La Virée Superbe: Peugeot - Napoléon
c. 1970
Artist / Maker / Culture
Milton Glaser
DIMENSIONS
31 1/2 x 23 1/2 in. (80 x 59.7 cm)
OBJECT NUMBER
PH.5879
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN
Bicycle, France, Man, Napoleon Bonaparte, Product, White
CREDIT LINE
Poster House Permanent Collection
KEYWORDS
Bicycle, France, Man, Napoleon Bonaparte, Product, White

During the 1970s, Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast of Push Pin Studios in New York were hired by the French company Peugeot, the oldest car manufacturer in the world, to design posters promoting its famous racing bikes. The firm had made its first bicycle in 1882 and gradually introduced racing bikes, sponsoring its first Tour de France winner in 1905. Here, Glaser promotes a Peugeot racing bike on a course through the Route Napoleon, a scenic road through the French Alps that follows the path taken by Napoleon during his 1815 escape from the island of Elba to Grenoble. (Fortunately, it became a paved tourist route in 1932.) His design is characteristic of the boldly colorful and irreverent style pioneered by Pushpin after its founding in 1954 in defiance of conventional advertising standards; Napoleon, riding a new Peugeot racing bike, hand hidden in his coat in his famous pose, is represented in a fluidly three-dimensional and humorous version of the style of the French poster designs of the Belle Epoque. 

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