930s, await archiving by Bargiel and her six-member staff. If questions of copyright and other legal issues can be resolved, said Colpin, the ultimate goal is to make all of this material available to ad junkies over the Internet.

The museum’s first temporary exhibit, which runs through February, is devoted to a self-taught genius of the ad world, French artist Rene Gruau. His frothy, sexy and joyful posters for the Lido and Moulin Rouge nightspots are immediately recognizable the world over.

A magazine illustrator at first, Gruau went into advertising when his friend Christian Dior, the Paris couturier, launched his first perfume in 1947. The 90-year-old Gruau, who draws artistic inspiration from Japanese prints, is still active and sketched American supermodel Cindy Crawford this year for Omega watches.

Though housed in the same vast riverside palace as the famed Louvre collection of paintings and other fine objets d’art, the Museum of Advertising is run by a separate association, the Central Union of the Decorative Arts. It gets half its money from the French government, the rest from corporate sponsors and other private donors. Visitors paying the 35-franc (about $5.65) entry price also can visit the other two museums in the Louvre operated by the union, on decorative arts and fashion and textiles.

The new museum also serves as a reminder of France’s important role in the development of advertising. Its Art Nouveau and Art Deco poster artists were very influential, and today two major international ad agencies are French: Havas Advertising and Publicis.

One of the top goals of the Museum of Advertising is to inspire a new generation of pitchmen and women. A library on the art and science of pitching products is scheduled to open this year.

“It’s great for the public to see the commercials that accompanied our childhoods, but it is also good for people from the profession to come,” Colpin said. “Our calling is to show things from the past, but also to serve as a model for future creations.”

* Musee de la Publicite, Palais du Louvre, 107 Rue du Rivoli, 75001 Paris. Phone: 33 1 4455-5760. Web site: https://www.museedelapub.org. Closed Mondays.