Bal des Étudiants Poster 1927

This is a poster, made by Jean Dupas, for the ‘Bal des Étudiants’ or Student Ball, and printed in 1927. The graphic style here is super stylized, and the artist renders the figures using a reduced color palette, limiting their range to greens, reds, and yellows. It's all about streamlining, distilling, simplifying. It's the visual equivalent of editing your own writing. The textures are smooth, almost velvety, and the surfaces feel like they've been polished to a high sheen, which gives the whole thing a strange kind of surreal sheen, like a hallucination. Check out the figure on the bottom left: notice how the light streams around their nude form? The yellow ribbons really enhance the tension, acting as the only disruptive element in a sea of otherwise cool tones. There is something so satisfying about the overall composition. Artists like Tamara de Lempicka also adopted this approach. It's a conversation that continues to evolve, where artists borrow, adapt, and transform ideas, remixing and reimagining ways of seeing and experiencing the world.