Georges Lepape

(French, 1887–1971)

Georges Lepape is a French poster artist, illustrator, and fashion designer. Lepape’s work incorporates orientalist motifs with fluid lines, bold coloration, and graphic stylizations that are evocative of the Art Nouveau movement, which includes Alphonse Mucha, Erté, Gustav Klimt, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The artist’s body of work spans across media, and he has contributed to the design of book covers, playbills, magazines, advertisements, and textiles. Born June 26, 1887 in Paris, France, Lepape studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts at the age of eighteen. In 1910 he began his iconic collaboration with artist and fashion designer Paul Poiret. The Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris held the first major exhibition of his work in 1920, and six years later he would be invited by publisher Condé Nast to work in New York. While there, he produced iconic cover art for Vogue and Vanity Fair magazines. In 2016 he broke an auction record in New York with his work Le Miroir, a watercolor and ink illustration on paper. The artist remained an influential figure in the fashion and art worlds until his death February 15, 1971, in Bonneval, France at the age of 83.