Futurism and Cubism

History

In the Europe of the second decade, still immersed in the softness of Art Nouveau, gasoline advertising focused decisively on the elitist aspect of the automobile and its fuel, and on this button it continued to push at least until the Forties.

The idea of modernity, already present in the advertising from the ‘Teens, was made more evident in the following decades, borrowing expressive motifs from Cubism and Futurism.

In the commercial graphics of the epoch, the use of illustrators influenced by the avantgarde connoted two not always coexistent messages: for medicines, for example, it served to underline the modernity of the research from whence the medicines came; for a chocolate or an aperitif, the aim was to identify the product with signs of elitism and refinement.

The two needs coexisted perfectly so long as the protagonist was a fuel; in the case of Futurism, the lines of force and the exasperated perspectives added to the sense of motorized speed.