Pan – the German Art Nouveau Magazine

The founding of the magazine “Pan” in Berlin in 1895 was something like the official starting signal for Germany’s participation in Art Nouveau. The name “Pan” was doubly programmatic in that the Greek god stood for pleasure and, above all, nature – something that was extremely important to Art Nouveau as a counter-reaction to industrialization, which was perceived as technoid – and the Greek word “pan” stood for the whole. After all, the founders intended to devote themselves to all the arts in the spirit of the new style.

The poster created by the Munich-trained painter Josef Sattler (1867 – 1931) was as full of symbolism as it was programmatic and is still considered THE German Art Nouveau poster (even if it was the magazine “Jugend”, founded a year later in Munich, that gave the new style its name): On the horizon, the friendly grinning Pan appears in the dawn, ready to continue tilling the field with the tools shown on the right, on whose soil the magazine can now flourish – whereby the already formed petals of a first flower turn out to be magazine pages and the stamens announce the name.

The poster is unusually small compared to the other works we offer here (the motif measures only approx. 33 x 26 cm) – because it was not intended to be displayed in the streets and therefore did not need to achieve a long-distance effect. Instead, the posters advertised directly in distribution outlets such as bookshops and kiosks, i.e. in places where the target audience already had the magazine close at hand. It remained the only “Pan” poster.

This hand-signed edition of only 100 numbered copies without the printer’s mark under the motif was announced in the first issue in April 1895: “100 copies of the poster executed by Joseph Sattler in three colors for the PAN cooperative” were “signed (…) and numbered (…) by the artist and can be obtained from the office”.

maybe of interest as well:

Secession – XIX Exhibition, Vienna