May 05, 2011 - Sale 2246

Sale 2246 - Lot 106

Price Realized: $ 16,800
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 20,000
LUCIANO ACHILLE MAUZAN (1883-1952) CASA AMERICA / PIANOS. 1930.
58 1/2x38 inches, 148 1/2x96 1/2 cm. Affiches Mauzan / Cosmos, Buenos Aires.
Condition B+: creases, wrinkles and abrasions in margins and image; repaired tears at edges, affecting text.
Throughout his productive life Mauzan lived and worked in France, Italy and Argentina. In addition to designing over 2000 posters he also designed well over a thousand postcards. His style varied with the era he was working in, with classic Italian Liberty Style images for movies in the years prior to the First World War; sober and patriotic images for Italy during the war to help raise money; beautiful, stylized Art Deco images in the 1920s; and bright, colorful images filled with humor in a wholly individual manner, based on the style of Leonetto Cappiello, through the 1930s. "For Mauzan, a sensualist, a craftsman, advertising was a carnival of exotic imagery in rebellion against the rhetoric of restraint and reasonable consensus called for by corporate business advertising. The poster, like a circus barker, clamored for attention" (Irresistible Empire: America's Advance Through Twentieth Century Europe, by Victoria de Grazia, p. 258). Seymour Chwast explains that Mauzan's drawing skill is "confident, forceful and animated. There is nothing arty in his posters with the in-your-face, sans-serif typography. His work fits the Art Deco criteria, but it also includes the spirit of surrealism, futurism, and Dada" (I Heart Design p. 27). The artist lived in Buenos Aires from 1927 until 1932, where he had his own advertising agency, Affiches Mauzan. Here, for a music store, he creates an image as emotionally appealing as it is visually striking. Mauzan cover and A343, Mauzan / Paris 43, Mauzan Cartellonista p. 100.