Silvana Editoriale, 2011, ISBN 9788836622528
This is just one of a series of volumes published by Milan based Silvana Editoriale that cover a variety of advertising topics including food and drink, motor cars, fashion and travel. Inside images of posters are arranged by subject and placed on the page to let them speak for themselves in the absence of designer conceits. The selection is brilliant - most of the images were things I saw for the first time. The archive of Italian graphics must run very deep. Consumer society may have been late in arriving in Italy but once established the originality and ingenuity of the local advertising art was quickly apparent. This was accompanied by a wave of industrial and product design, from typewriters to cars, from fashion to luxury goods that established a global reputation for formal elegance, innovation and attention to detail. Swiss and German designers searched for perfection of form via a rigorous reductive process to eliminate the superfluous with impressive, if sometimes impersonal results. In Italy, design traditions were less rigid with results that made space for character and personality without sacrificing refinement. Olivetti and Fiat were pioneers of this approach.
When drawing upon familiar stylistic genres, Italian graphic artists seemed more alert than any other nationality to the humorous potential in their source of inspiration. Even the geometric proprieties of Modernism were subverted in Italy thanks to the national passion for visual wit deployed with a lightness of touch rarely achieved elsewhere. Likewise the seductive rhythms of Art Nouveau lent themselves to a playful jollity that would have been heretical in Munich or Vienna. This involved a high degree of graphic absurdity, of inventive formal repurposing as much as setting up a comic situation. A favourite strategy of Italian illustrators was to personalise the product with characteristics drawn from the natural world. These excesses of the imagination include an owl with searchlight eyes, a tiger clawing its way into a jar of meat extract, a cockerel in evening dress, a weeping pig, an infant suspended from a clothes line, and irradiated infant buttocks. What might look coarse and vulgar elsewhere is made acceptable thanks to the Italian lightness of touch and (mostly) gentle humour. This book is a treasure box of the most wonderful delights for the eye and a tribute to the imaginative powers of generations of Italian poster artists.
Previous posts on Italian Graphics can be seen here and here.
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