Why We Commission Art Every Year: The Philosophy Behind Bottle Art
There is a question we are asked more often than any other: Why do you commission a new poster every year?
From the very beginning, Willi's Wine Bar was built on the belief that wine and art belong together — not just as decoration, but as expressions of the same impulse: the desire to make something beautiful and share it with others.
It Started With a Wall
When Mark Williamson opened Willi's at 13 Rue des Petits Champs in 1980, the bar needed something on its walls. The obvious solution would have been vintage wine labels, or prints of vineyards, or the kind of generic wine imagery that fills a thousand restaurants. Mark chose differently, and, inspired by the Pirelli calendar series and Mouton Rothschild labels, purchased the rights to a 1935 print by the master of modern advertising, A M Cassandre. This poster was to be the first of the Bottle Art Collection, with the very first commission to follow swiftly afterwards with Alberto Bali in 1984.
That first poster, and the first commission after it, set the template for everything that followed. Not a brief that dictated the outcome, but one that invited genuine creative response. Not a reproduction, but an original, a dialogue.
The Brief That Isn't a Brief
Over 45 years, we have worked with artists from across the world — painters, illustrators, photographers, graphic artists — each bringing their own language to the same subject. The brief has always been essentially the same: wine, the vine, the art de vivre. What you do with that is up to you.
The results have ranged from the lyrical to the graphic, from the intimate to the monumental. Some artists have painted the grape itself; others have painted the light in a glass, the gesture of a pour, the feeling of a long lunch that refuses to end. Each poster is a portrait of how one artist, in one moment, understood what wine means.
That diversity is not accidental. It is the whole point. A collection that looked the same every year would be a catalogue. What we have built is something closer to a conversation — one that has been running for more than four decades and shows no sign of stopping.
Why It Matters That They Are Original
We are sometimes asked why we don't simply license existing artworks, or work with stock imagery, or commission something more predictable. The answer is simple: originality is the only thing that cannot be replicated.
When you own a Bottle Art poster, you own a piece of a commission that was created specifically for Willi's — for this bar, this history, this particular understanding of what wine and art can mean together. No other poster collection in the world has been built this way, over this length of time, with this consistency of intent.
The signed Velin editions take this a step further. Printed on museum-quality Velin paper and signed by the artist, they are as close as you can get to owning the original work itself. They are made for collectors who understand that the value of a piece lies not just in how it looks on a wall, but in the story it carries.
A Living Collection
The Bottle Art collection now spans 35 posters and more than four decades of artistic collaboration. It includes works by artists who were unknown when we commissioned them and have since become celebrated; works that were ahead of their time and now look prescient; works that capture a particular moment in the history of wine culture with uncanny precision.
Pieces like the Jean-Charles de Castelbajac 2005 — bold, graphic, unmistakably his — sit alongside the quieter elegance of the Alberto Bali 1999 and the contemporary energy of the Jonas Bergstrand 2014. Together, they form something that no single artist could have created alone: a portrait of wine culture as seen through the eyes of the world's artists, year by year, for nearly half a century.
That is why we commission art every year. Because we cannot imagine doing it any other way.
Explore the full Bottle Art collection and find the poster that speaks to you.