As the all-time leader for Swiss Poster of the Year awards, Herbert Leupin qualifies as one of the most successful poster artists of all time. Over a 30 year span, Leupin won around 90 such honors. In all, he created about 500 posters.

Leupin began his studies in Basel and then went to Paris for two years to study with Paul Colin, the renowned Art Deco master who discovered Josephine Baker. There Leupin balanced his strong graphic training with a more artistic focus. This diverse training helped to make Leupin a master of the product poster, perhaps the most challenging poster assignment. In this field, Leupin is considered second only to Leonetto Cappiello, the father of modern advertising who dominated the Parisian poster field from 1900 to 1920 with his uncanny ability to focus on one irresistible image which could be absorbed instantly and remembered for a lifetime.

Leupin returned to Basel just prior to WWII. There he began to work in a highly realistic style that combined gentle humor with prodigious graphic skill. For more than a decade, Leupin and his Basel colleagues created Object Poster masterpieces, where close-ups of products transformed them into icons. The so-called Basel School, led by Leupin, Stoecklin, Brun and Birkhauser dominated Swiss advertising for the next two decades.

In the 1950s, Leupin moved to a more relaxed style that continued to emphasize wit and simplicity. This shift can be seen in a series for Eptinger mineral water, which began in 1941 and continued for more than a decade. Always inventive, his images continued into the 1970s to capture the product's essence with charm and grace. In his later years he turned his creative abilities to children's book illustration, where he enjoyed further success.

Pictured here, Leupin's 1953 poster for the Basel-based Buhler, Hefti & Co. is a lithograph measuring 35x50 inches. Its red background is actually darker and richer than in this photo.

[adapted from International Poster Gallery]

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