Poster Artist & Novelist
Edmund Edel—Germany’s First Modern Poster Artist and Satirist
Edmund Edel was a German novelist and caricaturist, as well as one of Germany’s leading poster artists from the mid 1890s up to World War I. He was also the first modern poster artist that Germany produced, influencing those that came after him such as Ernst Deutsch. The great Lucian Bernhard was his student.
Edmund Edel grew up in Berlin, or more precisely Charlottenburg, which today is a part of Berlin but was not so at the time. He initially studied Commerce, but then decided to become an artist instead. After attending the Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Royal Academy of Fine Arts) in Munich, spending two years at the Académie Julian in Paris, where he let himself be inspired by the great pioneer of French poster art, Jules Chéret, and completing an apprenticeship at the prominent graphic art and printing company O. de Rycker in Brussels, he lived and worked in Berlin.
In Berlin, Edmund Edel quickly became widely known through his illustrations for satirical magazines such as the Fliegende Blätter and Ulk and more than anything else for his more than one hundred eye-catching advertising posters, which for two decades brightened up the streets of Berlin. Edel was very much influenced by the posters of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in France, Dudley Hardy in England, and Henri Meunier in Belgium, merging them all into something new and very much Berlinish. Sadly, he did not design many posters after 1905, and in 1917, he decided to give posters up for good and to write novels instead. He wrote about 30 of those, chronicling, often satirically, the life and customs of Berlin in Wilhelmine Germany. He also directed several silent films and wrote screenplays for many more.
Edmund Edel was Jewish and had to endure antisemitic attacks throughout his life, although this did not negatively impact on his career. But when the Nazis took over Germany in 1933, the then 70-year old Jew Edmund Edel became an outcast, and his delightful drawings, posters, and novels were officially branded as “obscene and decadent”. He died, mercifully, not longer after.
Patzenhofer Ausschank
Lustige Blätter (funny papers)
Manegold
other Adverts
Gingerbreads
Theatre
Greetings from the Future State
Others
