The exhibition follows that of 2017 dedicated to the history of advertising from 1890 to 1957 and which was an opportunity to retrace the birth and evolution of advertising communication from the first sketches to the sketches, up to the printed poster.
On that occasion it was possible to admire the creations of poster designers such as Leonetto Cappiello, Sepo, Marcello Dudovich or Plinio Codognato. While in this vi we find the evolution of the history of advertising graphics and posters with great designers such as Armando Testa, Erberto Carboni, Raymond Savignac, Giancarlo Iliprandi, Pino Tovaglia, placing it side by side with a new medium – television – which with Carosello took its first steps in the world of advertising.
Posters from that period, flanked by sketches and sketches, and a na series of screens distributed in the exhibition halls, trace the uniqueness and innovation of Carosello's advertising inserts, bound by time to strict rules of novelty and length. Thus the universe of animated characters that were born with television, such as La Linea by Osvaldo Cavandoli, Re Arthur by Marco Biassoni, Calimero by Pagot or Angelino by Paul Campani, up to the multitude of characters born from the pencil of Gino Gavioli. Sketches, sketches, cels, storyboards are the complementary elements of the series of cartoons presented in the exhibition to which are added the advertising inserts in which the most important singers of the time are protagonists from Mina (Barilla) to Frank Sinatra, from Patty Pravo to Ornella Vanoni and Gianni Morandi or great actors such as Totò, Alberto Sordi, Virna Lisi, Vittorio Gassman and great directors such as Luciano Emmer, Mauro Bolognini, Ettore Scola, the Taviani brothers, as well as very popular TV personalities such as Mike Bongiorno, Pippo Baudo, Raffella Carrà, Sandra Mondaini and Raimondo Vianello.
A selection of the most important promotional items of the time such as the hippopotamus Pippo, or the inflatables of Camillo the Crocodile, of the Carolina Cow, of Susanna tutto Panna complete the presentation of advertising for the first thirty years of the second half of the twentieth century. Carosello, in fact, was also successful because it created and imposed his characteristic characters.
The fairy-tale consumer revolution - The advertising of that period - from 1957 to 1977, not just television - introduced a real revolution in everyone's cultural and visual heritage. Carosello was broadcast in black and white, but for the Italians it was rich in colour. In fact, it had the colors of consumption, the colors of a new world of shiny goods that presented themselves for the first time on the social scene: washing machines, refrigerators, cars, canned foods, etc.
Carosello was not simply advertising, but a fairy-tale landscape where happiness and well-being reigned, an extremely fascinating landscape for a population like the Italian one which came from a long period of hardship and poverty. A dreamlike landscape that exerted a particular effect in small villages, in the countryside and in the most backward regions, where it made legitimate the abandonment of that ethic of renunciation that belonged to the old peasant culture, in favor of the opulence of the city and its goods of consumption.
Image: Poster. Osvaldo Cavandoli, The Line © 2019 CAVA/QUIPOS
