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Action, life, speed, dream and colour. While the countryside and smaller towns still struggle immersed in the rubble of war, Milan and a few other industrial centers see the emergence of a new bourgeoisie that looks to the future. And from the meeting between industry and futurism, advertising is born, understood as a strategy that captures the consumer’s attention through impactful visual stimuli and makes the advertised product unique and recognisable.
Visual immediacy
The artists developed their own specific language, overcoming the typically Art Nouveau decorative richness of the affiche in favor of an approach that focused on visual immediacy, on the essentiality of the forms, on the strength of the typographical character, which itself becomes a graphic element.
Divided into two moments, the rich exhibition of the Salce collection develops through the masterpieces of Italian graphics from the twenties and thirties in particular, one of the most prolific periods for poster art, presenting the artists who established themselves in that period and who most they will dedicate themselves to the new art after the Second World War, highlighting its distinctive features and individual liveliness.
The first appointment, “Forms of the avant-garde in the posters of the Salce collection”, until 1 February 2024 sees the posters produced from 1915 to 1930 on display, in the first phase of the movement which finds renewal in the machine, in industrial ideology and in speed. of culture and society. The second appointment, “Imagining the universe with the art of advertising” from 1 March to 30 June 2024 will focus on the works produced from 1930 to 1940, when Futurism, having reached the peak of development, is characterized in aeropainting which , translated into the field of graphics, tells with the view from above, the exaltation of flight and aviation feats, also approaching surrealism.
Fortunato Depero
Three themes and three rooms transversely cross the exhibition. The first room is dedicated to the human figure in its transformations and reinterpretations. This is followed by the second room in which the thematic macro-area includes speed and movement. The third room hosts the typology of advertising posters concerning various objects and various aspects of everyday life, which perhaps best reflect the words of Fortunato Depero, when he states that ” the sign is the symbolic image of a product, it is the ingenious plastic and pictorial idea to exalt it”. “The art of the future will be powerfully advertising”, declared Depero in Futurism and advertising art, 1931. the relevance of thought is intense as you walk through the rooms of an exhibition that still makes you dream.