Jean Carlu

Jean Carlu (1900–1997) was a French poster designer, graphic artist and art director whose career connected interwar modernism, commercial communication and public information. Born in Bonnières-sur-Seine into a family of architects, he initially studied architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. After losing his right arm in a tram accident, he concentrated on graphic design and began professional poster work around the end of the First World War.

Carlu developed an international reputation through advertising, exhibition graphics and posters that used geometric simplification, concentrated typography and forceful symbolic images. His work moved through French commercial commissions and major international exhibitions, then into an extended period in the United States during and after the Second World War, where he designed public-information and industrial campaigns.

In 1954 he served as artistic director of Revillon’s L’Art et la Fourrure exhibition and designed its poster. The event filled the house’s Paris salons with fur-making demonstrations, sculpture, film, music, dance and scenography, placing Carlu’s visual direction over a multidisciplinary presentation of Revillon craft. He continued working across publishing, advertising and institutional graphics during the following decades.

Carlu treated the poster as an exercise in compression. Simple shapes, bold scale, controlled colour and a small amount of text had to establish an image rapidly and remain memorable in a crowded urban field. Cubist geometry and later photomontage gave him tools for reducing objects and faces to signs with immediate graphic force.

His commercial work could absorb an entire product or institution into one emblematic gesture. That economy was compatible with exhibition direction, where individual images, typography and spatial staging could be organised into a single public identity. L’Art et la Fourrure extended this logic from the printed poster into Revillon’s salons.

Across advertising and civic commissions, Carlu maintained a strong hierarchy of message, image and space. The visual language was modern without depending on decorative density: memorability came from proportion, silhouette, contrast and the disciplined placement of graphic elements.