«The Shop Fronts of Paris Paint Merchants – Photo Story by Gérard Ifert»

The picturesque shop fronts of paint merchants in 1950s Paris caught Gérard Ifert’s eye and he decided to look into this phenomenon. He discovered that since around 1875, the merchants had fought off competition from industrially produced paints by calling attention to themselves on the streets. Ifert looked more closely at many of these paint shops after closing hours and photographed them first in black-and-white and then, accompanied by his architect friend Lanfranco Bombelli, who had studied at the ETH, in color. The shops’ striking similarity with images by Zurich’s concrete artists in the orbit of Max Bill and Richard Paul Lohse led Karl Gerstner and Markus Kutter to include some of the shop fronts photographed by Ifert in their book «The New Graphic Art» (1959), where they were listed as «graphic art by non-graphic artists.» Today the shop fronts have completely disappeared.