Au Bûcheron

Au Bûcheron was a luxury Parisian furniture store with a wealthy clientele and a flair for publicity that led them to engage the services of the best of contemporary graphic artists including A M Cassandre, Rene Vincent and Paul Colin. The business name was lettered in a variety of Deco-style stencil fonts. Cassandre created a dynamic trademark in the form of a woodcutter wielding an axe on a falling tree, enclosed in an inverted triangle that was launched at the 1925 Exposition des Arts Decoratifs at which Au Bûcheron was an exhibitor. The activity of the lumberman was the start of a long process of refinement involving sawing, planing, assembly, veneering followed by buffing and polishing - all for the admiration of the incurably fashionable. Premises were on the prestigious rue de Rivoli but the company left their mark all over Paris in the form of oversized poster installations, large enough on occasion to all but obliterate the host building. Very much in a Parisian tradition of aggressive on-street advertising. The story is told in this magazine article from Commercial Art, No. 26, June 1929.