Raymond Savignac

Raymond Savignac, who has died aged 94, was the last of the great Parisian poster artists. For several decades, their works lit up the métro, and those by Savignac were the most entertainingly unmissable. He claimed that his career began in 1949 with the poster, Monsavon Au Lait. "I simply thought of a cake of soap for Monsavon, and a cow for the milk," he said. With a comic picture of a cow, its udders emptying themselves into a bar of soap, he made a visual scandal - and he went on making them well into his 90s.

Before Monsavon, Savignac served a long apprenticeship. Born in Paris, he left school at 15 and spent a miserable time in the city's transport drawing office, until he found a job with a company making cartoon films for advertising. Here, his work involved drawing figures, cutting them out, and making them move for the camera. In later years, he would always cite film - especially American comedies - as his inspiration. He enjoyed illustrating the products and copying the existing posters, often drawn by the much-admired affichistes, who were almost as well known as the products they advertised.

By chance, while touring the Paris publicity agents, Savignac met Cassandre, the most celebrated of these designers, and, in 1935, became his assistant. During Cassandre's winter absences in New York, Savignac was found a place at the smart printers, Draeger Frères, but since Draeger commissioned their more interesting work from outside designers, it was more than a disappointment: "Là, c'était l'horreur." This horror was interrupted by another - the war.

After demobilisation, and during the Nazi occupation of France, Savignac was again unemployed. A colleague suggested he should hold an exhibition, an unusual course of action for a commercial artist. At that time, poster designers worked by preparing a graphic idea for an imaginary brand name product, which would then be hawked around advertisers in the hope that they could match the design to a client.

Savignac's work was spotted by Robert Guérin, art director of the consortium général de la publicité, a lucky break that led to the success of the Monsavon soap poster. Some of his best known posters appeared the following year, and, through the 1950s and 60s, there were dozens more.

The style of a Savignac poster has nothing in common with Cassandre's purist compositions. But they share the humorous single figure, as it had appeared in Cassandre's famous "Dubo, Du bon, Dubonnet" designs. The public could identify with these recurring, isolated comic characters. With the air of put-upon, but smiling, consumers, they often have the look of Savignac self-portraits.

He makes their outlines with neckties and electric cables, constructs them out of cigarettes, fills their shapes with wool, or covers them with a map of France. They stand frozen next to fridges, paint each other with Astral enamel, put their wedge-shaped noses into a bel paese cheese, and hang from cranes by the tails of their Résistex working shirt. To advertise Vichy water - "iron constitution" - they disappear into a suit of armour.

Savignac's animals are as cheerful as his humans; when the Monsavon cow appears a second time, she is sitting happily in a bath of suds. They even smirk with plea sure when they are cut into slices, or in half, a common Savignac device. A smiling cow's head, for instance, relishes the smell of soup wafting from the pot in which its body is gently simmering. To recommend a half-price rail offer, Savignac literally cut his character in half.

In the 1970s, Savignac survived the ascendance of the photographic poster, by then becoming more economical to produce. As he grew older, he was aware of the contradictions in his work. He had made posters for cars; in the 1960s, the Renault quatre chevaux - "4 wheels, 4 doors, 4 seats, 4,472 francs". Ten years later, he drew cars driving through the head of an agonised man, a poster which advised the public to "Take Aspro".

In a later design, hands emerge in protest from the towers of a tilting Notre Dame: "Say no to an auto-route on the left bank". He used an exhibition and a book, Défense d'Afficher, to record his anxieties about the use of plastic, computers and new housing, which he described as "residential garages".

The poster's provocative violence, he said, "transcends the limit of bad taste, and actually gives it a certain style. Moreover, there is something worse than bad taste, and that is good taste. There are 900,000 Parisians stuffed with good taste." A year ago, crowds of them flocked to greet Savignac at the opening of his retrospective exhibition; it was the last chance to meet the survivor of a great French tradition.

· Raymond Savignac, poster artist, born November 6 1907; died October 28 2002

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