OP: Mouton Rothschild: Paintings for the Labels (paperback)

Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1983. Paperback. Very Good.

In celebration of l’Annee de la Victoire, the end of WWII, Baron Philippe of Chateau Mouton Rothschild commissioned an illustrated label by French artist Jean Hugo for the year’s bottle. It was such a successful marketing tactic that the vintner continued the tradition, employing contemporary artists to design their labels thereafter.

Making payment only in cases of wine, Mouton Rothschild managed to persuade some of the greatest artists of the twentieth century to contribute original works—Jean Cocteau, Georges Braque, Salvador Dali, Dorothea Tanning, Joan Miro, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, and Hisao Domoto, to name a few. The original artwork itself remained in the chateau’s archive, unavailable to public view until an exhibition in 1981.

Published in 1983, Mouton Rothschild: Paintings for the Labels is a magnificent exhibition catalog with images of the label art and the cases in which the works were displayed, artist biographies, a history of the chateau, and tasting notes for all vintages from 1945 to 1982.

Ours is an unused paperback copy with light shelfwear.