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The Louis Vuitton/Razzia Connection
Louis Vuitton probably does not really need any introduction. It is a pretty well known name, originally recognized for their luxury luggage with the famous LV monogram.
This was started by the founder in 1854 in Paris. He had a love affair with travel. More recently, the Louis Vuitton brand has expanded into other luxury and fashionable goods.
With their “Art of Travel” philosophy, the company decided to sponsor Christian Philipsen and Antoine Prunet’s vision of “The Parc de Bagatelle Concours d’Elegance” outside of Paris which they started in 1988 to show the crème de la crème of automobiles created for traveling.
From the 1980’s to the 2010 decade, Vuitton expanded and began organizing other Concours and Vintage car tours around the world. At the same time they hired an artist to create an image for a poster promoting those events.
This is when Razzia came into the equation. His given name is Gerard Courbouleix-Deneriaz and he was born in Paris. He choose his artist’s name as Razzia.
Razzia is an artist at heart starting as a teenager with photography. His inspiration came from British music groups such as The Rolling Stones and the Beatles. He photographed for many years this new generation of musician. His passion then developed into graphic design and poster designing.
He created his first poster in 1979 for Carolyn Carlson, a dancer and choreographer. It was a mixture of his photography, design and paint.
Razzia was making a name for himself as a poster artist and taught himself how to paint so he could create posters for concerts, movies, album covers, fashion shows and magazine covers. This is how the self taught Razzia discovered his talent for poster art.
In an age when most poster art is computer generated, Razzia is one of the world’s only modern day “poster artists”. During the Golden Age of posters, late 1800’s and early 1900’s, before television and certainly computers, advertisers employed the best artists they could find to make interesting and unique renderings of the product they wished to advertise and sell.
This was done in order to impact the market and stand out from their competitors with a strong image. In most cases the artist would produce a painting which when approved would be lithographed in a larger size with appropriate text. Razzia still conceives his posters from an original painting. Today Razzia is one of the only poster artists who still paints an image that he creates and turns it into an attractive and captivating advertising poster.
Since 1985, Razzia has created posters for concours and vintage car tours which Vuitton organized. A dream for a commercial artist is that Vuitton gave Razzia carte blanche on all the images he conceived for them. At the same time he created images for the Louis Vuitton Cup prestigious boat races which they have sponsored over the years, which were the qualifying races for the America’s Cup.
Producing poster images for Vuitton has established Razzia as a semi-automotive artist to much of his delight as he is an automobile and Formula 1 enthusiast who owns and has owned a few Porsches, Mini Coopers and Triumphs. Since 1985, Razzia has created close to 30 different automotive images for the Louis Vuitton rallies and Concours d’Elegances they have organized around the world.
Fortunately, the spectacular images that Razzia has created for Louis Vuitton are popular and they live on as a legacy. Other clients for which Razzia has worked include Stetson Hats, Lancia Automobiles, L’Oreal, International Prêt à Porter Féminin (France), Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s in the U.S., Harrods in the U.K., the Nice Jazz Festival, the City of Deauville, several brand names of Champagnes and several restaurants in Paris and New York. Among collectors of his posters are such prestigious names as Elton John, Jackie Collins and Michael Caine. His work has been shown in every major city around the world and is highly collected.
The Vuitton management has changed and for the last decade they did not renew their agreement with Razzia and have stopped supporting Classic Car events and the Vuitton Cup.
We are proud to have been working with Razzia for the last 25 years and have helped him distribute his striking images around the world. In 2007, Razzia produced a beautiful book covering the first 25 years of his work: “25 Years of Poster Art”.
Razzia has found his niche by creating compositions which blend perfectly with vintage advertising posters.
You can see most of his images on our website at www.arteauto.com
by Jacques Vaucher
For Linkage Magazine
Click here to view the Razzia items we have now
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