Colour Scheme
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photogrpahy
Fig. 2. Atelier Populaire, École des beaux-arts: “La chienlit c’est lui”, circa 1968.
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Subheading 12pt
Reading test
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The workshop
Atelier Populaire was known to work in a very egalitarian way, this can be seen in the way they put stamps on a lot of their prints that credit the movement/ group as a whole rather than any individual artist. This was done to protect the anonymity of the artist so they could express their grievances without having to worry about the repercussions of those beliefs on the particular individual. The identity of the artists that created them is one of the great unsolved mysteries in the modern history of protest art, yet the body of work these anonymous designers produced remains one of the most powerful testaments to the revolutionary spirit of the age in which they worked. Some 48 posters were knocked up in the factories and art schools of strife-torn France at the height of les événements urging students and workers to take to the barricades to paralyse Charles de Gaulle’s ultra-conservative government with a series of strikes and demonstrations. They go on display at the Hayward Gallery later this month as part of a series of events marking the 40th anniversary of the uprisings that engulfed Europe in 1968. The unique collection was assembled by the New York-based writer and curator Johan Kugelberg. Among the silkscreen works, hastily produced and plastered on walls and buildings, are posters urging students to support the factory workers and warning the public against ovine compliance with the ageing president’s reactionary rule.At the height of the turmoil, when students took over the École des Beaux Arts to form the Atelier Populaire, or Popular Workshop, the posters were described by student leaders as “weapons in the service of the struggle... an inseparable part of it”. Mr Kugelberg has spent the past decade painstakingly putting together his collection. He believes only 150 to 200 were ever produced during just a few weeks of that year. “These are really, really rare,” he said. “The problem you have is that you cannot go to Sotheby’s or Christie’s or look on eBay for them.
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