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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. Shortly after his initial publications in Le Rire
asked him to prepare his first poster (Le Frou Frou) for which
he used the style of his Le Rire work, simple drawing and flat
colour. From that point on he was inundated with commissions for
posters. These early works he did for Le Rire were instrumental
in the start of his career, and thus their importance to the serious
collector cannot be underestimated.
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 his
posters. Cappiello 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. Cappiello is
often called the father of the Modern Advertising Poster. His posters
are a sequel to the works of the artists such as Mucha,Villemot,
Cheret and Pal. Without doubt Cappiello had clear antecedents
in his style but he developed an entirely original approach to
the means of portraying the pictorial message. By means of wide
color planes and highly exaggerated colors and situations, he shocked,
surprised and moved. He began his career with a very gestural style
and then went on to lead the bold graphic style of the Art Deco
movement as it flowered in the 1902's and 30's. He designed posters
for ballets, literature, plays and music halls, champagne and spirits
bottles and even travel. In all Cappiello produced approximately
3,000 lithographic posters, making him the most prolific artist
in the history of the lithographic poster. In 1981, a major retrospective
of Cappiello's work was presented at the Galerie Nationale du Grand
Palais in Paris.
Portions of biography excerpted
from: Posters of the Belle Epoque: The Wine Spectator Collection
by Jack Rennert. |
