Cocaine — Theatre Poster Reprint (c. 1925)
French Grande
Created around 1925 by French painter and illustrator René Gaillard (d. 1960), this striking stone-lithograph poster is a vivid window into the fevered glamour of Montmartre between the wars. Gaillard, who lived and worked in the neighborhood for most of his life, was known for capturing its bohemian streets, nightlife, and characters with theatrical color and psychological edge.
The poster was produced to advertise La Splendide, a five-act play by Louis Gouriadec, and was boldly titled “Cocaine” — a substance still legal in Paris during the 1920s and emblematic of the era’s fascination with excess, speed, and modern sensation.
In a single image, Gaillard assembles the visual mythology of Paris:
the watchful green gargoyle, the luminous dome of Sacré-Cœur, and the seductive red windmill of the Moulin Rouge. In the foreground, a woman with heavy, drifting eyes sways to the pulse of a jazz band, suspended between ecstasy and collapse — part muse, part warning.
This reprint preserves the drama, scale, and decadence of the original French Grande format, a time when theatre posters were not just advertisements, but full-scale works of art, designed to stop passersby in their tracks and pull them into the spell of the night.
