ClaudeTolmer

Claude Tolmer (1911–1991) was a French graphic artist and art director, and a leading figure in the family firm Maison Tolmer, one of the most influential Paris-based printing and design houses of the first half of the twentieth century. Founded in 1910 by Claude's father, Alfred Tolmer, Maison Tolmer became the era's most sought-after producer of packaging and printed design for luxury goods, employing young avant-garde artists from across Western and Eastern Europe — including Jean Moral and Alexey Brodovitch — to give commercial imagery a new, experimental visual language through the 1950s.

Claude trained as a painter under André Lhote before entering the family business as a commercial artist and art director. Drawn to the expressive potential of the camera, he set up a studio in which he experimented with photograms, cliché-verre, and photomontage combined with painting and drawing — a body of work suffused with wit and a fascination with the tactile pleasure of surface and material. Examples of his work appeared in his father's canonical 1931 design manual Mise en Page: The Theory and Practice of Layout.

Alongside this manipulated, studio-based work, Tolmer also produced straightforward photographs of Parisian subjects — barges on the Seine, airplanes, the clutter of the flea market — that share the formal curiosity and urban ebullience found in the contemporaneous work of Brassaï, Germaine Krull and André Kertész. Tolmer belongs to a generation of European photographers, including Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy, for whom advertising imagery and fine-art photography were less opposing pursuits than two faces of the same modernist project.