Postcard Disasters - Messina 1908

For a while in the early decades of the postcard, publishers would dispatch their camera crews to record the aftermath of any manmade or natural disaster.  Copies were printed overnight and dispatched to street vendors and kiosks the next day. Editorial selection showed little regard for the sensibilities of victims or their friends and families. Images of the dead struck a morbid note but were not uncommon. A catastrophic earthquake struck the Sicilian port city of Messina in December 1908 - the epicentre was in the centre of the Strait of Messina and the mainland city of Reggio Calabria was equally devastated, first by the quake, then by a series of tsunamis. In Messina there were 75,000 fatalities (almost half the population), in Reggio 25,000 lives were lost.  Some 90% of Messina’s buildings were destroyed or seriously damaged despite which the postcard photographers got to work.  The event is unsurpassed as the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Europe. As recently as 2021 it was reported that some citizens of Messina were still housed in some of the temporary barrack-like buildings that went up in the early phase of rebuilding.  Restoration work went on for decades but no postcard photographers were on hand to record the process.  The last two images offer a moving reflection on the toll of human life.

 

Italian Posters - Irony, Imagination and Eroticism

     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.

 

Olivetti

In the 1950s and 1960s Olivetti promoted itself in Italy and beyond with a dazzling range of publicity. Lead by Giovanni Pintori and Marcello Nizzoli, the company created a unique reputation for excellence in graphic and product design and a powerful brand identity. Half a century later the advertising and poster designs look as fresh as when they were new. It remains astonishing to observe the ingenuity with which the intractable form of the typewriter was so fluently transmuted into a vast portfolio of modernist graphics. Every visual element that could be derived from the paraphernalia of typing, including numerals and letterforms, was put to work in an impressive sequence of designs that placed Olivetti products at the forefront of contemporary design around the world.

The manufacturing base was at Ivrea, a small town in Piedmont 35 miles north of Turin. Founded in 1908, the company quickly expanded to the point that Ivrea became a company town of 14,000 employees at its peak, complete with modernist styled worker housing and factory buildings. It survives to the present as a product badge in the ownership of Telecom Italia, a business that mopped up the last of Olivetti in 2003. In 2014 there were 580 staff employed in Ivrea – the current product offer comprises colour copiers, cash registers and a 3D printer. Olivetti’s demise was gradual but irrevocable. A range of electronic typewriters, desk-top calculators and basic word-processors was overwhelmed by the competition from a new wave of IT suppliers in the 80s and 90s and a transition to digital competence proved impossible. But with its design-lead philosophy, obsessive attention to detail and presentation plus the innovative use of coloured finishes, Olivetti in its prime was a blueprint for the future success of Apple.

In New York the Museum of Modern Art was the first institution to collect Olivetti products as exemplars of the modern movement in 1952. This modest selection of Olivetti graphics is supported by a feature from Graphis magazine 59 (1955) and some pages from a book published in 1996 by Somogy in France (“Et aussi des crayons”).

Italia Grafica 2

Continuing this month’s Italian theme with a selection of Italian graphics from the 1920s and 1930s. There are other national graphic traditions where a higher value is placed upon simplicity, elegance and refinement but Italian graphics have a flavour of their own with a preference for robust and bizarre humour. The influence of international Art Deco is also much to the fore. An Italian taste for broad humour is very much present in the Aspirin ad where the sickly occupant has evaporated leaving a pile of clothing behind while the reinvigorated former patient makes a hasty exit. An earlier selection can be seen by following this link.