Cover Essay: Fusing Technology with Art in Advertising

The relationship between art and technology in the late nineteenth century was contested but increasingly characterized by a harmonious integration that reflected a progressive and optimistic view of technological innovation. This cover essay examines an advertising poster designed by the German-Italian commercial artist Adolfo Hohenstein for a public exhibition of infants in incubators, which opened in Paris in 1896. Hohenstein's poster for the Maternité Lion, with its distinctive and innovative use of an art nouveau style, captures the widespread enthusiasm for the new technologies and industries that characterized the art nouveau movement. The aesthetics of art nouveau expressed a broader cultural optimism about modernity and progress around the turn of the twentieth century. Hohenstein's poster exemplifies this by providing an aestheticized and exhibitory framework for introducing the incubator as a new technology, specifically to appeal to women.