René Vincent
René Vincent was a French illustrator who lived from 1879 to 1936. Vincent worked mainly in the Art Deco style that began in France in the early 1920s and continued into the 1930s. He created well-known advertisement posters for major companies.
Vincent was born to an artistic family. His father was a writer, and his older brother was a portrait artist. Vincent studied art at the renowned Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France. Initially, he went to school for architecture. To make some extra money, he illustrated several books and soon after switched his major to graphic design. In his early career, Vincent started off his career creating furniture ads and fashion designs for La Vie Parisienne, a French weekly magazine that was very popular in the early twentieth century. He also did commission work for humor magazines and the Au Bon Marche department store.
He moved to the United States where he created mostly fashion illustrations for famous publications such as Harper’s Bazaar and the Saturday Evening Post. It was around this time that the more organic, natural style of Art Nouveau that was popular in the late nineteenth century gave way to the industrial and machinery influenced Art Deco style of the 1920s. This new style was rigid, using geometric shapes and straight lines. A far cry from the floral and curvy Art Nouveau style.
In the 1920s, when Vincent was in his 40s, he moved back to France. In Paris, he opened a studio and worked mostly on poster designs. Vincent worked for many large companies including the Shell Oil company, Michelin, and Bugatti, amongst others. Often, he made these posters under his pseudonym, Rageot.
Vincent was an enthusiast for the newly invented automobile. He was one of the first people in France to get a driver’s license and one of the first people in France to install a garage addition onto their house. Vincent’s Art Deco posters were quite popular and are some of his most well-known pieces today. He had developed his own style in which he used perspective to slightly distort the subjects, making them seem larger than life. René Vincent died in 1936 at 57 years of age.
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