Leonetto Cappiello Vintage Posters
Gallery and Biography
Cappiello Vintage Posters Art and Vintage Advertising Posters. Famous
Vintage Posters such as Maurin Quina, Cafe Martin, Mossant and more.
Pictures by Leonetto Cappiello with great prices at
famous art prints .com
Leonetto
Cappiello Biography
Leonetto Cappiello ( 1875 – 1942), Born in the Italian resort
town of Livorno, Cappiello had a natural talent for drawing, and his
first ambition was to be a great painter. He started studying art
with a painter’s career in mind, but meanwhile, purely as a hobby,
he would make a quick sketch of anybody who caught his attention –
relatives, home town characters, an occasional interesting tourist.
Soon, he found that these quick caricatures were always favorably
received, and by the time he was 21, he was able to make a little
money by having the best of these homespun drawings published in booklet
form. That may not have swayed him in itself, but two years later,
in 1898, he took a trip to Paris to visit his older brother who happened
to be working there at the Stock Exchange. Leonetto found Paris intoxicating,
and wanted to put off returning to his sleepy little seaside hometown
for a while; the only way to do it, of course, was by finding a way
to support himself. Why not utilize his gift for caricature again?
His brother told him that various magazines might pay a good price
for caricatures of celebrities, particularly ones that have not been
done to death already. Since that was true of most of the regular
Paris stars, Leonetto approached two famous visitors who were just
then staying in town, and who, being fellow Italian, might be willing
to give an untried kid a break: actor Ermete Novelli and composer
Giacomo Puccini. They obliged, and Leonetto promptly sold the sketches
to Le Rire; they were so well received that within weeks, he became
the favored caricaturist of theater and cabaret stars of Paris. One
of the major reasons for the quick acceptance of Cappiello was the
fact that his caricatures were never offensive: where other caricaturists
would grossly distort their subjects’ facial features and hold
them up for ridicule, Cappiello used only subtle exaggeration to spotlight
their outstanding characteristics. This gave him access to the one
group of performers who previously fought tooth and nail not to be
caricatured: the prominent ladies of the stage. When they saw that
he meant them no harm, even the most famous names of the day –
Sarah Bernhardt, Réjane, Jeannie Granier – were suddenly
willing to sit still for caricatures, and the young man from Livorno
became the darling of the foremost beauties of Paris. This prompted
Alexandre Natanson, co-publisher of La Revue Blanche, one of the magazines
that had been using his sketches, to commission Cappiello to publish
a portfolio of these drawings under the title “Nos Actrices”
( “Our Actresses”), which came out in 1899 and launched
his in career in earnest. But he might have remained a professional
illustrator if one of the editors to whom he routinely submitted sketches
had not asked him to prepare a poster for a new humor magazine he
was launching, Le Frou-Frou. Cappiello used a simple caricature in
his usual style – a can-can girl kicking up her skirts –
but now he had to use color, so he opted for a plain yellow background
and a dab of red on the pantaloons peeking out from under the petticoats.
The
poster, prepared so quickly in such a offhand way, made a provocative
splash on the billboards that no passer-by could resist. Instinctively,
Cappiello hit on the right formula: create an eye-catching character
and make a bold, loud statement – and everything else becomes
immaterial. It brought him immediate further offers from various advertisers,
and made him aware of the enormous power of effective communication:
he found the field in which he would labor the rest of his life. His
technique evolved fundamentally from that of British posterists like
Hassal, Hardy and the Beggarstaff Brothers, who used simple drawings
and flat colors – only Cappiello added dynamic zest and dramatic
impact they had never dreamed of. The designs, for the first few attempts,
are firmly rooted in his caricature style; but gradually, he frees
his imagination and begins to develop a poster language even more
compelling. With
few exceptions, Cappiello used two printer-agents for his work: up
to World War I, it was Vercasson, where he developed the principles
of his style; after that, it was Devambez, where he continued to apply
them with an even greater flair and bolder imagination. The key to
his approach was always image association – the idea that you
don’t really remember the image of the product itself, but the
image of something that is associated with the product. Thus, if you
are shown the picture of an old-fashioned phonograph with a listening
horn, you don’t think of any particular brand as it could be
any of a dozen names; but if you see a small white dog listening to
it attentively, the brand name “RCA Victor” will flash to
your mind instantly, involuntarily, because the association had been
firmly established there. Cappiello was the first who thoroughly understood
this, and he applied it with commendable diligence in about a thousand
posters. He
had an active career which lasted approximately 40 years, during which
time he produced an average of two posters per month. Although in
such quantity it is inevitable that certain themes and concepts are
repeated continually, it is to Cappiello’s credit that his inventiveness
never flagged, and he was always able to come up with new ways to
shock us, startle us out of our pedestrian complacency, and ultimately
delight us.
Biography
excerpted from:
Posters of the Belle Epoque: The Wine Spectator Collection
by Jack Rennert
To buy
Leonetto Cappiello posters framed click
the Framed Link or Mounted
Link.
|
Richard
Thompson Gallery Print Div. Websites
|
|
|
©2002-2006 Famous
Art Prints.com: All rights reserved.
All images and content are © copyright their respective copyright
owners.
|
