L'Automobile Majola franchit sans broncher tous les obstacles - an original poster by Mich, 1929, advertising the early motoring trade.

Motoring in the first decades of the century was an argument with the road surface, and the trade advertised on that basis: grip, durability, and the ability to keep going where the road gave out. The posters promise endurance rather than speed, and they do it with the comic exaggeration the period expected of commercial art.

Majola built light cars at Saint-Denis and later Neuilly through the 1920s, one of the several hundred small French manufacturers that flourished between the wars and almost all of which the Depression removed. Firms this size lived or died on trials results, which is why the poster sells obstacles rather than comfort.

Mich - Jean-Marie Michel Liébeaux - was a prolific caricaturist whose advertising work for the French tyre and motor trade traded on humour rather than glamour. His posters use exaggerated, cheerfully absurd figures, a deliberate contrast to the elegance his contemporaries were selling.

Restored from a high-resolution scan of an original lithograph, with the scanning marks and mount board removed so that only the poster itself is printed. Printed to order on cotton-fibre archival paper, with optional mounting and hand-finished framing in our own workshop.