5 minute read
Advertising: between art and business
Not your average form of art
by Laura De Cesare
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© www.metmuseum.org/art/collection
Toulouse Lautrec
When we think about art, maybe we never imagine that advertising could also be a form of art.
Her story is ancient, and it starts at the end of ‘800.
In this period, the first advertising poster realised by Toulouse Lautrec was born.
Toulouse Lautrec was a French painter and a pioneer of graphic design. In 1891, the Moulin Rouge’s director commissioned the young artist to create a poster to announce the arrival on the stage of a new dancer: Louise Weber.
From this moment, advertising language changed. Toulouse Lautrec showed details about bohèmien life in Paris, using simple lines and intense colours, leaving emotions permanently in the observer’s mind.
He became one of Paris’s most crucial illustrators and designers in a few years. Lautrec helped the avant-garde language become famous, and he represents a link between painting originality and press standardisation.
During Futurism, the advertising poster changed the concept. It was more graphic and less pictorial, more communicative, emotional and looking to the future, the industrial and the technology. In this period, the most influential artist was Fortunato Depero.
Depero
Depero was an Italian painter, sculptor, designer, illustrator, scenographer and costume designer. In 1919 opened his “Casa d’Arte Futurista” in Rovereto, a city in the north of Italy. It was an advertising agency where his adventure started. He thought that art should walk near industry, science, politic and fashion, celebrating it but without being subjugated from there. Depero created new lettering and used colourful illustrations and abstract figures.
The artist had a lot of collaborations with famous Italian enterprises such as Magnesia, Acqua San Pellegrino and Strega liquor, but the most important partnership was with Campari. He also realised the design of the favourite “Campari Soda” bottle, known worldwide, with many posters advertising.
Depero - Campari
© www.depero.it
Depero thought, with the owner Davide Campari, that the product must be recognizable to everybody to succeed.
Depero - Campari
© www.depero.it
With the economic boom, advertising lost its artistic value and became a business in the postwar period. Advertisers understood that they had to study the sign and the form to touch the public, and advertising became a science linked with sociology, psychology and marketing. Right now, Pop art has grown. Pop art means popular art, and it’s the first art that put in contact art with the mass.
Andy Warhol
The leading artist of this period was Andy Warhol. He was an American painter, graphic, illustrator, sculptor, screenwriter, film director and actor. He decided to convert art into business using silk-screen printing. With this technique, he printed goods in a series. In this way, the objects hadn’t the concept of a single piece but became a commercial product. It’s the case of silk-screen reproduction of Coca-Cola’s cans.
Coca-Cola - Andy warhol
© www.mostrawarhol.it/andy-warhol-opere
Obsession - David Lynch
© www.darlin.it/cultura-pop
David Lynch
Recently, advertising has changed a lot. During the poster campaign, many artists committed their work and created videos. It’s the example of David Lynch, an American film director, screenwriter, musician and painter. He created different advertising spots for Armani, Yves Saint Laurent, Gucci, Dior and Barilla, little artistic videos that show his unconventional talent.
History tells us that Lynch received his first offer to realise an advertising campaign from Calvin Klein for the new perfume Obsession. When, in 1988, he started to shoot that in advertising, the path toward passion began.
He created four spots from F. Scott Fitzgerald, D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway and Gustav Flaubert’s literary piece of novels. In these advertisements, the film director’s passion it’s clear, and the main characteristics are black tones, a dreamy atmosphere, unusual framings and flashing lights.
At the same time, all themes have their own peculiarities.
The first one was created on a fragment of Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, and it’s the most romantic. It finished with a sensual kiss between two actors in star camp. The second one, from Laurence’s Women in love, is more intimate and underlines the amorous lexical of the poet.
The third from The sun also rise by Hemingway is more spectral: there is a half-naked man in a dark room full of strange shadows, obsessed with woman visions that, after a burst of light, kissed him. In the final, Lynch shoots the man’s eyes, and he starts to cry. This scene underlines the obsession for a love that maybe could be only in his dream. The spot based on Flaubert’s work it’s not available. It’s well-none only the name of the actors: Lara Flynn Boyle and Benicio Del Toro.
SCAN HERE TO WATCH THE ADVERTISEMENT
Businesses and society always choose new ways to persuade the public, and the arts are always the key to success. It seduces the audience and transforms brands into legends that remain in everybody’s minds forever.
