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Italian Art Deco: Graphic Design Between the Wars
Review

Italian Art Deco: Graphic Design Between the Wars

Fredrica Glucksman and Elliott Barowitz
Women artists news, v 19, p45
31 Mar 1994

Abstract

Business community
Italian Art Deco is a book for graphic designers, design students, and lovers of Italian collectibles. The collection's abundance and variety of labels and logos reveal a culture's awareness of the need for products to complete for consumer attention on a store's shelves: a ring of faceless (futuristic) children for talc; an abstract face with white, bubbly lather replacing hair for shampoo; and a white-faced harlequin with red lips for lipstick. For Kolapeptide, a tonic, a large, faceless, undefined, red figure appears on a black background, but an anatomically correct brain, heart, and stomach are accurately positioned within it. In addition, the material demonstrates Italian humor and character. Picator's silhouetted warrior bullfrog (1933) and Mata's lightning-zapped bug (1943), both logos for insecticide, are that era's absurd version of today's Frank Perduce advertising his a smart-alecky, winking boy standing on a matchox; that he is smoking a cigarette indicates social mores of the day and targets the population. And - oh, yes - he's wearing paramilitary uniform.

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