The event Illustrious persuasions. Advertising masterpieces from the Salce Collection will be divided into three exhibition moments, organized by chronology: 1. The Belle Epoque, 2. Between the two wars, 3. From the second post-war period to 1962.
During just under a year, around 300 pieces from the Collection will be offered without interruption for direct viewing by the public: a sort of anthology of advertising graphics for how Nando Salce chose and kept it, from the first early acquisition in 1895 to at the moment when his death – in December 1962 – put an end to his passionate, voracious and uninterrupted collecting activity.
The first event, La Belle Epoque, will renew the glories of one of the most lively and innovative historical moments of the modern era, characterized by great urban and customary transformations: the Universal Expositions, the architecture of iron and glass, the bicycle and the automobile, electric light, fashion for all, cabaret, absinthe and champagne. An era which, despite objective inequalities and poverty, cloaked itself in an exuberant joie de vivre, decorated with flowers and sparkling with lights. An era in which, as the great Marcello Dudovich said, "one could not fail to have faith in the future".
An era which, as is known, was also unquestionably the golden age of poster art, of those large colored images, immediately popular and much loved, which covered the walls of the cities and solicited real obsessions, from the Paris of café chantants to to the provincial Treviso of the young Nando Salce.
With the intention of renewing the physical involvement of the spectator in front of the large street billboards, the opening exhibition of the Salce National Collection Museum will propose the figure skaters of Jules Chéret, the dancers of Leonetto Cappiello, the precious figures of Alfonse Mucha, the ladies fashion of Terzi, of Villa, of Mazza. But it will also illustrate that all-Italian way to poster design in which floral decorations and whiplash-like linearisms coexist with academic figures of classical memory, such as the young Marcello Dudovich, Leopoldo Metlicovtz or Giovanni Maria Mataloni, author of that Incandescence Auer which was the first famous purchase of Salce.
There will also be the more austere, highly refined Germanic language, with the masterpieces of the Viennese Secession, from Kolo Moser to Alfred Roller, and with the Italian declinations of Magrini, Anichini, Bonazza.
Finally, for the first time, the large-sized posters will be accompanied by different materials present in the Collection, such as calendars, posters, silk-screened cans; and a selection of historical photos will be proposed through which to reconstruct the glories of an unforgettable and still seductive era.
The memories of Marcel Proust in front of one of the many kiosk-columns at the time dedicated to billposting remind us of it: “Every morning I ran to the Morris column to see the shows it announced. Nothing was more disinterested and happier than the dreams offered to my imagination [...] and which were conditioned at the same time by the inseparable images of the words that made up the title and also by the color of the billboards, still damp and swollen with glue, on which it stood out..." .
