Leonetto Cappiello

Leonetto Cappiello (9 April 1875 – 2 February 1942) was an Italian and French poster art designer and painter, who mainly lived and worked in Paris. He is now often called 'the father of modern advertising' because of his innovation in poster design. The early advertising poster was characterized by a painterly quality as evidenced by early poster artists Jules Chéret, Alfred Choubrac and Hugo D'Alesi. Cappiello, like other young artists, worked in way that was almost the opposite of his predecessors. He was the first poster artist to use bold figures popping out of black backgrounds, a startling contrast to the posters early norm.

He was born in Livorno in Tuscany. He would die in Cannes in France. Cappiello had no formal training in art. The first exhibition of his work was in 1892, when a painting was displayed at the municipal museum in Florence. Some of his paintings are on display in the Museo Civico Giovanni Fattori in Livorno.

Cappiello started his career as a caricaturist illustrating in journals like Le Rire, Le Cri de Paris, Le Sourire, L'Assiette au Beurre, La Baionnette, Femina, and others. His first album of caricatures, "Lanterna Magica," was made in 1896. In 1898, he moved to Paris, and his caricatures were published in Le Rire for the first time.

In 1902, a 24-page book of his caricatures was published entitled Gens du Monde ‘people of high society’ for the magazine L’Assiette au Beurre. The following year a 38-page book entitled Le Théâtre de Cappiello ‘the theatre of Cappiello’ was published for a special issue of Le Théâtre magazine, this included captions written by theatre critics. Cappiello began to move away from caricature work favouring posters. In 1905 a final publication 70 Dessins de Cappiello ’70 drawings by Cappiello’ by H. Floury, included black and white lithographic prints, as well as a handful of colour images produce by the process of pochoir. The technique was popular at the time as a way of adding colour to an image relatively cheaply, and would involve colour being hand painted onto an image with stencils.

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