CROCIERE 1937 “ITALIA”
Erberto Carboni
Erberto Carboni: CROCIERE 1937 “ITALIA.” Milan/Rome: Pizzi e Pizio, 1937. Postcard. Offset lithograph typofoto composition to recto, annual cruise schedule to verso. Lengthy inscription to rear panel. Card with edgewear including a thumbnail sized divot with closed tear to fore edge. Signed and dated in plate. A good example of a classic Carboni/Studio Boggeri image.
4.25 x 6 vintage postcard designed by Erberto Carboni for the Societa di Navigazione’s 1937 cruise schedule. Variant reproduced in color on page 24 of 25 PUBLICITY CAMPAIGNS [Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1961]. "The Italian Designer Erberto Carboni is a recognized master in the field of publicity through the graphic arts. This book is a collection of his individual poster and advertising work since 1934, on such varied subjects as oil, wine, textiles, machinery, appliances, toothpaste and chemical products." – Ibid.
Erberto Carboni [1899 - 1984] was a recognized master in the field of publicity through the graphic arts. Carboni started his studies in architecture in 1921, but became also interested in graphic and industrial design. His career began at the famous Studio Boggeri, but later he worked on his own. He specialized in exhibitions for trade fairs (Olivetti), interior design and graphics. For many years, Carboni worked for RAI (the Italian radio and TV company), but also for clients who mainly manufactured basic consumer products like Motta (ice cream), Pavesi (bread), Barilla (pasta) and Shell Oil. He presented those clients with a complete graphic line, ranging from packaging to posters.
From 1953 to 1960 he worked for Bertolli, for whom he designed a whole series of magazine ads and posters. He mixed photography, graphics and inventive typography and brought a rigorous modernism into his work. In 1954 he designed the ‘Delfino’ (dolphin) chair for Arflex.
In 1933, a new direction in Italian Avant-Garde design were trumpeted by the opening of the Studio Boggeri in Milan in the heart of the industrial north. Former violinist Antonio Boggeri opened his self-named studio to spread the avant-garde stylings of The Ring of New Advertising Artists to the Italian peninsula. This being Italy, things quickly got complicated, with strict Bauhaus dogma yielding to Milan's playful karma. Boggeri's all-star roster started with Bauhaus-trained Xanti Schawinsky and quickly grew to include Marcello Nizzoli, Erberto Carboni, Imre Reiner and Kathe Bernhardt.
Boggeri and his colleagues paid tribute to the homegrown aesthetic of Marinetti’s Futurism, but were firmly forward-looking with their embrace of contemporary trends such as PhotoMontage, Collage and the ideology of the New Typography, while -- in the spirit of inclusiveness -- mixing in every other “Ism” of the 1930s Avant-Garde. The exuberance of early Boggeri output got Mussolini's attention, and Il Duce followed the aesthetic leads of Hitler and Stalin by clamping down on the artistic diversity radiating out of Milan.
Studio Boggeri survived the was and quickly came to the the forefront of the postwar Italian design Renaissance, trading the Avant-Garde stylings of the prewar years for the cool calculations of the Swiss through the fifties al the way into the eighties, all the while maintaining their essential spirit of levity.