Atelier Populaire

A youth movement took place in 1968, through atelier populaire, producing numerous posters of which protested the moribund policies of the president Charles de Gaulle.

The posters produced by the ATELIER POPULAIRE are weapons in the service of the struggle and are an inseparable part of it. Their rightful place is in the centers of conflict, that is to say, in the streets and on the walls of the Factories. To use them for decorative purposes, to display them in bourgeois places of culture or to consider them as objects of aesthetic interest is to impair both their function and their effect. This is why the ATELIER POPULAIRE has always refused to put them on sale. Even to keep them as historical evidence of a certain stage in the struggle is a betrayal, for the struggle itself is of such primary importance that the position of an ‘outside’ observer is a fiction which inevitably plays into the hands of the Ruling Class. That is why these works should not be taken as the final outcome of an experience, but as an inducement for finding, though contact with the masses, new levels of action, both on the cultural and the political plane.

Statement by the Atelier Populaire, Paris, 1968.

Ref: http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2008/april/may-1968-a-graphic-uprising

Candi Wong