Art And Advertising, A Combination To Always Keep In Mind

Composing the graphics of your own advertising poster , your own brochure or your own roll-up display is not an immediate and very simple thing for those who are not familiar with graphic design. The beauty, however, is that all these objects appear from the beginning as blank canvases, ready to receive the ideas and style of the graphic artist – artist. Of course, there are some basic rules that should not be forgotten: in the advertising banner it would be completely useless to insert texts or images that are difficult to read from a distance, just as it would be wrong to let oneself be taken by the horror vacui in creating a poster. That said, it is not wrong to look at the poster as a painting, at the advertising slogan as a short poem, or at the spot on TV as a short film. After all, as is well known, the combination of art and advertising has existed for a very long time.

Art and advertising

There was a time when collaboration between artists and advertisers was simply taken for granted. We are talking about the years of the Belle Epoque, between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the advertising posters and banners that were on the street, in clubs and on public transport were signed by some of the greatest and most interesting artists of the time. Think for example of the famous and stupendous lithographs by Toulouse-Lautrec to promote the Moulin Rouge, or the promotional screen prints by Marcello Dudovich to give visibility to Liquore Strega, Pirelli, Rinascente and many other brands of the period.

In Italy, a movement of artists particularly close to the world of advertising was the Futurist one, with several painters putting themselves at the service of companies: just think for example of the very successful collaboration between Depero and Campari. In the following decades, and in particular starting from the 1950s, with the economic boom, the advertising field moved slightly away from that of art to get a little closer to that of science: to give visibility to products and companies they used in fact more and more to sociology, psychology and so on. However, this did not completely cancel the use of art, on the contrary; think of the works of Bruno Munari and Armando Testa, with his unforgettable works for Lavazza, Peroni, Pirelli, Esso and so on.

The real transition towards modernity, however, takes place starting from the 1960s, with the explosion of consumerism and with the arrival of a new advertising aware of this new step: it is the era of pop-art style advertising, starting from famous cans of Campbell’s soup designed by Andy Warhol.

Art in advertising today

And the marriage between art and advertising continues today, at all levels. However, we are not just talking about graphics. Let’s think, for example, of the slogans, which often take up well-known literary motifs: this is the case of a recent Conad advertisement, which takes up the words of John Donne “no man is an island” to put them in his incipit “no man is a island, and not even a supermarket “. And we think of all the famous directors who have lent themselves to advertising.

Also Read: The Importance Of Context In Advertising