Comme il faut

Anonymous German Artist
Künstler-Redoute, Centraltheater Leipzig
ca. 1903
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Curt Behrends
Heute gehen wir zur Rollschuh Bahn
ca. 1910
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Henri Chachoin
La Teddy
(brand of suspenders)
ca. 1925
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Hans Rudi Erdt
Wintersport in Saarow
1911
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Joseph J. Gould
Lippincott's - October
1896
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Dudley Hardy
Cinderella - Drury Lane
1896
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Josef Rudolf Witzel
Wienrestaurant Volkstheater
1908
lithograph
(poster - proof before lettering)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Ludwig Hohlwein
Boll's Kindergarderobe, Munich
1908
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Ernst Heilemann
Wolfframm Piano, Dresden
1903
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Ernst Deutsch (called Dryden)
Der Trainer
(silent film)
1914
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Adolf Höfer
E.O. Merzbacher Furs, Munich
ca. 1909-1911
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Moritz Veit
Mademoiselle Milly Dagmar and her Performing Dogs
1906
lithograph
(poster - proof before lettering)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Edward Penfield
Harper's - Christmas
1896
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Emile Schneider
Strasbourg Tramline - Timetable
1897
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Ludwig Hohlwein
Tanz-Palast Blumen-Säle
1913
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Anonymous British Artist
The New Woman has Arrived
ca. 1896
lithograph (poster)
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

And just as the historian can never explain the individual work of art with all the decisions involved in making it, so the psychologist can never fully interpret its meaning to the questioning art lover.  This admission may come as a surprise to any reader who has felt troubled by so much rationalism in the face of art.  Yet it is rational, I think, to maintain that the meaning of human expression will always elude scientific explanation.  Have we not seen that our responses to facial expressions or speech sounds are always immediate, global, unanalyzed, and in that sense intuitive?  Where we understand we understand directly, as we understand the meaning of a musical phrase or the inflection of a voice.  The mystic and irrationalist errs only in thinking that such intuition must always be superior to reason, infallible.  There are misunderstandings of expression as there are other false responses.  The rational approach can help to eliminate such mistakes by showing what a work of art cannot have meant within the framework of its style and situation.  Having thus narrowed down the area of misunderstandings it must retire; for the particular in all its richness is bound to slip through the clumsy net of general concepts which we make by asking our twenty questions.  Created as a tool to help us find our way through the world of things, our language is notoriously poor when we try to analyze and categorize the inner world.

– E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1960)