?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 20,000
MARCELLO DUDOVICH (1878-1962) LIQUORE STREGA. 1906. 80 1/4x56 1/4 inches. G. Ricordi, Milan. Condition B+: restoration and minor restored losses along vertical and horizontal folds. Two sheets. Dudovich was one of the most prolific and important of the Italian poster artists. He designed more than six hundred posters in a career that spanned more than half a century. His formative years were spent working under Adolfo Hohenstein and Leopoldo Metlicovitz at the G. Ricordi printing company in Milan, where he worked exclusively up until the First World War (for a few years, between 1899-1906, he left to work with a different printer Chappuis, in Bologne). After the war ended, Dudovich became the art director at IGAP, another large printer in Milan. Throughout his career, he worked for all of the major Italian companies, but he is best remembered for the images he designed for the Italian Department Stores Mele and À La Rinascente. This poster for a liqueur marks Dudovich's triumphant return to Ricordi after his six-year stint at Chappuis. It is not only one of his masterpieces, but a masterpiece of Italian poster art itself. Using light in a staggeringly effective manner against flat tones and half-tones, he depicts a voluptuous woman leaning over to smell the aroma emanating from a small glass of liqueur. The manner in which the light effusing from the glass spreads all over the table and her body is handled in an exceptionally sensual manner. Her generous decolleté helps turn this simplest of gestures into an unforgettable, monumental act. Weill p. 88, Ricordi 183, Dudovich 170, Manifesto 400.
