?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 4,000 - $ 6,000
ALEARDO TERZI (1870-1943) MELE. 1910. 55 3/4x39 inches. G. Ricordi, Milan. Condition B+: overpainting and restoration in top margin; restoration along vertical and horizontal folds. Although he was primarily a book illustrator (from 1925 to 1930 he was the director of the Book Institute of Urbino, and went on to illustrate almost three hundred books), Terzi was also active at the turn of the century in the poster field, working for Ricordi, then for the printer Chappuis in Bologna. Mele was a department store in Naples which, through their collaboration with Ricordi, became a pioneer of mass advertising, commissioning in total over 180 posters between 1895 and the onset of the First World War. The artists employed by Ricordi are a veritable "Who's Who" of great Italian graphic designers: Adolfo Hohenstein, Leonetto Cappiello, Marcello Dudovitch, Franz Laskoff, Melticovitz, Aleardo Terzi and Aleardo Villa. While the artists who designed posters for Mele were diverse, the posters themselves always have class, aimed at the flourishing Italian middle class and depicting the infectious yet unattainably elegant bourgeoise utopian dream. In 1910 the color trend was clearly red, as seen in Terzi's depiction of four spotlessly clean and charming bambini quietly playing and chatting: A parents' dream, courtesy of the power of advertising! Mele 59.
