Dudovich

Marcello (1878-1962). Italian painter, illustrator and poster designer. For more than 50 years, Italians — but also Europeans, because Dudovich, a native of Trieste, worked for a long time at the weekly Simplicissimus, which was printed in Munich and remains one of the best examples of political and social satire expressed through drawings and writing — were able to look at Dudovich’s posters. They were like a big open-air exhibit which would describe, on fixed deadline, a drink, a department store, a raincoat, a hat, or a fashion accessory. Dudovich was the inspired interpreter of many eras, from the Belle Époque, and its decline, to World War I, with its Red Cross nurses and women making ammunition, and the Roaring ’20s, with its women-in-crisis and its fashionable garµonnes, the years of girls playing tennis and trying to emancipate themselves at the wheel of a six-cylinder auto or a Bugatti. The story of Dudovich as an interpreter of his own time is linked to a black hat lying on a yellow armchair. He was little more than a boy. He had arrived in Milan from Trieste, in May 1898, when public gardens were filled with the dead bodies of men killed by artillery, and with Bava Beccari’s dragoons. He had been called to Milan by the poster designer Methicoviz, who was also from Trieste, and who worked for the publisher Giulio Ricordi. At Ricordi, Dudovich found a job: he would patiently copy on a lithographic stone the sketches of Terzi and the posters of Capiello. One day, the Borsalino publishing house organized a poster contest. The young apprentice entered (with a black hat on a yellow armchair) and won. As a result he became part of the team of the printer-lithographer Chapuis, in Bologna. In 1911, he was hired by Simplicissimus, as the designer of the high society and fashion column. Together with his wife Elisa Bucchi, an early practitioner of fashion journalism, Dudovich began to move in high society, in order to witness the atmosphere, dissipation, lifestyles, and endless holidays in Deauville, Ostend, and Montecarlo. He wrote in his memoirs: “I would return to the hotel and, my head still full of that elegance, I would pin my drawing paper to the door and sketch from memory the evidence of that time and place. In Paris, we would go to the races at Auteil and Longschamps; in the evening, to the premières of Tristan Bernard, Sacha Guitry, Max Reinhardt, and Moissi. Together with Libero Andreotti and Enrico Sacchetti, my inseparable friends for both painting and revelry — Andreotti was a protégé of Worth, the most illustrious tailor of those years — I would stay up until dawn in bars where the last of the old-time Apaches made you drink from their glasses and stole your women. Gays — at the time they were called vegetarians — began to be trendy and made their eyes up with blue. Mistinguette would dance a tango with the blond Maurice. War changed everything.” But it didn’t change Marcello Dudovich and didn’t take away his skill at depicting an era that the war had suddenly made seem very distant in time and old to the point of decrepitude. His eye, his inspired ability to capture the essence of an outfit, and his graphic intuition, these didn’t age and didn’t become fossilized while recollecting better days. Just as he had been the interpreter of the Belle Époque, he became, in newspapers and, above all, in posters for La Rinascente, the interpreter of that era which went slightly mad in order to forget the cruel results of the war. He also chronicled the period immediately after, the period of modernism between the two world wars. It was because he couldn’t simplete repeat fashions, atmospheres, and realities. He didn’t just copy and reproduce, but understood and created. His women weren’t like those powerful and almost Michelangelo-inspired ones painted by Alfredo De Carolis, who engraved the maxims and the bookplates of D’Annunzio. They weren’t the panting twin sisters seduced by Andrea Sperelli, the pale protagonists of Pre-Raphaellite mirages, the copies of Anna Fougez, the luxury mammals of Guido Da Verona, or the garµonnes who anticipated the gymnastic parades of Achille Starace. His were the eternal women who, with or without cloche hats, in short skirts or long ones, with or without scarves and veils, we might happen to find at our side, even tomorrow.