leonetto cappiello
(1875-1942)
John Hassall may have been Britain’s poster king, but if anyone deserves the title of the world’s poster king, it is Leonetto Cappiello. He was born and grew up in Livorno at the Italian Riviera. He never had any formal training in art, but his exceptional talent showed early on. When he was only sixteen, he already had some of his oil paintings exhibited at the Promotrice in Florence. But what he was really good at was drawing caricatures of people, be it friends or strangers, ordinary people going about their business or famous personalities. And draw them he did. In 1896, at the age of twenty-one he published his first book with caricatures, Lanterna Magica.
Two years later, in 1898, he moved to Paris where, in order to make a living, Cappiello began producing sketches for a wide range of magazines, the most renowned being Le Rire. This work occupied him for the next seven years, though he also found time to illustrate books and book covers, sculpt statuettes, and, not least, design at least fifty posters. Cappiello’s life and artistic trajectory are recounted in detail in Jack Rennert’s truly remarkable study, Cappiello. The Posters of Leonetto Cappiello.
By 1905, the Italian immigrant Cappiello had discovered his true vocation and became a full-time poster artist. For him, the poster designer was “a rigorous and vigilant guardian of the aesthetic of the street”—a role he fulfilled with conviction. Over the course of his career he created so many posters that no one knows the exact number; estimates range from 750 to 1,500, almost all produced for just two printing houses: Vercasson (between 1900 and 1916) and Devambez (between 1919 and 1936). At least 200 of these designs were also issued as postcards.
Cappiello’s style arrived like a breath of fresh air. Favouring flat planes of vivid colour set against dark backgrounds that made the central motif leap to the eye, his posters were joyful, exuberant, and immediately arresting, often tinged with the fantastical. They were conceived to delight and to startle. “Surprise”, he declared, “is the foundation of advertising. It is its necessary condition.” Unlike some of his contemporaries—for instance Toulouse-Lautrec or Steinlen—Cappiello was not drawn to social critique or commentary, but to an affirmation of life. His friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, praised his work as “joyously coloured, graciously arranged, delicately assembled” and, above all, “marvellously modern”. Jack Rennert, who credits Cappiello with developing “a whole new vocabulary of poster design”, notes his flair for “intoxicating overstatements” and his ability to sustain a “general aura of relentless good cheer”. As an article in L’Affiche observed in 1927, Cappiello’s posters offered a kind of “magic fantasy that poetizes the vulgarities of our daily existence and transposes us to a higher plane.” He was indeed, as the Paris Midi wrote in 1923, “a painter with the soul of a poet”.
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