Richard Driehaus was visibly excited as he welcomed a standing room crowd to his namesake museum, the Driehaus Museum near Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, on the eve of the opening of L’Affichomania: The Passion for French Posters. The special exhibition officially opens today, February 11, and will run through January 7, 2018. Jeannine Falino, exhibition curator, had to sift through 8,000 posters from his private collection to create the exhibition which features 45 posters dating from 1875 to 1910 and created by five grand masters: Jules Chéret, Eugène Grasset, Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Alphonse Mucha. The poster craze, known as affichomanie, revolved around the acquisition of these posters, from buying and selling special editions to stealthy removals from walls and kiosks. Driehaus shared that he began collecting the posters of fin-de-siècle Paris in the mid-1970s with his first acquisition, a small print by Jules Chéret.

Source: Forbes February 11, 2017 15:58 UTC