The work of the French poster artist Raymond Savignac did much to define the image of postwar France. Capturing what now seems the remote optimism of the nascent affluent society, his visual gags and bright, simple colours are as integral to the texture and mood of French culture in what are now called the “30 glorious years” as, say, the films of Jacques Tati and the Nouvelle Vague, or the Citroën DS and General de Gaulle. In fact, his own, rather belated, career more or less coincided with this period.

The son of Marie and Marcellin Savignac, a shopkeeper from the Aveyron, he was born in Paris in 1907. As a boy he dreamt of becoming a champion cyclist. He also displayed a talent for drawing, and on leaving school at the age of 15 he was taken on as a draughtsman and tracer by the Transports Parisiens while studying mechanical drawing at night school. From there he moved to a job with Robert Lortac making commercial cartoons. This, at least, brought him closer to his great passion, film, and especially Charlie Chaplin. As he would later say: “My taste for gags led me to take apart the art of Chaplin. …My aim was to put cinema in my posters. …A poster is a gag transposed into a still image.”

Still, the late Twenties and early Thirties saw Savignac making little headway, earning a living at publishers and advertisers. A first break came in 1935, when he was taken on by one of the great poster designers of the day, Cassandre. This master of the form entrusted him with his first commission, a poster for “Maria Grimal” Roquefort. But though Savignac now had his first design on the streets, this was not really a breakthrough: Cassandre left for the United States in 1938 and Savignac returned to work for a printer. After mobilisation, demobilisation, and marriage to Marcelle Mercier, he spent most of the war years at the advertiser Robert Guérin’s Le Consortium.

Savignac liked to say: “I was born at the age of 41, from the udders of the Monsavon cow.” This was a reference to his poster for a brand of soap made with milk. It shows a pink cow with the milk from its udders flowing into a cake of soap. Immediately likeable and comprehensible, it was the first of Savignac’s many hits. And, ironically, it was taken up only when the advertiser who had first rejected the design saw it in an exhibition that Savignac and his fellow designer Villemot had organised for themselves in the Rue des Beaux-Arts.

Savignac’s visual gags soon caught on. The next decades saw him work for some 350 advertisers. Among the countless images, there was a man with traffic passing in and out of his ears (an advert for aspirin), a truncated vibrant red cow delighting in the smell of its own hindquarters simmering in a stockpot (for stock cubes), and an egghead man (to illustrate the smoothness of a Bic shave). These were the days of the memorable slogan, but the impact of Savignac’s visuals usually outdid the text they were illustrating.

Savignac liked to describe his posters as “visual scandals”. If his work for mass-consumption products was generally cheerful, his incisive vision was borne out in his film posters, notably for Yves Robert and Robert Bresson. For the latter’s L’Argent, for example, he drew a banknote with bloody teeth. In the 1970s Savignac produced a series of darker posters dwelling on urban and mental pollution, showing Notre Dame cathedral crying for help amid the fuming cars (ironically, Savignac’s last advertising poster, in the early 1980s, was for Citroën), or a family turning into lifeless objects in front of the television.

Savignac was a committed environmentalist who campaigned against the construction of an expressway along the banks of the Seine in 1971, and for the conservation of the French coastline. He spent the last two decades of his life in Trouville, Normandy, where the museum has a room given over to his work.

His 600-odd posters have been celebrated by numerous international exhibitions. The most recent was at the Bibliothèque Forney in Paris.

Raymond Savignac, poster artist, was born in Paris on November 6, 1907. He died in Trouville on October 28, 2002, aged 94.