The Arcades Project - Operi

course, in the end, the law according to which an action brings about an opposite
reaction holds true for Jugendstil. The genuine liberation from an epoch, that is,
has the structure of awakening in this respect as well: it is entirely mled by
cunning. Only with cunning, not without it, can we work free of the realm of
dream. But there is also a false liberation; its sign is violence. From the beginning,
it condemned Jugendstil to failure. 0 Dream Structure 0 [G 1,7]
Illllermost, decisive significance of the advertisement: "Good posters exist ...
only in the domain of trifles, of industry, or of revolution;' Maurice Talmeyr, La
GiN du sang (paris, 1901), p. 277. The same thought with which the bourgeois
here detects the tendency of advertising in its early period: "In short, the moral of
the poster has nothing to do with its art, and its art nothing to do with the moral,
and this defines the character of the poster" (ibid., p. 275). [G1,8]
Just as certain modes of presentation-genre scenes and the like-begin, in the
course of the nineteenth century, to "cross over)) into advertising, so also into the
realm of the obscene. The Nazarene style and the Makart style have their black
and their colored lithographic cousins in the field of obscene graphics. I saw a
plate that, at first glance, could have passed as something like Siegfried's bath in
dragon blood: green sylvan solitude, crimson mantle of the hero, naked flesh, a
sheet of water-it was the most complicated embrace of tllTee human bodies, and
it looked like the frontispiece of an inexpensive book for young people. Ths is
the language of color characteristic of the posters that flourished in the arcades.
When we hear that portraits of famous cancan dancers like Rigolette and
Frichette would have hung there, we have to imagine them colored like this.
Falser colors are possible in the arcades; that combs are red and green surprises
no one. Snow White's stepmother had such things, and when the comb did not
do its work, the beantiful apple was there to help out-half red, half poison­
green, like cheap combs. Everywhere gloves play a starring role, colored ones,
but above all the long black variety on which so many, following YVette Guilbert,
have placed their hopes for happiness, and which will bring some, let us hope, to
Margo Lion. And laid out on a side table in a tavern, stockings make for an
ethereal meat counter. [G 1 a, 1]
The writings of the Surrealists treat words like trade names, and their texts are, at
bottom, a form of prospectus for enterprises not yet off the ground. Nesting
today in trade names are figments such as those earlier thought to be hidden in
the cache of "poetic" vocables. [G1a,2]
In 1867, a wallpaper dealer put up his posters on the columns ofhridges. [Gla,3]
Many years ago, on the streetcar, I saw a poster that, if things had their due in this
world, would have found its admirers, historians, exegetes, and copyists just as
surely as any great poem or painting. And, in fact, it was botl1 at the same time.