?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 500 - $ 750
ERBERTO CARBONI (1899-1984) SHELL DYNAMIN. 1938. 38 5/8x25 7/8 inches. Industrie Grafiche Pietro Vero, Milan. Condition B+: repaired tears and staining in margins and image; restored minor losses in margins. Carboni was one of the top Milanese designers. Like so many of his Italian counterparts, he began his career working for the famed Boggeri Studio before heading out on his own. Although his largest clients manufactured basic consumer products, Carboni applied a rigorous modernism to his work bringing an elevated sense of design to ostensibly mundane items. For most of his accounts he would produce his clients' complete graphic line from packaging to posters, and these clients included Motta (ice cream), Pavesi (bread), Barilla (pasta), RAI (the Italian National Radio), and Shell Oil. Carboni began working for Shell in 1936, and the company quickly became his first big account. Over the years he designed many ads for Shell using many different styles, ranging from modernism to surrealism and employing graphics, photography and photomontage. In 1938, his posters for the company featured photographs of classical Roman statues situated against backgrounds of surprisingly saturated colors. The striking effect and the resulting images are unique in advertising history, this one being one of the very best. Carboni 41.
