PERMANENT COLLECTIONS — FRENCH PROTEST POSTERS
FROM MAY 1968

French protest posters from the Naples Museum of Art Permanent Collection, on exhibit in the Friends of Art Gallery
at the Philharmonic Center for the Arts, October 17-November 15, 2009.

In May 1968, thousands of French university students took to the streets in nationwide demonstrations that often led to violent confrontations with the police. Workers joined the student protests, the worker strikes shutting down the economy and destabilizing the French government. What started as an expression of dissatisfaction with the university system led to a radical reassessment of almost every French institution. Nineteen sixty-eight was a year characterized by worldwide student protests against the Vietnam War, and an assortment of social and political issues. The May-June 1968 student protests in France were a significant event that mirrored the international sense of outrage with then-prevailing world conditions.

One million posters like those included in this exhibition went up all over France. They were produced quickly, with cheap materials donated to students by printers who were on strike. They were designed primarily by a group of students called the People’s Studio; most of the artists were from the Paris School of Fine Arts. The posters were initially made to be sold as a form of fund-raising for the student movement. The artists quickly saw that their art was not a product, though, but a form of political action. None of the art work is attributed to a specific individual, the artists even rejecting the idea of the posters as art to be used for decorative purposes or as an historical document. Fortunately, these 24 examples of the posters survived to remind us that art is never produced in a vacuum, but is a reflection of the environment in which it is created.